I'm heading Investor Relations at Vend. You're probably aware that last week we shared a trading update for our Q1 results, including a revised Mobility outlook for revenues for 2026, an updated cost outlook, and preliminary figures for the first quarter. With today's presentation, we will provide the full context for the quarter, and as usual, we have our CEO, Christian, and our CFO, PC here, who will walk you through the performance and the key highlights. Following the presentation, we will then have a Q&A session with financial analysts through Microsoft Teams. Before I hand over to Christian, let me just quickly show you also our disclaimer slide. With this, Christian, the floor is yours.
Thank you so much, Jan Børre, and good morning, everyone. In our annual report, I described 2025 as the year where Vend took shape as a focused pure play marketplace company. I think that the first quarter of 2026 demonstrates the strength of the foundation that we have built. Group revenues ended at NOK 1,543 million, which is up 2%. If you look at the revenues across our 4 verticals, they grew 10%, while group revenues were impacted by the phase out of transitional service revenues. Group EBITDA improved by 36% to NOK 563 million, and the margin expanded to 36% from 27% 1 year ago.
This is a reflection of the sustained cost discipline and the positive development that we have seen across our verticals. Real Estate had a particularly strong quarter, where we saw ARPA growth driving both revenue and profitability across Real Estate. Jobs also delivered solid growth supported by strong ARPA development. Commerce showed really encouraging progress with the strong transactional growth and improved unit economics. In Mobility, Norway and our transactional businesses performed well. However, Sweden was held back by the platform migration stabilization. In Denmark, the professional ARPA growth was offset by volume declines.
As we communicated lastly last week, we don't expect Mobility to achieve revenue growth in line with our stated medium-term target of 12%-17% in 2026. Our other verticals are performing in line with their respective targets, however. Our market position in Mobility remains strong. Of course, bringing this segment back to stronger growth is a key priority for us. At the same time, we are really focusing on the things that we can control. We now expect the 2026 cost base, which is OpEx excluding COGS, to decline by approximately NOK 100 million compared to 2025. This is a revision to the broadly stable commentary that we made in Q4.
Also, our platform migration continues to advance, we are accelerating our efforts in AI. These are things I'll come back to in a minute. We completed the sales of Mittanbud and Lendo. We received Adevinta Spain proceeds. Now, having completed our NOK 2 billion buyback program, we are today announcing a new NOK 4 billion program, which will be conducted in two tranches. While we acknowledge that there are some near-term headwinds in mobility, the underlying health and the underlying trajectory of our overall business remains strong. Let's move to transition status. In Q1, we really focused on establishing a clear path to recovery for Blocket.
We are now seeing this marketplace regain momentum. We are working really hard to improve the user satisfaction score, which is recovering, but quite slowly. From the low we had of 1.5 in December to now 2.6 for Mobility and 2.9 for Recommerce in April. Improving the Net Promoter Score is going to be a key priority for us throughout 2026. The good news is that the new platform is proving to be more efficient. We have some examples here. For instance, leads per visit are up 27%. We are also seeing shorter times to sell in the marketplace.
We also see that ads generating leads within the first 14 days is up 37% year-over-year. I think these examples really validate the strength of the market, but also the effectiveness of our common platform. At the same time, we do continue to see lower engagement than we had on the old platform, this is something that remains a key focus for us to improve going forward. We're doing a number of things here. We are, for example, specifically working on moving our users from the mobile web to the app because it is in the app where we see the strongest engagement, the highest login rates, and also the best retention.
I'm happy to say that we already see positive results of the work that we have done. Total visits and app visits to Blocket are growing week by week and right now there are some seasonality effects, but we are closing the gap that we're aiming for. On the commercial side, the planned price adjustments for the dealer packages will take effect from May 1st. When it comes to the private volumes, we recognize that more is needed than just, let's say, technical fixes. This requires us to rebuild the perceived value of the platform and also making sure that the listing process is efficient and safer. Finally commenting on migration in Norway.
Here, we reached a key milestone in Q1. This process remains on track. Again, I want to remind you that this is more of a backend-focused transition in Norway. It doesn't really affect the user interface or the experience that consumers are seeing. To finalize this is important to us because this consolidation really enables us to build once and scale innovations across the Nordics. We are also accelerating our AI agenda. Here, our approach is to combine advanced technology with our deep and proprietary data. We think this is an advantage that we have that is very hard for others to replicate.
Throughout Q1, we have made significant progress in several areas, particularly those where we focus, like ad quality and search and matching and also decision support. We have some notable examples from our core verticals. For example, in Real Estate, we launched a conversational search pilot in Norway. This is a product that moves beyond, let's say, the traditional search filters and allows users to use more, let's say, their intent and their life context, and it's also a very map-based service. In Mobility, we have integrated AI-driven recommendations in our pro tool, Dealer Hub.
