Good morning, everyone, and a warm welcome to the Axfood Capital Market Day 2023. What a pleasure it is to have you all here with us at our new, very advanced, highly automated center here in Bålsta on a Friday morning in November. Alexander Bergroth is my name, and I'm the head of investor relations here at Axfood. We have a very packed program for today, and we're going to begin by looking briefly at today's presenters, which you can see here on the slide behind me. First, we're going to hear from Klas Balkow, our President and CEO, who's going to start by talking about our strategy and how we propose to create long-term sustainable growth. Then you'll hear from Anders Lexmon, who's going to give you a financial review, talking about our investments over the past few years.
Åsa Domeij will talk about how we take the lead for a sustainable food Sweden. Then we have Nicholas Pettersson, who's going to talk about logistics and the future data-driven work approaches. You'll hear more about our different chains and how they're developing. We have Thomas Evertsson from Willys, Simone Margulies from Hemköp, and Eva Pettersson from Snabbgross with us. So it's a packed agenda with a good pace through the various presentations across the day. Speaking of the agenda, here it is on the screen. There will be two sessions of presentations.
First, we'll have Klas, Nicholas, Anders, and Åsa. That's the first session between 9:00 A.M. and 10:30 A.M., approximately. Then we're going to break between 10:30 A.M. and 11:00 A.M. with some coffee and something to eat outside in the lounge part we've created, when we built this outside here. Then we reconvene at 11:00 A.M.
It's time for Thomas, Simone, and Eva to take the stage before we have a Q&A at approximately 12, where all our presenters will be available. After the Q&A, we will have a brief presentation of the tour we offer you after lunch of the facilities out here. After that presentation of the tour, we're going to have some lunch in the staff canteen, which is quite nearby. My colleagues are on standby to show you the way, of course, and I'm here throughout the day as well.
Then an opportunity for some mingling, chatting, talk to the presenters during the coffee break, not least, but also over lunch. So use this opportunity, and then after the tour, we will reconvene, reconvene in here briefly, and Klas Balkow will sum up the day with a few closing remarks. A few practical points, emergency exits.
The one we have is the main entrance. You just walk out the door here, go to the main entrance, and that's where we reconvene, should there be an evacuation. I think that was more or less it, and I'd like to give the floor to Klas Balkow, first presenter for today.
Thank you, Alex.
Excellent. Thanks, Alex, and good morning, everyone. Let me just add to what Alex has already said: welcome. We're very pleased to see so many of you here at the Axfood Capital Market Day, and in particular, we're very pleased to see that you've joined us out here in Bålsta to have a look at our new logistics center, this whole facility. We started, of course, to plan for all of this, not the construction per se, but planning and estimates for this facility began already back in 2018.
And at this stage, it's wonderful to have this opportunity to show you what we've been doing over the course of these past few years, so that you can have a look and see for yourself what's happened to this investment, because it has been and remains a very big investment for us.
However, it's also an amazing step which will strengthen our efficiency and our competitiveness for many years to come. That's the theme of today. We'll see the facility, we'll talk more about it from up here as well, and we'll have an opportunity to get back to it over and over again. But there are lots of other things that we'd like to share with you as well today. First of all, I'd like to say that Axfood has a very solid foundation. We have a strong market position, we have a number of different brands and concepts, and over the past few years, we've seen a continuously promising development, and we've grown in our markets. We also have a high pace of development. We intend to and will maintain it in operations, in digitization, and automation, not least.
All those are components which are making us quick on our feet, and we need to be very quick and flexible. We've seen the movements over the past few years, not least, and we've had to navigate through the market. So it takes a lot of flexibility, and we have that flexibility. We also have a very strong corporate culture with a focus and an idea, many competent people in our organizations, and sustainability is also embedded in our business model. So this is giving us a very solid foundation to rest upon, now and for the future. We have a clear strategic framework, a clear path forward. We're going to be leaders in good, sustainable, affordable food. That's our vision, and it's raising everyone's quality of life. That's our purpose, and we're clear with our purpose.
It's helping us when we make our decisions, and it's our guiding light to make sure that we make the right decisions moving forward. We also know that we have a model which is about growing stronger together, because there are differences amongst our people and our concepts. These differences provide our strength. We can act and be competitive in many different fronts and many different arenas at the same time. When you have a capital market day, you have. We're sitting here, not just with the quarterly report, with all of our analysts. You can sort of gaze more into the future than just the past quarter, and we've seen that we have a good track record of growth.
And if you look at the past 10 years, specifically, if you look at this slide, the average annual growth on our net sales is to the tune of 8%, and earnings per share up by 9%. This really shows that we've succeeded over the years to develop and to see a promising development in the market, which we intend to continue on this path. Historically speaking, we've described our market, food retail, as a stable one. It's grown with inflation, and of course, this is still true.
However, if you want to simplify a little bit, you could also to this add that a number of events have occurred over the past few years, external factors that have impacted us, and it's impacted the dynamics in our market. Let's take five years, step five years back in time to 2018 or so.
You might remember that we had a drought. We talked a lot about it. It was a very extensive drought. It impacted the entire food chain, but mainly primary production. It impacted harvests negatively, et cetera. And during the pandemic then, I think we can all remember that it, it's not so very long ago, but we saw major disruptions in supply chains globally and shifts in the demand patterns of customers. We noted that we had some locations that were underperforming, some were outperforming others. We saw shifts, transfers between segments and between geographies.
Some of these have been further accelerated, moving to café and restaurant into food retail, but that volume then reverted back afterwards. So it's been a period with many factors to consider. And one part which the pandemic impacted and laid the foundation, really, for the incredible...
was the incredible inflation in foods that we've seen recently. It also was further impacted by the turbulence we saw, both nearby and around the globe, and energy and raw material prices were also impacted, of course. High inflation is the result of many different factors combined, and we've tried as best we can to explain where the inflation is coming from. You could still say that regardless of the reasons, it's impacted our customers, our consumers. They've reacted, and they've partly changed their behaviors. Also, of course, due to the fact that they, they have less money in their wallets. It's meant that we have a much greater focus on price, value, and discounts. It has impacted the dynamics of our market to some extent, and we're still in a highly competitive environment in this industry.
Generally speaking, volumes are down over the past 12 years, if you look at the market as a whole, and profitability in our industry has also dropped. This is due to the actors involved and the cost increases they've incurred for their raw materials and their products. They haven't passed on the entire increase to consumers, and we also have higher costs, pay increases, but also leases and rents. So food retail has not been compensated in full for the increase in costs, and according to Statistics Sweden, perhaps you've read this. Profitability was reduced by more than half during the first six months to 1.7%, from previously 3.7% last year. You might reflect on profitability levels in such a systemically important industry.
But even though we have a challenging environment, I would say that we still have a very stable industry, not least if you compare with many other industries. It's still a growing market with an existing demand, because we will keep eating food, after all. Now, over the past year, we've overperformed. We've grown by more than the market, a little bit more so than we usually do, where consumers have sought out price value, low price, and Willys have seen an extraordinary development, I have to say. And Thomas Evertsson, the CEO, will tell us more about this later on today.
So we've gained market shares, and gaining market shares for us is nothing new per se. However, we've taken a clear step, and we estimate right now that we've approximately 22% of the market in food retail, excluding the companies where we have minority holdings.
But let's gaze into the future. I would say that we see three main trends impacting our industry, and this is, of course, also linked to many of the activities that we do and that we focus on greatly. Consumer focus on price, value, and discount never been greater. There's also digitalization and automation as a second trend, and finally, health and sustainability. As I've mentioned, consumers now have adjusted and changed their demand for price, value, and discount. This is a trend we're convinced is here to stay for now. Because if we look at our own surveys and measurements on the choice of store, food store, for the first time that we've seen, previously, it used to be when you choose one location, geographic location has been at the top of the list.
Now, that's been overtaken by price as a factor, and that's something that we believe is a trend which will stay. We've seen this in other industries as well. And then discount is not new. The fact that it's more important over time is nothing new either. If we look 15 years back in time, discount has continued to grow market shares, with the exception of one year. And so we estimate that the discount segment represents about a fifth today in Sweden. And so you might reflect on the fact that if it constitutes a fifth of the market, it is a fairly small part in Sweden compared to a number of other European countries. I'm thinking, for example, at the U.K., Poland, Germany, but also neighboring countries like Denmark and Norway.
So we see potential here for us, not least with Willys, who is a leading discount player in Sweden, so we need to continue to develop and use the shift in the market, the movement towards discount. Trend number two that I'd like to focus on is digitalization and automation. It's an important part, and I've already mentioned that it's a real focal point for us. We need to make sure that we improve our efficiency, develop our business, to be as strong as possible in our offering to customers. We see rapid development, digitalization, generally, artificial intelligence, gaining more and more room in our core processes with new explorative opportunities to develop the business. We've invested a lot in these areas, and we'll continue to do so.
I would say that this is also one of the reasons why we have a journey of profitable growth ahead. We have a solid digital platform and very strong IT organization. They work together with the rest of the organization as a whole to develop our business and drive the digital development even further. We have a platform that we've developed, that we continue to develop. Here are some important points, events going 20 years back in time, and I'll reassure you, I won't go through every single one of them, but just to mention one thing that happened about 10 years ago was the introduction of the SAP system that we rolled out. It's been very valuable to us.
It gives us much better follow-up our business and how we can develop it, and we continue to build on SAP.
We develop this platform one step at a time. Another area which you've heard us talk about is a data-driven working method. We have a lot of data, a lot of data that's allowing us to develop business even further, to be even more relevant to our customers. Data-driven decision making helps us in many ways. Nicholas Pettersson, CEO of Dagab, will tell us a bit more about this, not least about the data-driven work we do in purchasing and product assortment. The journey of automation is something I'd also like to underline here. Because even if you... You'll see some of it today, but we started back in 2018 by automating our warehouse for perishables in Jönköping in 2018, and fruit and veg, we've also put a lot of effort into.
Here we have a journey of automation at this facility, and we're working in the other major warehouse facilities as well to enhance automation. Then the final trend, which I'd like to mention, is health and sustainability. Because food for a growing population without an improvement in biological diversity and a reduced food CO2 footprint is not going to be sustainable. This is a major challenge, just because food and food production represents about one third of the footprint, generally, in all the emissions. So here we have both a major opportunity and a great share of responsibility to implement change, and sustainability is very present everywhere in Axfood.
We challenge, we try to show the way to reduce the impact of food throughout the value chain, and our ambition is to be the strongest force moving forward for a more sustainable food Sweden.
We've made progress during the year. We've reduced our impact on the climate and biological biodiversity, less waste, food waste, it made improvements in inclusion, and you see some of the key ratios here behind me on the screen. But let me also be very clear in saying that if we look at the past few years, not least in how this all reflects the changed patterns of the consumer, it has disadvantaged healthy consumption. That's something that is of concern to me, to us, probably to you, too, and it's very important that we all keep up the high level of ambition in these areas, and that we continue to see a quick pace of development, and we remain focused on solutions. Also, Domeij, who's head of sustainability, will talk more about this in a little while.
To try and round up my introduction, I'd like to say that we operate in a very stable market, but it also has some different design features. It's been a real strength for us. In addition to our big chains, the ones that are well established, Willys, Hemköp, Snabbgross, of many years, we also have our development companies, who introduce innovation and development and exciting new steps forward. Apohem, Middagsfrid for food or dinner kits, et cetera. Apohem is a pharmacy e-commerce. We also have a share in Mathem. It's a pure player in home delivery, and you will have noted probably that recently it was announced that we've made a merger with Mathem and Oda. Oda, of course, is the equivalent in the Norwegian market.
