I would like to welcome you all attending this first presentation of Bohus as a listed company. My name is John Thomasgaard. I am the CEO of Bohus, and I will do this presentation today together with Krister Pedersen, which is our CFO. We will come back to that. First, the agenda. We will tell you some highlights from this first quarter as a listed company. I will also use the opportunity to reiterate what Bohus is and why this is a good company. We will jump into the business review and the financials, which will all partly be done by the CFO and we will conclude with the outlook and summary and of course, it is Q&As. For those of you who wants to ask questions, we will ask you to submit these questions into the portal, and they will be handled from there.
That is the agenda for today's presentation. We are quite happy to announce strong results in line with the preconditions we stated in the IPO. We have had with our 55 stores, which we, during 2025, acquired. We will present figures here on a comparable basis. That is of course, one of the complexities in what we present. We will come back to that. We had a growth of 15.7% year-over-year revenue for the total group, which made NOK 963.8 million and a like-for-like growth of 10.1%. We also improved the gross margin to 48.9% compared to same quarter of 2025 with a gross margin of 47.5%. That made the profit of NOK 143.5 million compared to the EBIT of last year, which gave an EBIT margin of 14.9% compared to the EBIT margin last year of 13.3%.
We have opened two new stores in the quarter, and we have had a successful listing of Bohus at Oslo Stock Exchange and bringing almost 3,000 new shareholders into the company. We have also done a successful refinancing, optimizing our financial structure and also reducing our financial cost after this listing. That is some of the highlights. I will jump into a little bit about Bohus. This is Bohus. Bohus has a market share in the core market we are operating in at about 20%. It is increasing and has been increasing for several years. A large customer club with more than 600,000 members and a steady growth for a number of years, and an increasing growth for the last years with above 9% year-over-year and also with a gain in market shares.
Ending up now in this second quarter with a turnover of NOK 963 million, as I said earlier, and a strong gross margin of 48.9%, and equaling an EBIT margin of 14.9%. We operate 72 stores. six of those are franchise stores, and 66 is owned by the group. More than 1,300 skilled employees and an automated central warehouse supporting all of those stores and e-com and in the multichannel operation. We are in a very attractive market with important characteristics that creates barriers, which is not easy to enter. It is a business with large and high-value goods, which makes it very important with the logistics. It is expensive and it is complex to operate this kind of logistics in Norway. We are a destination category, which gives a lot of benefits, and we have very low brand dominance, which has a big impact on pricing and margin.
We are also in a market that is much more resilient than we experienced that many believed. It has been steady growth in this market for a number of years and in different economics environments, we have still been growing year- by- year. This market has been steadily growing for almost 20 years. Had a peak under COVID, a little bit decline afterwards, but on track again afterwards. It's a very strong development in this market and we are doing quite good in this market. We consider Bohus to be part of what we call the mid-market, which is between the premium players and the low-price players.
It's basically four big Norwegian chain in this market, which is characterized to be quite big in Norway, this market part, we are part of that, and we are the biggest one in that market, which gives us a lot of competitive strengths. I will use a few words about our logistics center, which we are alone now having in Norway in this manner, which is very important to create this competitive strength and this competitive advantages that we have compared to our competitors. Gives us a lot of opportunities. Creates shorter delivery times, lower transport costs, and also lower inventory levels, both in stores and in the value chain. That's a very important competitive strength we have. It's a large central warehouse, which is also now planned to be expanded for the years to come.
To add up these things, we have a very strong company with a lot of structural advantages and competitive strengths that's much stronger than what we can see from our competitors, and which also is the main reason, as we see it, for the very good development Bohus have had for many years. We have the scale, the size, which is important, we have a lot of effects by that. We have a very low break-even level at our stores compared to the competitors, which makes us able to grow very profitable and with a low risk. We have this logistics, which I already mentioned, which is a part of that and is one of the reasons for this low break-even level. We have a lot of attractive locations, we have a potential of growing location, which we are doing.
We have an interesting pipeline already in contract and working on. We have a very strong brand, and it's clearly the most preferred brand in this industry among customers in Norway, but also among vendors, landlords, employees, and a lot of benefits, which is why Bohus has this strong position. Let's jump to some more figures and to the business review. As I said, we had a strong growth across all the company or all the categories for this second quarter. This is, of course, a part of the year where the season of garden furniture, outdoor furniture is high. The rest of the year, this category is small or very small. We had a strong growth in this quarter, but it's not only the outdoor category that is growing.
The outdoor category made 40% of the growth in NOK, also the other core categories had very strong growth. In NOK, they had more or less the same as the outdoor categories. In percentage, of course, it's a big difference in that. Strong growth and all the important and large categories are developing quite well. We also have a store roll-out, which is according to the plan. We opened two new stores in the quarter, we have opened four new stores so far this year, that's also what's a part of the plan as we see it now. All of these stores are doing as we expected and in a positive way. The new stores we have opened is Lade in Trondheim, which is an acquisition, which was one of the largest stores in Møbelringen, one of our main competitors.