Here we support dealers with the market insight and real-time optimization of their inventory, which is something that is important because it reduces their time to sell. This was just launched in Norway, but we plan to also have it in the Swedish market in Q3 of this year. To ensure that we remain at the forefront of this development, we are today announcing that we are establishing a new dedicated AI unit. This team is tasked with building a completely new and, let's say, AI native marketplace experience. We purposely set this up as a separate and lean unit to make sure that it has the speed and autonomy needed to really innovate outside of the core product environment.
The goal here is to shift toward a more, let's say, intuitive and agentic user journey, really ensuring that Vend also remains the preferred destination in the future. Worth mentioning that this initiative will be managed within, let's say, the existing financial framework. It doesn't change our financial guidance in any way. Let's now move to the verticals, and as Jan Boje said, we pre-announced revenue and EBITDA per vertical last week. The key numbers should already be known, but let me just put some flavor to this development. Let's begin with Mobility. Here, our ARPA growth continued to be strong in Norway in Q1 with the 27% growth for professionals and 13% for the private segment, partly explained by the yearly price increases.
Professional ARPA was further boosted by packaging and improved upselling. Car volumes in both pro and private increased, but we did see a decline in subverticals, and this offset the car growth in the private segment. We have already discussed Sweden, but let me just mention that we launched new packages to dealers on February 1. We delayed the price increase to May 1, which will now be implemented, and this leads to the pro ARPA being at the same level as last year in this quarter. Car volumes for pro are in line with the last year, but just like in Norway, this was offset by a drop in the subverticals.
For private ARPA growth continued, which is driven by the value-based pricing that we introduced last year. Volumes were, as we have discussed before, impacted by the platform transition and were down across categories in Q1. Worth saying that the trends were improving in March. In Denmark, here we now report the same KPIs as we do in Norway and Sweden for our professional business. This is after the change that we made to the business model, going from pay per day to pay per ad. We are re-replacing the pay per day gradually, and this will be phased out. There is a strong starting point for the Pro ARPA at 644 NOK.
This represents, let's say an underlying growth, which is similar to the levels that we have in the other countries, around 15%-20%. I think this really represents the strength that we have with our Danish position. Now, after a strong year for used cars last year, Pro volumes declined at the start of 2026. This was particularly true for combustion engine cars and the lower priced segments. This was driven by a combination of, let's say, dealer adaptation to our new model, but also a market development where we saw softer domestic demand and an increase of exports of around 35% this quarter.
You can say that roughly 50/50 of these effects were driven by the market and by the changes in the business model, respectively. The decline that you see here in private ARPA is explained by the reversal to the free list model for cars priced below NOK 50,000 on DBA. The Bilbasen volumes remain somewhat under pressure as dealers continue to source directly from private sellers. Also here we saw an improvement in the trend in March, and this seems to be holding up also in April. Moving on to the financials. Overall revenues and mobility increased by 5% in Q1. Classified revenues grew by 3%.
This time I would actually like to comment on each countries specifically as the situation is very different in each one. Norway continues to deliver strong development, 21% revenue growth, primarily then driven by the professional segment. We have talked about the Blocket transition challenges in Sweden. This of course, contributes to the negative growth, where Sweden saw a decline of 7% in classified revenue. The softer volumes in Denmark led to weak classified revenues development also here. Q1 ended up slightly 2% up. Looking then at the transactional business, here we continued to deliver well, with 15% growth, driven by strong quarters in both Nettbil and Autovext.
Advertising also remained on growth in Q1, up 7% year-on-year, most notably in Norway. OpEx, excluding COGS, increased 6%, primarily driven by increased marketing investments in Sweden. This leads us to an overall EBITDA increase of 2% over Q1 last year, resulting in an overall margin of 48%. Moving to Real Estate, here in Norway, ARPA increased 20% year-on-year. This was driven by residential for sale, where we had 19% ARPA growth. In Finland, we at the beginning of the year successfully pivoted our business model to, let's say, a fixed monthly structure. This was done to improve monetization.
As a result of this, you can see that we have adjusted our reporting metrics. We have moved away from ARPA to ARPO, Average Revenue Per Office. ARPO isn't directly comparable to the old ARPA. If we do, let's say a like for like comparison of realtor revenues, we can indicate an approximate increase of around 25% year-on-year. Turning to volumes, in Norway, residential for sale declined 5% in Q1. Let me also here remind you that the Q1 last year was an exceptionally strong quarter. Also, the earlier timing of Easter this year impacted Q1, because what we usually see is that the listing activity cools off in the weeks leading up to the holiday.