A very logical type of business, because we need to build scale and efficiency in these to continue to improve our efficiency. We have an extraordinary breadth. The way we collaborate, not least with, of course, Axfood and Dagab, and the underlying levels, is really helping us. We've seen good growth, not least in the past few years, but we also operate in a business and industry which is showing historically low profitability. We're also under pressure, of course, because we're on a journey of transformation of our warehousing and logistics. Regardless of the pressures on the market, I'm convinced that the long-term investments that we're making right now will strengthen our competitiveness, so that we'll see continued profitable growth in the future.
And with those words, I'm going to round off my part, and I'm now going to let our CFO, Anders Lexmon, take the floor. And as Alex mentioned, I'm going to come back for the Q&A session, and then we'll have a look at the facility later on today. Once again, very welcome. Thank you.
Thank you, Klas. And just as Alex has said, we're now going to make a deep dive into the financial developments that we have within Axfood, and also take a closer look at investments and leverage and liquidity as well as the cash flow. And I'm also going to touch upon the financial targets that we have and what we're working with within the group.
When it comes to investments, we are making these for two reasons: to drive growth and to create productivity. The first one is, of course, that we're working with acquisitions. And as we in Q4 2021 acquired Bergendahls, which was a major investment, and also 9.9% of City Gross. This far, well, that has been the biggest acquisition that we've made within Axfood. The second area is, needless to say, our logistics platform is something that we invest in heavily.
...And, this location where we are today, that is such an example, and it's also the biggest investment initiative that we have taken this far, which is also something that is given us an opportunity to create efficiencies in a completely different way compared to before. The third area that Klas has already described in detail, that is digitalization, where we're also investing. Here it's about making use of the data, just as Klas has said, to meet our customers with a good customer offering, but also to create internal process solutions, automation, robots, for example.
The fourth area that we're investing in, and investing heavily in, last but not least, I guess I have to say, that is, that we are investing in our stores, new stores, but also refurbishing and, making the stores that we have, more modern, because we do want to have modern, nice stores for our customers. So that is something that we're working with continuously as well. As last year, we started nine new stores, and we're working with a guidance with 10-15. So we have ramped up when it comes to new stores and those investments. Looking at developments in our investments, well, the last few years, we sort of passed what was somewhat of a standstill.
We had the acquisition of Bergendahls, and we also had the Eurocash that we bought in 2017. And of course, we've also had investments in automation and logistics. And if we try to look at the investments and how they are distributed, then about half of the investments goes to stores, that store network, and then the other half, well, I guess you could say, IT and logistics, about 50/50 there, if you want a rough idea as to how we work with our investments. And that takes me back to what we've invested in automation. Here as well, we are now moving away from that stance still that we have had, and this is in line with what we have communicated.
We have invested in Bålsta, of course, and also invested in the new facility, Landskrona, for fruit and vegetables.
And most of those investments have been made, some remain for next year. And then, well, I would like to get back to what we have on this slide. And we had this slide as well on our Capital Markets Day in 2021, but I think it's a nice slide explaining why we're investing in Bålsta. You see the blue line, which is where we have the developments of our costs. And right now, we have our old warehouse, and we're also ramping up these facilities, which means that we have more costs. But, looking at next year, first half of next year, we will see that efficiencies will go up and costs will go down.
First six, or last six months, rather, of next year, we estimate that we'll have efficiency improvements to the tune of SEK 300 million-SEK 400 million, and we will increase capacity utilization of this facility, and that will give us those cost savings. In percentages, 0.3%-0.5%. This confirms also what we told you in 2021. Then, looking at our major acquisition at Bergendahls Food, we see here as well that we had synergies that were identified, SEK 200 million on an annual basis. So we see that this is now gradually being realized, and as of 2024, we'll see these synergies being fully realized.
One could also say that the effect of the synergies that we see this year, well, they're counteracted by the fact that we have double the costs having to do with the logistics investments that are being made. That is combined with the weakening of the Swedish krona. That, of course, also has an impact on our performance. Let me continue with debt and the developments that we see here. You see a graph where you see 2019 and onwards, and before then, we basically had no debt. But at 2019, what we saw then was that we had a new accounting standards, IFRS 16, that impacted us with some SEK 5 billion. And excluding that effect, we would have had negative numbers, and that up until we started investing in automation and the acquisition of Bergendahls Food.
Which means that we have availed ourselves of the external credit facility that we have. But I would say that most of these investments, they have been financed through our cash flow. And I should remind you also perhaps that we had preemptive rights issue last year, so we got some help from our shareholders. But looking at where we are now, net debt to EBITA, we are at 1.7, and adjusted for certain factors, we're at 0.3. Then if we look at our cash flow, Klas, Klas has already mentioned this, that we have a very strong underlying operating cash flow. And looking back to 2016, we can see that we have been strengthening the cash flow successively.
This is partially explained by the acquisition of the Bergendahls, but in addition, we have strengthened our working capital, and that is what you see in the middle. You see that we have moved from around -2 to -4, which of course has improved our financial position. It has been somewhat weakened the last couple of years, and there are a few explanations, new rules, and also the dilution effect that is linked to the Bergendahls acquisition, and also the fact that we are now having double warehousing because we're building Bålsta, and we still have our old warehouse facilities. But that is something that we expect will end next year. And then looking at the capital employed, well, here as well, we have the impact of new rules.
But we see that we have return on capital employed that has gone down because of the new accounting rules and also because of the Bålsta facility, but we're now at a stable level at around 20%. Let's look then at our financial targets. We have three of them. We say that we're out to perform the market in growth over time. That is what you see to the left and what we also have been doing the last few years. We also say that we should have an EBIT margin of around 4.5% over time, and the numbers that we see today are linked to the structural costs that we've had for integrating Bergendahls and also the automation and the construction work here in Bålsta.
The underlying margin, that is what you see in dark blue. It was last year at 4.4 on a rolling basis. We see what we have here. Equity ratio, we say 20% at the end of the year, and we're well in line with that target. Okay, then to conclude, I would just like to summarize the 4 focus areas that we have, talking about the financial part of our business. First of all, it's about driving growth in the existing environment and also in new investments. We are going to continue to work with improving our profitability through growth, keeping our expenses in check, and profitable investments, of course. We're going to focus on our cash flow and cash efficiencies, needless to say.
We're also going to continue, of course, to have focus on the financial position, which is strong and enables us to continue to take new initiatives in the future. Okay, that, being said, I'm going to hand over to Åsa.
Now, we're going to move over to a slightly different area, but it is incredibly important to our business. This first slide doesn't have a lot of information on it. However, it contains a lot.
... even though it doesn't have a lot of text, because it's about the ambitions of our group to not just develop our own company, but to also develop the food industry in society as a whole, and that, in turn, will make it easier for us to reach our targets. I'm going to try and position myself so I don't block anything. I don't just want to stand in the way. I have the slides behind me. But let me tell you a little bit about the steps that we are taking in the work we do. If there's one thing that characterizes the sustainability work that we do, it's the long-term focus. We don't want it to be about urgent efforts to put out fires. No firefighting.
We want to look at what's truly important, even if it's an area where we haven't received a question from a single investor or anyone else for that matter. We want to be early in dealing with all of the issues concerned, and we're usually in a good position when a debate pops up somewhere because we have this focus. For example, when there's a debate in society or when an investor has a question or what have you. Sustainability is about the environment, of course, it could be agriculture, transport, the cooling media in stores, social issues for our own people, our own employees, and the whole supply chain, of course, as well as animal welfare. And here are but a few examples. In 2008, that's the start of this timeline.
A lot happened before that as well, but I started in 2008, so I know more about what's happened since then. But there was a basic environmental policy already before that, a code of conduct, our membership of the Global Compact. But in 2008, a radical decision was made on fish. Everything that was red in the WWF guide was phased out, and that was a lot. Every place swam away from our stores and our freezers. And I remember this. This was a very topical period. There were Greenpeace activists who chained themselves to freezers in stores. I don't know if you remember this. And I remember my first day at work, my introduction, when I came into Axfood's office, the first thing I was told was that, "Oh, there's a crisis in the marine area of fish. There's so many things.
Can you just pop down over your lunch break and do an interview with Swedish television on at Hemköp in Sundbyberg?" That was my first day at work, my introduction. But since then, one thing after another has followed suit. We have started investing in solar panels, first on a small scale, and then more and more. On our roof, you will have seen on this building, in Hallstavik, a major wind farm. It's the bigger one planned in the country. I'm sure there will be more coming. And here in 2015, this looks very boring and bureaucratic, doesn't it? A sustainability routine, a procedure was introduced, and that was incredibly important to the sustainability work we do because it meant that sustainability comes in at an early stage in sourcing and purchasing.
As a supplier, you can be discarded at a very early stage by Dagab, due to an assessment by the sustainability team in Dagab. And so there is a right of veto, you could say, to stop, to block a deal which doesn't meet the sustainability requirements. That was a real milestone, in fact, in the work we do. And here we see some other elements, some other examples. Animal welfare, for example. This is a mix, of course, of different types of measures and decisions. Outdoor eggs, where we integrated animal welfare with biodiversity, since these hens won't eat soy from Brazil, for example.
That's not part of their feed structure. A positive force in society. We have a strategy for how we impact society, and we work in four different ways. One is public affairs, as it's called, classical lobbyism. We meet decision-makers, politicians, authorities.
We try to drive issues, we table proposals, we take part in the debate in society. Here, it's becoming a little bit easier. I don't know if you've noticed, but the business community is more of a driving force in sustainability. Traditionally, it used to be more the case that when there were political proposals for sustainability, many in business said, "No, stop, we don't want to." Now, that's no longer the case. The business community is more of a driver towards politicians, in fact, and many companies and business representative organizations are critical when politicians fail to be good enough in sustainability. Sometimes I think about the force we could constitute when both business and the world of politics wanted together to achieve more in sustainability.
We could see an extraordinarily positive development. Similarly, we want to work with others in our industry.
For example, to work on industry-wide agreements, agree with our competitors, and take important steps forward. There are a number of initiatives we've been able to get through. I'll just mention the list of bans or prohibitions that ICA on board and Coop. It's about pesticides or biocides that we will not accept in products. Not least those who are already banned in the EU, of course, but it's very important in fruit and veg, not least, because a lot of products are used, which are permitted still in other parts of the world, and it's so much easier when we share a list of requirements in sustainability.
Makes it easier for everyone. We have a number of proposals for new industry-wide agreements, where we hope to be able to get our competitors on board so that we can drive the industry as a whole.
We do networking in different ways. We work with other businesses. We were one of the founders of the climate network, the Haga Initiative, where we both have shared climate reports and produce various interesting reports and contact the world of politics with different proposals. So we want to be drivers in the organizations of the industry so that they step up and do more. And then we also have our own initiatives, where we do business on our own to try and single-handedly push the industry in the right direction. It can be anything from initiatives in packaging. We had the first voluntary return compensation for some types of bottles and cans, electric vehicles and transports. We take important steps in the right direction, and we hope that others will follow suit.