We have a greenfield establishment, a more compact store at the shopping mall, Triaden, in Lørenskog, outside Oslo. Quite different kind of stores, quite successful, both of them. As I said, in this year, we have opened four stores already, which is the plan, we have opened six new stores actually for the last 12 months. A like-for-like growth here for 10.1% and a steady growth in all the important categories. No setback in the category development as we see it. As I said, the outdoor furniture equals more or less 40% of the growth this quarter, which is a high volume and a high sales, which also is a category that is profitable as it is, it also drives a lot of new customers to the stores. It's very important to do that kind of things.
We also have an uplift in the gross margin from a nice level of 47.5% in 2025 up to 48.9% now in 2026. It's a lot of effects that's a reason behind that. We are working mainly on the operational parts of it, how to optimize the value chain, how to optimize the volumes and assortment all the time, how to optimize all this support and distribute to the stores. A lot of things to do there. We have done a lot, it's also a lot to do. We are also working on price optimization, which is a tool we have in our industry where we know that the brand dominance is so low, it's also a potential here to do things that create profit. A favorable product mix.
We also have some currency effects, it's not basically and mainly currency effect that is the reason for this margin uplift. On the OpEx side, we have a small increase in the OpEx percent and also then increase in the OpEx in NOK. It's due to the high volumes we have now in the logistics, much higher volumes than last year, especially on garden furniture, where the seasonality of how to take it in and take it out have a big impact. We have also had some extra cost this quarter, as we had in the first quarter due to the consolidation of the group and some SAP one-time migration effects. We also have a ramp-up effect when we start new stores.
We know that for the first quarter, we mainly have the costs, and then we have the invoicing and the revenues the following quarter. In the second quarter, we had some positive effects from the two openings in the first quarter, but we still had this, let's say, negative or the cost effects of the stores opening in the second quarter. This is a normal development, but as it is. We also have some ramp-up effects at the HQ, at the main office, due to the consolidation of the group and to be prepared for the listing and the future for the company. We are also at a quite early stage in the consolidation of the group. This consolidation took place 12 months ago, the 8th of July last year was the formal date for the consolidation.
We have a lot of consolidation effects and synergy effects to work on in the future. Anyway, this gives a quite nice profit for the quarter with an EBIT margin of 14.9%, which is then 1.6% above the second quarter in 2025. An EBIT of NOK 135.5 million, which is an increase of NOK 32.7 million on a comparable basis. That's important to emphasize. This is driven, of course, both by revenue growth and the gross margin mainly. I think I will hand over to Krister for some more details about the financials.
Thank you, John, and good morning to you all. I'll go through the financials and some technicalities around it. As John mentioned, during the third quarter of 2025, Bohus has changed from being a franchise structure with a wholesale operation to being a fully integrated retailer. There are still six franchisees under the Bohus brand, while the remaining 66 stores are fully owned by Bohus. The figures in this presentation is primarily compared with the management figures for 2025, as we have bought or acquired the stores from 1st of January 2025. The comparison is made to give you the best view of the performance of the current structure. In this figure, showing the bridge in revenue between reported 2025 figures, the acquisition effect, and the underlying growth of 15.7%.
Breaking down the profit and loss statement, we already mentioned the growth, the improvement in gross margin by 1.4 percentage points. The adjusted EBIT of NOK 143.5 million, which is up from the NOK 110.8 million we had the same quarter last year. Due to the process we have been through, we have items affecting comparability of NOK 19.6 million, which NOK 24.1 million is related to the cost of the IPO process, offset by a NOK 4.6 million reduction in cost of the synthetic share program. On net financials, we had a positive currency effect of NOK 7.2 million, giving a financial cost before currency effects of NOK 37 million, where of NOK 25 million is IFRS 16 effect. With everything calculated in, we had a profit for the period of NOK 71.4 million.
On cash flow for the quarter, we had a normal seasonal fluctuation in net working capital for the quarter, reducing the cash flow by NOK 88 million. One item to mention here is the holiday pay actual from last year, paid out in the second quarter. There are small changes in core net working capital. When excluding the change in net working capital, we had a cash flow from operations of NOK 226 million.
Net investments are NOK 40 million for the quarter, driven by new stores, IT development, and other infrastructure investments. The biggest effect is the cash flow from financing, where we had paid NOK 200 million to the owners pre-IPO and repayment of long-term debt of NOK 200 million, net leaving the cash position at NOK 25 million at the end of the quarter. However, the liquidity reserve is still good. It is quite good, NOK 470 million.
We have replaced the existing long-term loan with a more flexible RCF in parallel with the IPO process, and the facility is NOK 600 million, which is the same as we had for the old agreement. With this structure, we have reduced excess cash and unnecessary drawdown on credit facilities. Here, a reduction of NOK 200 million. The interest terms are improved by a minimum of 0.5 percentage points, and combined with lower utilization of credit facilities, we are reducing interest costs.