In Finland, after changing to the new business model, we are no longer reporting on the listing counts, but instead we follow the total number of offices as the core volume metric that represents the new operational reality. Here, I just want to say that we are satisfied that we retain almost all Finnish realtor offices as our customers post this transition. Classifieds revenues for Real Estate grew 11% year-on-year in Q1, primarily then driven by strong double-digit ARPA growth across multiple segments actually in Norway. Total revenues in Finland grew 28%, driven by the business model change that I just explained.
Our transactional businesses, Casa and HomeQ, continued solid growth with revenues up 20% year-on-year. On costs, OpEx excluding COGS increased 3% year-on-year. This in total led to that the EBITDA reached NOK 164 million in the quarter, which is up 30% year-on-year with a margin of 48%. To Jobs, here we also continue to deliver strong ARPA growth, 13% year-on-year. This improvement was driven by upsell revenue growth and continued modification of our discount model. Volumes, as you can see, continue to decline somewhat slower than we saw in Q4.
This development mirrors what we see in the overall market and in the publicly available figures. This means that Q1 Jobs delivered 8% revenue growth. The 13% ARPA growth more than offset the 4% volume decline. OpEx, excluding COGS, decreased by 2%, and this led to an EBITDA growth of 18% year-on-year with a margin of 64%. Finally, Recommerce. Here, if we look at the gross, the transacted gross merchandise value, we have a mixed picture with a very positive development in Finland with 44%, continued improvement in Norway with 19%.
At the same time, we see that in Sweden we recorded a decline of 10% due to the Blocket platform transition and the temporary effects of that. Take rates remained solid across all markets with Norway and Finland reaching 16% and 17% respectively. This means that Recommerce revenues increased 20% year-on-year, driven by a 24% increase in the transactional revenues. Classified revenues increased as we saw strong growth in private classifieds, which more than offset the decline in the pro segment. Advertising revenues increased 30% year-on-year, driven by increased activity in all our markets.
We continued improvement of the gross margin in Q1, driven by several successful initiatives around COGS and pricing. OpEx excluding the COGS declined 1% year-on-year, this was primarily driven by FTE reductions and increased AI automation. I think it is really good to see an EBITDA improvement of NOK 43 million year-on-year. This is actually a 25 percentage point margin expansion. It is worth noting that this EBITDA performance was supported by one-off effects of sponsored shipping campaigns for around NOK 6 million and low marketing spend in general.
If we look going forward, the underlying transactional margin will remain healthy, but we think that we'll be stabilizing a bit more as we move past these, let's say, campaigns. We also expect marketing expenses to increase in the coming quarters, due to seasonal campaigns that we have scheduled across our markets. With that, I'll hand it over to PC to go through the financials.
Thank you, Christian, and good morning, everyone. Let's move to the financials for Q1. As previously mentioned, revenue and EBITDA for the group and also for the verticals were announced at the trading update last week. Let's just summarize the key figures. In total, revenues on a constant currency basis grew 2% compared to Q1 last year. This is driven by solid underlying revenue growth in Real Estate, Jobs, Recommerce, while Mobility saw a somewhat muted growth momentum. Revenues in Other HQ, as expected, declined 63% due to the exit of the TSA with Schibsted Media.
Total EBITDA ended at NOK 563 million, 36% up versus last year, driven by positive developments across all our segments, in particular Real Estate, Jobs, Recommerce, and also Other HQ. Christian has covered the vertical performance, but let me give you some more context on the Other HQ segment. At the end of 2025, the TSA services with Schibsted Media were fully terminated, with dimensions significant impact on the revenues. EBITDA ended at minus NOK 72 million in the quarter compared to a loss of minus NOK 110 million in the same period last year. We have accelerated our cost reduction and delivered ahead of our original plan, more than offsetting the declining revenues. Let's take a closer look at the cost development in the quarter. As this slide shows as before, focusing on OpEx excluding COGS.
In total, OpEx excluding COGS in the quarter declined by 12%. Other costs decreased by 34%, driven by positive effects from the company simplification and cost efficiency agenda. In addition to some one-off costs that we have mentioned in 2025, in particular, the big kickoff that we have, you know, starting in 2025. Personnel costs increased by 1%, reflecting increased personnel costs in the verticals, largely offset by the decline in the Other HQ segment. Total marketing costs increased by 15%, driven by some increasing activity across all our verticals. Overall, this resulted in an almost 9 percentage point improvement in OpEx excluding COGS over revenue from 63% in Q1 last year to 55% in Q1 2026.
This time, we have added an FTE overview to highlight the reduction and development in FTEs from the CMD in November 2024 until Q1 this year. Total number FTEs has declined at around 290 since the time of the CMD. The reduction is, as expected, concentrated around our common functions and customer operations, driven by the execution of the Vend's simplification and cost efficiency agenda, including the exit of the TSAs with Schibsted Media. We have increased FTEs in Mobility and Real Estate to support the growth of both the core business but also our scaling business. These increases also reflect some movements between common functions and the verticals.
