Ladies and gentlemen, good morning and good afternoon, wherever you are, and welcome to Teknosa's fourth quarter earnings call and webcast. My name is Sibel Turhan, and I'm the Investor Relations Manager of Teknosa. Before we start, please take a moment to review our disclaimer notes. I'd like to inform you that this presentation on the 2025 full year financial results includes the company's audited financial information, prepared in accordance with IAS 29 inflation accounting provisions, as per the Capital Markets Board's decision, dated 28 December 2023. Our presenter today is Teknosa CFO, Mr. Ümit Kocagil. Please note that all participants will be in listen-only mode during the presentation. Following the first part of this call, there will be a Q&A session, and you will be able to submit your questions through the Q&A box on your panel.
If you have any questions, we kindly ask you to submit your questions in writing before the Q&A session begins, which will let us review and address them efficiently. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded, and the link will be made available online following the call. Now, I'd like to hand the floor over to our CFO, Ümit Bey.
Thank you, Sibel. Hello, everyone, and welcome to our meeting on full year financial results for 2025. Today, I would like to begin with a brief overview of Teknosa's full year results and highlight several KPI developments. I will then walk you through our market assessment, financial performance, the key opportunities and cost initiatives we are focusing on to navigate this challenging environment, where we expect the benefits of our actions to become increasingly visible, particularly from the second half of this year onward. Since we have already published our financial results, I will be happy to address any questions you may have during the Q&A session. Let me start with the key highlights from 2025 year to date. Macroeconomic conditions remained challenging throughout the period. Financial costs stayed elevated.
The normalization of policy rates progressed more slowly than anticipated during the year, which is continuing to weigh on overall consumer demand across the market. Along with this backdrop, we recorded a year-on-year decline in revenues. This was primarily driven by slower market growth, store closings due to ongoing network optimization strategy, intense competition, and continued shift in consumer spending toward essential categories, such as food and grocery shopping, and daily FMCG. On the positive side, we implemented a number of initiatives to accelerate online growth and strengthen the resilience of our revenue mix. These initiatives focused on strengthening our channel mix, expanding customer reach, and enhancing customer journey, positioning us well for the period ahead. Despite the headwinds on top-line performance, we made meaningful progress on operational profitability. Our EBITDA margin improved, supported by gross margin expansion and disciplined cost mitigation actions across the organization.
At the net profit level, results remained under pressure. Despite the successfully executed, favorably priced rent insurances, elevated financing costs, and the discontinuation of inflation accounting under the Turkish Tax Procedure Law impacted the bottom line. Above all, our long-term value creation strategy remains firmly on track. We continue to advance strategic projects focused on efficiency and profitability. Thus, we expect their contribution to earnings increase progressively and becoming more visible from the second half of 2026 onward. Before moving to the operational KPIs on the right side of this slide, let me briefly remind you that all the figures presented are prepared in line with IAS 29 standards. This means that figures from prior periods have been revised to reflect December 2025 purchasing power. In response to recent macroeconomic developments, we accelerated several strategic initiatives over the past 12 months.
During this period, we closed a significant number of smaller scale stores that were not meeting our performance expectations, while continuing to open larger format stores in new locations within well-established shopping malls, including Bursa Suriye, Izmir Gaziemir Forum, Erzurum, and Samsun Piazza. Our market expansion strategy remains intact on opening larger, experience-driven digital stores in strategically selected high traffic locations. As part of our intensified store network optimization efforts, the total number of stores declined from 175 to 141 by year-end, compared to last year. As a result of these optimization efforts, our average net sales area per store increased significantly, reaching 676 sq m . We see as an important enabler of the customer experience we are targeting in our physical stores. We also continued to expand our SKU, namely, stock keeping units portfolio, to better address evolving consumer demand.