And then the report, Food 2030, which we've been working with a few years now. It started because we felt that Sweden needed a food strategy. Many other countries do, of course. So we were a driver towards politicians, and in the end, it was decided that Sweden would put together a food strategy. Here we presented our shadow strategy because we like to be a bit more concrete than politicians usually are, and we launched it ahead of politics, in fact. So we've been updating it annually since 2016. In addition to our proposals in the area of food strategy, we also have a summary of progress so far with the food strategy. We've heard from many politicians that we're the only ones who do this. The government offices don't, the authorities don't.
If you're interested in food strategy, do have a read of this. The basic assumption in this report, if you don't feel like reading the 125 proposals in it, it's in their entirety. The good thing to remember, if you will, is that sustainability gives Swedish food production competitiveness, because what makes it interesting for us to use Swedish raw materials in our own in-house labels is the added value in animal welfare, in the environment. Swedish food production will never, ever be the cheapest bulk production, ever.
But here there is a debate because there are others in society who say, "Reduce environmental requirements, the demands for animal welfare as well, that reduces cost and strengthens our competitiveness." We don't believe in that at all, because we see that things are happening in the world outside of Sweden in the area of sustainability.
It's dangerous to be proud and satisfied always and just sit back and think that we're best at sustainability in Sweden. A lot is happening elsewhere. This is a simple model for our sustainability work. We divide in terms of our communication. How would we explain this? We divide it into food, environment, and people to show the totality of what we do. That's where I started. We work in a broad approach with sustainability, not just individual issues. Just a few examples.
Here are our goals, our targets. Do have a read of this. It's available in Swedish and English on axfood.se, and I would put it to you then. We are particularly transparent with our targets compared to many others. In fact, we have one target to sell 30% share of sale from sustainability label products, green labels, health, et cetera.
We also work to reduce by half the food waste by 2025. We will likely manage. We're putting in some extra support, and we've almost always been able to stick to the plan. And this is incredibly important in terms of the environment, because all the resources that can be... that have been included in food production will then be wasted if you just throw it away. That's a very, very negative environmental impact. Good proteins we work with, and good proteins, you might wonder, oh, what's that? Green protein and, and what various types of vegetables. But, but we also look at the good ones from the, animal kingdom, so we work on animal welfare.
Resource efficiency is another incredibly important point and linked to the climate, where our aim is to get to net zero emissions for our own business by 2030, our own business. So it's not about agriculture, because they have very substantial indirect emissions. We would not have been able to manage that. There are so many large agricultural productions, but we work with packaging. We have one target, to reduce plastics use by 25%. We have transports with a large fleet of our own, of course, and we're transitioning our fleet, and we also work with eco sales, organic sales, to get it up to 10%. Putting a lot of work into that. We're at four or five percent right now. We have a strategy for a living wage.
We work with diversity in management positions, and we work with our own illness-related absence. There are approximately 40 targets, so you can easily have a look at them if you read through the program. A brief summary then. We want to be the leaders for a sustainable system. We work with collaboration with society to drive this development, and we have clear targets which are also public, so that there's transparency. So if you'd like to know more, do read the sustainability program and Climate 2030, the strategy. Thank you.
Hey, Hej allesammans ,
Hi. It's so fun to have you all here at Dagab. Being the CEO, it's great to be able to welcome you to this site workplace that will be here for many, many years to come, and which is a good example of efficiencies and modernity. I know that all the 500 coworkers that we have here, they're really looking forward to showing you the facility. As you all know, Dagab is a key part of Axfood and the day-to-day work. We're in charge of all the logistics, the assortment, transports, everything that is to end up on the shelves in the stores, which means that we have a lot of things to do, big range, different products, different articles that are being managed every day.
Which means that well, there are also many negotiations, and we've seen more of that the last few years. Previously, maybe 500, 600 negotiations a year, now somewhere around 17,000, which means that a lot is happening within Dagab. And I do think that the last few years, we have shown that we are an organization that can manage big, complex projects in a world that is quite challenging. And we are a company in continuous movement, continuous transformation, and I'm going to get back to that a bit later. But...
...Most importantly, I think that we have proven over time that we're a strong partner for all the different companies that we have within Axfood, not least our private labels. But we also have some 7,000 external customers that we deliver to on a daily basis. And we have been on a transformation journey the last five, six, seven years, and a big journey of change, quite simply. And I do think that that, well, what we have today is proof that we have an end-to-end solution, and we have a very high level of digital competence. that we have been here talking about, and I've said this before, that it's been very important for us to take this step from being a classical logistics operation with warehouses to becoming something completely different.
We are now a data-driven supplier, quite simply. By creating this dynamic force, that is what we have done with this end-to-end solution, being data-driven, well, that gives us an ability in a changing, challenging world, to free up time. If something is important today, to have a strong market position, it is that you have to be able to free up time by working more efficiently and, by being able to develop the customer offering continuously. Data-driven, full-scale supplier, what does it mean? Well, of course, everyone here understands that today we have to work digitally, data-driven. That's obvious, but we also need to work with automation, and this is a natural part of what we do, all the integrated processes that we have within Dagab, where we work with our assortment, we work with logistics.
To give you one example as to how we work with the being data-driven, it is about having a smart, efficient flow of goods. And of course, it is important with the assortment that has to match the needs of our customers. It is also important to work with our strategy. Based on the data that we have, we have to be able to analyze and understand what customers want. And we have a strength here because we're much closer to customers than many other suppliers, and we do use our data. It's also about enabling a green transition, and perhaps one doesn't think all that much about this component, but we do try to be as efficient as we possibly can. And this is also based on data with the infrastructure, how to manage this transition.
Something else that might sound a bit trivial, but is important, is that we do have some 4,000 coworkers, and here, we have to think about those employees as well. Maybe you want to relocate to another location, have another position, and we need and have today different skills and competencies. We have those who have doctorates in mathematics, and we have those who drive our trucks, and we need the right coworker in the right place. But looking at the assortment and how we work at data-driven, well, we have been doing a lot here as well. Together with SAP, we have developed a completely new system, and we're actually the first ones having this.
This is a solution that we will be able to utilize, working with the assortment, price, campaigns, and also seasonal fluctuations, which is also very important to us. This is a system that, and I've mentioned this before, that, well, we have to work in a data-driven manner throughout the entire organization. The system that we have, well, we want to be able to use all the data we have. We want to be able to work with AI, machine learning, to create proposals for new products in our assortment.
We want to be able to have less time that has to be spent on preparatory phases, so that we can spend time more efficiently in creating value for our consumers, and we want to be able to create value for us as a company that way. And this is done in many different ways. For example, we're now able to cluster the assortment that we have in a much more efficient way, looking at what the specific stores need. And if we were to do the same thing using manual labor, we would have to use many, many coworkers.
I think that, sometimes it's easy to forget, but with the technology, we can create agility and quality, and we reduce vulnerabilities. Something that might be even more important to being the company we are, we have created transparency, so that everyone can see what the purpose, the thinking is with the new decisions having to do with the product range. That is something that is very important as well when developing the company in the market. We do work with this. We have a team within Dagab, that is also working with Willys and Hemköp, and this team continuously look at how to make decisions, what decisions to make, how to negotiate, and what is to be replaced, what is to be launched in our product range.
We do see with the insight that we get through data, that consumers today, they think that, well, campaigns are very important, and that, that is what drives customers to the stores more today than before. We get customer insight this way. We have a lot of information about our customers, and if we can share that information with our suppliers, and well, they have their data, their knowledge as well, and utilizing this, we get an excellent collaboration. So that is, well, data-driven work processes, and a very important part of this, of course, is logistics. Bålsta symbolizes that, and Klas has already said that this was a journey we embarked upon quite a few years ago.
But looking more specifically at Bålsta, well, the journey started back in 2018 or so, and what we did then was that we performed an analysis looking at our customers. And, the most common question I get is, "Well, have you made the right decisions? Do you have the right supplier for automation?" And, well, within Axfood, we've always been of the view that we want to be close to our markets with our warehouses, and, then this is, well, the best possible place, close to Stockholm. We decided on Bålsta, and, we decided on Bålsta because, we had the space available here, and it's close to Stockholm. And then in 2019, we looked at the different logistics solutions across the world. We looked at the different solutions, different suppliers.
We had our vision based on our position in the Swedish market, and we made our choice because here we have a company with the experience of complex solutions within retail. We're very happy with the decision that was made. We're now working with a family company, and Witron has a lot of experience, and we have an excellent collaboration. More specific facts about the building as such, I think you saw that it's big, 600 meters long, 175 meters wide, 30 meters high, and we have some 500 coworkers today working three shifts. When we're fully operational, we will be able to bring in 10,000 pallets a day and also deliver them from the facility.
Talking e-commerce, it can manage around 70 e-commerce trucks an hour, which means that we can grow with this building. This is kind of exciting, thinking about the size that one out of five Swedes will be getting food from this building. We also have what is today the biggest solar panel facility in Sweden. That's what we have on our roof. Looking at Bålsta then and what is unique with the building, well, you see the layout behind me, and we have an Omni-channel warehousing system. Within these four walls, we have dry, we have refrigerated, and we have frozen, which is unique. We have been building these four stores and for e-commerce at the same time, which is also unique.
This means that we have to have different picking processes, but by having everything within one building, we do create efficiencies. We have, for example, intake of goods in one building, which means that we can have more of an offering towards all our customers, be it e-commerce or physical stores. We create flexibility that we wouldn't have without this solution. We can also purchase more often, which increases the rate of turnover, and that way, we can also hopefully have a higher level of service. I do think that in times like these, we also optimize transports better. We can combine dry and refrigerated without having separate transports, and we can also work more efficiently with staffing.
So staffing, transport, to work as efficient as possible in those ways with these components, that's also important for sustainability. Last but not least, having these different channels, we can also control how we send the products out to customers. And what makes this possible is automation. Everyone is talking about automation, but we do have a very high degree of automation. And looking at the picking systems that we have, what is unique with Bålsta is that we have kind of flexibility that is kind of unique. Automation very often is inflexible, but we're flexible with our automation, and that by having different picking systems or different picking methods, fully automated, semi-automatic, and we also have automation throughout the entire flow, one way or another, which is kind of unusual.
What is important with this is that, well, we all know that the market is developing, there are fluctuations, but by having these different picking methods, we can also control things. We can see what are the needs this week, what customer needs more this week, next month, et cetera. So we use this flexibility as much as possible. And Anders has also talked about this, that we have worked with creating efficiencies. We've been working here now for a few months, and I think that we will reach the targets that have been communicated. The startup of Bålsta. Well, I think that you've all already noticed, all of you, that we're ramping up Bålsta.
We started last year, and it's easy to forget, perhaps, that this is a very big project, one of the biggest in the northern parts of Europe, but we started out, we did learn many things around May. We had some problems, and the question I got was: What's the problem? But there were many different things because this is a big, complex building. I think you'll have another understanding of that once we've seen the building, but it had to do with software, and we were in a learning process, after all. We had to understand how to act, how to solve things with this high degree of automation. We were used to more manual working methods, but then after summer, it started to stabilize and operations increased.
We have also started with refrigerated goods this fall, and things have been working excellently, and we are now moving everything from Borlänge into Bålsta. After Christmas, we will also move the refrigerated warehousing from other locations, which means that we, well, we're keeping up with the plan that we had, and everything feels great. I would like to say also that we now have a lot of knowledge that we have gained, and it is a process that is well underway. Now we're going to look at a little film before we continue.