For Jobs, the decline is mainly driven by the exit of our Jobs business in Finland and Sweden, while Recommerce have driven quite significant reductions from an operational perspective. Our total product and tech organization across the common functions, but also what is included in the vertical numbers, is around 800 FTEs. This is around 100 FTEs lower than at the time of the CMD. At our trading update last week, we announced the carrying value of Vend's 14% stake in Adevinta has been revised down to NOK 7.2 billion. This is NOK 8.9 billion lower compared to Q4 2025. The reduction is due to the following factors.
We received cash proceeds from the Adevinta Spain transaction of NOK 3.2 billion in the period, and around NOK 6 billion is attributed to the effects of the peer multiple contraction that we have observed during the quarter. The underlying performance from Adevinta is solid. As you can see, we have made a small upward adjustments of NOK 200 million based on better performance in 2025, partly offset by some negative currency effects during Q1. Going forward, we will, on a yearly basis, provide the high-level metrics for Adevinta. The 2025 full year revenue and EBITDA numbers for Adevinta show strong underlying operational development, with total revenue growth of 9% and adjusted EBITDA increase of 30%. Total net debt at the end of 2025 stood at EUR 5.9 billion. Let's move to our operating profit.
That increased to NOK 331 million compared to NOK 222 million in Q1 last year. The positive development reflects the improved EBITDA, partly offset by some increases on depreciation and amortization costs and somewhat higher net other expenses. As mentioned on the previous slide, the fair value of a 14% stake in Adevinta has decreased from NOK 16.1 billion to NOK 7.2 billion in Q1. Adjusted for the capital distribution of NOK 3.2 billion, a loss of NOK 5.8 billion was recognized as a financial expense in the quarter. In totality, a net loss for the group ended at minus NOK 5.5 billion. Now let's move to cash flow.
Cash flow from continuing operations, focusing then on operating activities ended at NOK 485 million compared to NOK 254 million in Q1 last year. The increase is mainly driven by the improved EBITDA, but also, some positive effects related to working capital and provisions, and lower paid taxes, partly offset by increase in net interest payments. Cash flow from investing activities in Q1 ended at plus NOK 2.9 billion, mainly driven by the capital distribution from Adevinta Spain. CapEx was NOK 116 million in the quarter, slightly lower than Q1 last year. Finally, cash flow from financing activities ended at -NOK 1.5 billion due to the share buyback program. In accordance, with our principle for capital allocation, we continue to distribute and return excess cash to our shareholders.
We deliver solid operational cash flow. In addition, we have received proceeds from Adevinta Spain and our own transaction with Lendo and Mittanbud. The NOK 2.0 billion share buyback program that we announced and started in November was completed in April this year. At the end of Q1, we had a strong balance sheet with a net cash position of NOK 3.4 billion. Fully in line with our policy of paying a progressive dividend, the board has proposed an ordinary dividend for 2025 of NOK 2.50 per share, amounting to NOK 527 million, to be resolved at the Annual General Meeting later today. Today, we have announced a new share buyback program of NOK 4.0 billion, with the first NOK 2 billion tranche being launched already now in the coming week.
Let's take a step back and look at our midterm targets. Just to wrap up, I'd like to reiterate that our strategy, our medium-term target, and our capital allocation principles that we announced at the CMD remain unchanged. 2026, we have communicated that we expect our verticals to grow in line with the medium-term targeted range. As we have talked about last week and today, Mobility in Sweden and Denmark had a slow start, and we now expect full-year revenue growth for 2026 in the mid-to-high single-digit growth range for Mobility as a whole, and this is below what we expected earlier of 12%-17%. The medium-term targets remain unchanged for Mobility also. The other verticals are expected to deliver revenue growth in line with their respective medium-term targets.
In other HQ, as before, we expect revenue reduction in 2026 to be around NOK 300 million compared to 2025. This is reflecting the termination of the TSA with Schibsted Media, but also effects from our own exit processes with Lendo, Prisjakt, and also delivery over time. On cost, based on the current progress and additional measures, we expect 2026 full-year OpEx excluding COGS to decline by approximately NOK 100 million compared to 2025. This represent a revision of the commentary at the Q4 report, where we expected the cost to be broadly stable in 2026. Overall, we remain committed and confident in our ability to deliver on our medium-term target, supported by our growth initiatives, a simplified portfolio, continued platform consolidation, and a sustained cost discipline. With that, I'll hand over to Jan Bøe to guide us through the Q&A.