Since the launch of our marketplace, the number of SKUs has increased 51-fold, exceeding 250,000 SKUs. In parallel, the number of active merchants on our marketplace has grown to approximately 1,400. Customer satisfaction remained strong throughout the period. Our Net Promoter Score, which is a key indicator of customer satisfaction, stood at 70, in line with global benchmarks. I would like to highlight that this score represents an average across all stores, online channels, services, and call center. Finally, our Techno Club loyalty program, which was launched in 2021, surpassed 5.2 million registered customers. This continued growth supports higher customer engagement and further strengthens brand loyalty. Now let's look at the market performance before getting into details of our financial results. A reputation, GfK, the independent research company, follows two consumer electronic markets.
The first one is panel market, which represents the total sales of consumer electronic products in Turkey, the second one is tech online market, which constitutes a subset of the panel market and includes only the online sales across all channels in panel market. As I have mentioned on previous calls, economic headwinds remained in place, we are also coming off a very high base from the last year, which naturally slowed overall market growth. If you look at the inflation-adjusted data, the panel market grew by about 8% in 2025 compared to 2023. In 2025, panel market declined by around 2% in real terms, mainly due to sharp contraction in the 1st quarter. Within this environment, the tech online channel has been relatively resilient.
Growth moderated around 2% year-on-year basis in 2025, compared to very strong 15% growth we've seen in 2024. Importantly, tech online continued to outperform the overall market. The fundamentals of tech online remain very strong, driven by increasing digital adoption and change in consumer behavior. This creates a clear opportunity for us, especially as we continue to invest in online capabilities and as demand gradually recovers. When we break down these figures by category, a few points stand out. In the overall panel market, we saw a contraction across all categories. IT and telecom were the most resilient and recorded the smallest declines during the period. While categories such as small domestic appliances, white goods, and consumer electronics were more significantly impacted by lower demand. When we look specifically at the tech online market, the picture is more encouraging.
White goods and consumer electronics delivered strong growth and made a positive contribution in the first half. IT and small domestic appliances also performed above inflation, demonstrating solid underlying demand in the online channel. Telecom was the only category that recorded a decline during the period. In the following pages, I will walk you through the main KPIs on our profit and loss statement and highlight the strategic initiatives we have implemented. Revenues continued to face pressure due to tightened demand conditions, store closures, intense competitive dynamics, and compounded by a challenging comparison base from last year. Seasonality followed its typical pattern, with performance supported by the campaign season, including November events such as 11.11, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday, as well as year-end shopping activity. While the reported revenues were impacted by the store closures, underlying performance remained resilient.
Excluding the impact of the closed stores in revenue, like for like revenues increased 2.6%, which is above overall market trend. Accordingly, full-year revenues reached TRY 83.5 billion. Looking ahead, we remain focused on strategic initiatives to optimize our retail mix, accelerate growth in complementary product and services, and further strengthen our online presence across both our own e-commerce platform and third-party marketplaces. As we discussed on our previous calls, as expected, gross margin came under pressure in the fourth quarter due to increased promotional activity driven by seasonality, as well as lower category margins resulting from increased competition. However, on a full-year basis, our gross profit margin improved, supported by the disciplined measures we implemented throughout the year.
These included a more selective and disciplined pricing approach, effective inventory management, leading to improved sales turnover, a continued focus on higher-margin categories. Subsequently, we achieved margin improvements across all categories, reflecting strong execution and a more balanced commercial strategy. Overall, we achieved a 0.6 percentage points improvement year-over-year in 2025, reaching 13.5%. Let me briefly walk you through why we see the online channel as a structural growth opportunity. First, on market dynamics. While the overall consumer electronic market has been under pressure, tech online demand remains resilient and continues to grow. This divergence creates a structural opportunity for players with the right digital capabilities and scale, we are positioning ourselves to capture that growth. Second, our positioning.
Growth in the online channel across both our own platform, VanPi, and the marketplaces is a key strategic priority for us. Additionally, in order to benefit from existing customer traffic, beyond Hepsiburada and Trendyol, we have expanded our presence by entering 3 additional measured marketplaces: Amazon, Pazarama, and N11. This significantly broadens our reach and allows us to capture incremental demand. Third, our tech online positioning. Within the tech online segment, we have taken growth in oriented and selective positions to strengthen competitiveness and gain shares, even in a challenging pricing environment. Our focus here is to discipline growth with scale benefits.
