Good morning, everybody, and welcome to Verkkokauppa.com Q3 presentation. If you have any questions, please feel free to send them to investors@verkkokauppa.com, and all questions will be then dealt at the end of the presentation in the Q&A section. Today, joining with me and also available for questions, CFO Mikko Forsell and Investor Relations Manager Marja Mäkinen. As always, I will start my presentation with the market surroundings and trends impacting our business. Then some highlights out of the report of this morning, following by strategy execution, and then at the end, market outlook and questions, if there are any. So if we start with the market, the market was probably as tough as it gets, at least for the recent years that we have seen.
For the first time since some months, we saw a decline in consumer confidence again. One can speculate the reason for that. Typically, for example, geopolitical uncertainties have been impacting that, and there are also some clouds in the Finnish employment landscape at the moment. So this can typically drive down the consumer confidence, which has an impact on purchasing behavior as well. Then there are hard facts, hard facts, pushing down the purchasing power, such as high inflation, which has been going on for a certain period of time already, and increasing interest rates, which impact everybody having a mortgage in the Finnish market. We also see that the B2B business is cloudier than it has been before. Many small and mid-sized businesses have a troubling environment at the moment.
There are some increases in bankruptcies, for example. As a reminder, 80% of our B2B business comes out of small and mid-sized businesses, so that impacts our performance and the demand side in the B2B segment. On top of that, we saw and somewhat expected that price-driven market will intensify during the third quarter, and as we go into the main part of the year, the market has been soft for a longer period of time, and typically at some point, everybody starts to make more aggressive prices to make sure that inventory turns are secured, and this is what happened during the third quarter. Somewhat twofold, if you look at the report, the revenue development's obviously something that we cannot be happy about.
Revenue declining by 15%, basically in all channels and all segments, and most of the categories due to the aforementioned factors. In certain categories, we saw positive performance in small domestic appliances, in gaming, for example. Especially happy I am about the private label category development continuing nicely to grow, and in this quarter by over 20%, so our own sourcing office and operations really now kicking in, and we are able to have good price/quality ratio products for our customers in the Finnish market. On the other hand, if you look then, if you look at the margin development, we saw a nice improvement to previous year.
Main reasons behind that, first of all, we have been improving our pricing and campaigning capabilities and processes quite a lot, so we are running the business with a healthier margin more effectively. Secondly, our consumer financing is having a positive impact on the margin, gross profit in total. And thirdly, private label categories typically are of a higher margin, and as they increase, the internal share of sale increases, and the sale increases, that has a positive impact on the total margin as well. And on top of that, we have been quite successful in running our assortment down and delisting certain unprofitable products, and that's also impacting positively the outcome. The sales split, as such, didn't significantly change, so all improvements were made by internal operational improvements.
And the third part, also from a positive side, if you look at, for example, inventory management, we have been really successful throughout the year, making sure that the inventory level stays on a healthy level and turn is secured. Even in this tough demand and declining volumes, we were able to have it on a lower level than previous year by declining significantly. And if you look at the P&L, the revenue development obviously impacting the, the gross profit as such, but the cost management due to outsourced warehouse operations, due to lower inventory levels, due to more effective running of operations, making sure that we gained a small profit improvement also in this third quarter. So now three consecutive profit improvements in this year.
The profitability actually improved slightly more from 1.5% - 1.9% due to the just mentioned factors. The financials of the company are on a solid level. The inventory level decreasing, impacting heavily our cash flow position, significantly improved from previous year. Cash position is solid, and also, equity ratio improving slightly from previous year. Investments, the biggest ones conducted throughout the last couple of years, so those are on a lower level at the moment. So all in all, we are running a much better inventory management at the moment. We are making sure that there are no surprises coming from that. We are distributing the funds better at the moment, and the financial position of the company is unchanged and solid.
If you then sum up the whole year until now, the three quarters, the revenue development has been low, revenue declining by 9%. The market has been tough, but still we have been able to almost have the same gross profit level than previous year, basically due to the high and solid gross margin development that we have had throughout the year. Because of that, accompanied with cost efficiency measures and profitability improvement program, we are able to have a comparable EBIT significantly above that of previous year until now. Cash flow, like already mentioned, on a positive level. If you then move into the strategy execution part, first of all, we are running and operating our business on a short- and long-term strategy perspective.
