Thank you very much and very welcome to BHG's first-ever Capital Markets Day. I must admit, also my first-ever Capital Markets Day. Thank you very much for making the trip here to Kalmar. We really appreciate it. You're more than welcome. For those of you following digitally, also most welcome. My name is Gustaf Öhrn. I'm the BHG CEO. I've been so for the last 18 months. I believe I have met most of you, I think all of you in this room in some sort of shape or form. Probably not all of you listening digitally. But in very, very short, my background is a tradesman at heart. Started my career at H&M. Since then, I have, among other things, been the CEO of J. Lindeberg, Stadium, and Åhléns. I'm very, very happy and proud to be here and really looking forward to the day.
I'll start this off with a few words about the agenda of the day. I will start. I'll do a short summary of what we are, what we have done, and what we have achieved, but more than anything focusing on forward-looking strategy and the initiatives that are to come. After that, I will leave it to Jesper. He will talk more about and quantify the effects of these initiatives. The sort of schedule as it stands, as I said, first me, then Jesper, then we will take a short break. We will be back after the break. I will hand the word to Mikael and Emma. They will talk about home improvement and the journey we're doing on consolidation in Do-It-Yourself , one of our biggest initiatives this year. After that, we're leaving for lunch. We'll need to be in the bus at 11:30 A.M.
We'll be back here at 1:00 P.M. We will then leave it to Christian and David. They're going to talk about Value Home, the initiatives we're doing there, and also a bit of a deep dive on the Hemfint Group, which is a newly consolidated entity. After that, they will leave it to Bang, who's going to talk about Premium Living and focus primarily on the Nordic Nest Group. I will take lead on a short sort of concluding remarks. The last point on the agenda today is basically the tour of the warehouse and the automation investment that we're currently doing here at Nordic Nest. Should be ready and back in the bus by some 3:30 P.M., I believe, and then there'll be plenty of time to make it back to the flight in time for the flight back at 4:30 P.M.
There will be opportunities for sort of Q&As after each session. First, I'll do mine and Jesper, and then we'll have the first Q&A session. And then we'll have one after each business unit's presentation and a longer Q&A towards the end of the day. So if we end up being short on time through the time schedule, we'll try to postpone the other questions to the final Q&A after the concluding remarks. That is the plan. This is the team. I must say that I'm super proud of the team we have, the team we have here together, and the team we have put together. I think we have a world-class, highly motivated, well-incentivized team who really wants to do this.
So I'm super proud of what we have achieved in the last 18 months, both taking us through a very, very tough period of time, as you all know, and also setting us up for the market rebound, as we believe is to come. I will let all of them introduce themselves as they start their presentations. But before I do that, I should mention also Jakob, who's head of our IR. I think most of you have met him. He's the one who's responsible for setting all this up. So if it's success, it's thanks to him. If it's a failure, it's also thanks to him. But let's start. Our key messages of today, and we basically have three key messages. If you don't remember anything else, try to remember this. These are the key messages.
We are well-prepared for the market rebound when it comes, and we are confident that it will come. We have done the preparations. We have done the strategic things we needed to do. We have done the structural things we needed to do. We have done the operationals, and we have done the financial preparations. We are well-prepared for the market rebound when it comes. The second key message is the updated financial targets. I'm sure you've read them. They were published this morning. The board of directors took a decision basically based on where we are, the market environment, the new strategy, our current strengthened financial status, and based on that, we updated our financial targets. I will come back to them, and Jesper will deep dive on them.
The third one, maybe the most important key message of today, is what we call the profitability rebound, basically showing you what we are to do to take us from the current level of profit to, in the first phase, back to what we call the pre-pandemic levels of profitability, which is basically the 5%, and after that all the way to the 7% that stands as our financial target. What are the initiatives, and what is the effect of these initiatives? That's what I will talk a little bit about, what Jesper is going to sort of quantify the effects of, and then we will hear from the business unit leads and the CEOs the deep dive of what we're doing and how it is to be done. Those are the three main messages of this Capital Markets Day.
First, very brief and just a few words about what we are. What is BHG? We are a group of online businesses in Do-It-Yourself and home interior. We work in a very decentralized structure. We are heavily dependent on and focused on what we call entrepreneurial accountability, basically that all the CEOs and the management of the entities must feel fully accountable for the business and the result of their businesses. We have divided our business into three business units: Home Improvement, Value Home, and Premium Living. We turn over some SEK 12 billion, and we do that between the current roughly 15 entities, and we're selling some 1.7 million SKUs in the total group.
We have been profitable since start, and the average profitability in the group the last five years, including sort of pre-pandemic, during the pandemic, and post-pandemic, is basically 5% of profitability, the level we now in the first phase target to get back to. Trying to just say a few words of what we are, but maybe more about how we got to where we are. I think it's useful to sort of discuss this or explain this in the phases that has taken us to where we are. The company or the group, as we call it and as it stands, we say the beginning of this was 2012. Basically, Mikael Olander and his team, they acquired Bygghemma.
From then up to the start of the pandemic, they basically took the group from SEK 200 million up to actually become what was the leading B2C online platform in the Nordics. They did that through organic growth and through a number of acquisitions. Most of these acquisitions were focused on securing access to products, verticals and specialists to broaden the assortment range and become the platform that we currently are. They also, during this time, stepped into the home interior segment in the value with the acquisition of Chilli and Trademax. The next phase, which really defines us, is the pandemic phase. We were online, and we were home-based. It went absolutely crazy when we hit the pandemic. We had crazy growth. All our energy, all our focus went to handling the growth.
We did that with super focus, and we also did a number of larger acquisitions, one of them being Nordic Nest, but also acquiring the Hafa Group and the HYMA Group. So strong organic growth, handling that organic growth, and big acquisition of platforms. Towards the end of the pandemic, and you all probably remember it all too well, supply chains broke down, lead times got long, inflation in raw materials, capacity constraints, long lead times, and that's where we are entering what we call the sort of the post-pandemic phase. Then in the beginning of 2022, we had the war in Ukraine. We had inflation. We had interest rates going up. And what happened was basically our own inventory and the market inventory skyrocketed, and demand fell. Super tough period, the post-pandemic phase.
Where we are right now, we're in the final moments, and we see the end of this phase, and that is why we're having this Capital Markets Day right now. But the post-pandemic phase for us has been very much about cost-cutting, reducing inventory, few divestments, and consolidations, and preparing ourselves for the market rebound, the market rebound that we now see the first signs of coming. That is very much what we're here to tell you more about. I started off by saying that we are prepared for the market rebound, and I can truly say that we are. We have done a strategic job. We have defined a forward-looking and forward-leaning strategic plan together with one of the leading consultancy firms. We call it the Olympia Plan. We have, as you know, focused a lot structurally in the last 18 months.
We have divided our business into the three business units. We have divested a few businesses where we didn't find strategically valuable and where we didn't see the preconditions for sort of profitability within the foreseeable future. More than anything, we have consolidated. We have basically, in the last 18 months, gone from 25 entities to 15 entities, primarily through consolidations. With that, we're sort of halfway to our target state of 7-8 platforms, and we have a number of consolidations ongoing and ahead of us. Finally, and Jesper will talk more about this, a lot of focus to be prepared financially, cost-cutting, inventory reduction, cash flow improvement, and strengthening in our balance sheet. I started with saying we are confident that we are prepared for the market rebound when it comes. Few words about the sort of market, the structural, and the non-structural trends.
We are confident that we are well-positioned to capitalize on the structural market trends when they sort of resurface again after this distorted period of time. We're also confident that we are to capitalize on the normalized market when it happens, and as I said, we see the early signs. With our leading online position, we have a superior customer value. That is what we have built this position on, and it is crucial. To be able to take this position, you need to be as important for the suppliers as they are to us. Let me try to sort of clarify this in two slides. I'll start with the market trends, starting with the sort of fundamental market trends. As I said, even if they have been distorted in the last few years, the turbulence from the pandemic and the post-pandemic, they're still there.
The first structural trend is the interest in home and home environment. That is unchanged and still valid. The second one, and of course super important, is the online migration, the migration from the physical channel to the online channel. It is happening. It will continue to happen. I believe that in some categories we're probably close to the balance point between the channels. I'm talking more about sort of books and home electronics. But looking at the categories where we're big in, Do-It-Yourself and home improvement, the penetration is still very low. And also looking at from a sort of the more mature markets, primarily maybe the U.S. and the U.K., we can see that the penetration in our home markets is still very low. So we are confident that that migration will continue.
Third, something that has really revolutionized this industry with the online revolution, price transparency. Today, almost any consumer can at any given time have a full price transparency on most of the products in the market. This has driven price consciousness, no question why. You need to be super sharp on price. If you're not super sharp on price, you will not be successful. That is one of our key focuses to always secure best on price. Finally, we see two major positions that we believe are vital to succeed long-term and build long-term profitable businesses. One is what we call the platform position, basically a wide target audience and solving most of their needs within this platform. In our case, it's the Bygghemma, the one-stop shop, wide assortment, wide target group, and solving most of their needs. That's one way of doing it.