Thanks, PC. Lot of raised hands already here on Teams, which is good. First up, we have Julia at the UBS. Julia, please unmute and go ahead.
Yes. Good morning. Thank you for taking my questions. I have 2, if that's okay. The first one would be about the macro environment in Norway. How would you summarize it? On the back of it, if you could comment on the number of new approved listings by vertical in Norway in April, and do you see any changes on the back of the macro situation? My second question would be about Blocket and the planned price increases. Just given the volumes still remain down year-over-year, you've seen some pushback in the beginning of the year, and competition seems to be increasing. What gives you comfort that you will not face an elevated volume headwind as a result of these price increases? Thank you.
Okay. On the macro in Norway, I would say it is fairly okay. Of course, we do see some challenges in Jobs in particular. That's kind of where we have seen a reduction. I wouldn't say that there are any big changes in the macro in Norway as it stands. I don't have any comments on the NAA for April. When it comes to planned price increases, we are now, as we said, implementing the price increases for the professional segment. We have a confidence in that is a segment that is holding up really well. We see that, you know, the volume level is stable.
We are delivering really well when it comes to leads. There is an intact, let's say, willingness to pay from the professionals. We have high confidence there. On the private side, we have postponed further, let's say, price optimization to really make sure that we fix and resolve the situation in the private segment before we kind of continue that, task.
Thank you.
Thanks, Julia. Next in line we have Will from BNP. Will, if you can hear us, please go ahead.
Hi, thanks for taking my questions. A couple from me. Firstly, traffic dynamics are a bit harder to unpick for Vend versus some of your listed peers, considering the size of your generalist business. For each of your key units, which I would describe as Norway Property, Norway Autos, Swedish Autos, and Norway Jobs, could you give us a bit of an overview of traffic trends? You know, typically, as long as kind of relative traffic trends versus peers have been fine, historically investors wouldn't be too focused. On the other hand, at the moment, with potential risk around AI, could you talk to how LLM traffic has developed in those segments? In particular, does the generalist business give you an additional moat?
For example, is there lower rates of LLM traffic than some of your peers, which are already quite low? Secondly, could you give us some commentary around the absolute central cost number for 2026 and 2027? You know, from history, there's a certain reticence to comment specifically on that, but it's quite important here, and there's quite a few moving parts. If you're not willing to, could you kind of give us some insight as to why that's difficult and what particular elements of the outlook are harder to comment on for central costs? Thank you.
Yeah. The first question was around traffic. Quite the detailed question. I think I'll try to keep the answer on a relatively high level. You know, we have around 300 million visits per month to our sites. I would say in general, our traffic is fairly stable in our key positions. The exception of course now is Blocket, where we have seen a shift. We kind of keep the reach on a monthly basis. We reach the same number of users. We see that each user is visiting us less frequently.
That is the key topic that we're working on when it comes to, let's say, the traffic numbers. That's important. When it comes to AI and LLMs, the volume of traffic from LLMs is still very low. There hasn't been a significant shift in that number. I do think that we see the Recommerce vertical as a positive in for our totality when we think about, let's say, the moat that we can have against the AI and LLMs. Of course, Recommerce is one of our most visited verticals and most frequently visited verticals as well. It is definitely a strength for us in that sense.
I guess I can take the cost questions on central cost. If you look at start a bit on the total, we've been quite clear that our total cost base from the CMD and towards the midterm should go down in absolute terms and significant down in relation to revenue. The biggest change in the cost structure and the cost base will be in the central and the common functions. That is also something that you can see if you look at the FTE details that we provide today. That has, you know, already happened and will continue to happen going forward.
This is where we have then we see the biggest effects of the big change from the old company and the Schibsted used to be with the new pure play marketplace company, and particularly now also then with the exit of the TSAs with Schibsted Media. This is also where we see the positive effects from a cost perspective once we are exiting our own companies with, you know, Lendo, Prisjakt, and Mittanbud. We are just in the middle of that. I mean, we're still serving Lendo as a TSA until after summer, as an example. We are in the midst of this journey to reset the cost base. Of course, on the bottom line, we're also losing some revenues, as we talked about earlier today.
All in all, I think if we have said for 2026 that we expect Other HQ. Earlier we said that we are prepared for a drag of NOK 100 million. We revised that in Q4 to NOK 50 million. I think with the updated, let's say, cost measure today, you should expect that the EBITDA will be broadly stable for 2026 versus 2025, reflecting the updated message on cost. This will also continue beyond 2026.
Thanks very much. Just one quick follow-up. In terms of Norway Jobs traffic, is there any trends to pull out there, or is that consistent with the others, perhaps an area of particular investor scrutiny?