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So a lot of focus on Bålsta, but there are other things happening in logistics in Dagab as well, so I'd like to mention some of that as well. And if we start in the end to say as if to say that the group has seen excellent development over a number of years. We're growing more than the market, and we've also acquired both Bergendahls Food and part owner, a holding in City Gross, and we're a big supplier to MatHem. Bålsta, as will be main logistics from Mälardalen and northbound, where we will deliver to all Hemköp, both our own group-owned and others, and Willys and Snabbgross. And we've sort of focused on trying to build flexibility in the market.
We've grown so much after all, and we've made a decision in the short term that when it comes to convenience trade volume in Bålsta, we're going to wait and leave that decision for the autumn of 2024. We've communicated clearly that we will move into that segment, but it's about having the necessary flexibility based on the development we've seen so far, and be free to choose what sort of order of magnitude of volume we want to do out of Bålsta or not. The most important point from your perspective is whether this will impact the synergies, and the answer is absolutely no, it's not going to impact. It's about having the flexibility we feel is wise to have, depending on the current and future market preconditions. But we're also looking at other big events in Dagab.
One thing is that we've built a new fruit and vegetable warehouse in Landskrona. We moved quite unnoticed. I don't think we had a single disruption. And then the next step is after the... Well, in the new year, we have automation starting down there. We built it together with KNAPP. It's the same solution as we've chosen to have in Jönköping. We see that there are a lot of similarities between Jönköping and Landskrona based on the customers and the assortment. But in Landskrona, we're going to have both SRS pallets, boxes, and cardboard for fruit and veg, and we'll be able to automate a lot of the flow. We look forward to that. So that's a big task after Christmas and the new year. And secondly, we're securing our capacity at the Backa warehouse in Gothenburg.
We're expanding the existing high bay warehouse. The licensing with the authorities has taken quite some time, but now we're underway, and the idea is that by the early parts of 2025, we'll add extra capacity, mainly for dry goods in the Gothenburg area. Something also has touched upon, which I'm particularly proud of, is our transport. We are a big fleet today, and so you procure a lot, and you can therefore also impact functionality, work environment, sustainability for the industry as a whole, and we have a great focus on that. We want to set an example. And if you control the whole value chain like we do, you can also experiment with the values, and we've become an attractive partner, for example, for Volvo and Scania, and testing new things together with them.
So as you can see on this slide, we have really made a journey when it comes to our footprint, and all our vehicles can now run on fossil-free fuels. To us, it's been quite important to have a biodiversity strategy on how we invest in our fleet, because it's a little bit uncertain, the future. Is it natural gas? Or what will the future look like? We have diversity based on that uncertainty. So we want to reduce the footprint, but we also want to have good working environment and a good level of environmental impact. We move around where people live, not least.
And if you were to take the next step in all of that, you get to electrification. And here, we're really getting to advanced analysis, as I mentioned before, because electrification without knowing what you're doing could be very costly indeed.
So we started doing what I said earlier, we looked specifically at how our vehicles drive, when do they need to stop? And together with the technological development in batteries, not least, we've been able to put together quite an advanced plan for how our charging infrastructure should look like, what supply provisions we have for our premises and our facilities. It's very important to be able to electrify, and we've really gotten away. Many people talk about electrification, but I have to say that we have made a lot of progress. We're using several vehicles today in commercial operations, not just light or smaller trucks, but trailers, and we use them.
They're in operations, and we're learning a lot, and I think this is going to be a very important factor over time, at least when it comes to our sustainability footprint.
And we've also started looking at e-commerce, so we've converted one of the lighter, e-commerce trucks because we do so many runs with them, not least in areas where people live. To be able to do smooth, silent driving is, in those areas, expected to be a huge competitive advantage. And at the end of the day, the diversity in our fleet of vehicles, as I mentioned, and the electrification, are all about reducing our footprint, being sustainable in society, and that's important for a company growing like we do. Something which also hasn't been talked about very much is the acquisition of Bergendahls Food. It's a big, item on Dagab's agenda over the past few years, however, and we're very happy. At the start of the year, we're able to say that we've concluded the integration work.
When I say concluded, this is to say that in less than one year, in fact, we had Dagabified all of the warehouse they used to operate. It's now a fully Dagab-operated warehouse, and also both for working conditions and employment and operations, but also product range, so that we now have one for the entire business and converting the 42 City Gross shops, and we've done it with Axfood IT and Willys. Now we're stepping into a new phase. The first phase, we replaced all the own labels in City Gross to the ones we had in the Axfood Group. That was done by the summer, as many are aware, now we need to try and harmonize the assortment even more so that we can strengthen the concept of City Gross together with that company.
Last but not least, before it's time for a coffee break, I'm going to talk about our product development. Our private label products is nothing that's happened by accident. We've worked on it in a very focused manner for many years. You must never forget that the reason why you have private labels has, well, it's never been clearer than before. We want to offer a product with better price and price value. But because, our private labels are such a big part of our portfolio and covers so many different categories, it's also incredibly important that it represents more than just price. So we need it to be a good label and good brand.
We've worked on it for a long time and over a number of years, and so we're very pleased to say that we've received quite a number of awards. Produce, consumers like it, but we also get recognition from media. These are good brands. This is, looks good. It's appealing, attractive to consumers to buy. In addition to price value, we also want to stand out. It used to be a price factor mainly, but now with the supplier concentration and the diversity we have in private labels, we can act more swiftly. We've seen it in the vegetarian product range, the organic range. So we've seen examples, and it's going to be ever more important because concentration is going to continue.
And the best example that we have a good strategy in private labels is that you look at the development we've seen over the past while, and it's worth comparing with our competitors, no question about that. Now, to conclude, we're well on the way to becoming the data-driven, full-scale supplier that we want to be. We use a data-driven approach to everything we do. We will continue our transformation, remain on the move to create the preconditions for further efficiency, improvement, and competitiveness. Thank you. That was all for me. Thank you, Nicholas, and thank you to all the presenters. Now, we're going to have a break now. It's time for some coffee and fruit and what have you. So it's all ready and waiting for you outside.
We'll reconvene in here at 11:00, and it's time for Willys, Hemköp, and Snabbgross to present before we move on to the Q&A. But now we have a break until 11:00. Thank you.
Hello, how are you?
Hi, and welcome back. Let's continue. We're going to continue with Thomas Evertsson and Willys.
... Hello!
Hi, hello. I'm going to try to keep you awake with a little bit of information about Willys. I'm the Managing Director of Willys. Thomas Evertsson is my name, and I've been the CEO, managing director for quite a few years now. Willys, as well, we have Willys, Willys Hemma, Eurocash, and we also own part of City Gross. What I'm going to focus on mainly today is Willys, and I'll give you a little bit of information towards the end about Eurocash as well. That is my agenda for today. Well, you are familiar with the numbers, but you see that we're at around SEK 42 billion, close to SEK 43 billion in net sales, and EBIT of around SEK 2 billion. We're very happy and very pleased with this.
Well, you see that just over half of Axfood is what this segment represents right now. The position that Willys has in the Swedish market is kind of unique, not just for Sweden, but also from a European perspective, because there aren't that many players that Willys can compare itself with in Europe. The combination that we have with the broad assortment, some 10,000 articles, and also at the same time, kind of a tough, aggressive pricing, that's not too common. Usually, you have discount with limited assortment, or you have higher prices and more of a range, but we're a combination of the two, and that is what we have developed into becoming over the years. Some 10,000 articles and not exactly the same in all stores.
Well, this is our way to be kind of dynamic. We look at whether we're in Lidingö, in Stockholm, or Ikva, out in the countryside, somewhere in the rural areas. We do try to adapt, but at the same time, we have our concept that distinguishes us from others, and we do believe in one solution, and that is a solution that we want to repeat in many places, to create scale and efficiencies and also a uniform look and feel. But, yes, we do distinguish a bit between Ikva in the rural areas and Lidingö in Stockholm. But when it comes to our pricing, well, we usually talk about having a high and low strategy or an everyday low strategy, and I guess we're somewhere in between. We have a basic pricing that is, kind of, strict.
We look at discount, we look at hypermarkets, and we try to be as close as possible to Lidl, and we try to be cheaper than the other hypermarkets, so that consumers feel that it's better to shop with us. And e-commerce, that is also something important, and we don't like a franchise. A franchise can be okay, but what we want to do is that we want to work with standardization, and we want to work with being efficient, and we want to have one uniform customer experience. And just as Axfood, needless to say, we want to grow, and we want to outperform the market.
And I've been around for a long time, so I know that this with outperforming the market year-over-year, month-over-month, that that is, as a matter of fact, the challenge, because we have many talented competitors as well, and maybe we're just a few percentage points above the market, but that gives me a reason to celebrate with a cake. And well, we have to remember that what we've seen, the sales developments that we've seen, has been kind of exceptional. The last two years, I would say, have been exceptional. But that is because, well, we have inflation, needless to say, and the sales growth that we've seen. But we have seen that it has worked when we have had highs in the economy, droughts, pandemic.
And just as all discount, we've noticed that people do not have as much money in their wallets anymore. Nothing strange. Something else that is important with the increasing sales is that we really like to measure what our customers think and feel, and we work with what we refer to as NPS, Net Promoter Score, where we measure to what extent our consumers are also ambassadors. And we can see that for the third consecutive year, we are the retail chain in Sweden that have the most recommendations, and this is evidence, this is proof that we have been successful, and that you, the consumer, you actually decide to recommend us to other consumers, and we think that is something very important.
The customer satisfaction index, well, that is, of course, something that is used in many different sectors, but it's kind of complicated. We know that we have our habits as customers, as consumers. But we're now at the same level as the one who's been in the lead in the Swedish food retail market, and it is difficult for us to be at the same level as a hypermar- a hypermarket that has everything. But we're now happy that we're here on par with the, the main competitor. And talking about the key ratios, as long as comparable sales is increasing, I guess you can say that, everything is fine. But, looking into the future and looking at, preference, consideration, well, perhaps these are more important to thinking about the future.
And consumers in Sweden, well, they know a lot, and we know that we see advertisements, et cetera. But what is more important is when we ask the consumers: Where could you imagine to shop next time? If you have to choose, if you have to pick one, a chain, which one would it be? So that is something that we measure, and we do this on an ongoing basis every month. And this is also something that we can compare with our market share. And we're at 14%. Well, of course, then, these are good news. If we ask the Swedish population, and more than 20% says that I would actually prefer to shop at Willys. And well, these are great news, as a matter of fact, looking ahead and looking at future sales developments for Willys.
And then, this with building a brand, this is something that we have focused on a lot, and we do believe in building brands. We do believe that, long term, together with building nice stores, building brands, that is something important. What do customers, people in Sweden, think about you? And what we have done successively is that we have moved up the scale. We're number five when it comes to the brand strength today. And looking at the companies that we're competing with, well, these are not little unknown companies. 2022, as a matter of fact, we were one of few companies that strengthened our position when it comes to brand and brand equity. And, in 2023, well, we don't have those numbers yet. These are for 2022.
But one would expect that looking at the sales growth in 2023, we would, we will probably strengthen this position as well. Åsa, she's already talked about the work with sustainability, and Klas talked about this as well with food waste, and this is something that we have tried to focus on a lot. We're well ahead there as well in those surveys. Looking back 20 years in time, discount wasn't really seen as something sustainable, but we're now building sustainability into our brand and have been doing so for several years. Of course, to grow at the rate that we've been growing, this is something that is based on a number of things: existing customers and them shopping more, and no one shops at only one place.