We have said that this year we will be mainly focusing on turning the profitability around, making sure that we have a nice profitability improvement regardless of the market. We are concentrating on our operational part of the business and our commercial part of the business. And the actions and tasks we have set ourselves for making sure that these also are shown in the figures, we are totally on track at the moment, so without these measures, without these actions, our EBIT would be significantly below that we are seeing at the moment.
Then if you look at value creation long term in our line of business throughout the assortment, experience, speed and flexibility, we have conducted our assortment optimization project at the moment, so all not turning product or not profitable products have been sold out at the moment. We have also successfully implemented new AI-driven dynamic pricing tool. It's totally operating around 2,000-3,000 SKUs at the moment, and we are ready to expand that into a larger part of our assortment already this year, and then going forward into the next year. In experience part, we have conducted probably one of the biggest topics and epics in our history as we have renewed our site in total, all components, all or how it's built, how it's run.
There are certain things that we are still developing, search box , for example, or searchability of certain products, but in big picture, we are now ready with that project. Then if you look at the delivery capability of the company, we have significantly improved our internal logistic processes and flows. We have also developed our cooperations with our delivery partners in our delivery network, and I think we can say that we are the fastest deliverer in e-commerce landscape in Finland when it comes down to next-day deliveries or same-day deliveries. We have also successfully developed a fast delivery, so within one hour, you can get 30,000 SKUs in the main Helsinki capital area. At the moment we are piloting also bigger, bulky items, such as large-sized TVs and large domestic appliances also within an hour.
So we are the forerunner at the moment in the Finnish market. And then lastly, we are quite proud of our new released product service that we offer for our clients, trade-in service, totally own develop, digital, incorporated in our purchasing flow, incorporated in our Verkkis account. So at the moment we are offering 3,000 SKUs that we can trade in for the customer to have the benefits right away on the account. So it's a good... and I think really successful product in the current landscape, as consumers are also worrying about the old devices.
But from a sustainability point of view, we, as a biggest operator in the Finnish consumer electronic landscape, it's our duty to make sure that life cycles of products are making longer, and there is a second life for each device. We have plans to expand this from the current roughly 3,000 SKUs to maybe 10,000 SKUs or even more, so throughout the latter half of the year and also continuing next year. So last part: how do we see the market develop? So, we don't believe that the big economic, macroeconomic picture will change that rapidly. Inflation has been quite high for quite long time.
Interest rates will not start to decrease on a short period, so purchasing power will be at the lower level than previous years for at least when we look at next year time period. Also, B2B segment is expected to have some headwind, as the uncertainties typically take some much longer time. It starts later and also prolongs for a longer period of time. On a positive note, we understand that as we are in the line of business of selling sustainable for a need, for a cause, and most of our products are needed in day-to-day lives, so there is at certain point need for a new device if something gets broken. So the market and demand will start recovering at certain point, and we are ready when that will happen.
We are also in a belief that we have the right business model, that we can offer the best possible service in a transparent and fair manner to our customers. We have a cost structure in place that we can invest in marketing and pricing when the market opens up. We do strongly believe that the mega trend of retail going online will take on at certain point again, and we are ready to push when the time is right. There's no need for changing the guidance. It is obvious that the revenue levels will not reach the levels of previous year. But on the other hand, we have been heavily focusing on turning around our profitability and making a better profit than previous year.
So if we sum up the third quarter, probably one of the toughest that we have had in the last years, impacting our top line development and revenue development. On the other hand, things that were in our hands, I think we did a pretty decent job on making sure that we improve our operations. We have good new features implemented that we have released throughout this year and previous year; we have invested in automation, so our business model is intact. It's more effective than it has been before, and we are ready when the market at certain point opens up. We have also, like, disclosed a few times this year; we have been working on our long-term strategy and long-term targets.
We want to make sure we take all trends and drivers, macro, economic and microeconomic drivers, into account to build the best possible roadmap and playbook for the upcoming five years, and we are succeeding with that work as planned, and the plan is to release the targets within this year time. So that's all. I look at my colleagues, and there have been no questions so far, so thank you all for joining, and have a great Thursday day. Thank you.