The other way, which we believe in, is to have much more niched target groups, understanding that target group better than the competition, and sort of supply or delivering on those needs better than the competition. A very good example of that business model is actually Nordic Nest, but also Hylte and the likes. Super niche customer focus and delivering top-notch on that target group. If those were the structural trends, we then have the things driving the market and the key drivers of the market and what we believe the market normalization, as you know, disposable income, consumer confidence, and for us also important, activities in the housing market. All three intertwined, all three heavily affected by the pandemic and the post-pandemic, but all three also where we see clear signs of normalization. Inflation is basically down.
We saw last week the first cut of interest rates in the Swedish market, and we see consumer confidence and housing activities improving, yes, from low levels, but it is happening. We unchanged believe that the market is going to be very challenging for all of 2024, but we're also confident that the market has begun to rebound, and that's where we are here to capitalize on. So if those were the trends, I'll say a few words about the value customer proposition and also about the supplier customer proposition. Starting with a customer value proposition, if you are to be successful in this business, as I said, you need to deliver on price. If you're not best in price or at least on par on price, you have no reason to exist.
We secure that through a very lean, low-fixed-based cost structure, super crucial, one of the fundamentals that we have built this group on and remain super committed to. So delivering our best on price through a low-cost structure. Second one, choice or assortment, basically using our wide assortment platforms, but combining this with the assortment from our verticals and specialists, and also combining this with the assortment from our private label-driven Value Home businesses. By doing this, we can get a very wide assortment, be very strong on price on branded products through the low-cost structure, but also deliver the best price through our private label-driven businesses. So delivering on price, delivering on assortment, and delivering on convenience.
I think maybe especially in our categories, for those of you who have done renovations, you understand the value of getting your products home delivered because we're talking bulky things, difficult to handle. So another one is the home deliveries of bulky items, and the third one being the services. Through the verticals and the specialists, we have the key competence and can deliver also on those. So delivering on price, choice, convenience, and service. If you got that right, you have a very good start, but you need one more thing, and that is securing access to products, securing access to the products and the brands that the consumer wants to buy, as vital as the other ones.
Through our 10 years of driving, through our leading position online, we are now as vital for the suppliers as they are to us, and that is a key driver in today's market. For some of these suppliers, we are also their vehicle for international expansion. Customer value, supplier value, crucial to succeed. Few words about group and the role of the group. As I said, we are a small group, and you actually see most of the group in the room today. We are committed to remain a small group. We are committed to remain the decentralized structure. We have a few key functions, finance being one, IR being other. We have some centers of excellence, one being tech, one being ESG, one actually being online marketing.
The reason we have online marketing as a center of excellence is because then we can secure the kind of competence that the smaller entities otherwise could not. But the most important role of the group is to secure the best possible management for the entities and make sure that they're well incentivized, highly motivated, and are incentivized in the sort of direction that we want them to drive the group. In very, very short, if we have 15 brilliant CEOs who are highly motivated and highly incentivized, our work is super easy. That's where we spend a lot of our time securing that we get the best possible management in place. The second one I think we have learned, super crucial, super valuable, is benchmarking, but even more, sharing best practice.
When we have proven models, processes, systems, or whatever it may be, and we can share that within the group, sharing best practice, that is what the entrepreneurs really, really appreciate. And that's, I think, today is where we have the biggest gains. So a lot of focus on sharing best practice. We have, as I mentioned, and you will meet them today, super operationally experienced business unit leads, all of them with previous CEO experience. Their job is to support the businesses and secure governance of the businesses. We're also driving from group a lot of the structural work, and as you know, a lot of the work in the last 18 months has been structural, divestments, but maybe even more consolidations. That is something we drive from group. Of course, defining group strategy and supporting on M&A, and Jesper will come back to our current M&A focus.
And of course, optimizing capital allocation and external communication, this basically being one of them. So that was the main group functions. As I said, we have three business units: Home Improvement, basically our Do-It-Yoursel f business, primarily in the Nordics, and primarily on a dropship-based business model. Main focus right now is creating the powerhouse through consolidations. We have the Value Home business, that is our home interior in the value segment, strong position in the Nordics, strong position in Eastern Europe, and based on the private label-based business model, main focus operational excellence and profitability improvements. Christian will talk more about this. And then finally, Premium Living, home interior in the premium segment, a very international business with more than 50% of the business outside of the Nordics, where the key focus is continued internationalization, and Bang will tell us more about this.
We are coming from, and the reason why I feel fairly confident that we can capitalize on the market rebound when it comes, from a market-leading position in many categories, one of them being online Do-It-Yourself , where we have a super strong position, I would say especially in the Swedish and the Finnish market. We are without doubt the leading online actor in those markets. But also in Value Home, where we between the two main platforms of HFN and Hemfint Group also have a leading position online in home interior and leisure, and where we're also holding a very strong position in the Eastern European economies on furniture.
Last but not least, on Premium Living, we have the leading position in the Nordics for supplying Scandinavian design, but maybe more important, we have a leading position internationally for bringing the Scandinavian designs outside to the rest of the world. So strong leading position to benefit from when the market rebounds. Finally, our updated financial targets, as I said, the board of directors this morning took a decision to update our financial targets. They've been updated because the market environment has changed, we have defined a new strategy, and we also have a stronger financial position than we had before. The old financial target was set in 2021, and as we all know, that was a completely different environment.
The main financial targets as they stand is just to continue to deliver above the addressable market on growth, on profitability to return to what we call a pre-pandemic adjusted profitability of 5%, and over time further improve that profitability to an EBIT margin of 7%. On capital structure, we have the ambition to continue to strengthen the balance sheet and operate with a net debt EBITDA target of below 2.5x. And finally, dividend, we will be paying dividend when our cash flow exceeds the available investment in profitable growth and under the requirement that a capital structure is met, and Jesper will come back to these targets. And finally, my most important slide, and this is probably where I started, and also my last slide, we are today to show you how we are to take us back to the first, the 5%, then the 7% of profitability.
We have 4 main levers that we're working to get us back to this profitability. The first one being growth, and as you all know, growth is the main lever of profitability. We have a number of growth initiatives in the pipeline, and the business unit leads will tell you more about that, but it's everything from internationalization to category expansion in relevant categories to selling through marketplaces. In some cases, different growth initiatives and different BUs, in some cases they're covering many BUs. Second main lever is the consolidations. We have done a number of consolidations, we have more to be done. We have currently 3 ongoing consolidations in the group, quite big consolidations. One, Emma will tell us more about the Do-It-Yourself powerhouse journey.
They will tell us more about the Hemfint Group consolidation we're currently doing, and Bang will talk a little bit about the integration of Lampgallerian and KitchenTime into the Nordic Nest Group. But consolidation, third lever being improved efficiency. We have focused so hard on this for the last 18 months in a challenging market. We have done a lot of investments in fulfillment, in new IT structures, and one of the reasons why we have done this is that we have to build more scalable solutions. One of the things we learned during the pandemic when our volumes skyrocketed was that we did not have all the scalable solutions in place. Our sort of profitability did not scale with the volume. So a lot of focus on that, automation, IT processes, etc., etc., build scalable solutions.
Also, as a means of efficiency, using AI as the tool it is to improve efficiency. We have done good things on content creation, we have done good things on online marketing, we are in the process of doing good things on customer service. And third, but quite important, group-wide agreements. We've currently done an agreement on last-mile deliveries where we really use the full group volume to achieve good prices. We've currently done the same on payment solutions, and we can see significant savings from these types of group-wide agreements. And last but not least, to take us all the way to the 7%, we will need the support of the market. But as I said, we are confident that we will get that support from the market rebound. These are the four main levers: growth, consolidation, efficiency, and market normalization.
Jesper will tell us more about the effect of these levers to take us back to the desired profitability. With that, I'll leave it, and I'm going to leave it to Jesper. My suggestion would be that we take the Q&A on this part after Jesper's presentation because he'll probably answer most of the questions, or at least many of them. But thank you, Jesper.
My name is Jesper Flemme, and I am the Group CFO. I actually can't believe it's eight years since Martin, one of the founders, sent me that email with the header "long shot" asking me to join the group, but it apparently is. I've been with the group for eight years, and my background is with Deloitte and the CDON Group.
I will start with our financial profile, some words about the market, achievements in 2023, before we focus on the financial impact of our strategic focus areas. BHG has an attractive financial profile. We have maintained profitability every year since the IPO despite challenging macro and, as a result, development. The business model is capital-efficient, generated profits are efficiently converted to cash flows, and structured growth will return as the market normalizes. The market is showing signs of recovery, and we're well positioned to capture this momentum. Adjusted EBIT over the past seven years, steady development before the pandemic, very strong profitability during the pandemic, and a weaker development in the post-pandemic period. However, as I said, we have had a positive EBIT each year since the IPO despite the challenges we have faced. We have shown resilience and have a good opportunity to return to higher profitability levels.