Maybe you have one convenience store, you have another store, where you are during the summers, and then you have your hypermarket that you go to. One important component of our growth is that we have existing customers shopping more. But then, of course, we also have many new customers, which is not to be underestimated. We have a customer program, Willys Plus, that actually celebrated 10 years this year. So we've been working with this for 130 months. But nevertheless, we have some 25,000 new members every month. This is something that we've seen year-on-year, month-on-month, and it accelerated last summer, and we're now reaching completely new levels. Then, of course, you're kind of curious, these customers, who are they? How will they behave?
We now have some 303.5 million members in this Willys Plus program. Let's take a look at the new customers. What is kind of interesting is that these customers, and the reason why I know this is that we look at information that we have from official registers, and we compare that to the information we have about the customers. What we see is that these customers, the new ones, they are kind of different compared to the ones that have been in our program longer. What we see is that they have a somewhat more of a higher income, which is good. They buy more food, which is good, and they also drive longer stretches in order to buy food.
And then I guess we can suspect that normally these customers, they belong to another team, and what team? Well, we do not know, but we can guess based on us knowing where they live, and we know how close they live to other stores. And this is not rocket science to understand that the market leader, that of course, is one team or one layer that we get some customers from, which is good. And what is also interesting is that these new members, they become loyal quickly, quicker than what we're used to, to with new customers, because we like our old habits. You try something out, and usually successively, depending on how much you like that supplier, you build loyalty. But here, the next question will be: Are we going to keep these customers? Well, you never know.
But of course, this has to do with how well we perform, and the best way to have these customers staying with us is that we take good care of our stores. And we cannot really expect every single one of them to stay. But I would be really, really happy if a majority of these new members will stay with us, and we will do our utmost to, to make that happen. Something else that is important... Talking about having existing customers feeling that they're happy with us and for us to attract new customers, that is expansion, investments in our stores. And Anders has already said that, we have expanded quite rapidly the last few years, and this is the way it happens.
We always are on the lookout for new locations, and here I want to stress the fact that sometimes it is profitable to move a store, relocate a store, and that is also something we spend quite a bit of energy on. With a market share of 14%, of course, you might think that the glass is, well, less than half full because 80% or just over 80% is not shopping with you. Of course, we see that there is a potential here with more stores in new locations and also more customers to existing stores. This is something that we have to work with on a continuous basis. We also invest, and we have been given that opportunity to get money for investments so that we can modernize to ensure that the stores still provide a nice customer experience.
We work with some 25, 30 stores every year that we refurbish, and we do this properly. It's not a little bit of improvement here or there, but we, we do things properly. And the same thing with the, the concepts that we have. We do things properly with facelifts every five years or, or so. So we have a 5.0, before that, a 4.0, et cetera. And we'll be working next year with creating the next generation of Willys. And it is not because we feel that things have to be fixed, but because we want to make things future proof. Something else that is important for our growth, the journey and what we've seen the last few years, is that we have invested in e-commerce.
this about E-commerce, we started with same price online as in the stores. Well, customers need to know what they are to pay, and we have Click and Collect, and we have the delivery options. So we focus on Click and Collect, and 80% or so of E-commerce is Click and Collect. Well, we have that picking in the stores, and then we get some help from the customers. But E-commerce customers, and what's good with them? Well, for us, we look at our profitability from a customer perspective. I don't know how profitable you as an individual are, but everything else alike. If you start with E-commerce, you will become more profitable as a customer. So if you start to do E-commerce, you will not stop completely with going to a physical store.
You will do less, but you will not stop going to the store, which is good, because this means that we can, so to say, steal customers, and we can make the customers more profitable for us. So which means that e-commerce has been very important for us. And then I would now like to say, and this is kind of new, because this is something that we haven't been talking about before, but we are the second largest e-commerce player when it comes to food in Sweden. We have a market share of around 14%, but looking at e-commerce, as a matter of fact, we're at 25%, and it's just the, that big player, the ICA, that is bigger. And that is something that we're very proud of, and I think we should be. Thank you.
Well, it wasn't that much of an applause, but anyway, we're happy for what we get. And then, well, with the feeling confident in sales, well, that also gives us the confidence when it comes to advertising and communications. We have felt that this has been kind of difficult, but now we get successes in the market, and that gives us more confidence, and we're investing more and more in video and the like. And we feel that we're now more comfortable with this. You have to understand that marketing and what and how you communicate, it's a balancing act.
You do not want to make things too humorous or too boring. But I think we have one of the most well-known slogans in Sweden, as a matter of fact, with "Ah, let's relax for the weekend," Nu tar vi helg.
This is obvious that if you do good things, you also have to tell people about them. Here we have a positive interplay with what we do and how we communicate around of what we do. I would like to conclude by also mentioning Eurocash. This is the cross-border grocery chain that we have, and of course, it is. This is something important. We're there around the Norwegian border, and during the pandemic, this was not easy. Borders were closed, and 96% of the customers were on the wrong side of the border. We're past that, luckily.
But, let me just say that it's been kind of difficult after the pandemic as well, and that is because of the Norwegian krone and the inflation that we've seen that's been lower in Norway, and we've seen that, there has been aggressive competition in Norway as well. We've seen that, during the summer, then the Norwegian krone has gone up, inflation has gone up, and, now things are improving, with the price gap being around 35-40%, and we see that the Norwegian customers are coming back. We're doing okay close to the Norwegian border. We have taken the opportunity to refurbish our stores, and we've been working with our brand, and we're now, we feel well positioned and well equipped to, to take care of our Norwegian customers.
To conclude, I would just like to say that we have a unique position in the Swedish market, and we've shown that we can grow and outgrow the market. We have a couple of excellent years behind us, and most important thing, that we have the customers on board. This is something that we care a lot about, how customers perceive us, and a happy customer that will recommend us, that gives us opportunities to keep customers and sell a lot of food to our customers. We're going to continue. Now I'll hand over to Simone.
Hey, Simone Margulies. Simone Margulies is my name. Since 2020, I'm the CEO of the Hemköp chain of stores, food retail, and net sales of SEK 269 billion in 2022. We see the market in two segments. The first one is discount and hypermarket. You've just heard Willys, with an exceptional development, and the second one, we call traditional groceries. It represents more than 50% of Swedish food retail, and that's where you find Hemköp, with two brands and two formats for stores, Hemköp and Tempo. Hemköp offers a broad range with a rich offering of fresh products, group-owned stores. We have 201 Hemköp stores, 65 are group-owned, and 136 are franchises, manager-owned. We like franchises. We offer in both.
In Tempo, we have 131 owner store, a franchise one in a convenience store. SEK 19.6 billion for Hemköp and Tempo in retail, trade. Stable result, SEK 298 million in total for the past 12 months rolling. With the new strategic focus we agreed on three years ago, we work in a very focused manner to be even clearer in our positioning in the market. We put the customer in focus in everything we do, and for Hemköp, we want to be the favorite store for all those who love food, with much more enjoyable food in a more pleasant, simpler manner. And for Tempo, we want to be the local convenience store, the good neighbor, with closeness, proximity to good food and service.
Tempo has an important position and an important role to play in the local markets, and we saw this in particular during the pandemic year, where Tempo grew quite a lot. We see a slowdown in the growth over the past year as a knock-on effect of the fact that people are choosing discount over convenience stores. During the year, we've worked to do brand work to clarify Tempo's position, and we defined a journey of change. To strengthen Tempo further, we want to have a relevant offering for a small store in the proximity market, and we'll be able to sum this up in years to come. An important point was that we started with a new store concept with Tempo.
We have a first outlet in Bålsta that opened last year, and we have 6 stores this year, where we've developed a hybrid concept, where you can have unstaffed opening hours. And this is a way for us to make more available to more people, these Tempo offerings in a new way. If we have a look at Hemköp, we've seen a stronger growth than our main competitors for several years. We're particularly pleased over the fact that over the past Q4 , we've also gained market shares on the total. We've good development in comparable units, and we've good cost controls.
This means that we can reinvest in the stores, in our customer offerings, and in price value, in particular, and that together with our store managers. We see ever clearly that the customers appreciate the work that we do together in the chain.
We have a joint clear focus, price value, volume, and development of our fresh foods. This is attracting new customers, more of them, and we also see more customer loyalty. We've also had a clear growth in our club loyalty concept, Club Hemköp, and we see clear transitions and movements in our brand. We have a clear strategy in relation to our customer promises. It's strengthening our position in the market, and I thought I'd walk you through the strategic shifts that we've seen over the past while, which we believe will strengthen our growth.
We have a presence through 201 Hemköp stores in attractive locations. We are where people live and work and move around, and we have a clear growth in the numbers in the population. We have a clear ambition to continue to grow in attractive locations, both group-owned and the franchise stores.
This year, we're setting up four new Hemköp stores, the most recent one in Stadshagen, opening in a week from now. In 2020, we developed a new store concept for Hemköp, and since 2021, we have a high pace of modernization. We've already modernized 40 or so in both types of ownership, and the aim is to modernize the entire network by 2025. We see strong two-digit growth in the modernized stores, and this is confirmation that we have a new attractive concept for the stores that we've refurbished. An important other part of our modernization journey is to convert to CO2 in our cooling, and it's important part of our climate footprint that we want to be moving in that direction, and we're making great strides.
If we look at the assortment, we worked in a data-driven manner to broaden our assortment and have attractive offerings and prices from the respective local markets perspective. We look at the specific customer segments based on the store clusters we are active within, to have a strong local offering. And during the year, we've also worked to follow the changing patterns of behavior of our customers so that we can adapt the assortments based on what we learn. We've broadened our assortment. We've developed our fresh foods. It's strengthening our position, and it's setting us apart from competitors, and it builds loyalty from customers.
We've developed our offering in meal solutions, in particular, both pre-packed, finished meals and concepts in salads and sandwiches, and now we have a hot food buffet available in 30 or so stores, and we'll continue to develop and scale up these concepts in more of our store because it's making us competitive, both in relation to our competitors and the industrial shift we see. We offer a really good value for money offering for both breakfast and lunch. One example is at the store we have in Hemköp, Stockholm City, where we serve over 1,000 lunches per day.
But we've also invested in fruit and veg. It's important both in terms of our positioning in perishables, but it's also generally very important, and we've strengthened our price value in the program we call Always Good Pricing. We have 900 everyday stores, retail food with attractive pricing.
Together with our regular pricing and campaigns, we have a clear positioning in price value. We work to optimize both our offering and price in every and to every local market, and this is how we build competitiveness in relation to competitors in each local market. It's striking this balance between the synergies we get from economies of scale and conceptualization, and the local adaptation to each marketplace. That's how we create attractive stores. Talking of much nicer, more pleasant food is also about focusing on sustainability, and we are leaders. We guide and inspire our customers by to make more sustainable choices through communication in store. We guide for sales, and we have inspiration offered in all our channels. We take active assortment decisions. We're the only actor since 2014 who've chosen to only sell organic bananas, for example.
