To the second quarter presentation for Europris. I'm actually really pleased to see that we have an audience in the room again. You are very much welcome to you guys that actually took the time to come and see us today. I'm even more pleased actually to present the best quarterly result in Europris' history. Test. [Foreign language] [Foreign language] [Foreign language] [Foreign language] Test. [Foreign language] [Foreign language] Okay, thank you. We are back in business again. Welcome to the second quarter presentation of Europris. As I said, I'm still happy to see you. Now we have some extra time to read the materials. COVID-19, as I said, has had a major impact on the quarter. It has not only been on top of Europris agenda, but it has been on top of the whole society agenda for the quarter.
We are really humbled when we see the effects of the pandemic for the Europris numbers. It's still too early to conclude on the long-term effects of the COVID-19. Short-term, Europris has obviously been in a position to get positive effects into the numbers. When we look at the second quarter of 2020, sales grew by record numbers due to the high sales following COVID-19. It was 34.6% like-for-like growth. During the quarter, we have demonstrated solid gross margin management through balancing of the campaigns and also the product offering. Gross margin increased to 43.9%, up by 1.5% points from last year. OpEx to sales ratio was reduced to 20.5%. That's a reduction from 24.2% last year. Keep in mind that last year also included NOK 35 million in additional cost related to the high fill rate at the central warehouse.
Even adjusting for that, it's a significant decrease in the OpEx to sales ratio. It has been demonstrated good cost control in the second quarter this year. Adjusted EBITDA came in at an all-time high NOK 517 million, up from NOK 296 million last year. In addition to the numbers, we have successfully launched our new e-commerce platform during the quarter, and actually, I have gotten the most exciting job in Norwegian retail. I'm really happy with that. As we speak, my successor as CFO is being interviewed. At least it's a line of our candidates. Very many applicants for the position, and we're looking forward to have a good candidate. The position will not be filled before after summer because there are many interviews that should be done.
When we look at the first half of 2020, group revenue increased by 25.7% and adjusted net profit increased by 200% to NOK 255 million, up from NOK 85 million last year. I think the numbers are solid, what has really impressed me the most during the first half of 2020 is the way the organization has responded to the difficult challenges we've had. In my view, Europris has actually demonstrated truly operational excellence in the first half. We got a slow start to the year. We realized early in January that actually winter is not coming this year, we had to adjust the product offering, we had to adjust the marketing. We did that early on, and that was actually rewarded already in February with an increase in customer traffic and also increase in sales.
We regained the traffic and the sales momentum by doing positive changes to our product selection. Then COVID-19 arrived, and that actually put the whole organization on the test. During these difficult times with COVID-19, we have had every day 2,500 store employees going to work, facing 100,000 customers on average every day. That has been a challenge for the organization. Our employees have done whatever they can to keep all our stores open and make sure that the customers get the goods they need in this difficult period. I'm really proud that we have managed to do this in a safe way. They have implemented new strict routines for health and hygiene in all our stores and make sure that the customers have a safe shopping environment.
At the same time as the stores experienced strong growth, of course, also the back office experienced the same. If you ask a retailer, I think everyone would say that getting 30% growth, that's almost a dream. If you ask the logistics guys if they would like 30% growth overnight, yeah, they would like it, but they would like to plan it. This time they couldn't plan it. The way they responded and actually increased the capacity in a really short time to handle this kind of growth and how the buyers of the company turned around and made sure that we got the products we needed because we didn't plan for this kind of growth. We planned for a normal season, and we had to make a lot of adjustments.
The operational excellence that has been demonstrated in this quarter, in my view, that has been tremendous. I'm really impressed by the way the organization has handled it, and I would like to thank all my employees for doing a lot of hard work over these last couple of months. That's truly what happened in the first half. COVID-19, as I said, was on top of the agenda in the second quarter, and it really is also when we enter the second half of 2020. Europris has done a lot of hard work to adhere every time to the Folkehelseinstituttet's guidelines for safe trade. All the infection control measures we have taken in these stores and the organization are now being implemented as part of the concept.
We are preparing that this will take some time, and we are also preparing that we should facilitate a safe shopping environment for our customers over time. This is now being integrated as part of the normal concepts. The impact of sales, we will come a little bit back, but obviously, it has been positive until now. On the currency side, we've seen large variations in the currency. It's been volatile over the last half year. In our profits, you see that we had a negative impact at year-end, a positive impact at the end of the first quarter, and now it's negative in the second quarter. The first half year is more or less neutral when it comes to currency. We continue to do our hedging, and we will remain on that path.