Cash flow perspective, we have several different operating models within the group today, but still some 50% is based on the dropship model. The beauty of that model is that when the business is growing, it frees up cash. Combining that with low CapEx needs to maintain operations, we have had an average of 1.5% of sales over the past couple of years, a number that is still valid, results in high conversion from EBITDA to operating cash flows, which can then be used to fuel further growth. As the subheader says, since the IPO, cumulative operating cash flow actually exceeds EBIT. Moving on to the market and starting with size. Regardless of whether comparison is made with other geographies and/or product categories, the conclusion is that our segments are under-penetrated.
We have a strong potential and a large addressable market currently, some SEK 40 billion in the Nordics, and even more so as online migration continues and penetration increases. In essence, there is ample space for BHG to continue grow in this current market and segments. Looking at the market environment and using the intention to renovate index to illustrate the development, as you can see on the right-hand side, we have had a significant and clear market downturn in the post-pandemic environment, which of course has impacted us. Looking to the left and the pre-pandemic market levels, which can be viewed as normal level, which in turn implies a strong upside once the market normalizes to this level. The market is showing some signs of recovery already, but as Gustaf said, we still believe it will gain most momentum at the end of the year and beginning of next.
2023, a year with significant improvements. We focused our efforts from a financial perspective and did communicate targets to reduce inventory and costs. And as you can see, we managed to outperform the inventory target and deliver in line with our cost reduction target. On top, we managed to generate a fantastic SEK 1.6 billion cash flow from operations and reduce our interest-bearing liabilities with the same amount. This means that we're now ready to fully focus on our updated financial targets. As Gustav said, we have identified and quantified tangible initiatives within several buckets for driving profitable growth and achieving our updated financial targets. Starting with growth, we believe that our growth initiatives will support the EBIT margin with up to 1.5 percentage points. Most of the growth will come from international markets with Premium Living leading the way, but also from continued category expansion.
Moving on to consolidation, another 1.5 percentage points will come from consolidations, the main initiatives being the creation of the Nordic Home Improvement Powerhouse and the Hemfint consolidation, projects that will take some time to fully realize but with great potential. The largest contribution to the EBIT margin will come from improved efficiency, and this bucket contains a wide range of initiatives. From a logistical perspective, automation, optimizing warehouse space, and group-wide last-mile delivery agreement. We will use AI as a tool to improve customer service, both customer experience and reducing costs. Last but not least, we will use our scale to get the best possible prices from our suppliers and thereby improving product margin.
The combined effect from growth, consolidation, and efficiency will take us back to the pre-pandemic profit levels of roughly 5%, and adding the effect from market normalization and increased online penetration, we will reach the 7%. From initiatives to P&L, we will improve on all lines. Starting from the top of the P&L, focusing on Nordic purchasing and market normalization will improve product margin. Continued warehousing automation and posted agreements will reduce direct selling costs. The biggest effect on the P&L will be seen on the SG&A line, and it's an effect from consolidations that will reduce both IT and organizational costs. D&A will improve from optimized warehouse space and thereby reducing amortization of leasing liabilities. From a timing perspective, effects on the product margin and direct selling cost line will be easier to realize, while the full effect from consolidations will take some 12-18 months to capture.
From a balance sheet perspective, great improvements were made last year. Still, we are committed to further strengthening our balance sheet and reducing leverage. We are targeting a below 2.5x leverage, which is both reasonable and clearly achievable considering historical levels and what our updated profitability targets imply. Drivers going forward will be normalized EBITDA, disciplined working capital development, and maintained low CapEx. My last slide will cover M&A. Since the group was founded in 2012, we have made over 35 acquisitions. In the early stages, we focused on adding new assortments by acquiring category specialists and entering new markets, which in the DIY field requires understanding of local preferences and local brands. In the period that followed, we made larger acquisitions and thereby added new business areas such as Nordic Nest.
We have now adjusted our strategy, focusing on complementing existing business areas from product category and/or geography perspective. We apply strict criteria when evaluating potential acquisitions, ensuring that any potential acquisition has a clear strategic rationale with strong synergy potential while remaining accretive for our financial profile. KitchenTime and Trendrum are recent examples of good acquisitions that fulfill these criteria, clear synergies adding almost no costs and limited or no leverage impact. KitchenTime was communicated in January, and in less than three months, we launched new sites in six different languages fully integrated on the Nordic Nest platform. We have added a cooking and dining specialist that entails both new suppliers and new customers without adding costs or liabilities. That concludes my presentation, and myself and Gustaf will now do our very best to answer your questions.
But you need to use the mic.
Yes. Niklas Ekman from Carnegie. First question on the margin target and particularly the drivers here. You're talking about a 5% margin would be achieved. Is it right to assume that that would be achieved in the current market situation? Because you talk about market normalization only contributing around 1%-2%. So would you achieve 5% even if the market would stay at the current level? Is that the right way? And as a follow-up, if we see a return to a normalized market, if you have a 5% starting point, wouldn't you be able to achieve much more than 7%?
I mean, the ambition in this total strategy work has been to take us back to that 5% profitability regardless of help from the market. So it's right to assume that we will get almost there.
Close to the 5%.
Without any help from the market. As I think we have said before, the next step will be the 7%, but we don't view the 7% as a ceiling, but it's the next step, and it's our updated financial target.
Yes. Okay. If we get to the 7%, I will be more than pleased.
Good. Second question, when you talk about first signs of market rebound, because on the one hand, you're talking about 2024 being a challenging year basically throughout the year, but you're also talking about first signs of rebound. Are you actually seeing it in terms of volumes, in terms of traffic, or are you more talking about the macro indicators?
We're talking more about the macro indicators. I mean, we've definitely seen macro indicators going the right way. We all know that. But as we've said, we believe the market is going to remain challenging for all of 2024, and we base that primarily on the fact that disposable income is still lower than it was a year ago. Even with the planned sort of interest rate cuts, it's going to be quite low disposable income. We've also said that we're a little bit more bullish about the housing market and that that will increase more due to consumer confidence coming back. But we also know there's quite a delayed effect on consumption. So I think the conclusion is that 2024 is going to be tough from a market perspective, but the macro signs are definitely there.
A third question, if I may. When you talk about your financial targets on debt to keep it below 2.5x EBITDA, isn't that a fairly high leverage if you consider the balance sheet problems you've had in the past? Wouldn't it be more prudent to maybe assume a more cautious view on the balance sheet going forward?
I think that target should be viewed from two perspectives, the first being where we are right now. I mean, we're at much higher levels right now. The other perspective is that we also want to keep that flexibility to be able to continue to do M&A, accretive M&A with discipline, of course. Combining those two perspectives, the board obviously felt that it was a fair target to have a below 2.5x.
Thank you.
Benjamin.
Hi, Benjamin, ABG. So a couple of questions from me as well. First of all, I was wondering if you could go back to the EBIT margin bridge slide and perhaps talk a bit more on this sort of timeline for each component there. That would be helpful.
So most of the initiatives are in motion. As I said, initiatives when it comes to improving product margin, improving direct selling costs, we will see those gradually over the past 12, 18, 24 months. When it comes to consolidations, that will take longer time. The biggest chunk is the Nordic Home Improvement Powerhouse. As I said, it will take 12-18 months to capture the effect.
Will the other components less than 12 months? Is that how we should interpret it?
Gradually, you will see the effects. You will not have all of them in 12 months, but gradually, we will see the effects.
Perfect. Thank you. Then I was wondering as well on group agreements and perhaps specifically last-mile delivery, just sort of trying to understand the effects here. Does a platform such as Bygghemma, for example, gain better, lower fulfillment costs as well?
Not so much on the dropship-based businesses. That is primarily on the warehouse-based businesses. We get that effect, yes. But there's still a substantial part of our business, and it's a big cost driver. So if we can get down on last-mile delivery costs, even with a few percentage points, it makes a big difference on our total cost levels. And we really saw the effect when we combined all the volumes and went out and did that negotiation. And of course, once you get one of those agreements, you can take it to the others as well, and they have to match it to be in the game. So we're very happy with what we've done on last mile, but also actually maybe less effect, but also substantial savings in payment solutions.
Perfect. Thank you.
More questions? Good. Then we say thank you very much for this first session. We have a fairly long break. I think we're starting at 10:45 A.M. We will be welcoming Mikael and Emma to talk us more about home improvement and the Do-It-Yourself consolidation journey. Sorry?
11:00.
Sorry. Please be here in good time before that so we can start on the dot because that's what we aim to do. If you go out and take a left, there's toilets on the right. And further down the hall, where you came in, there's also coffees available. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Welcome back. My name is Mikael Hagman. I'm here to talk about the Home Improvement business unit. I have 30 years of CEO experience within retail and the consumer segment in the Nordics, worked and operated in most of the Nordic countries. In 2017, BHG bought a company that I founded, and somehow I got tangled up in the acquisition, and I was part of it, apparently. I've been here since 2017 in various roles. The Home Improvement segment is just under half of BHG's turnover. It operates in the space of home improvement/DIY. It has a distinct market position within home improvement based on an unbeatable range or assortment of products, price leadership, a combination of a dominating generalist and agile specialist. We're predominantly using a dropship model.