Yeah. The Jobs position is holding up really well. It's at its, let's say, highest level ever when it comes to, let's say, awareness, top of mind, and these things, and it enjoys very high traffic. There's not been any negative development in that area.
Many thanks.
Good. Thanks so much, Will. Next we have Ed from Morgan Stanley. Ed, please go ahead with your questions.
Sure. Two from me as well, please. First of all, on Finland, I just wonder if you could give a bit more color around the switch to the subscription model. It's obviously been a business you've talked about for some time, having a lot of latent potential. Why the slightly different commercial format? I wonder if you could give us some context around the competitive and commercial situations to help us understand that change. Second of all, on the AI mode unit, it's an interesting initiative. I just wondered, do you expect to produce anything tangible that we'll be able to see on some sort of given timeline, or is this sort of very much sort of a demonstration of sort of background R&D and, you know, it may come to something or it may not? Thanks.
Yes. Great questions. The switch we made in business model in Finland was where we go from a listing-based model to, let's say, an all-you-can-eat model where we charge a price per office. We really think that that is a beneficial model to make sure that we capture all the volume in the market. Because you have a subscription and you get, you will post everything in a sense, and it's also a quite robust model in a volatile market. When we introduced it, we also then took the chance to raise prices and starting that journey given the strength that we have developed over the last few years.
When it comes to the AI mode unit, yes, the intention of that team is, as I said in my introduction, to develop, let's say, an AI native experience. What would a marketplace look like if it were starting today, right? Not having all the legacy. That's why I have set it on the outside so that they get free reins, in a way. The idea is definitely that they will produce something that is tangible and used by many of our users across our markets.
Okay. Thank you.
Thanks so much, Ed. We can go to Oslo. We have Petter from ABG. Petter, please go ahead.
Thank you, Ambjörn. I can start with two questions. I can take one by one at a time. Christian, on the Mobility in Sweden, you are talking about, you know, fixing things in the private segment. What do you need to fix there to improve that? Thanks.
Yeah. Just to be very clear on that, we have already fixed many things in Sweden. That's also why we see improved trends both when it comes to listings and when it comes to traffic in total and in our apps. There are a number of things that we can still do. We, for example, as mentioned, we are driving more traffic to our apps where we see higher engagement and better loyalty and so on. We're also working on improving the app in general. Also improving the search experience is a key topic for us.
Categorization, how you search, all of those things are examples of things that we are working on, and a number of small things as well.
Okay. Thanks. Then on costs, PC. In Q1 now, I mean, costs are down NOK 120 million, I think, excluding COGS, and you're guiding costs down NOK 100 million. That means that you're basically then saying flattish cost for the remaining of 2026. You just mentioned that you're still having some serving, you know, Lendo, as on costs. How should we see this and also in the context of your targets saying, you know, 40% of extra sales in 2027? Thank you.
Thanks for that. At NOK 116 million is the number that we were down in Q1. Just remember, Q1 has quite easy comps on last year because we have now reduced our costs with the TSA, and last year we carried quite a lot of cost. You will not see that repeating four times during the year, so that will gradually become smaller. That's sort of a positive effect year-on-year. In addition, also last year, we spent around NOK 25 million on the company event, and that we don't have this year. In one way, it is a bigger decline than what you should expect going forward. You are right.
You know, if you just take the headline numbers, that means that the total cost pay will develop quite stable for the remaining three quarters, as we now have guided on. I think if you look at Q1, you see that the personnel cost is actually increasing, so, slightly. You know, there's no major shift expected on the personal expenses. Year on year, the other expenses will sort of gradually come down and be more stable as well. We have reserved flexibility on the marketing to make sure that we have enough capacity to invest into strengthening our positions, defend our position, and we have talked about the situation in Sweden and in Denmark.
I think those pieces together is what sort of comprise the totality of our NOK 100 million reduction in cost year-on-year.
Thank you.
Thanks, Petter. Next we have Andrew from Barclays. Good morning, Andrew.
Morning, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. Two from me as well, please. First one is for PC on the guidance. There's obviously quite a lot of moving parts here, so it'd be helpful if you could be specific in terms of how you feel about where the current consensus EBITDA sits for 2026, which I believe pre your trading update was around NOK 2.6. Could you give us the moving parts in terms of what could or could not mean you can get to NOK 2.6? First question. I mean, the second one is on Denmark Mobility. I feel like you're being maybe a little bit more vocal about there being some issues with dealers around the pricing model migration there.
It would be helpful to get a lot more color in terms of what those issues are and why you have confidence that we're gonna work through those in Denmark, and we're not setting ourselves up for a few quarters of disappointment there. Thank you.