Looking at sales, total retail sales was grow by 35.4% in the second quarter. It was 33.5% adjusted for one additional sales day in June. The sales growth is relatively evenly distributed over the quarter, with a slight overweight in May. All categories of Europris demonstrate sales growth and also strong growth. The seasonally important category home and garden increased by 44.6%, driven by good weather and Norwegians preparing for a summer holiday at home. The sales growth in the quarter has been relatively evenly distributed between customers and an increase in the basket, and the basket increase is mainly driven by an increase in the number of items per customer. We have seen solid sales growth across the whole country. All geographies has grown. We've seen the strongest growth in the Southern Norway, in the Eastern Norway, close to the Swedish border with a growth of 41.3%.
This is also the area where we have seen most cases of infections in Norway. Of course, closing of the border towards Sweden has temporarily halted the cross-border trade and had a positive effect on our stores. The lowest growth we see is in northern Norway. That's where we see the least cases of infections in Norway. This is also an area where the customers are used to more planned shopping. This is where we see the least change in consumer behavior following COVID-19. They're used to do planned shoppings due to distances to the store. The basket has always been and will be higher in northern Norway than it is in southern Norway. It's no big change in the shopping pattern up north.
We are happy to see that also in the rest of the country, from Mid Norway down to Southern Norway, the growth has been in the range 30%-35% in the quarter. It's strong growth across the store base. When you look at our like-for-like stores, that's 259 of them, 258 had positive growth in the second quarter. Europris continue to outperform, but what we see, a mixed and challenging retail market. We don't have market figures for the first half yet, so we have looked at the figures accumulated per May. Europris had a growth of 22.3%, while total retail grew in this period by 5.5%. We see it's mixed results, and we also seen during the quarter that the figures are changing month by month.
I think April was low for many retailers, but the recovery started in June, no, in May, and has really followed up in June. We see stronger numbers in Norwegian retail, but there are differences. I think textiles are still struggling. They're recovering, but from really low numbers. While, of course, the state monopoly, they're doing great, and pharmacies. Hardware stores, do-it-yourself stores are doing well. The whole consumption in Norway has been good, actually, but it's very rarely mixed. Shopping centers more hit by the COVID-19 than other stores. Suburban stores like ours have thrived in this period, and variety retail, in general, has thrived during the second quarter and done a really good job, and increase in sales by 13.6%.
Even in that positive segment, Europris continue to outperform the market and take new market shares by growing far more than the variety retail in the market. We've analyzed the shopping frequency and the customers we've seen in our stores over the first half year. In the total Europris chain grew by 25.5% in the first half, and the customer transactions were up by 10.7% to 16.7 million customer visits. We have analyzed these customer visits, and see that the 10.7% growth in customer transactions, three-quarters of that is due to increased frequency by existing customers, and one-quarter is due to unique new customers in our stores. Most customers still pay by card, and that has increased during COVID-19. The cash sales in % of total sales has been reduced.
Assuming a slightly higher frequency for cash customers, we see that we had around 2.7 million unique customers in our stores in the first half. Turning to gross margin, the gross margin, as I said, was 43.9%, an increase from 42.4% last year. We have increased margins that reflects balancing of the campaigns and the product offering. By balancing campaigns, what we mean is that we plan for a season that we should use seasonal products and also campaign product to attract traffic. In this special period, we've seen that we get sold out of some campaign products or seasonal products before they actually planned to be on campaign.
That means you have to rebalance and put other products on campaigns because for us, it's very important that the customers that come to our stores, even if they come in late in the campaign period, they should get their goods. They should get the offer they came for. We don't put products on campaign unless we have enough supply for all the stores. We should supply the expected demand. We had to make a lot of adjustment. That means basically we sold some more products before the campaigns, we sold it at full price, before the campaign was up. The gross profit was up by 41.2% to NOK 971 million. On the operating expenses, it totaled to NOK 454 million or 20.5% of sales compared to 24.2% last year. As I said, we had some additional logistics costs last year at NOK 35 million.