A typical customer of the home improvement segment is a homeowner, a little bit above or on average income. We exist predominantly in Sweden and Finland today, but see great growth opportunities in the other Nordic markets. We come from a position of a very fragmented type of business with many small platforms all across the space of home improvement. What we've done is try to consolidate these three into three major platforms. The most important one is Bygghemma, which is a destination for all your needs within home improvement. Besides that, we have two operations in Hafa Brand Group who operate predominantly in bathrooms, doors and windows, and selected home appliances. Then HYMA, which is our specialist in gardening, forestry, and hunting. The combination of these three is a great strength because they all work together.
Hafa Brand Group is a major supplier to Bygghemma. The collaboration between Bygghemma and Hafa is strong on product sourcing, negotiating with suppliers, etc. All these three platforms and their subsidiaries and their surrounding sites, we have a great leadership team in place. They're very competitive. They have a take-no-prisoners attitude, very, very strong competitors, but somehow they manage to work together. I guess that's my job, to keep them together. Going forward, Bygghemma, and we'll talk more about this. Emma will take the stage later. We have a great opportunity to grow in Norway and Denmark and continue what we've done historically, which is a data-driven approach to increasing our assortment and our offering to the customers, both in terms of services and in terms of products.
The Hafa Brand Group will continue its geographical expansion within the D2C business as well as product innovate within their categories, predominantly in the bathroom category. And there, they have an advantage because they will have firsthand consumer data from the Bygghemma sales channels. And HYMA, they have already done a geographical expansion into the Nordic markets and beyond. They're actually in Germany as well, but there's still more work to do to solidify those establishments in the new markets. And they also have an opportunity to grow quite substantially within private label, especially in the hunting segment. And as I said, the collaboration between this group is good, and their alignment of the incentive structures is very positive for everyone. So finally, my slide. What will this lead to? Well, we have several growth initiatives, category expansion and geographical expansion. That's been something we've done historically.
We're refining and redefining how we do that. So that will continue and deliver some substantial growth for us. We will also be benefiting from the group-wide agreements and the collaboration between the platforms in improved efficiency. We're also, of course, betting on substantial improvements in the macroeconomics, structural growth, which will come. But I think our main objective and the thing we can bring to the table is the creation of the Nordic Powerhouse platform. And this will lead to improved purchasing conditions with suppliers, increased efficiency, more seamless transfer of best practices across all of Nordics. So basically, what we want to do is the success we've had in Sweden and Finland, we want to take that to the other markets as well within the Nordics. And here to talk a little bit more about that is Emma. So I will hand over to her now.
Thank you, Hagman. Hi, everyone. My name is Emma Paulsson, and I'm the CEO for Bygghemma in the Nordics. I joined BHG almost two years ago, and my background has been consumer goods all the time, from furniture with IKEA many years ago to food and frozen food with Findus, part of Nomad Foods. I will do my very best to explain how we will become the number one online home improvement store with an unbeatable range in all the Nordic markets. But first, just to give some context on our current shape of the Nordic Powerhouse. So the Bygghemma Nordic, all the companies that are in scope for the Powerhouse, is approximately 60% of the business unit home improvement today. Most of the sales are coming out of Sweden and Finland, 98% of the sales.
All of us are today, or up until today, operating as separate units, separate companies and brands up until today. When Bygghemma.se was launched in Sweden many years ago and the equivalent in Finland many years ago, we broke new grounds in the home improvement segment. We grew sales and took market shares really fast, and we increased the number of well-known, strong brands in our total offer to customers to a really good price. Over those years, we've also learned a lot. We have gained insights and skills and improved our customer experience. We are now ready to establish the Nordic Powerhouse. We have set out our ambition to become the number one online home improvement store with an unbeatable range in all the Nordic markets. We have slightly different positions in the markets today.
We will become number one in all the markets in online market shares in home improvement. We will be the most trusted brand by customers, leading in retention rate with top two in brand awareness per market within home improvement. We will have the market's widest offering. So we can be that true Do-It-Yourself one-stop shop with a relevant and profitable offering, both products and services within home improvement. And as the Nordic online destination, we are now investing for a seamless customer and supplier experience with scalability and smart technology. Moving on to how we will establish the Nordic Home Improvement Powerhouse, I will elaborate a bit more on the coming slides. To summarize, we have four key strategic focus areas, first one being our organization. We're coming together as one.
We will have shared resources where it makes sense, such as finance, tech, Nordic procurement, people, and culture, but with strong local sales and marketing team. So we utilize cost synergies where relevant but remain the strong local relevance for our local customers. The second focus area is our shared tech backbone. We are currently building that new home for many, many sites, many brands. And third focus area is the work with our Pan Nordic brand, Bygghemma brand. You will find the same brand in all the Nordic markets with that broad platform for the wide audience. And the fourth key focus area is our supply chain. We are working to have the best offer to the best prices, relevant offer to the best prices, and the most efficient fulfillment possible in all the Nordic countries.
So the Nordic Powerhouse will deliver the unbeatable assortment, the competitive prices, being that number one online platform in all the Nordic markets with a strong brand awareness, destinations supported by well-known category experts, and a customer base that has a strong purchasing power. Now, there are many examples of other industries where you will find big global brands as a high share. This is just illustrating one. In the home improvement market landscape, the local customer preferences remain quite high, but we believe it will gradually become harmonized. So 30%-35% in the home improvement industry, we find the Pan Nordic and global strong brands. But 40%-45% are local brands with a strong local customer preference, such as, for example, Svedbergs in Sweden and Harvia in Finland.
All of us will operate together in the Nordic Powerhouse as Nordic as possible, as local as needed, to utilize the cost synergies but to remain strong local relevance. The country destination supported by category experts has been mentioned a few times. So Bygghemma will be the well-known, strong brand, the broad platform. In Sweden, it's called Bygghemma. In Denmark, Norway, Bygghjemme. In Finland, it's called Netrauta. It's the same brand, same offer, just called differently in the different languages. This is the highest strategic priority brand for our journey. But then we have other brands that are part of our strategy, our category must-haves. And here we get the specific category expertise needed as well as access to specific brands. One example in the Swedish market being Polarpumpen, where we sell heat pumps, where you need that specific competence and also the right well-known, strong brands.
All of these brands are part of the Powerhouse and will be on the same shared tech backbone. Why customers choose Bygghemma? Now, these are numbers from the Swedish market. The position is very similar in Finland today. So we have a significant increase in unique number of customers, plus 13% CAGR from 2019- 2023, with quite stable number of customers placing three or more orders over these couple of years. We continuously improve our customer experience. Our customers in the Swedish market give us a score of 4.5 out of 5 in Trustpilot, which is quite a good score compared to two to three years ago. We say we have an unbeatable assortment. We have currently 900,000 SKUs live in the Swedish bygghemma.se site today, a good increase in the last couple of years. The closest competitor in this market in Sweden has 150.
We are best in class when it comes to prices. In our core categories, our primary offerings, we have 90% price leadership. And besides securing safe and convenient home deliveries of quite bulky products, we have improved our delivery to promise from 80% to 90% over these last two years. And I should also say it's not because we have increased the lead times. It's actually rather the opposite. We have decreased our delivery times by 30%-40% over the same period of time. So the numbers are from Sweden, similar numbers in Finland today. We don't have the same position in Norway or Denmark yet. But I should also say the 500,000 unique customers, although we're proud of that increase in unique customers, it's still only 10% of the population or the households in Sweden today.
Same penetration number in Finland, 9% of all the households in the country. We see that as a potential as well. So to summarize, we are confident and strongly believe we have great profitable growth potentials with our plans to become the online home improvement store with an unbeatable range in all the Nordic markets. That was my final slide.
Thank you very much, Emma. I think we have time now for questions and hopefully some answers.
Hey, Niklas from Carnegie. Can I ask, when you talk about being the undisputed Nordic leader, as you said, you're very strong in Sweden and Finland, and I assume you are already the undisputed leader in those markets. But how about Norway and Denmark? Is that possible with the position you have today, or does that require significant improvement?
We absolutely believe it's possible. As I said, we've gained a lot of skills and insights. We have the competence, and we know how to grow fast with an improved customer experience. We don't have the same position. We have some sales in Norway today. Bygghemma, we don't have any existing Bygghemma sales in Denmark at all currently.
Okay. So you're talking about undisputed across the Nordics?
Across the Nordics in online market shares.
Okay. That makes sense. Thank you.
Thank you.
Hi. Daniel Schmidt from Danske Bank. Maybe a very specific question. I think I asked Gustaf a couple of years ago, and especially on Bygghemma. You have free deliveries, but you take out an expedite fee that's basically corresponding to the cost of the delivery. You don't see any sort of risk that you are alienating customers by sort of promising one thing and then actually returning with the same cost, basically, when they check out.
We don't have free deliveries on everything. We transfer quite bulky products, but we test and learn and listen to our customers all the time. We do communicate in every step possible extra costs added. There's no surprise when you move forward down the customer journey.
I think over time, we've done quite a good job in increasing the transparency for the customer. There's not a nasty surprise. It's very obvious to the customer.