I can start on the outlook. I am not going to give any specific comments around EBITDA for a year or versus consensus. Just to remind, the structure that we have in place where we communicate the expectations on the revenue growth for all our verticals and also for Other HQ. With the updated now, you should assume, you know, mid-to-high single-digit growth for Mobility, 12-17% for Real Estate, 5-10% on Jobs, and then e-commerce be above 20%. We comment on the NOK -300 million year-on-year on Other HQ. There you have a quite good, let's say, structure in terms of in assessing the revenue development.
Then we have commented that the total cost development excluding COGS is expected to be down around NOK 100 million. Then you can use those pieces and then compare that to the current market expectations.
Yes, on Denmark, let me explain a little bit the backdrop in Denmark. Because this market is in a quite specific situation where with a very intense EV transition. New car sales is performing well. That usually translates to also good used car sales. In fact, what we're seeing now is a reduction of around 10% in used car sales in Denmark. One reason here is that there's a lot of exports of combustion engine cars to other markets. That increase was 35% in this quarter. That's kind of one side of it. That represents half of, let's say, the volume or let's say the impact on Denmark.
The other half is then a result of the business model change. As I said, there are price increases baked into the business model change, but there are also changes in behavior from the dealers. For example, that they do less relisting of cars. They didn't have to do that in the pay per day model. Now we have to incentivize them to do it. Less dual listing of both for sale and leasing cars. There are also some, for example, if you're exporting a car that you in the old model, you would just list it for a few days before it was exported. Now you will wait in doing that.
I think we are working really actively on resolving these things, making it easier to relist. Thinking through how we are going to incentivize people to do double listing, being clearer in our communication about the value that we provide to the car dealers, and of course, just being in constant interaction and dialogue with our customers and car dealers in Denmark.
Thanks, Andrew. We can go back to Marcus from SEB. Marcus, please go ahead. Marcus, can you hear us? We can't hear you, maybe put you back in the queue and go to Henriette from Danske Bank and take you later, Marcus. Henriette, please go ahead.
Sorry.
Yes.
Thank you. Two questions for me. First, on Blocket. Have you seen any further change in listings following competitor Tradera receiving car listings from Wake from April? Also, a follow-up question on the OpEx guiding for 2026. If I understand you correctly, you expect personal costs and the employee base to be broadly flat year-over-year, so further employee reduction is expected from 2027 onwards. Can you elaborate a little bit on this? Thanks.
On the Blocket situation first, it is true that competition has intensified somewhat. What we see is that it's not affecting our numbers as we can see. If you look at the Tradera, it's now kind of stabilized at around 15,000 cars compared to around 140,000 for Blocket. We are still, you know, way ahead. Same when it comes to traffic. They are at around 20,000 daily. We are 35 times higher than that. I think we have a good grasp of that situation. Where we see, let's say, more competition is for the lower priced cars.
Those have, to some degree, moved to for example, Facebook groups as an example or Facebook Marketplace.
On your cost question, I'm not gonna give sort of exact outlook by cost line. I can repeat and reflect a bit on the total situation, right? What we saw in 2025 was quite a big reduction in cost also on the personnel cost because of the structural changes or, you know, exiting the TSAs with media and cleaning up the cost structure, particularly in our common and support functions. Also, for 2026 we don't have these bigger structural changes as we had in 2025. In 2027 we expect more effect once we have come past, you know, the transition milestones that we are still in the midst of right now.
Then as I just referred to earlier in the question was that the cost base was quite stable in Q1, so don't expect any major shifts in the coming quarters. We will, as you have seen over the last quarter, continue to work on our cost base, work on our FTE base, and you should expect it to, you know, gradually go down also from the current levels that you see. Then also just remember that there is salary inflation coming in, you know, particularly in the second half, eating up some of the potential reductions.
Thanks, PC. We have next Olaf from Pareto Securities. Olaf, please unmute.
Thanks. Can you hear me?
Yes.
Yes. Two questions from me here. Could you help us unpack a bit the 2026 guidance downgrade in Mobility, across geographies to help us understand, like, how much stems from Sweden and how much from Denmark? Secondly, can you give some color on how dealers in Sweden have distributed across the new package tiers, and then also try to compare it to Norway at the same point in time last year?
Do you want me to take the. I can take.
You can take the guidance.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I can comment on the guidance. We're not gonna give you sort of a geographical breakdown of that. We're measuring the Mobility on the total business and total revenues. I mean, if you look at what we have talked about today, Norway is developing well and, you know, in line with our expectations. You should read, you know, the reason for the downgrade is the situation that we have in Sweden and also in Denmark. I'm not gonna give you sort of a breakdown of the split between those two markets.
When it comes to the package distribution, I can give you some rough numbers, but also keep in mind that as we are now implementing, let's say, the price change for this, the distribution may change. Roughly speaking, it's around 60% or so on the base package, which is higher than what we have in Norway. There's very few on the medium package, around 5%, 6%, and then the rest is on the largest package. That's the situation right now, and it may change as I said.