This year, the cost increase is basically related to the handling of goods. With more than 30% growth, you need to handle the goods as well, so it's at the logistics center, the packing and picking of goods has increased some cost, in addition to transportation to the stores. On top of that, our store managers, they are incentivized by sales and margins. Of course, we have increased the provisions for performance-based salaries for those employees. In sum, this leads to the adjusted EBITDA that came in at NOK 517 million, up from NOK 296 million last year. The EBITDA, of course, is impacted by the high sales growth, but also the strong gross margin management and the good cost control that we have demonstrated in the quarter. On the cash flow, we have a positive development in the net working capital.
That is also influenced by the high sales growth. We see that inventory was too high last year, and this has now been reduced by NOK 125 million to the end of the first half this year. We have a more healthy inventory situation at the center warehouse this year than what we had last year. Cash and liquidity reserves at the end of the quarter was NOK 1.3 billion, significant up from last year. The strategy of Europris remains unchanged. We have three key focus areas, and that is to strengthen the price and cost position, it's to improve the customer experience, and it is to drive customer growth. Looking at the progress we made in this quarter, we start with the price and cost position. Still, the new warehouse remains our key issue in this strategy direction.
In this quarter, we have actually exited now three old warehouses in Fredrikstad. Now we operate out of the new central warehouse in Moss and the old central warehouse in Fredrikstad. Basically, we've gone from five locations to two. We are on our path going from five to one. Now it's only one to go, and the old warehouse in Fredrikstad will be exited in the first half of 2021. The real test in this quarter has been the scale-up of the high-bay warehouse that we started operations in February. Due to the high volume we've experienced in the quarter, we have actually, for some periods in the offload and unloading of the system of the high-bay warehouse, actually been touching the capacity limits with our 2 shift regime that we operate today in this quarter, and that has actually worked quite fine.
It's a solid system, worked without any problems in this quarter, and obviously it has increased our capacity and also contributed that we could deliver this quarter at the cost rate we have done. The new capacity has helped us to be more cost-efficient in this quarter as well. Looking ahead, we will start testing of the automation in the low-bay area now in the third quarter. That was slightly delayed due to COVID-19, but the foreign workers are now back in Norway. They have been quarantined, are ready to work again. We're starting the testing now during summer, and we will start operations in the first half of 2021.
When that stage is completed, we will have all operations out of a single highly automated warehouse in Moss, and we expect savings after the transitional period we're in that will last until we move out of the old warehouse in 2022 or the lease expires. The second part in improving cost position is about ÖoB and the sourcing partnership we have with Tokmanni and now also ÖoB in Sweden. We acquired 20% of ÖoB, completed that in December last year, and we have an option to acquire the remaining 80%. That option period starts when we have agreed on the 2019 accounts of Överskottsbolaget. They have been delayed with issuing their accounts for 2019 due to a change of CFO and also a change of focus in the organization due to COVID-19. They operationally were hit, and they needed to focus management resources on handling the operations.
They finalized their accounts and have their general assembly on the 30th of June, and I expect to receive ÖoB's financials with supporting due diligence information during the third quarter. We will start doing the due diligence on the financial numbers, and after that, we have completed that, then we have a six-month option period. That means that the option period will not expire until into Q1 2021 at the earliest. Looking at the sales performance of ÖoB, that has been strong in the first half with a growth of 8.8%. ÖoB has basically seen more or less the same effects of COVID-19 as us, a mixed effect on the store base, growing sales, of course, for them negative on the border shops towards Norway, where they've lost traffic and they actually closed two stores temporary due to the loss in traffic.
Otherwise, it's more or less the same effects as we've seen but at a slight lower rate. EBITDA in ÖoB for the first half was NOK 13.9 million, compared to NOK 10.7 million in the first half of 2019. When we look at the next strategy element, it's about improving the customer experience. A key asset in this is to develop the concept and the categories. As the fourth quarter is seasonally important to us, we don't do any major changes during this quarter, but I would like to talk something about what I think is the key asset of Europris, and that is the flexible concept. Over time, we have developed a concept that is truly flexible and also operationally adaptable. During this quarter, we have really seen that this comes into handy.
As I said, we didn't plan for 30% growth. You need to have a flexible organization, you need to be able to adapt to these kind of unforeseen changes. Our buyers did that, starting off early, even with the Tokmanni Europris sourcing office in Shanghai, making sure that we got all the goods we needed for the summer season. They had their contingency plans up early, making sure that we actually got everything we have ordered. Our buyers also in Norway really had to adapt. They had to change the marketing, they had to change the focus we had on the campaigns. We had to make a lot of changes in the stores to facilitate new regulations. Just on the product offering, seasonal product promotions were adjusted.