Now we work actively to raise the degree of sustainability labeled products in fruit and veg, MSC-labeled fish, and we work actively to develop alternative protein offerings, and now in beef and green beef, which is 50% vegetable, 50% meat. We also use our loyalty club, Club Hemköp, as an important part of our focus. We give priority and we give premium to sustainable choices, double points. Anything that contains organic or environmentally labeled food, but we also work actively to reduce food waste and plastic use in the entire value chain. And our sales guidance is an important tool to reduce our climate footprint. For example, this year, we represent about half of all the national campaigns on organic vegetarian products. We have an ambitious sustainability agenda, and so we are market leaders.
We have the highest degree of organic food sales in Sweden, and we have the lowest CO2 emission per kilo food sold in the industry. We developed a new club, a loyalty club, in 2020. We've seen a real growth. We're coming close to 2 million members, so up by 12% over the past 12 months, in fact. We see more loyalty amongst our active members. They're becoming ever more active, and we see that we're growing above and beyond. We further develop our club's offerings through customer journeys, offerings, recommendations on recipes based on available customer data, and we launched a new app in April. It's a platform for us to develop the customer and in our digital customer meeting, to continue to inspire and make the customers loyal throughout the customer journey.
The next step is to launch mobile scanning during Q1 of next year. We've had real expansion in e-commerce over the past few years. From 2020 to 2023, we went from 17 stores with e-commerce offerings to 68. We've built Click and Collect and home delivery, and for the future, we focus on optimizing e-commerce for each store. We're also offering new online offerings in new physical stores, and we're expanding home delivery. The app I mentioned earlier is also important step in making the customer journey easier, also when buying online. From April, when we launched it, we see that the sales through the app is up by 70% and the conversion rate is up by 20%.
We're also modernizing Hemköp.se, the website, to make it a better customer experience, making it easier for the customers. We also have a number of purchase-ready recipes, ready-to-buy recipes. Now, let's try and sum up. We continue to overperform in relation to our main competitors in traditional groceries. We have a clear strategy in relation to our customer promises. We're gradually, step by step, strengthening our brand. We continue to expand our physical network of stores. We have a high rate of modernization. We develop our digital customer meetings with a simpler, more personal customer meeting, and we develop our customer offering, focusing on fresh foods, vegetables, food solutions, and price value.
The fact that our customers are becoming more loyal and that we're gaining market shares for the fourth consecutive quarter is something we see as a testament to the fact that we're doing the right things, and we're very proud of it. Thank you.
Hi, my name is Eva Pettersson, and I'm the managing director of Snabbgross. Let's see. Snabbgross is one of the major restaurant wholesalers in Sweden. We focus on lunch restaurants, fast food operators, and cafes. And since 2020, we also offer consumers to come shop with us in Snabbgross Club, and we have seven such stores out of the 30 group-owned stores that we have. On a rolling twelve-month basis, we have net sales of around SEK 5.2 billion, and operating profit of around SEK 259 million, which means that we contributed to Axfood with around 7%. Snabbgross, we do have a unique position in the market. And why? Well, because we're the only nationwide wholesaler with stores across the country.
This could be compared with the competitors that basically just deliver from a warehouse to customers. We have excellent opening hours, which they open every day during the week, and we also offer e-commerce. Which means that we have a competitive advantage in that the customers can actually come to our stores, get that look and feel of what the products are. And can also talk to us if they feel that something is missing, and our employees also have that dialogue with the customers. And our customers, they do come to see us several times a week. Okay. Snabbgross is, as I've said, one of the leading players in the private food service market.
Here, what you see, the numbers behind me, and what you see to the left is that we have a value growth in that private food service market from 2019 and up until Q3 2023. Then to the right, you see both the value and the volume growth in the Swedish restaurant market, also beginning 2019 and up until Q2 2023. We see that the restaurant market and also the Swedish food service market, they have recovered after the big drop that we saw during the COVID in 2020 with a number of restrictions. We also see that numbers are increasing, particularly in 2022. We also see, looking at value growth, that it's declining in 2023, this successively, and this, of course, has to do with inflation.
But we can also see, looking at the restaurant market, that, well, Q2, we do not have that volume growth anymore in that market. So the conclusion will be that, the restaurant market, the restaurant sector, is heading towards more difficult times. Snabbgross, well, we have a net sales. As you can see, we're at around 15.5% in market share, being the third largest player. And, we have taken market share throughout the years, and that is what you see to the right. Looking at that graph, what we see as well is, that we have taken market share, particularly from 2019 and onwards. During the pandemic, 2020, Snabbgross, as a matter of fact, fared relatively well in the market.
Developments were flat compared to the big drops that characterized the market back then. Many customers, they did find our stores, during the COVID. Well, they came to us to do their shopping because many customers were afraid to place orders a week in advance, and so they quite simply came to us and shopped what they needed for the day. We have been able to keep many of those customers that found us back then. They have stayed with us, which means that the unique position that we have with cash and carry in those stores, it is something that stands strong in good times as well as bad.
You see that we have had an amazing sales development the last few years, where we have passed not just SEK 4 billion, but also SEK 5 billion, on a rolling twelve-month basis. Well, the last few years, we have started one or two new stores every year, which is quite a lot, as a matter of fact, considering the number of stores that we have, and we have today 30 stores. Our plan is to stick with this expansion rate. Also in 2024, we'll be opening one new store, and that will be in Norrköping in 2024. Just as with the other concepts, we do make sure that we also invest in existing stores with either modernizing them, or we might move them to a new location, which also helps us with the growth.
So the seven of our stores, as I've already mentioned, are Snabbgross Club, where we invite consumers to shop with us as well at wholesale prices. And we're going to continue to open up more existing Snabbgross stores to become club stores. And Snabbgross, well, we have more than 100,000 active B2B customers, and as a matter of fact, we have them in all 290 municipalities in Sweden, and we have more than 70% of our sales that we have are from the customers we prioritize, and those that we work with the most, the restaurants, pizzerias, fast food operators, and cafes. And as you can see in the slide, we also have many different customers.
35% of our customer base that comes to shop with us, it could be associations, organizations, and, well, smaller companies. As of 2020 up until today, we have increased our customer base with 35%. Most of our customers, they do come to our stores to shop, but 20% of our sales is, as a matter of fact, through e-commerce, where we pick and deliver from the store to the customer. Our prioritized groups, every group of every customer, of course, is important, but the groups that we prioritize here, we focus more to give them a bit more. We want to be full range wholesalers for these customers, and we're talking about fast food operators, lunch restaurants, and cafes. What we do is, for example, that we focus on the assortment, on price, on campaigns.
The assortment is to cover everything that these customers need. They should be able to buy everything with us at our stores. And the price, well, of course, we have to be competitive with, the best price is the wholesale prices in Sweden, and this is very important that we have the right price on what they want to buy. And the campaigns, well, we want to work actively with these customers. And, we have seen that right now, well, times are tough, and, our customers experience that they have fewer customers. So it is important that we stay in tune all the time with our customers and how their behaviors have changed. For example, we can see that, there are premium products that disappear from the plates, and our customers chooses that to have cheaper alternatives.
And here as well, of course, we're there, and we adapt according to their needs. And Snabbgross Club. Since 2020, we have this new concept, and we launched the first store in Stockholm, where we have a Snabbgross Club, and well, it is, nothing strange. It's a regular Snabbgross, but we've also invited the private consumers. They pay SEK 299 a year, and then they become members and, can come to our stores to shop. And, they get access to our assortment, good prices, and, that means that what they paid for the membership, well, they will make up for that very quickly. Once every other week, we have new campaigns, and we have a, a modern club concept. We can communicate with our customers easily.
B2B, that is still the foundation for what we do, but we're now moving towards this new customer group with private individual, which means that we can grow our business. And looking ahead, our ambition is to continue to expand with Snabbgross Club, with new stores, or by converting existing B2B stores. And we do see that there's strong interest among consumers. We have more than 65,000 private consumers that have been registered for Snabbgross Club. And looking at this period that we see on the side, we have started with 7 stores. Well, we started with 3, and they were new stores because we started this new concept.
But now, since last year, we've also converted all but the existing stores, which means that we're now in Sundsvall, Jönköping, and in November, we just converted Växjö, and also the store in Gärdet, in Stockholm. And, something also about our own private label, private label brand, Gastrino, that was launched in 2020 in bulk, of course, and here we have the products where we want a high quality at good prices, and we have around 100 products in our assortment today, and we plan for continued launches. Gastrino has not adjusted strength under the arrangement that we have today, it's also contributed to profitable, profitable growth. And this is part of us building our assortment to attract loyal customers and create profitable growth.
And much of what we have seen in growth, the last few years, that has been through Gastrino, and we have a private label share of around 12% today. And that takes me to, well, where I am to sum up what I've been trying to say, which is, and I have talked about this already, but I maintain that we have a strong and unique position in the market. When it comes to private food service, we've seen nice growth throughout the years, in good times as well as in bad. And we do offer an assortment that is relevant and affordable. We work more and more with private label. And we're adapting the assortment to the market. We look at price, we ensure that we have good campaigns all the time.
We still see growth opportunities in that we can establish new stores across the country, and also, of course, with the Snabbgross Club, giving us new opportunities, where we have a new customer group that can come to us and buy products at low prices. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Eva, and a round of applause for you, too. Standing ovations, wouldn't you say? Now, it's time for Q&A, and I'm going to ask for some help. We-- I'd like to see another table up here, if possible. Nicholas and Anders, why don't you come along? We'll have nearly too many people otherwise, but the others have their microphones on if you-- there are any questions for the rest of you. So everyone's here. The danger, Eva, is that I will end up drinking from your glass instead. Oh, it wasn't even yours. Oh, Simone's. There you go. I'm going to try and coordinate the Q&A, and there are microphones that we need to send around, and then we'll try and make sure that as many of you as possible will get a chance to ask a question.
And I'm sure there are questions, but we'll also be available outside, of course, so I'm sure that you'd very much like to come out and see the premises. Let's wait for a microphone for you. Oh, you started over there with Nicholas. My apologies. No, no, no problem. I didn't raise the hand 'cause I already had the microphone. Sorry about that. Could we talk a little bit about the SEK 300 million-SEK 400 million that you were expecting to have in savings on this warehouse? Could you tell us a little bit more about where those savings will come from? And how much of this do you expect to be able to keep or pass on, as way of investing in the customer offering?
I can go first.
Nicholas, I'm sure you can add more to this, but this is about becoming more effective in operations. Because we use machines, we've automated a lot of the features that used to be manual. Manual procedures previously, to put it that way, and that is efficiency of scale. And then, of course, we have the write-downs, but in addition, it's also going to be a lot more efficient. That's the start, and then you can add whatever bits I missed there to complement to my answer. But secondly, a classical part of your question is: What does this give shareholders in terms of profitability or how does it impact the market? I would describe this as saying that we're creating huge potential for competitiveness.
We have our long-term financial targets, of course, but ultimately, we can also be even more competitive if the market demands it of us. We're very clear with our positioning, of what the pricing position will be for us. We want to grow. It gives us a force and a possibility to maintain our position and create profitable growth underlying, of course. Thank you. Can I also follow up and ask about Bergendahls, where you've more or less completed the integration, but you're still talking about how this is going to be fully completed by 2024 with full impact. How much of that impact has been realized already?
Well, Anders was very clear in saying that we've worked on this, we're more or less on board with it, and so full effect by next year. We're moving right into it, but we've also talked about why we've had some forces moving in, counteracting the development during the year, so we haven't seen the full impact yet. But the synergies in purchasing and management and handling, et cetera, has gradually been completed so that it will be completely ready by 2024.