Yeah. But I think that's changed. You're right because it does say that it might be an expedite fee. And I don't really know the difference between an expedite fee and a delivery fee. Maybe you can tell me. And it also compounds if you add more products. So maybe it's SEK 69, and then if you add another two products, it's SEK 179, which is basically, I guess, the entire profit for the sale. You don't ever sort of detect any complaints about that or any sort of risk that that's jeopardizing customer satisfaction.
I think, as Emma said, we test, trial, communicate with our customers, listen to our customers. What we will do in the future, we won't divulge here or now in relation to our competitive situation. But I think we're fully aware of what could occur. And so far, it has not, but we will monitor it very closely. And it's not the whole profit.
Maybe more than the profit, but who knows?
It certainly adds a little bit to the profit.
More questions?
Okay. Thank you very much.
Good.
Thank you very much. We are ahead of schedule. The plan was to leave at 11:30 A.M. for the restaurant. We're going to Kalmar Slott. There will be a car downstairs. I'm currently trying to investigate if we can leave at 11:15 A.M. instead, which will be 15 minutes ahead of schedule. I'll ask that when we get back outside. But 11:15 A.M. or 11:30 A.M. to be confirmed within short. And regardless, we need to be back here at 1:00 P.M. So the bus from the restaurant will leave at 11:45 A.M. Thank you very much, and I'll see you all at the restaurant. Thank you.
Thank you.
Okay. Good afternoon and welcome back, everyone. I hope you enjoyed your lunch. My name is Christian Eriksson. I'm Head of Value Home here at BHG. I have close to 20 years' experience working with online business. I started the online career in Bonnier, then moved on to CDON Group. Now I've been at BHG for the last 10 years. So what is then Value Home segment? We had a SEK 3.9 billion turnover last year. And this is including the divestment that we made end of Q3 last year. We divested our German business and our Danish retail business. Totally, they comprise about SEK 1 billion in turnover. And as you can see, the EBIT margin is quite low last year.
To some degree, affected by the divestment that we made, they dragged down the EBIT margin somewhat, but still way too low and still way under our pre-pandemic level. So we see a lot of potential in increasing this margin going forward. Right now, this segment is active in 15 markets. Sweden is still our main market. And as you can see, rest of the world, that is Furniture1, our Eastern European business. But what is interesting with this is to see the share of sales in the Nordics outside of Sweden. So we think we have some potential there, but I will get back to that in a minute. So Value Home, that is our Private Label operation. So less than 5% sorry, about 5% of the sales comes from external brands in this segment. The rest is White Label and Private Label.
Just to explain the difference between White Label and Private Label, White Label is not produced solely for us, and it could be sold for other channels besides BHG, while Private Label is produced for us only and sold through BHG channels only. The majority of sales are from Private Label. This means that we are working really closely to the producers and also develop the assortment together with the producers. Also, working with producers can add some complexity to the model as well because we need to add some value before we let the product on the market. That could be quality control. That can be making sure that the products are compliant with the demands. That could be photos. That could be content like descriptions and manuals and so on.
So a little bit more complexity to this model, but usually what we see is a higher margin also in this segment. I do think we have a fairly good understanding of the customer in the local market. We don't have local offices, but in each platform, we have people dedicated to observing the local market, keeping track of trends and competitors. And also, I think we are quite unique when it comes to how we organize our warehouse and logistics when it comes to handling bulky products because this could be quite complex. And this is something we're also taking into consideration already when we develop the assortment, making sure that we keep the volume on the product down because if we can keep the volume down, we can ship it cheaper, and that's a competitive advantage. So this segment consists of three different platforms.
So the business model can vary somewhat between the platforms. For instance, Furniture1, that's our Eastern European business, super asset-light business. They hold no inventory whatsoever. They have no warehouses. The only thing they have is terminals to make sure that they can facilitate picking up the goods for the last-mile delivery. And they do 100% of the last-mile delivery by themselves and pretty much all of the line haul as well, from the producers to the terminal. And then we have Home Furnishing Nordic. I would say that's a 50/50 split between stock-kept units and dropshipping and back orders. And then we have Hemfint Group. Pretty much all the high runners are on inventory except the made-for-order products. So they vary somewhat. And of course, Furniture1, that's a white label, but we have exclusivity on some of the markets. And the Scandinavian platform, that's mainly private label.
We usually also brand the products ourselves with our own brand. The reason for this is not to market the branded product because I think we have a high return on investment in marketing the sites themselves. But there's really two reasons for this. The main reason is to kind of elevate the perceived value of the product. Usually, the customer prefers to buy a branded product over a non-branded product. The second one is to help the customer navigate through the sites. Let's say you find a product in Scandinavian Choice. Then it's quite easy to find similar products, similar design, just looking at the brand Scandinavian Choice. It's a little bit to facilitate the customer selection process as well. Where is the growth and increase in profit coming from then in the medium- term?
We have quite high ambitions for this segment as well. And that is to some extent based on what were the levels we had pre-pandemic and what was the direction before the pandemic on this EBIT margin. So let's start with growth. And there's really two main initiatives when it comes to growth. And the first one is what I call market expansion. And this means not only entering new market but also paying more attention to the recently open market. And I think we have some interesting track record here looking at the Hemfint Group. In 2022, that group didn't have any sales outside of Sweden. So we started late, I think, in Q4 2022 in opening up other Scandinavian markets. And already in 2023, the share of sale from outside of Sweden was 11%.
Looking at Q1 this year, the share of sales is about 60% outside of Sweden. We see a lot of potential here in the market expansion. Of course, this can be done in a couple of ways. One way is expanding with our own sites, of course. The other way is through marketplace, Wayfair, Amazon to enter new markets. Of course, this has a positive side effect of leveraging kind of the assortment and content that we have today. The only thing that we need to add is pretty much translate the content to the market that we're entering. With today's tool, that is quite simple. The second initiative is assortment expansion.
So I think looking back to 2023, I think we placed a lot of emphasis on reducing the inventory and getting the cost under control and so on and maybe falling a little bit behind on the assortment development. So from now on, that will be our full focus to improve the customer proposition and customer offer. And of course, this is also one way to leverage the infrastructure that we already have in place with the quality control, the sales channel, the marketing, logistics, and so on. And I think we have also one benefit compared to some of our competitors, at least, is that we are quite competent in scaling up the assortment through back order and dropship. So we can do this expansion in assortment with a very, very low risk. The next two, consolidation and efficiency.
I'm not going to deep dive into consolidation because David is going to talk about that in a minute. But I think we have a pretty good track record on consolidation. I think Gustaf mentioned that before. And also, consolidation of warehouses as well are quite significant costs for this group. And last year, in this segment alone, we reduced the number of warehouses by over 50% in less than one year. And of course, that shows up in the cost structure that we have now moving into Q1. And efficiency, I would say there's mainly three areas I think we can get some impact on improving the efficiency. The first one is the purchasing, purchasing power. Within this segment, I think all the platform has overlapping assortment.
I think we need to do more to make sure that we increase our purchasing power, collaborating more between the platforms but also within the platform. That is one of the ideas behind the consolidation that we are doing with Hemfint Group. The next one is customer service. I think to date, we had a fairly analog approach to customer service. And I think also, by historic reason, we usually have customer service in-house. But we've done some extensive testing now starting in Q3 last year on outsourcing the first line customer service. And the result has been really, really good when it comes to efficiency and customer satisfaction. So we will start implementing that in other platforms as well. And the last one, I would say, is the logistics, quite a big cost for this segment.
By continuing to consolidate the warehouse, of course, we will reduce the fixed cost, of course, but also improve the efficiency of the order handling as well. The last one is market normalization. I think we've already talked about this. But as you know, two really rough years behind us. I think we've always been quite good at scaling up the business, fairly good, but we haven't been that good at scaling down when we saw the demand decrease. So I think what we learned from that is to keep the organization much more flexible. So I think looking at the situation that we are today, I think we have shorter lease agreements. I think we have more flexible logistics organization, more flexible customer service organization.
That in combination with the improved cost structure that we have, I think when the demand returns, we will see a pretty impressive leverage in this segment. Okay. I will turn it over to David to deep dive into consolidation, and then we'll take some questions after that.
Thank you, Christian. I'm the new one in this group, but I'm not new to e-commerce. I have been working for 20 years building e-commerce, mostly at CDON but in other brands like Nelly, Gymgrossisten as well. But working with BHG for one year right now. Two or three weeks ago, I got the COO for HFN in Value Home segment. So that's a new opportunity, and we will see good results. If we talk about the consolidation of Hemfint Group, we launched that group in April. We already see good effects on cross-selling between the brands, which we did expect. We also see good effects using best practices from the organizations. We have one organization that's very good at white labeling and China sourcing, European sourcing. We have one organization, Outlets, that is very good at Asian sourcing for more technical, advanced products.
When we combine that strength, it's very good in consolidation. To be more concrete, here's the plan for the consolidation. If we move to warehouse and logistics, now we can move the bulky goods to our cheaper location at Hemfint. We can move high runners to a location near Stockholm where our outlet has its warehouse. That leads to less transportation lead times and cheaper transportation for the Stockholm area, which is quite a big percent of the total turnover. Customer service, Christian mentioned, we have outsourced, and we have tested that in Hemfint. Now we can apply that first-line support offshore in the whole consolidation group for all brands, and it's already set in place. Regarding IT, we moved to one back office. With one back office, we can lower the cost structure, but we can also lower the we can build scalability.