We had to find replacement for sold-out products wherever that was possible. We put a significant focus already back in March, we saw that if this continues as we see it, we will be sold out. What do we do? We started looking for stock lots to ensure good bargains for the customers and also have traffic drivers for the summer season. This materialized in Tax-Free days at Europris and I think that's a brilliant idea. Norwegians like to travel during summer, but our buyers, they realized this year they can't travel. We do the job for them. From the office in Fredrikstad they search whole Europe for stock lots or attractive offers from less fortunate retailers. We made tax-free shopping available for all Norwegians through our 265 stores in Norway.
I think doing that with a sense of humor, that's something you need in a retail organization. Also, I think this kind of flexibility that we have demonstrated in this quarter is quite important, and I think if it's one key takeaway you should have from this presentation, maybe except from the record profits and sales, that should not be COVID-19, but it should be the way that the Europris organization responded to the challenge. Because the way our employees actually make a turn, change the product offering, this is truly in the DNA of Europris. We are doing campaigns every week. Every week is a new campaign. That is actually close to 30% of our total sales. We are used to quick changes and we are changing from season to season. This quarter we actually had multiple seasons.
We had Easter and start of spring, summer in the same week. We are used to doing these kind of quick shifts. We have a large and variety in the assortment, which means that we can shift the focus between the product groups. I think the uniqueness about Europris is not just the products, but it's the combination of how we do it is the uniqueness of Europris. I think honestly, you can copy the products, you can copy the prices, you can copy the promotions, but what you can't copy, that's the people and the culture. The way we do it and the way we have put this into system is really a competitive advantage for Europris, and it shows also that we have some resilience in difficulty at times when it comes unforeseen market changes like we've seen now.
That should be one of the key takeaways, at least from the presentation today. On driving customer growth, the new e-commerce platform has been long overdue, and we're really happy to see it launched. It facilitates a much simpler and more flexible shopping solution, and we have also expanded the e-commerce offering significantly. The picking is now done at the central warehouse, which basically means that all articles we have at the central warehouse is something you can buy online. It's a much bigger selection of products. For us, I'm not that concerned that we should do this kind of amount of total chain sales online. What I would like to do is make sure that the customers have the possibility to shop in the way they like. For us, it's about conversion.
Whether if it's in the physical stores or online, that doesn't really matter. We want to make shopping easy and convenient for the customers. With Europris today, you can do click and collect in two hours for selected items in all our stores. You can do click and collect on all products from the central warehouse and get it delivered to your local Europris store free of charge. We give you home deliveries, then we charge for the transportation, or you can get it in any of our 264 physical stores. The results have been positive. E-commerce sales grew by 99% in the second quarter and accounted for 2.1% of chain sales. Home deliveries, that grew by 167%, and click and collect grew by 87%. Click and collect now accounts for 80% of total e-commerce sales. That's quite stable compared to what we saw last year.
Not only e-commerce is important to drive customer traffic. With digitalization, we get better and more access to data, and Europris has over time developed eCRM systems and also now scaling up capacity to do better analysis and take commercial decisions based on this new data. This is just an example of what we've done because we saw that there were some significant differences between the stores during COVID-19. We started analyzing what happened to our customers at the Strømmen store. We looked at 21,000 unique bank cards used in Strømmen and other chain stores before and after COVID-19. We saw that the customers, they remained loyal. They just shopped less at Europris Strømmen. They moved their shopping to other stores, and like any other customer, they increased the basket and they increased the frequency of visits to Europris.
I think, going forward, we have now more than half a million members in our customer club, MER. We are collecting more data than ever before, and this will be an edge for us. We are scaling up the capacity to do analysis and to make commercial decisions based on these kind of data. Our decisions and marketing and also decisions will be more commercially driven and data-driven in the future. It's also about opening new stores and developing the store estate. As planned, we didn't open any stores in the second quarter. We actually closed the store at Haugenstua, Oslo, that has been a loss-making store for some years, been in our tail of unprofitable stores. We got an offer to exit the contract, and we did that.