Thank you. Thank you very much. I also wanted to ask about the savings here at Bålsta, but perhaps from another perspective. The savings targets were set a number of years ago. You probably saw before you some sort of volume development for the group. That growth has been a lot greater, and that could imply that you have reached more savings and synergy effects from Bålsta, possibly, compared to what you expected before. Well, I think the latter is what you're thinking, and there's potential, of course, if the volume development continues so that we reach full capacity at an early stage. That's a correct observation. When I looked at your number, it stretches out to 2027, 2028 for full capacity. It could possibly come a little bit sooner if we see a continued development. Great.
For Nicholas, a comment on really the same point. Your decision to wait to roll out convenience retail, is this because you want to look at your volume uptake here, and that it's perhaps going more rapidly than you expected, and so you'd like to prioritize the main part?
Yes, it's about more flexibility, as I mentioned. It's a way of creating freedom of choice and flexibility for us. Excellent. And one more question to conclude, for Thomas, but Klas might be able to answer it, too. Eurocash, you mentioned two factors which are a little bit more temporary, the price war and the Norwegian currency. A little bit tougher after the pandemic, but also some structural. This is the sugar tax and other excise duties that have been... Well, they haven't abolished it completely. Tell us.
Well, the sugar tax is like a sinus curve. If you look back over a 10-year period, it's gone up and then down, depending on who ran the country. And there was an active decision to reduce the tax. We don't know how long that's going to last. There are other forces who might take it in the other direction, but we just have to adapt to the current situation always. But the fact of the matter is that the difference is somewhere around 40%. What they've done in terms of regulation is that they've halved the quota for tobacco, so instead of being allowed to bring a full multi-pack of snus, you can only do half of a multi-pack now.
There are a number of stores on the border between Norway and Sweden, with a special focus on certain product categories, but we sell everything. We sell food as well, not just particular products. But the taxes, that's sort of gone up and down over time, so we cannot speculate on what's going to happen. The tax is still there, but it's less, so it's lower. Thank you. Now, let's see. Will you go or... No, over here. Who's next? I'm going to shoot from the hip. Here I go. Fredrik Ivarsson, ABG.
A question for Anders. Talking operating capital, you mentioned that earlier, and the overlap effect that you have from the double warehouse situation, that's going to disappear by next year, of course. Could you give us any idea, any numbers? Well, somewhere between SEK 200 million and SEK 300 million, I would estimate.
Thank you. And then perhaps to Claes, MatHem, Oda, will what will happen? Well, delivery over the border, over national boundary is what it is. Well, we have our deliveries to MatHem. That will continue. Is this working?
Gustav Essiebee. It's also for Thomas, but perhaps Claes can answer it. I'm thinking about the customer inflow to Willys. You said you're happy if you get to keep the majority of the new customers.
What needs to happen then? How do you keep some of these new or different customers with a higher mean average income or... Is there a sneak peek somewhere in the Willys 5.0? Thomas, why don't you to give us the sneak peek? Come on up here. We've talked about this, how we've looked into some of the new customers.
Thomas, you touched upon this on some of the new ones and what they think, if they're planning to stay. We might not be able to keep all of them, but if we keep 80% of them, then you've discovered something, and that's what we think. Many people have discovered Willys. They didn't expect to discover it, and they're actually very happy with what they're seeing. But then I think we can also say that tomorrow's a new day.
That's something we apply every single day, and we want to be very clear of saying that we want to secure a good customer offering, customer meeting, so that you appreciate coming to us, and you want to stay. But that takes work from us. Don't know if you'd like to add anything to that? No, no, no. That's precisely what it's all about.
You mustn't make it too complicated, the image of how food stores look like. More things are similar than different between different food stores. We do have 30%-35% private labels, which you mightn't get in the main competitors. They have other private labels, but 65%-70% is, in fact, very alike across the board, and that's why operations is so incredibly important. And it's just as important as having the right color of a dress if you're in fashion retail. It's how you run and operate food store that is the determining factor. So we can work with the customer with campaigns and customer programs, but it's how you enjoy being in our stores and how we run them. That's what it's all about, and we have great confidence. We think we'll be able to show,
... enough of a nice store to keep a majority, but we're not naive. Some of them might perhaps at least hand back some of the volume they've temporarily ended up shopping for, with us. We don't know. And on one of our most important components is, of course, to check our pricing position, and you might get back to another pricing position. And that all depends on the customers as well, but this is an important focus point. So an El dorado delicatessen for next year? No, that's not the plan. Now you're at 5.0 now, not further than that. Well, as I said, we're not lying sleepless at night over a concept. It's more about tweaking details.
Just to give you some areas that we look at, it's fruit and veg, whereas we have some other food store design concepts, getting a few 10 percentage points down on waste and then assortment adaptations. Where can we scale up, scale down, tweaking it. Those are some of the points and some things that we might keep to ourselves for now, because this tends to create follows. Can I just add one final question? The enormous influx of customers. Historically, when you've had new customers, what retention rate have you had for them previously? What do you think it will take to keep a certain percentage of these new customers so that you can offer cake in Gothenburg next year as well? I have to give you the same answer as before.
It's impossible to say for sure, because it's pure speculation and guessing, but our aim is to show stores that are good enough so that you, as a consumer, choosing to try us out, switching from your other store, that you might buy a little bit more than you used to from us, or you even switch fully. Some customers won't do that, some... But we hope that the large majority of shoppers will stay with us, and I think that it's going to do a lot to, have a lot to do with what we perform, how we perform. We're also impacted on the performance of our competitors.
Gustav, you did touch upon this, that it's difficult to speculate about the future, and if you look at towards the history, we've seen continuous developments, what you talked about with new members, et cetera, and that is what we've been working with. We have to look at the track record as well as the future. Okay. Daniel, and a question for Thomas, as a matter of fact. So you have to get back up there or rather stay up there. I need my own table then. Okay, anyway, we'll have a Willys capital market day in the future. Well, 2021, you talked about new stores. You had a map showing Sweden with some 25 new stores from end of 2020 up until 2024, and we're not there yet. But you're well on the way with that plan.
I think you have some 20 new stores. Will you deliver on the 25? That's the first question. What do you think about the next three to four years after that, and how you'll deliver in terms of growth? Well, we have said 10-15, and if we're to reach 5, according to your calculations, well, I think probabilities are good. Yes, we think that we will. Then looking into the future? Well, we have a strategy. We think that we can grow Willys to more locations and also more stores in existing locations. That's one thing. But it's not just us deciding whether it will be possible with the store, because we have legislation, we have municipalities deciding whether they are willing to give us the premises. We have competition.
So it's difficult to say something about a specific year. We have a strategy. We want to grow. Maybe one year we'll have 10 new stores, and another year we'll have 5 new Willys stores. So it's not about our performance, but rather other things. And we all know, which I might add, that, lead times are long, and we're also now in a stage where we see, well, we see slowdowns in, construction of new apartments, new buildings. We see a slowdown in the business cycle, and that is also something that has an impact.
But would you say that it's more difficult to present forecasts now compared to a few years ago? I'll help you out, Thomas. We had a clear direction, and, you will get, a guidance in Q4, and then, well, February first, we'll talk about the direction.
One more question. I think it was Klas mentioning this with price and location, and next year, if we see deflation, do you think that this will change again when it comes to priorities? Well, this is that big question we're thinking about and no one can answer. What will happen with price developments in the future? We don't know, but value and the discount is now something that's more interesting for many consumers, and we think that that will last. But then if things were to happen with a little bit of deflation or something, well, value for what you buy, that will stay relevant. And, Nicklas from Handelsbanken. A couple of questions, and maybe along the same line as Daniels. Price and location and then switching positions. Do you feel a bit stressed out?
Do you feel that you need to hurry up when it comes to new Willys stores, because you see that you have new members, and you see where they live and where they travel from?
We would like to open more stores, but as has been said, the lead times are long, you need to have permissions, et cetera, so we do what we can.
Okay, thank you. And then another question. A lot has happened within Axfood, with the acquisition of Bergendahls, the merger, the warehouse that is almost 100% up and running. And what will be the next big thing for Axfood, that you'll take on? Well, politically correct answer is that you'll see a press release when something happens. But joking aside, we now have some 20% of the market, and we feel that we want to develop further.
And we've made some acquisitions, and, well, you can always think about what remains. But, of course, we'll continue to develop our logistics platform, the digitalization and everything we do there, and we're going to continue to make sure that we can be even more attractive for our customers. And, maybe that is not too much of a detailed answer, but there is a lot we can still do to develop. Okay, a question also about Snabbgross. If I understood you correctly, there has been a bit of a slowdown. And can we then draw any conclusions? Are there specific segments, specific geographical areas? Well, we believe, or rather, what we see is that, restaurants, we see a slowdown. Customers are still out there.
Maybe you have one round of lunch servings or, well, the same thing with dinners, and you do not have a three-course meal necessarily when you go to a restaurant. We also see that there are several chains that are in problems. We see bankruptcies. Our customer groups, we have the lunch restaurants, the pizzerias, the fast food, and we do believe that they will be relatively strong in the future as well. Because if you want to go out for a meal, perhaps you will opt for something that is a bit simpler and a bit cheaper. Well, we are optimistic.
Yeah.
I'll ask my question in English. My Swedish is not there yet. Ignacio Canals from Bloomberg Intelligence. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about the promotional environment in Sweden leading into 2024, if you expect a significant uptick in promotions? And specifically about—because I assume that in Willys, your strategy is every day low price. How does that affect your promotional strategy? How does it compare to your competitors, and how does it affect when you talk with suppliers? Thank you.
That's a relevant question, obviously, and I think we've talked about it, and we have addressed that we've seen a higher share of campaigns during 2023. That doesn't mean more number of campaigns. It means that the consumers have shopped more when the campaign is there in these products. So that's why you have got a higher share. So I think that our strategy still sticks. Now, Thomas, you can add on if you want to in terms of to Willys. And we'll continue to drive that, and we continue to be competitive. And as someone pointed out, I think Nicholas did that as well, that campaigns has just been significantly important, particularly in 2023. I'm not sure it's gonna be equally important. We'll have to see. It's difficult to say about 2024.
It depends on, of course, how the overall business cycle is developing in terms of how the consumers, how their financial situation is, of course. So it depends on how that goes. But we continue with our road, we continue with our campaign and promotion strategy. We've seen it so far, it's been successful, and we'll continue on that now.
That's very helpful. Thank you.
Thank you.
... Thank you, from Nordea. I have a question. Well, I'll start with the Willys and the pricing. You mentioned that you look at Lidl, and you look at hypermarkets, but could you give us a bit more detail? Is it Lidl, where you have your benchmarking, or are you working with percentages, that you want to be so and so many percentage points below a competitor? Well, this is something that we do all the time. As a high and low actor, we cannot compete with everything, but of course, each product has to have its correct price. But we look at all competitors that are out there, and perhaps someone is stronger in certain categories, and then we look at that.
But, we have a discount that is important, and, without giving you any precise numbers, we try to stay as close to Lidl as possible on specific products. But they have another offering, because they have maybe one-fifth of the product range that we have, and we try to, well, decide when we need to be head to head or perhaps where we can let go of, one percentage point or something. So well, it's an ongoing work, and it's not really percentages that we're talking about. But, well, we see things happening all the time with different campaigns, promotions, different products. And the promise that we have given consumers is that we'll have the cheapest grocery bag in Sweden, and not a, a specific product. Thank you. And Hemköp.