So when you enter a new marketplace or a new sales channel, you only do one integration for the whole group. In marketing, we instantly drive in the group marketing team with expertise, lowering the cost of sale from day one. Regarding finance and other supporting functions, we already set up one organization to manage all three brands and can manage more brands if so will be. We have already set up a purchase office for all three brands where we combined all the strengths and purchasing power. But also, as I mentioned before, the best practice of European white label sourcing and Asia, more technical sourcing. And that combined power is very powerful for the Hemfint Group. So if I conclude what we can expect from the consolidation, we can see increased topline because of cross-selling and fast entering new sales channels.
We can see better margin to greater purchasing power and cherry-picking the best suppliers. We'll lower fulfillment and direct selling costs, optimizing locations and higher volumes. We can see more scalability on our marketing, lowering the cost of sales levels. In most functions, one organization instead of three, lowering the overhead cost quite a bit. So in total, we expect this to drive a very positive EBIT over time. And now for some questions.
Thank you, Benjamin at ABG. So I was thinking a bit about your private labels. You mentioned yourself that you don't really invest that much into the brands. It's more of a navigational feature for customers. How do you think about the competition from international giants such as TMO, for example? Yeah. What are your thoughts there in general?
I think there's always been an international threat. Just going back to the IPO, I know there was a lot of discussion about Amazon and what effect they're going to have on us and so on. Of course, we try to keep track of what's going on in the market. I think, as I mentioned in the presentation, this is not an easy business. It's a quite complex business with high thresholds due to the complexity of the products and the bulkiness of the products. It's not that easy to just enter a market if you don't have the logistics set up for it. I'm guessing they will try. I'm not sure that they will succeed with this type of product, at least.
I'm sort of a follow-up to that one. Could you give us an indication of top 10 keywords? Are they branded keywords, or are they keywords such as chair, for example?
Usually, when people search for furniture, they search for either the kind of functionality of the product or a specific fabric or color they have seen. So we don't see any search on brand for furniture, hardly any. I know there are some high-end brands, but that's pretty much it, and that's a very small part of the market. So usually, you search for color, fabric, and functionality. That's it.
Thank you.
Yeah. Hi, Johan Fred, SEB. You mentioned that you've reduced the number of warehouses by approximately 50% last year. How many warehouses do you have currently, and are you happy with that number, or do you expect further consolidation?
Yeah. I'm not going to give you an exact number on how many warehouses we have, but we are still continuing to consolidate the warehouse. I think when we leave 2024, we will have fewer warehouses than we started the year. That's an ongoing process.
Okay. Thank you. And my second question is basically a follow-up on Benjamin's side. Could you disclose the sales split between white label and private label and also maybe develop on the difference in margin profile between private label and white label? Thank you.
Usually, I wouldn't want to go into the exact sales split. But looking at 95% comes from White Label or Private Label, and Private Label is a vast majority of that sales. And margin-wise, I would say Private Label has a slightly higher margin. It's not that very much high, actually. But of course, if you have 3-5-point higher margin, that makes a pretty good effect in the end.
Thank you.
That's it. Okay. Now it's time for Bang and Nordic Nest.
Thank you, Christian and David.
Okay. First of all, once again, a warm welcome to Kalmar. It's great that you have taken the time to travel to visit us here in our home turf. This is really exciting, and I'm actually looking even more forward to the warehouse tour because that's where you will see the business and actually meet a small part of the team that is actually creating the things we do here. My name is Bang. I've been fortunate enough to be a part of the Nordic Nest journey since January 2017. So it's seven and a half years. Time flies. Of course, we became a part of BHG in December 2020, and I've been a part of the group management since one and a half years back, roughly.
Prior to that, I've spent most of my time in the Swedish home electronics business, starting at Elgiganten and had some 7 years at MediaMarkt. I think there's a quite good retail education to work with 17% gross margin and just try to achieve profitability. And I think try is the key word here. We never succeeded at MediaMarkt. So that's why it's really fun to be a part of a profitable business nowadays. And the premium living segment is, I would say, maybe the least complex business area in the group. It consists of two entities. It's the Nordic Nest Group, where I'm also the CEO. And then we have Sleepo. And just the differences, the main difference between the two is that the Nordic Nest Group consists of mainly external brands.
We have roughly 95% sales coming from external brands, while Sleepo, still in the premium segment, have succeeded to do that really well with private label. So the private label share is now at 35%-40%, and we see huge possibility to increase. And the Sleepo team with Philip as the CEO heading, it's amazing to see how they have succeeded to fill the premium segment with private label, being able to, of course, gain a lot more gross margin and with that, also profitability. But with that said, we're going to focus a bit more on the Nordic Nest Group today, which consists of four brands. It's Nordic Nest. And Nordic Nest was actually launched in May 2019. Prior to that, the company name was Design Online. So sometimes, I get a bit surprised that it's only five years old, Nordic Nest.
That's our broad Scandinavian global brand. We see that it's a huge success globally. But we also see in the Nordics, we need something else because the Nordic customers, they are not really attracted to the Scandinavian niche because they see the Scandinavian niche as the general interior and furniture. So in the home markets, we see a big need for category specialists. That's one of the biggest reasons that we acquired Svenssons in May 2021. Now this year, acquired KitchenTime and also consolidating Lampgallerian. So we will have the broad Nordic Nest, and then we will have a furniture specialist in Svenssons. We will have a kitchen and dining specialist in KitchenTime. And we will have a lighting specialist with Lampgallerian.
With those three category specialists and the broad Nordic Nest, we are going basically head-to-head to our main competitors in the Nordic markets. For us, it's really important that we keep the customer-facing part completely separate. But everything else in the back end is one company, one team. It's operations. It's tech stack. So we can do that really efficient. And as Jesper told in the beginning of the day, it took us less than three months to build a completely new site for KitchenTime and launching six sites in different languages, completely fully integrated to what we run in operations here in Kalmar. Today, Nordic Nest is a quite big company. When I started seven years ago, we were 35 employees and had just passed SEK 160 million in year turnover. And this is where we are today, which makes me, of course, super proud.
The facilities we are in now, we moved into in the beginning of 2019. So we will see when we take the tour. It's actually three sections that's been built over the last three, four years. So basically, since we moved here, we've been into a logistics and warehouse project that we are still into and hopefully will finalize at the end of this year so we can start turning the small things and improving the business. But today, 26 sites in 16 different languages. And we've always had a broad global presence. The founder of the company, his dream was actually to bring Scandinavian design globally. So from the start, we launched a bunch of sites. We actually had eight sites and only had a year return over SEK 6 million, which is, from a strategic perspective, maybe a bit strange.
But with that start, I'm confident that that built the foundation of where we are today, where the majority of the sales actually comes from outside of Sweden. From a profitability perspective, one of our key pillars has always been that we want to drive profitable growth. And for as long as you can look in the numbers, we have been on the right side of the zero limit. And I think I quite often get the questions, "What are you doing differently compared to competitors to actually be profitable?" Well, first of all, we don't accept losing money. To me, it's crazy to say, "We don't need to make money. It's okay to just grow." Because if you say that out loud, what happens to the team? We have 500 employees every day making decisions that could make us earn more money or lose money.
If I would tell them, "Guys, profitability is not important," I'm sure that they will make worse decisions than if we say, "We need to make money, period." It might be tough. It might be hard. But there's no other way than making money. I think that's the biggest reason for us making money while a lot of competitors haven't done it. But actually, the biggest secret is on the next slide. And that's our culture. And we're actually going to give you a goodie bag at the end of the day, and we're going to share this. Unfortunately, the time is too little for me to go through the culture manual that we have. But we'll share that with you so you have something to read on the way home. But the foundation in the entire culture is these three pillars.
We want to create the world's best customer experience. We want to build the most motivated team in the world. As I said, we're going to make money. We think it's fun to make money. We don't make that a secret in the team. We celebrate when we make money. Maybe this isn't something strange. Most retail companies probably say, "We want to have great customer experience, and we want to have a team that loves to come to work." You're right. I think most companies are saying this. I think it's very few companies actually doing this for real. We tell our team, "Whenever you make decisions, you can use our three pillars, and you can ask yourself the questions, 'Will this decision give us better customer satisfaction or not? Yes or no?'
Will this make myself and my team members think it's more fun to come to work? Yes or no?" You only make decisions where you answer at least yes on one or two questions, period. So our entire team, the 500 team members, they have a full mandate to make every decision needed to say yes to the two first pillars. We're going to meet the customer service manager later. Actually, on customer service, we have no policies when it comes to compensating and helping customers. We only have one rule. You need to make every decision needed to make the customer happy. They have that mandate from the first day they work here. I think that's really giving us a significant advantage to competitors, that every employee feels that the customers are super important.