All right. Thanks.
Very good. We have Giles from Jefferies. Good morning, Giles.
Morning. Thank you. I'm assuming you can hear me. My first question was on the AI unit. Christian, I was curious to know what's actually changed here, because as far as I'm aware, you've had a 40-person, 50-person AI unit for a couple of years now seeking to drive AI through the organization. What's actually gonna change there? Is it the number of resources? Is it the scope? Is it the pace? What could actually change? Secondly, Blocket and Recommerce, the 10% decline, you spoke about platform migration, but that was completed in Q4. I'm wondering if there's a competition impact on that decline.
Then finally, sticking with the same theme of Recommerce, we've obviously had Vinted results now, and they're printing a level of GMV growth that's a multiple of yours on a blended basis, and I think they would attribute it to their focus on driving down the cost to serve and driving up convenience, and they would say vertical integration is a part of that. Christian, are you still thinking that selling delivery was the right thing to do?
I didn't hear the second question, to be honest.
Maybe we can start with the first one, Giles, on the AI mode unit, and then we take it step by step.
On the AI unit, yes, you're right. We have a unit already that we call Department of AI. That unit's mandate is to really support the rest of our organization in driving both AI adoption in ways of working, but also in integrating AI into our products. That department will continue to work exactly as it has. They are doing a really good job, and it is kind of why we see the great results of AI in our products. This new team will be a small, separate and standalone team that will have the mandate to, you know, rethink the marketplace experience with an AI native background, so to speak. It's a different mandate from the department that we already have.
Then your second was your question whether it was right for us to sell delivery? Was that the sort of the summary of the question?
Yeah.
In a sentence, yes.
Yeah. I think the, our assessment hasn't changed. You know, distribution logistics is an important part of the Recommerce business, but we don't you know, see the need that we own our own distribution business. But we are interested in securing, you know, competition in last mile in the Norwegian, in any market, but particularly here in the Norwegian market. That is a focus for us, but we don't see that we need to own that business.
The last question was on.
Apologies.
Yeah. The last question was on Vinted. I'm not sure I got the entire question here either. Of course, Vinted has impressive growth across Europe. It shows the potential of recommerce in my view. We also see good growth in our markets. It is about, as you say, making sure that this is cost efficient for people to buy used instead of new, and also make it really easy and convenient. That is kind of driving adoption of recommerce.
Thanks, guys, and my apologies there's still a big delay on my line.
Thanks, Charles. Marcus, we can try again, from SEB if you can, unmute and try again.
Yes. Can you hear me now?
Perfect.
Yeah. Thank you. If I understand you correctly, my first question there is on Blocket has really progressed as we could hope and expect since you reported in February. And it could be at a good run rate for the second half, it seems. For the guidance downgrade then, what surprised you in March, April? Is it that Denmark trend is more sticky than we could hope? What surprised you really over March, April? It would be helpful then to understand the trends from February, March, April. Where is it going in the wrong direction?
I wouldn't say that it is going in the wrong direction. It is right, as you say, that, you know, Blocket is progressing with in positive direction on key metrics. The work is not done yet. We recognize that this will take some time throughout this year to have a focus on, you know, putting Blocket back to growth in a way. We will really focus on that. Then in Denmark, I think, we have, you know, got a better grasp of the situation in Denmark, after this quarter and that kind of resulted in the conclusion. I don't know if you want to add anything.
A couple of points maybe. You know, in our outlook, we have not assumed, you know, any significant price events in the private segment. Our focus now is really to, you know, stabilize situation, improving, you know, protect the position of Blocket, also within the private segment in Sweden. In Denmark, it's a bit hard to say. You know, we try never to give an outlook on how markets develop because it's very difficult. We don't assume in our outlook a reversal of the market dynamics that Christian talked about. That is an unknown in our outlook.
We just try to provide, you know, our best view on based on what we know and what we expect for the rest of the year.
A short follow-up on that, on traffic for March and April in Blocket and Bilbasen, where is it year over year in March, April, in the two vertical Mobility in Blocket and Bilbasen?
We're not disclosing exact numbers, but it is in Blocket improving week by week. We are closing the gap in that area.
Okay. In Bilbasen, is it?
Again, not commenting on concrete numbers. It, I mean, the traffic is not an issue in Bilbasen. It's the other things that we have mentioned that are the things that we are working on there.
Thank you.
Thanks, Marcus. I can still see a hand from you, Charles, but I guess it's an old hand. If not, scream out. With this, I think we can conclude the Q&A and the presentation today. Thank you so much for tuning in and maybe some of you at the AGM later today.
Thank you.
Bye.