As you can see on the right-hand side of this slide, in terms of scale and reach, our marketplace ecosystem now covers 14 categories, with approximately 1,400 active merchants, representing a 31% increase year-on-year, and 256,000 SKUs, up to 28% versus last year. This allows us to offer customers a wider product selection and more choice where they prefer. Finally, the value and impact. Our e-commerce GMV, Gross Merchandise Value, has reached TRY 15.7 billion, accounting for 18% of retail GMV and 11% of total company revenues. This clearly demonstrates that e-commerce is no longer a supporting channel, it's a meaningful contributor to growth, scale, and long-term value creation. We are rolling out forward-looking operational efficiency initiatives focused on cost mitigation, with their financial impact expected to materialize progressively over time.
Throughout the year, we continued optimizing our store network to eliminate inefficiencies and identify saving opportunities across personnel, rent, logistic, and general administrative expenses. We also optimized our marketing and communication spending with an increased focus on retail media. In addition, we worked closely with our suppliers on investment-related revenues to help reduce rent costs and further improve our store setup. We implemented pro-process improvements and operational enhancements in our warehouse. If you refer to the right side of this slide, you can see the impact of our all certain actions taken this year. On quarter and full year basis, we managed to increase our OpEx margin. Having said that, we expect to capture further benefits from these cost initiatives going forward.
Turning to EBITDA, we delivered a strong full year performance, with EBITDA increasing by 10% year-on-year to TRY 4.2 billion, compared to TRY 3.8 billion last year. Accordingly, our EBITDA margin improved from 4.2% to 5% for the year. This improvement was driven by higher gross margin and disciplined OpEx management, despite overall cost pressures, clearly reflecting our continued focus on cost discipline and operational efficiency. This slide highlights our significantly increased IT and digitalization investments and efforts, including AI-driven solutions, which are essential for our transformation into a truly digital-first company. In 2025, we realized TRY 954 billion in CapEx, with a strong focus on technology, digital transformation, and efficiency-enhancing initiatives, which we accounted for approximately 61% of total CapEx.
This year, a key milestone was the full rollout of our SAP ERP transformation, which strengthens data integrity, standardized processes, and provides end-to-end operational visibility across the organization. On the physical side, we continue selective expansion in large and high-potential locations, while advancing store-level digitalization to enhance execution, omni-channel reach, and customer experience. AI solutions are increasingly driving commercial effectiveness. Through tools such as Bilge and Sales Wizard, as I have explained in earlier calls, we support our sales team with data-driven recommendations, helping to increase the mix of higher-margin products, improve conversion rates, drive revenue growth, and enhance customer interactions. AI-powered localized assortment enables us to tailor product ranges at store level, reflecting local demand patterns and supporting sustainable inventory turnover. Our AI-powered stock accelerator identifies slow-moving inventory and recommends targeted actions by analyzing sales, stock, and elasticity data, further improving stock efficiency.
While these investments are already strengthening our operational foundation, the full financial and operational impacts are expected to become more visible from the second half of 2026 onward. Below EBITDA, credit card commission costs remain the main driver of financial expenses, particularly in the current high interest rate environment. As we have highlighted in our previous calls, credit card commission rates have been kept stable by the central bank since November 2023. Despite minimum commission rates that can be applied to credit card usage remaining unchanged, we achieved a meaningful reduction in this cost. This improvement was supported by several disciplined actions, including tightening our collection mix in field, installment discipline, continuously negotiating commission terms with banks in line with declining interest rates, and expanding alternative payment solutions, such as consumer loans with more favorable rates and supplier cost participation.