When we give them the mandate, they also feel that they are important and that they are motivated. If we combine our five biggest markets, we are at 4.7 out of 5 in customer reviews. Our CMO is always telling me, "When you say this, you need to also tell that we actually send review requests to all our customers." I know what he's implying, but maybe that some of our competitors are not doing that. But for us, it's really not about showing a good number. It's really about having great customer service. The 91 in the team is one of the questions that we measure on a monthly basis. This one is, "Would you recommend us as an employee?" There we have 91% of the team answering yes.
Another question that we measure, which actually makes me even more proud, is, "Do you feel that you're contributing to our results?" There we have 98% of the team saying yes. 98% of the 500 team members feel that they are contributing to our results. To me, that makes me so proud because I think that's the essence, if you're going to improve the results, if they feel that what they do is important, regardless of which task you have. We follow a lot of numbers closely. Going back to the profitability, 5% is comparing to the peers in the industry quite strong. But I'm going to come back to numbers. We see there's potential to grow that even further in the future. Let's deep dive a bit in the customer numbers.
As you see, the majority part of sales comes from outside of the Nordics, where Germany is the biggest market outside of the Nordics. We also have a strong footprint in Asia, where South Korea is the biggest market. We have South Korea, Japan, and China. That's the three key markets in Asia. We have a small team of 14 people in Seoul working with the three Asian markets. When it comes to the demographics, it's a bit different in different countries. This is a very, very top overview. What you can say, it's in all countries, it's more female than male customers. But if you look outside of Sweden and the further away you come from Sweden, actually, the customer gets younger and younger. I think that has somewhat to do with the online business but also probably the cross-border online business.
So if you look at South Korea, the cross-border consumer is probably a bit younger than the general e-commerce customer or the general consumer in Korea. The recurring 50%, that's an average. We can, of course, see in our more mature markets, the recurring percentage is even higher than in the new markets. But we are quite proud of the 50% recurring rate of customers. And I think a lot of that has actually to do with the customer service. Sometimes I'll say, "If we could run a perfect operations, we would do wrong deliberately." Because the only way to get super satisfied customers is actually when something goes wrong. If everything just goes according to plan, people are okay but not super, super happy. We actually had a conversation during lunch where somebody got broken plates a couple of years ago.
It was just a scratch, I think, on the side.
Yeah, a very small scratch.
Well, a small scratch.
Still happen.
Yeah. Sent an email, and we just refunded the amount. And how is that taking a toll on profitability? Well, for me, customer service is also marketing. If we compare the customer service cost compared to what we spend on Google, it's a fraction. But it's really about taking care of the current customer instead of trying to put a lot more money into bringing new customers. And to see that as a whole perspective, it's super important to us. Then just a couple of Trustpilot stars to the right. Our long-term target is to get from the 4.7 in average to 4.9, which is a real tough stretch. And maybe we will just stay on the 4.7, but it's a signal to the team that we always need to improve customer satisfaction and do everything we can to improve it. And do we have loyal customers?
Well, this is the number of unique customers that have grown from 2020 - 2023. So now we have over 1 million unique customers in 2023. But what makes me even more proud is the other number, which is the number of customers that have placed more than three orders with us. And that's actually grown even more than the unique number of customers. And that's one of our key KPIs when it comes to customer retention. We are a bit careful about talking about loyal customers because, in all honesty, no customers are loyal. If we do things well, they are reoccurring. And we shouldn't expect us as a company to take more space in people's lives than that they would buy again with us.
So we refrain a bit from talking about loyalty because it becomes a bit misleading; it's a bit of a misconception, I think, in the word. We measure the recurring customers. And if we do this really well and continue to do what we do, we will see this number continue to increase. And that will, of course, take down the cost in online marketing and make sure that we will continue to improve profitability. Customers are super important. What's also important is our brands and partners. And in this premium segment, in all honesty, we need to handle our relations sometimes with white gloves because it's a lot of old, traditional brands with strong brand value.
So it's to find the combination of still being strong in the market, matching prices, driving campaigns, which is needed for the customers to actually place orders, but also protecting and helping the brands to build their brand equity with us. So we need to do a lot of things for the brands, not only to sell volumes. Surprisingly often, I talk to brand managers, and they say, "We don't care about sales. We care about our brand perception. So what are we going to do about that?" And that's a bit not fully honest, I think. But we need to invest a lot of time and effort into creating great content, building the brands. So to be able to have this strong brand portfolio, we have a big part of the team working with content production, photo, styling to make everything unique.
One of our biggest, I would say, reasons for actually being in the market is customers are not brand selective when it comes to home interior. The customer journey starts with the home. We want to redecorate our living room. And where do you want to go? Then you need to go somewhere where you can find all the brands that have put together content with a mix of brands and products. All our external brands, they take great pictures but only with their own brands. So here we have a huge opportunity. If we do this well, we can really help the customers and the brands to increase sales. Most sales come from external brands, but we also work with private labels. So in the bottom here, we have our current private labels. It's five brands. It costs roughly 5% of total sales from the private labels.
It's different styles and a bit different in category as well. Here we need to continue to develop the assortment, being very, very careful because if we would just slightly touch the design of one of our external brands, that would just be completely madness. So we need to bring something else to the table when it comes to design and style. So it takes quite a lot of effort for our own brands team to actually work with the assortment. But we see, of course, a huge gross margin improvement in the own brands' sales compared to external sales. During the last couple of years, as I said, this facility has been a big warehouse project since 2019. We are now in the last part of the warehouse optimization and automation phase. We're almost done with phase two. You will see it when we walk around.
Hopefully, everything will be settled before Q4 this year. With everything done, we hope that we will reach roughly 30 SEK per handled order compared to the roughly 50-55 before. So, of course, with 2 million shipments a year with today's turnover, that's a huge improvement in profitability. The facility itself will help us reach SEK 3.5-4 billion. We could almost double sales in the facility that we are setting up now. We are actually quite late in the automation. The reason for us being late is we didn't get the calculation together prior to this volume. It wouldn't be reasonable to do automation investments prior to this. With the current volume and this investment, if we just stick on the current sales volume, it will take us 4.5 years to get the return back.
And hopefully, we will grow during the period as well. So we will have an even quicker return on investment on the full automation. A thing that we have done really well is to set up the business to add-on brands. And the first brand we did an add-on was Svenssons in May 2021. And as you can see, we grew sales from SEK 326 million in year-end sales to SEK 530 million in two years' time. And we improved gross margin during the same period. And I think what's even more important, we increased customer satisfaction rate from 2.9- 4.4. And everything from tech stack to operations are now built to actually add on more brands in a very cost-efficient way. So we will see. Now we have our hands full with both KitchenTime and Lampgallerian. But we will see what's going on in the market, of course.
If we have good opportunities, we are prepared to catch them in a good way. It's been a couple of tough years, of course, for all of us. When I'm in the business and working in the daily operations, I'm honestly just a bit frustrated and angry about that we are not performing better. But when I take a step back and look at what we actually have achieved during the last couple of years in terms of sales compared to market, where we have significantly outperformed market development in terms of sales. At the same time, we have been even with a slightly declining profit, we have been able to protect profitability and are at a decent level.
What's even more important, during this tough period of time, we have been able to invest in the tech stack, in the warehouse, in the team, expand to new markets. So for us, even if it's been the toughest consumer sentiment for a couple of decades, we have been able to grow, protect profitability, and continue to invest in the future. So when taking a step back, I'm super proud of what the team have achieved over the last 24 months but still a bit angry that we are losing profitability. So I think that summarized the two last years for me. We have so many things that we can improve that would actually increase both sales and profitability. One of the most important things that we will continue to do is to expand internationally.
If we look in this segment in the global business, it's super high fragmentation. If you look at local countries, there are a bunch of competitors in each local country. But if we try to look at the ones that are a bit broader internationally, we have gathered them on this slide. As you can see, the Nordic Nest brand is by far the most present brand in the international markets. We try to divide our different markets in, I would say, three tiers. We have the mature markets, so to say, which would be for us Sweden, Norway, Germany, big markets where we have a significant share. Then we have, of course, the completely new markets, which were for us last year Portugal, Greece, Italy, Poland. Then we have these mid-tier markets, which would be the Netherlands, France.
Not super big yet but still big enough where we need to put in a bit more effort. I would say it's a three-step process. When we launch a completely new site, we can do that really fast, and especially now with the help of AI, fast to low cost. We can gain a lot of traction just starting to add on Google. 1-2 years down the road, we need to put in slightly more effort to actually continue to develop the market. The middle phase is actually the most cost-intense compared to what we get back. Then we get the third step where we have established a bit more stable presence in the market. We can see that sales will continue to grow with less effort being put in. We see the three tiers in the different sites.
And then, of course, we have our dot-com site that ships to 70 countries. That's where we look at, do we have any countries with big potentials coming up that we haven't localized yet? We truly believe that we are able to win geographically. And this is why. What's our right to win globally? Well, it's one thing we need to do. We need to stay in the Scandinavian niche and stay super true to that. I'm going to just give one example. If you look at Google, if we would try to win the search phrase sofas in Germany, we would never do that profitably. But just by adding Scandinavian sofas, we are reducing CPCs significantly, and we are hitting the right customers directly. So by doing this in Germany, in Korea, in the US, we can actually be super efficient in winning globally.