We have six stores in the pipeline for 2020 and beyond, including a new city concept store in Oslo. That is, if everything goes as planned, due to be opened in the fourth quarter. It's a little bit different city store than the one you see at Gunerius. It's located on Løren, so a little bit different location, more residential, but in an area with a lot of population and also co-located with a grocery store that has high sales. We're really looking forward to see a new concept store in Oslo. We continue to do negotiations with landlords. We have a good pipeline of negotiations going on for good locations, and we believe that post-COVID-19, Europris is in a good position to negotiate with landowners because we have a winning retail concept.
I think we're in a good position, and landlords should actually look for Europris because we are one of those that can attract customers to a shopping area. Summarizing and looking on the outlook, like I started off saying, it's too early to draw any conclusions about the long-term effect of COVID-19 on the current situation. As I said, the flexibility and the concept and the organization's ability to quickly adapt to market changes, that gives Europris a resilience and also a competitive advantage to handle unforeseen market changes. The long-term financial outlook for Europris remains unchanged. We should continue to outperform the market over time and to deliver profitable growth driven by the actions we do on the new center warehouse, and we should also continue to pay out dividends to our shareholders. With that, I think we open up for questions.
We'll start with questions from the audience, and then we will take questions from the web, Trine.
Okay. Thank you. Markus Heiberg from Kepler Cheuvreux. If we look at going forward, because I think Q2 is behind us, it was an exceptional quarter. How do you believe sales categories will develop? Do you believe in essentials doing better or discretionary categories? Now you saw this home and garden category doing very well. Of course, essential goods are, I would guess, doing well, but how do you see this going into Q3? That's my first question.
I think it's a very good question, but difficult to answer because it depends on the depth and the length of the infection control measures. As long as people spend more time at home, I think they will consume more in their households, both washing detergents, personal care, food, everything. Also they might make it nice at home. Preparing for summer holiday, many people, they buy new garden furniture, they freshen up, they're doing refurbishment. I think, as long as people are spending more time at home, you will basically see more or less good growth in all categories. It's back to the thing, you don't plan for 30%-40% growth. At one point you get sold out, and you need to focus a little bit differently.
Yes. Do you expect some sort of market saturation that people have now bought what they need for their garden? Do you see, because you have accelerating growth in June, do you think that people are still, as you say, buying even more goods for their home? Do you think that was kind of a spike in June?
I think obviously it was a spike, and people started preparing for that summer holiday at home early. I think we got a lot of hard good sales especially in May. It was nice weather, it was good conditions for preparing to staying at home. Also that continued into June. Normally we see that the sales of seasonal items drops significantly in July. People are well prepared and planning their shopping. I think we will see lower sales in the next couple of months, and like we said in the announcement when we talked about our sales in April and May, we think that the biggest changes are behind us, that we will gradually, like the rest of the society, move towards the normal. We just don't know how that new normal will be yet. That's too early to say.
Okay, thank you. My second and last question here is on the cost side. I think it's very interesting because obviously you didn't prepare for this. You see employee costs are up 26%, I think, and even higher if you adjust for the extraordinary cost last year. It's basically a variable cost this quarter. It's one-to-one with the top line. How do you see costs develop if you had time to prepare for this? Is that not a normal assumption, but that payroll costs will move something like one-to-one with the top line if you have extraordinary growth, or how do you see that?
When you look at the personnel cost in the quarter, you're absolutely right, it's up by more than 20%. Some of it is due to the volume, but that's the small part. The large part is actually due to that we incentivize our store managers by sales growth and also margins improvements. From the contribution they have in their stores, they get their annual bonuses. Of course, the incentive-based pay increases this year due to what happened in this quarter. We've taken that cost in this quarter.
Okay. You will say that the cost from an increased Q2 bonus is, of course, taken now.
That-
That would be for every quarter.
Yeah.
if you have strong growth.
They don't have quarterly bonuses. They have full year bonus agreement, and we see now that their full year bonus cost will increase, and that cost is taken in the second quarter.
Yeah. Thank you.
Thank you. Quite interesting to see that a quarter of the customer transactions is actually coming from new customers. I assume that there might be some barriers in terms of complying to GDPR to know exactly who those new customers are. Is there any other way that you can identify the new customers and how to actually make sure that they become usual customers going forward?