There was news, well, about a week ago. You had some retailer-owned stores that left. Is this something new that has happened? Because I don't remember having seen anything like that before. We have commented on this, that it does happen. We have new stores as well that have joined us, and it does happen that retailers, they change their concept, and that, that's sad, of course, but it's something that we have to accept. Well, we have different situations with rental agreements, et cetera, and if a retailer has their own agreement, then it's easier for them to switch. But, yeah, these things happen. And the last question, having to do with this amazing facility. Next year, are you working with indices, and the 6.5% for rental for costs?
That was very detailed. I'm not sure I have that reply. We have to get back to you. The rental market, generally speaking, there is an index, but we have to get back to you. Thanks.
Okay, I'll take my question in English. Just to give maybe a quick question on the cost synergies there you talked about. So you've got SEK 300-400 million here, SEK 200 million from Bergendahls. If I just assume that, say, free cash flow is going to go up by SEK 600 million, is that kind of wrong? Would you have to sort of actually reinvest that money in maybe keeping market share and things like that? You kind of talked about that just before, but can you maybe be a bit more clear that, is it going to go straight up by that, or are you going to have to maybe actually reinvest some of that to keep your spot?
Well, I think, and there was some similar questions about before, but Anders also pointed out that if you take some of these synergies that we are getting, it's also being erased in a way of, of other costs that has happened in the, during the last year. Currency is one area. We also is now working with the transformation here, et cetera. So, it obviously, it gives us synergies, and then we are still have to to balance and handle the market out there. And as someone asked here earlier, will this, when we are getting these synergies or the efficiencies from, from a logistical center here, will that go to a more, a more competitive marketplace or, or to be more aggressive in the market?
Or will it go to, to increase our, our, our bottom line? Obviously, it depends on where the market goes. For us, it's strictly important to be very competitive and to make sure that we are, are, are driving our position in the market, and we're sticking to that, and we are thinking that we're gaining, we are driving profitable growth behind that. So we'll see where the market goes, and I think that's the tricky question right now. We don't know.
Okay, fair enough. Just my other question was, I guess, with sort of Lidl and Netto coming into the market, like, if you actually look where they've kind of got a store near one of yours, what is it- what actually happens to the profitability of a store when they come and actually start to compete in a very local sense?
You said Lidl and Netto, did you say that?
Yeah.
Yeah. Well, Netto, as they have, they're not here any longer, and Lidl has been here for now 20 years, almost. So, I think we are very used to, Lidl has, has, been here for many years, and they were used to have Lidl, even next door. And as, as Thomas pointed out, they- it's- they have a different concept and a different offer with a more limited range, and we have a broader range. So, so I think that we are looking at the whole competitive landscape when we open up in a city where it tends to be that you have a supermarket, you may have an hypermarket and a, and a hard discount and then Willys. So, that's the arena that we are playing in.
You're not going to do anything sort of irrational to try and kind of take market share or try to sort of change strategy or anything like that?
I think Thomas pointed it out, that we, in terms of Willys, when we are fighting with Willys, it's very—we are keeping making sure that we are as tight as we can with the hard discounter. Then we have a wider range, and we want to also make sure that we have a clear spread towards the hypermarket segment. Niklas?
Just a second round now. We've only a few minutes left, so, yes. Well, I'll try and be brief. The automation investments, you're saying it covers 60% of your volume. Now that you've made some leeway, you've made some progress on this investment-
... What's your perspective on running a second center, like another Vitron center? Do, does that feature in your plans if you look to the future, or do you feel that you have such a good coverage of the market, the way it's playing out right now, that you're fine the way it is? But I think that's what the question there about potential as well, earlier. Let's get this logistics center sorted here, and then it depends on our development. We have another warehousing structure for the south of Sweden, and there, there's remaining potential as we move forward. I'm sure we'll get back to you on that point, in that case. At the same time, you've made some investments already down there. Yes, we have.
But we also invest in the here and the now to cope with capacity.
If you take the perspective from when we started talking about this today, we started drafting these plans five years ago. This is not a facility that you build from scratch, overnight. The lead times are long, so you need to start planning and look at the efficiency of our units. You've had some questions. I saw someone over there who hasn't asked a question before. Go ahead.
Sorry, I have to ask the question in English.
That's okay.
So I have a question for Thomas, with Willys. You've reported incredible like for like for quite some time now. Would you be able to split the percentage between, like, inflation, switching gains, and maybe increased volume? Would you be able to share that?
Well, for us, we are keeping the inflation part based on the overall statistics in the market. So you can look at the statistic number that we have in the Swedish market, and you can use that as an inflation rate, and then it differs some, but that's giving you a fairly good guidance. And then you're getting also, then you can really see the volume growth that Willys has reported.
Okay, great. Then maybe a cheeky question. You are currently adding about between 40,000 and 45,000 new Willys Plus members per month. Do you expect that to normalize slightly? And if so, at what level would you be happy for that? I-
In terms of monthly growth?
Yeah, yeah.
I think that we were very happy when we had the 25,000. So of course, we are even more happy, I think, now with the increased rate than so if you have a monthly growth of 25, it's fantastic. If we have more, it's also... We are not saying we want to have that. We want to have as many as we can.
Okay, great. Thank you.
Okay, one final question, I think, then we need to wrap this up.
Okay, I'll be back at the end. I'm going to switch back to Swedish, Magnus Råman. It's about five, six years ago, Klas. Five, six years ago, since the decision was made, you've said, and your main competitor also made an important investment decision with e-commerce online, and you passed it on the way out here, and I saw there were many delivery trucks and vehicles parked outside their facilities, and you showed us the market share. If they're 2.5 times bigger than you in the total market, there's a much smaller difference in, if you look at online trade, and if you add MatHem, you're already bigger than your main competitor at this stage. So here's a question of detail, perhaps it's more for Niklas.
When it comes to the MatHem deliveries, is there not an argument to be made that you would say that it would make more sense when you make palleting and de-palleting and everything that we're about to see here now, that you have the online deliveries from here, rather than doing them in palleting, de-palleting, sending it in bulk to MatHem warehouse and then another in, in palleting, de-palleting again? But we are two different companies, and we have a small holding in MatHem. MatHem is a separate, independent company in charge of their deliveries, writing their own agreements, signing them themselves, and the cooperation we have with them is to deliver bulk volume to MatHem.
Every night, there are a couple of trucks that go over to their facilities. As for the other question, that's up to MatHem, of course.
They'll have to evaluate whether they'd be interested in doing something more than what we do right now, but currently, we're focusing on a delivery option that they've chosen. So we will supply the needs, for that customer. That's basically what it's about. Now, with all that, perhaps there are additional questions, but the benefit of all this is that we will walk around together, of course. I'm looking a little bit, tensely to who's going to take command now, because, of course, now, here, come up here and join us up here.
Let us know what's happening. Now, we're going to get some help. What's happening next? What are we going to do? What are we allowed to do? What may we not do? There, I expect clear instructions. Thank you very much. Can you hear me? Yes, great. Johan Näslund is my name.
It's my honor to present this facility to you, our guests. We're working in logistics, but I think this is another type of challenge in terms of logistics. It's big enough. In 60 minutes, starting at 1:30, we will move across this facility, and as you've heard, you've heard the size of it, it is big. We've created a path for you. Let me see if I can get it here. This is what it looks like. It's easy to figure out, isn't it? Wouldn't you say? Easy peasy. And in order for this to work, we're going to split you into 4 different groups. At the back of your guest card, there's a number, and it represents the group you belong to … And just outside, there are 4 different tables set, laid out with some equipment.
We have a high-visibility vest, and we have this guide equipment that you grab, both the receiver and the headsets. The reason why we need this is because there's a certain sound level out there, but also for safety. We want you to hear what's happening. You need to be able to access all the information and hear it properly, so we're going to be using it throughout the guided tour. We have also taken all security measures. There's ongoing production currently. Along the red line, you see the dotted line more to the left. That's where we're moving on the production floor, so we're going to have to close off, cordon off, so that we can pass safely. Four groups, a few minutes between the groups, along this trail.
It's about 750 meters and, also moving up and down, height-wise, across 20 meters. 1:30, group one will head off.
In group, that belongs to... I will lead that one, and we will meet 3:30. We need to leave this area, so please come a few minutes before that, so we can equip yourself with these things. Thereafter, 23 minutes or-
Then after 2-3 minutes, it's time for group 2, then 3 and 4. After about 60 minutes, we will be back here, where we just hand back all the equipment, and that concludes the tour. During this tour, I'm planning to tell... Well, I'd like to tell you now a little bit about what we're going to be seeing.
We have very many deals. We have all temperatures-
We have all the temperature zones represented, but to save your comfort a little bit, we're going to pass outside the high cooling, but not go in. Everything to the left is dry foods, and it's non-cooled. That's what we're going to focus on. That's where we have most of the movement, but we're getting started with the perishables, and then the freezing will be active in full by next year. So we're going to show you these parts. Along the dotted line, we're going to pass the manual area with trucks and voice picking and a few other things, and then the inbound, and you'll see the high storage. And we look at the fully automated parts.
For practical reasons, we won't be able to go down and have a closer look at all the equipment 'cause there's so many of us, but we've arranged so that there are a few stations, a few stops, so that you can have a look at least at, and get a better idea of how everything's done. And then we're going to look at the small picking, where the small items are located, and then concluding with the outbound deliveries out. And the red line you saw to the right at the end, we'll go on, across the passageway, and then we'll be back here. That's what we're going to show you. You will all have a guide, in charge of the talking and the explaining. And during the course of this tour, please feel free to ask questions and talk.
If you press the button on the middle of this unit, everyone will hear when you ask a question. Make sure that you have the microphone close to your mouth. Otherwise, the guide will speak so that you can hear everything throughout the tour. Now, I think that was everything from me at this stage on the practical aspects of the tour. Now, Alexander will tell us a little bit about what's happening from now up until 1:30 P.M., when we head off. The current speaker is not using a microphone, unfortunately, so the interpreters can't hear this particular comment.
We've got 2 or 3 minutes.
So we're talking 2, 3 minutes. You can't sit around in the canteen if you don't belong to group one and just enjoying another cup of coffee. It takes a while to get set up with headsets and the vests, et cetera. So make sure that you all make your way back up there for, up here for 1:30 P.M. Any other questions on the practical point? That's another good question. You are allowed to take photos, but for GDPR reasons, you must not take any photos if a person can be clearly identified in the photo, unless you ask for prior permission.
But in some parts, you might want to take a selfie to send to your family, just because it's so cool. That's perfectly okay. But don't take any photos of any of the employees at all. Okay, Alexander, over to you. Thank you.
Thank you, Johan. So the tour starts at 1:30 P.M., but now it's time for lunch, and that's going to be in the staff canteen over in that direction. There are colleagues here who will show you the way, and you go and grab your food, the food you'd prefer. There are a few different options. You go and sit down, enjoy your lunch. And these presenters of ours will also be there for the lunch, so that you can keep mingling, asking questions, discussing throughout the lunch. So it's time to go and grab something to eat, and then at 1:30 P.M. sharp, we meet back here. Thank you.