We couldn't get rid of this cost that we can control by our, by the, by our actions, but we have significantly curbed the usage of credit card as collection method, switching from credit card collection to consumer loans and cash collection. As a result, the share of credit card collection decreased by approximately 5 percentage points year-on-year basis. Collectively, these initiatives are helping us to reduce financing costs and improve cash flow efficiency. As I have shared in our previous earnings calls, strengthening financial discipline, stock, and liquidity management remain core priorities in this high interest rate environment.
Despite the positive impact of our new bond issuances, which enabled us to secure financing at below market borrowing costs, the total net financial expenses to revenue ratio, including credit card commissions, increased from 4.9% to 5.9% in Q4, primarily due to higher overall borrowing levels. On a full year basis, the ratio rose slightly from 5.7% to 5.8%. We continue to optimize stock turnover, maintain improved payment terms, and further fine-tune payment days to help mitigate interest expenses throughout the year. With relatively slow turnover, year-end net working capital turned positive. Daily cash management remained under tight control, supported by disciplined procurement, planning, and execution. As a result of these efforts, although net working capital was positive, average net working capital days remained stable compared to last year.
Let's look at our full year net income, which compared to the same period last year. We achieved a positive contribution around TRY 400 million from EBITDA, thanks to our margin expansion initiatives and disciplined management of operating expenses, as discussed earlier. Below EBITDA, TRY 221 million decrease in operational expenses, TRY 325 million decrease in net financial expenses, including interest and credit card costs versus last year, also supported the bottom line. These were all set by a relatively higher negative impact from lower monetary gain, amounting to TRY 365 million as a result of lower inflation for the full year compared to last year, along with relatively lower demand.
On top of it, there was an increase in tax difference at TRY 28 million, which includes a negative impact of TRY 78 million, arising from the discontinuation of inflation accounting under statutory financials. Overall, our net loss in 2025 amounted to TRY 2.2 billion, which was around TRY 400 million lower than 2024 result, despite one-off costs we have to bear for store closures and headcount optimization initiatives. Looking ahead, as interest rates begin to normalize, we expect this loss position to gradually reverse, supporting a recovery in our net income level. Before concluding my presentation and opening the floor for questions, as a summary, I can say that Teknosa continues to operate in a challenging macro and demand environment, while maintaining focus on clearly defined strategic priorities. Now, I would like to highlight our main focus areas for 2026.
First, we are pursuing revenue growth and online expansion through increased sales of complementary products and services. A continued focus on higher margin categories, growth in all channels, and continuous optimization of our retail mix. Second, we remain focused on cost discipline and efficiency gains through targeted measures aligned with the current economic environment. We continue to sustain alternative payment performance by expanding attractive non-credit card payment options to decrease level of credit card collection, which will also attract consumer demand. In parallel, effective inventory management and disciplined cash flow practices further supports our efforts to reduce financing costs, which helps limit the impact of high borrowing costs for mitigating financial expenses. At the same time, our AI-powered digital transformation initiatives are contributing to improvements in operational efficiency. While we selectively continue the expansion of our big format stores footprint.
Finally, we remain committed to our long-term growth ambitions and strategic CapEx investments, with a continued focus on sustainable value creation for all our shareholders. This is the end of my presentation. Now, if it's okay for you, we may proceed with your questions.
Thank you, Ümit Bey. Before we begin taking your questions, I would like to kindly remind you that you can submit your questions via the Q&A box on your panels. While making your statement, please first introduce yourself. Your questions will be addressed one by one.
There's a question. I guess I can start with Mustafa Kemal Bey's question.
Okay.
First question was: How has 2026 started? How do you see the macro and sector outlook evolving? You know, we just came from a very strong Q4, which is the seasonality effect. Afterwards, the Q1 is the, let's say, the least sales are just coming due to the seasonality effect. The operating environment remains challenging, driven by intense competition and ongoing inflationary pressures. Against this backdrop, disciplined cost control and OpEx optimization continue to be the core priority for us, supporting operational resilience and margin protections. The sales are a little bit, as we say, lost their pace comparing to 2023, still there is a progress, we are just going to see that there will be a better improvements in this sales in the coming months, probably.