I think on the GDPR, we have a system that is absolutely 100% in compliance with the regulations. It's just a bank card that get it. We don't know who the customers are. We know that for those customers that become part of our MER Customer Club, and there we have now more than half a million customers. We are starting to attract more and more data and more and more customers that we actually know who are and we can communicate with, but they have, of course, accepted that we use this kind of data in analyzing and also in marketing. We don't know, but we will work extremely hard to make sure that the new customers we get actually are being served and welcomed.
This is spread out with our 264 stores. You see these stores are in local communities. When I go to my local Europris store, they know their customers. If they get a new customer, they actually see him and recognize him. They actually see these new customers coming in. You can do it on data, but face-to-face is also quite good.
Also interesting to see that e-commerce revenue growth was actually 99%, which is quite amazing, I think. It now accounts for about 2% of chain sales. Basically, my question is the platform rigged to still make sure you can see growth, e-commerce growth, picking in the central warehouse and then make sure that you can actually meet that demand going forward? Should we also expect that percentage of chain sales to increase steadily going forward? Because I think I remember just a couple of years back, I think we were talking about the e-commerce sales being maybe 0.5%.
Yeah, it was 0.6% in 2019, the full year. This quarter last year was 1.4%. The second quarter with a lot of garden furniture is the peak season for e-commerce sales. It was full high also last year. The growth we've seen, we can absolutely handle that. We have the capacity to do that. As I said, 80% is click and collect. That is still coming through the stores, the majority of it. It's not that much of home deliveries. Of course, it's growing, but we have a new solution. It's much better than the old one. We were expecting to see significant growth, but we're pleased with that the customers actually like it.
Regarding the home deliveries, which grew by 167%, are there any particular categories that stands out?
You would be amazed. It's like all over. Compared to the stores, it's less washing and cleaning, but it's a lot home interior decoration. It's garden furniture. Yeah, a lot of things that people buy to make it nice at home.
Regarding the new e-com platform, you said that the assortment is wider and broader than in a typical store. Is it actually possible to buy, for example, off-season products online that you won't typically see in a store?
Yeah, it is. We don't do that at the moment. We have tested with some selected assortment only available online. Occasionally, we started with some seasonal products. I think let's see how this works and what the customers want. We have credibility on price and products. I think we can sell a lot more online than what we do actually in the stores. What I would be careful with is to start a competition between the online and our own stores. It should be a unique assortment online that the stores could recommend for the customers in the stores also to use. I think it's a potential there, but we haven't explored it.
Thank you.
Just one question from me, Eirik from Carnegie, and it's on FX. You touched on the unfavorable FX movements now this spring. Two questions there. Have you already started to move prices up a bit? Number two is if you could give any flavor on how far you've come with the renegotiations with your Far East suppliers, for instance, for the Q4 deliveries, just a quick update on how FX has been affecting you as of today.
For us, we're in this business because we should have low prices and offer that to our customers. That's why we do the hedging. We should be focused on the price and not be stressed by some certain movements in the currency on the short term. I think we managed this quite well during the second quarter. We are following the market every month, doing detailed price analysis, both in the grocery stores, but also on competitors in discount variety retail. We should be competitive and never compromise on that price position. We are sure that we haven't done that. Of course, for some products, we have started to see that the market prices are increasing. We have followed that and to make sure that we take out the price we can in the market at the same time as we remain competitive.
For the second quarter, price increases will come on seasonal assortment, especially for the Christmas goods. There we will see some price increases. We will never compromise on the price position we have, and always we negotiate with our suppliers. This year, we have purchased Christmas items together with both ÖoB and Tokmanni, while we in the past only purchased together with Tokmanni. We're getting an edge there. I'm sure that we will maintain the competitive position and manage the currency situation like we've done before.
Thanks.
Oliver Pisani, Nordea. Just a quick technical question first. What was the total rent of the three warehouses that you exited this quarter?
That's a detailed question. I think Trine should answer later on. I don't remember the exact number.
Okay. I think I had another one here. Yeah. We're getting close to the ÖoB potential transaction, could you perhaps just elaborate a bit broadly your thinking of the risks versus the opportunities of that transaction now going forward?
I think the key objective of the ÖoB transaction was basically to start doing sourcing together. That was the whole basis for the partnership that we should add more sourcing forces together so we increase the total capacity of Tokmanni and Europris and ÖoB to get the lower prices. That's the key of it. The joint ownership is basically to make it more committed from all parties. That remains the key issue. We have the option to acquire the remaining 80%, and that should be done if you believe that you can actually do it better, that you can make the turnaround. We were hoping that they should do the turnaround before we had to make the decision. Still, it looks promising this year, but let's wait and see. The option will not expire until we've seen the full 2020.