What's the potential globally, then? Well, it's really difficult to get a number of what's the total market for premium Scandinavian design globally? We don't have that number. Internally, we are looking at one number. There's actually one global international furniture player, as you may have heard of. The yearly turnover of IKEA is SEK 540 billion. One could say that the limit won't be market demand for us. There's a potential out there globally enough for us to continue to grow for the next couple of decades, right? It's completely into our hands to make this success globally. Coming back to the profitability, we need to be more profitable and just not only grow. Internationalization will be, of course, growing to new markets will help us scale costs and add profitability to the business.
And then we have the efficiencies, both consolidating Lampgallerian and KitchenTime, but especially warehouse automation, customer service working with AI, and also daily operations in the team will give us a big improvement in cost efficiency. So we are confident that we will reach the 7%-8% EBIT with this going on. And that would definitely set us close to one of the three pillars to have the strongest profitability in the category. Thank you so much. Let's open up for questions.
Thank you. Benjamin at ABG. So I have one question for you today. And this might be a tricky one to answer. You talked about a three-tier journey for markets. Could you talk about or give an indication of what share of sales is in which respective tier, please?
Oh. Rough figures, I'm sorry.
I would say the tier with the mature markets, so to say, would be roughly 50%-55% of sales. The other two would be 30%, 20%. It's a lot of new markets in the tier three category. Since it's quite easy to open new markets, we can just almost shotgun new local adapted sites.
Perfect. Thank you.
Thank you.
Niklas from Carnegie, can I ask you talk about that you were prepared to catch opportunities on the M&A side? You're one of a few parts where you have done M&A recently. What gaps do you see? What kind of products, what kind of brands or markets? Where do you see the greatest M&A opportunity going forward?
I think with the acquisition of KitchenTime, we actually filled a really important gap within kitchen and dining. If we look internationally, I would say the biggest reason for us to do acquisition outside of Sweden would be from an operational perspective. Because now we are doing all fulfillment from this facility in Kalmar. With growth in both continental Europe and in Asia, at some point, we need logistical facilities outside of Sweden. So that would be, I would say, the biggest reason is to find operations possibilities. But from a sales perspective, I think we're quite strong with the Nordic Nest brand internationally. So it would, yeah.
That tacks on to my next question. This current facility and the expansion you've been doing here now, how long do you think that will carry you? Is it obvious that the next leg of expansion would be internationally rather than expanding here?
This facility will take us roughly to SEK 4 billion. It depends slightly on the category split, of course, over the couple of years. Since this size of building is now, it's full. We can't build more in this building. It probably makes sense that we will be outside of Sweden because actually, it makes not so big difference to have a new building on the other side of the road or actually in Germany. It's almost as complicated. Probably outside of Sweden.
Okay. Thanks.
Daniel Schmidt from Danske Bank. Can I ask you? Clearly, sort of been quite successful compared to many others with reasonable profitability, even though it's been quite difficult times. What really strikes me is the super generosity that you're offering the customer, the sort of world-class experience at the same time that you're very focused on profitability. How easy is it to sort of strike a balance between not being too generous, overly generous? How do you measure that sort of payback? Because you have competitors that are doing the opposite. They are blocking misbehaving customers, quite a few.
Well, first of all, we have a really close analysis on the actual customers. So if we have a customer that is calling us for the third time with a scratch plate, we will tell us that, "Please send the plates back, and we will refund it." So it's really not being we're not being naive. But it's really about setting the right mindset. Because I think if our customer service team would be a bit more held back, there's a huge risk that we will actually not help customers that are honest. So from our way of building culture, I would rather let someone fool us than have the risk of one customer being honest, not getting the help they should have.
In all honesty, in the big scheme of things, even if we give away a couple of plates, it's quite small numbers, honestly, compared to what we spend on marketing, on campaigns. It's really small numbers. Instead of being too tough on customers, I would rather lower online marketing spend if I was forced to choose.
Well, are you basically saying that you could go even further, maybe, in generosity, and it will be beneficial for you?
I don't think we need to because I think we are on a quite good level with the 4.7 in average customer rating.
What's your NPS score?
73, roughly, currently.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you. Okay. Thank you. I'll hand over to Gustaf.
Thank you very much.
On time.
On time.
Well done, Bank.
Thank you.
Thank you very much. I know you're all getting tired. We're basically at the sort of concluding remarks. I'll see if I can do my very best to sort of wrap this up, summarize it, and then I'm going to open up again for general questions. Then we will all be available to do our best to answer them. I'm sorry if you're expecting something completely new now in the concluding remarks because that's not what I'm going to serve you. Basically, I will be, to a high extent, repeating myself. We came here, and we asked you to come here very much to communicate three main messages. I hope we manage to get those messages across. The first message was that we are thoroughly prepared for the market to rebound, and we are confident that it will. We have done the necessary preparations.
We have done the strategic work. We have done the structural work. We have done the operational work, and we have done the financial work. We are properly prepared when the market rebounds, and they are confident that it will. The second key message is that we have updated our financial targets. We had a board decision this morning to do so. We did so to better reflect our strategy and to better reflect the current market environment. The third key message, maybe the most important key message, is what we call the profitability comeback.
Basically, trying to show you or the ambition to show you all the initiatives we are doing to take us back, in the first instance, to what we call the pre-pandemic levels of profitability, basically the 5%, and then with market normalization all the way up to the 7%, showing you the strategy, the initiatives, and the effect. Those were the three key messages. Our strategic focus areas and the key slide that you've seen in many shapes or forms during the day, this is the roadmap to take us there. Basically, four main levers: growth initiatives and growth, as you all know, being the main lever to drive profitability. We have a number of growth initiatives in the pipeline. One, of course, internationalization, key driver for Bank at Nordic Nest, but also in all BUs, we're doing it. Sorry.
Category expansion, a key driver, primarily maybe within home improvement and the Do-It-Yourself sector, but also valid for all three BUs. Last, also selling over external marketplaces, maybe primarily for the Value Home business. Second main lever, consolidations. We have done a high number of consolidations. We have a number right now in the pipeline. You have heard from Emma about the Do-It-Yourself powerhouse consolidating the Nordic Do-It-Yourself market. You have heard from David about the Hemfint Group consolidation. You have heard from Bang about the consolidation of Nordic Nest Group, who are now also consolidating KitchenTime and Lampgallerian into the business. The third lever, improved efficiency. Super focused the last few years.
As I've said in my initial presentation, getting costs down, being super slim, being lean is the key to the competitive advantage to be able to kind of afford to price aggressively and be best in price. But we are driving efficiencies through automation. Good example we see very soon together with Nordic Nest and what they are currently investing in. Also using AI as the tool it is. We're doing a lot of things in content and marketing right now. And we're also looking into what we can do in customer service, which is actually substantial cost for us. There's big savings potential. And group-wide agreements. We told a little bit last mile, payment solutions, but really using our combined size to get the best deals. So that was the third lever.
The fourth lever we have, as mentioned, market normalization and back to the structural trends, the category growth and the online migration. We are confident that it's happening. We are seeing all the signs that it is happening. If it's going to happen the end of this year or the beginning of next, that could be debated. But we are confident that it will. So with these four main levers, we're quite confident that we're in a position right now to capitalize on these and do the journey from the current profitability levels to the 7%. And with that, I would like to say thank you very much for listening. And I'd like to open up again for questions. Any questions? Do you have any questions, Jacob, from the crowd? All right.
You need to support me on this one, Jesper. I get all worried when you're not here.
I think this one is actually for Bank. So what do you think are the main reasons that no player has achieved multinational leadership in the premium segment?
When I look broad over the competitive landscape, it's really about because home interior is quite local. So it's really difficult if you have a local home interior company to actually win another market. It's very few styles that are global. And Scandinavian design is one of the styles. So I think it's about style. And there are, of course, a couple of German companies that have the Scandinavian niche. And I'm not a specialist on this. But when I talk to my creative team, and they look at the creatives that the German companies are trying to create, the Scandinavian style and feel, it doesn't feel very Scandinavian. So I think we have a really strong position coming from Sweden, working with the Swedish and Scandinavian brand, and with knowledge and honesty and transparency, being able to actually bring out the Scandinavian style globally.
That's also a very cost-efficient way of doing it because we don't need to change photos. We don't need to change assortment. We don't need to change the offering because the customers globally want the same offers and the same assortment and the same visuals that we are creating for the home markets.
Any more questions, Jacob?
Nope.
Any other questions? Good. Thank you very much. And then I'm going to finish this off by saying thank you very much for coming to Kalmar. I know it's not really on the way to anything. But we appreciate you taking the.
Hey.
Sorry. Sorry. We really appreciate you taking the time. And an extra shout-out to Peter coming all the way from the U.S. to join us. Thank you very much. And I would like to say a very big thank you to the digital crowd as well. Thank you for listening in. We'll be available also after this on our website. And the last thank you goes to Bank and his team here at Nordic Nest for hosting us. And thank you very much for coming again. Thanks.