Let me read the second question for you. Do you think the store efficiency initiatives have been completed?
Our store closures are part of an ongoing store network optimization strategy. We are focusing on larger format stores, which have out-performed to be more efficient and better suited to deliver enhanced customer experience. In 2025, we have out-performed a major revision in our store network. As we just reviewed our network in 2025, we are not planning a big number of store closings. Please keep in mind that network optimization is an essential need for a retailer. If a store doesn't meet our profitability expectations, despite all efforts, we consider possible change of place in mall or neighborhood. If not, we proceed with closures, which is normal practice for a retailer. At the same time, we continue to open larger stores to increase operational efficiency and improve customer services.
The next question from Mustafa Bay is, are you planning any borrowing on the credit side?
In line with our net working capital need, we are planning, of course, borrowing. Maybe we can just consider the bond issues depending on the level of interest rates.
Mm-hmm.
on this rates. We are following it. In the meantime, we are just going to plan this sort of cases, I can say.
I will switch to the fifth question since I see that it's related. You have managed the credit card side as well. Should we expect this performance to continue, the credit card commission?
There was another question fourth, I guess.
Yeah, yeah. I can also read that. Okay. There is a visible erosion in equity. Will the rights issue or a capital injection from Sabancı through a private placement be considered?
As of today, there is no decision or publicly disclosed plan regarding a capital increase for 2026. We can proceed with our own equity.
The next question is that, the one about the credit card commissions that, you have managed. Should we expect this performance to continue?
With the minimum commission rates, we are just trying to mitigate this cost. As we said in the presentation, we are happy with the progress. The field is just expecting and also embracing this sort of initiatives to lower the cost for the Teknosa. We just aim to keep the level of this cash collection and the consumer loans to reduce the credit card usage. Meantime, we are just going to push far forward. That's what I can say for the issue.
The last question from Mustafa Bay is: Could the ongoing sales process regarding Akçansa become part of your agenda in the upcoming period as well? Thank you again, and I also appreciate your transparent communication, that he commented. Thank you, Mustafa Bay, your questions as well.
This question, we haven't received any information on this matter from our main shareholder. In the event of any potential share sale, our main shareholder would announce a public disclosure regarding the matter. As Teknosa and management, our responsibility is to navigate and perform the best financials possible under these headwinds and continue the value creation for all stakeholders. That's all I can say.
Mm-hmm.
Sorry.
The next question is from Alper Bay. hello, thank you for the presentation. The networking capital usually turns deeply negative in the fourth quarter for Teknosa. Could you explain why the networking capital turned positive in this quarter? how should we expect networking capital to evolve in the first quarter and the second quarter of 2026? Thank you.
As I say, seasonality is a very important, or the factor for the retailers. Normally, as I say, in the Q1, the sales are lower relatively to other quarters, and afterwards in Q2, Q3, and Q4, the sales are going to increase. Meanwhile, there are some heavy promotions and big sales coming for November and December, so you should just get more money, and you should also try to manage your stock level in order to just make the sales. Afterwards, with the collections, your networking capital should be mined as a retailer. This is essential, and up until this period, up until 2025, we just observed this situation, and we just managed it. In 2025, there were some main changes in the demand.
As we said, the growth pace has just slowed down. In this case, the revenue didn't just come up with the right things. We have to make some payments throughout the period for our suppliers. In this sense, networking capital just turned to positive. In Q1, normally, Q1 is. We even just, let's say, provided a guidance, but the Q1 will be probably in the seasonality effect. If you just look at the previous months, you can just see the previous years, let's say. You can just see the progress, by the way. Alper Bay.
Any further questions? No further questions. Thank you all for your participation today. Ümit Bey, I'll now hand it over to you again for your closing remarks.
Thank you all for joining and listening to our webcast. Hope to see you in the next quarter's earning. Thank you very much.