That gives us some more time. I think, we should take this time. We should do a thorough, not only the financial due diligence, but also the commercial due diligence in this period. We have assigned partners to do that. Based on this analysis and the business plan we provide to the board, they will make their decision. Do they believe that we can do some changes and make the turnaround in ÖoB? I think there are some things you can do on the operational execution. There are some things we could share on the development of the concept and the categories. Let this be taken care of by the due diligence and then the board will make their decision on that.
Thanks.
Regarding future growth in new stores, I think you mentioned that there are six stores planned for this year and beyond. Historically, there's been a higher number of new stores every year, about 15, I believe. You touched upon, let's say, a new concept city store in a more residential area in Oslo now. Would you be able to comment anything about your thoughts for 2021? Are there a number of, let's say, spots or locations that you're considering? Are we talking about a single or double-digit number of stores, let's say for 2021 and 2022?
No, we're not. I think the horizon is too short to have a double-digit when you come into to that close period. We have planned another two for this year. That means we'll come up to four new stores in total in 2020. Our long-term guiding is around five, I think that's within the range. We have another pipeline for four beyond 2020. It's a good pipeline, and we continuously work with landowners to find good locations. I'm excited to see the new city store concept in Oslo. The concept itself, it will be more or less the same as at the Gunerius, the size of the store, product selection, but it might be tuned a little bit to fit more with the residential area it is in, rather than the downtown store of Gunerius.
I think, we will take this, we will learn how we should tune the assortment, and that will form the basis on how we go forward. Looking at the pipeline we have, I honestly don't remember all the stores, where the locations are, but it's not any new city stores except for the one. The other stores are spread around the country.
I believe that ÖoB has had the concept of city stores for some years. There's been some changes in the number of them, but hovering around 10, I believe. Are those largely city center stores or also residential stores? Why have you, let's say, come to the conclusion that you would like to try a, let's say, a city store in a more residential area at Løren now?
They actually have both, so more residential areas and city center stores. I think this is a good location that came up. I think it's a good potential for sales in that area. We see that customers are actually not willing to travel very long to and out of these stores. They do the shopping quite locally. I think this is a very good opportunity for us to see for a location. Honestly, it's not that easy to find good enough locations at the prices we are willing to pay. I think that the landowners will adjust and make sure that you will see more city Europris stores in the future.
Do you see any particular changes in category mix of a typical, let's say, residential city store than the city center store?
I think that's too early. Let's wait and see the numbers.
Thank you.
A couple of questions from the web here. It's Ole Martin Westgaard, DNB. Can you please elaborate on your thinking about purchasing volumes for second half next year? When do you commit to volumes for seasonal goods?
You commit to the volumes of seasonal goods in the range 12-16 months before the season. You do that on a quite long horizon, and obviously, when we plan for the seasons, we plan for more normal growth. We did that this year. We are planning for a more normal Christmas season as well, and we will do that also for the seasons next year. I think everyone remembers what happens when we were too enthusiastic and increased the purchasing volumes like we did last year. That is not the kind of situation you would like. I think you should plan for a normal season. If you get an extraordinary volume like you see in this year, the Europris organization has proved that it's actually flexible and have the ability to adapt to the situation.
I think we should focus on normal purchasing and do operational excellence like we've demonstrated this quarter.
As a last question from Petter Nystrøm, ABG. You say sales were boosted by increased consumption in private households, halted cross-border shopping, and Norwegians having holiday at home. Isn't this also drivers that will support Q3 sales?
Yes, of course, to some extent it is, as long as the borders towards Sweden are closed, I expect to see higher sales in the stores close to the border. For how long it will last, and what kind of infection control measures that will stay in force in society, that's still too early to say. Short term, I think those kind of changes will be positive for Europris, but I still believe that we've seen the peak is behind us. As you understand, we are soon getting sold out of some summer seasonal items. We are changing the focus, and I wouldn't be surprised if I saw another Tax-Free week coming soon.
No more questions.
Okay, last time we missed a few questions on the web because we cut the line too early. We give it half minute, but they have had plenty of time until now.