Further on the balance sheet, net interest-bearing debt, excluding IFRS 16, increased by NOK 228 million compared to the end of last year. The increase is mainly driven by the cash flow from financing activities. With this, it gives us a leverage ratio of 0.8x, which applies for the RCF agreement. We are on the lowest level on the interest term ratio. Net interest-bearing debt, including IFRS 16, is increased by an additional NOK 156 million, which is mainly driven by the four new stores. I think that was the financials. Maybe, John, you will give the summary and the outlook?
Yes. Thank you, Krister. I think the main message from us here today is that we are ticking off the preconditions which we stated in the IPO process and that we are delivering as we should. With a solid year-on-year, it is a very strong growth for this quarter, but we will come back to that, and an increased EBIT margin as a part of that. We have a very good cash flow from the operating activities. We have a rich pipeline of new stores with already four planned for 2027 according to what we have been saying and working on potentials for the years to come. In general and fundamentally, we have the attractive financial profile, a conservative debt level, and a high flexibility to be able to pay out the dividends that we have stated in this case. That's the main message.
This is according to what we have been presenting in the IPO process, we are quite satisfied with that. With that in mind, we are not changing any expectations, we are keeping overall our financial targets as we have been saying. We have had a stronger quarter now than the average expectation for the future. That's according to our expectation. It will go up and down. We have some strong quarters, we have some strong initiatives, in the long run, we are looking at these financial targets with a like-for-like growth of mid-single digits in the short term, in the long term, a bit higher when we get the effects of a lot of initiatives we are working on. We have a target of three to five new stores per year for this year, for a new year.
We are in average of that with a revenue level of NOK 20 million-NOK 25 million. A gradual increase in the EBIT margin up to the mid-teens, which this quarter is supporting. This is this quarter. This is not every quarter. Of course, the dividend policy as a part of that. That concludes the financials and the presentations from our side, we will jump to the Q&As, Krister will join me to answer that.
The first question is regarding the product mix. Could you elaborate on the product mix impact on gross margins from outdoor furniture in the quarter and the impact from currency tailwind?
The categories have quite even gross margin. Outdoor furniture have a slightly lower gross margin than other categories, but not significant. We also saw that outdoor furniture standalone improved year-over-year, the margin. We have currency effect. It's quite difficult to isolate the currency effect. We have in our calculation, an estimate of around 0.4 percentage points improved related to the currency.
How should we think about your OpEx growth for the remaining of the year?
We have done a lot of things in the first quarter, the second quarter. We had some effect of the new stores. We had effect from the SAP migration. We don't expect those effects to continue the rest of the year.
During the quarter, you ran an anniversary campaign which also extended into Q3. Could you elaborate on its impact on sales and gross margin?
I think it's early to conclude on the third quarter, but we see that the campaigns and things we have been running in the second quarter has been working well for us. Let's come back to third quarter.
I think we could add that this jubileums campaign is not a significant campaign as it used to be. Nowadays, you can see anniversaries in more or less all the chains all the time. That's not the main driver of the figures for Q2. It's a general high level of campaigns, and this is actually just a different wording. Yeah.
Can you share some insights on the seasonality from both sales and cost in the quarter?
Well, in seasonality, the first quarter is the quarter with the lowest sales, and the fourth quarter is normally we have the highest sale. I think the second and the third quarter is somewhere in between there. We are earning money every month of the year. I think that is the takeaway from that.
It's quite even between the quarters, but of course, with this second quarter now in the books, it has sort of been even more equal than it was a year ago. When we look at the quarters, the fourth quarter has been the strongest quarter, and it was a very strong quarter last year. With this strong, it's even more equalized between the quarters.
Also, for all Norwegian companies, the holiday pay is reducing OpEx in the second quarter. I don't think that all international companies have that effect. In Norway, that's reducing OpEx level and that payroll cost compared to the other quarters.
That was the same last year also.
Yes, true.
In the second quarter.
What was the like-for-like growth excluding the outdoor furniture?
Well, outdoor furniture was 40% of the growth. Like excluding that was 6%, around that.
Can you quantify how much the new stores impacted the OpEx to sales figures in the quarter?
Can you take one more time?
Can you quantify how much the new stores impacted the OpEx to sales figures in the quarter?
Well, we have higher cost percentage in the new stores since we have the delayed invoicing of orders. The OpEx level in new stores are higher in the beginning of the period. We saw that especially in the first quarter this year. The effect in the second quarter is not so high, but I think we are around 40% cost percentage for that two new stores in the second quarter.
How do you see the rest of the year and going into 2027?
Well, we expect the market development to continue. We are not planning for any big changes. That's also as of for 2027. We often get questions about the interest rates and how that affects our business, but as I showed you in the early presentation, we can see that the history is quite stable and that this market is quite resilient in normal fluctuations. We expect a steady, decent growth in the market, and we will gain market shares as we have been doing, and we will do as we have been doing. As stated in the IPO and the financial target, we think we will deliver as we should.
That concludes the questions from the web.
Thank you.
That concludes also the presentation from our part. Thank you everybody attending this first quarterly presentation from our side. I welcome you back to next presentation in 27th of October, where we will present the Q3 figures. We will also update on sales figures as we did after this quarter in early October, I anticipate. Thank you for joining us, and have a still nice summer. Thank you