Good morning and welcome to the Björn Borg third quarter results presentation. We are joined today by Henrik Bunge and Jens Nyström, CEO and CFO of Björn Borg. During the presentation, questions can be submitted via the link, and they will be addressed after the presentation. With that said, I hand over the word to Henrik.
Brilliant, brilliant. Thank you, Hjalmar, and good to be back again. So, of course, we have a beautiful Friday ahead of us for us, 11:00 A.M. at Sports Hour, so you might want to join us there as well. Not only are we promising a good investment, also to make you better through training. But there's a difference through it, though. So, well, as Hjalmar said, this is our Q3 presentation, and of course, why don't I start with quoting myself? That's a good sign of insanity, I guess, but we have a very strong quarter behind us, and it's a record quarter and the second record quarter for 2021. So clearly, we are on a roll, which is absolutely fantastic. And just looking at some of the highlights, starting with net sales, we have a net sales growth with 6.8% to SEK 240 million.
Again, that's record sales in the quarter, and of course, that means that our year-to-date number is also record high. Clearly, of course, we see that we have a good traction among end consumers picking up our products, which is, of course, very good news. The second one, of course, is our EBIT development, and that is going exceptionally well. Of course, according to plan, it's driven predominantly with two things. Of course, we have a high focus on our margins. We will get back to that a bit later, meaning lower discounts, cleaning up our distribution, being much more cautious in terms of where we are pushing our products, and also, of course, driving our online growth where we have strong gross margins.
And secondly, of course, having a very strong cost control in place, meaning that we're really only investing where we see a strong return on investment. So that's really paying off, and we're doing a record EBIT in Q3, which is fantastic. And again, of course, rolling 12-month EBIT now above 100 million SEK. So one of those thresholds that I gave myself when I joined this company was to take it beyond 100 million SEK rolling 12, and now we're here. So that's very, very good. But with that said, we also believe that this journey is simply just in the beginning. We also look at our online business. So, as you know, if you've been listening to us before, we had a strong online focus that we kicked off already in 2018.
Of course, last year, that really took off, thanks to, if you can say that, to the pandemic and, of course, a massive change in consumer behavior. We'll continue with that focus also in 2021, which for us then means focusing on our own e-com, focusing on marketplaces, but also, of course, focusing on retailers. We see that the consumers really are continuing to shop to a very high extent in various online platforms. With that said, though, we can conclude that in the last quarter, we see a small recovery in store-based retail. Our comp stores are actually growing versus last year, and we see some strong numbers in our own retail stores. However, of course, as you will see soon, we are declining, but that's due to our strategy of closing down and minimizing our retail footprint.
We simply believe that the brand's future is much more online, and not only when it comes to distribution, but of course, also when it comes to building the brand, and those things are working really, really well. Sweden and Netherlands, that's our biggest markets, of course, and we see strong growth numbers there as well. We also see growth numbers across almost all markets, which is reassuring, so of course, we're trying to build a European footprint, before then, of course, we want to build a global footprint, so the key, of course, is to get better traction and higher penetration in more markets. Growth is also coming across in all our brand KPIs, so I'll show a few graphs later on, but what we see in the quarter is actually that the brand has never been stronger.
As you know, if you've been following us, we every week are asking consumers in Northern Europe in our different big cities a number of different questions around us, but also around competition, and here we see that we are making strong growth and inroads in us as a sports brand, which is fantastic, and that, of course, will, looking ahead, also drive growth numbers. We are decreasing net debt, so, of course, we have a very strong financial situation, so all in all, our record quarter, of course, we're super happy, but again, with that said, we want more. This is just the beginning of something much, much bigger. Our ambition remains the same, and that's to build the number one sports fashion brand for people who want to feel active and attractive, and that's where we're heading.
I think this quarter was just one stepping stone closer to that long-term objective. With that said, just a brief recap then. What is it that we really are all about? The whole idea is with the mission behind the company, the reason why we go up every morning is that we believe that we want to inspire you and myself, of course, internally and externally, that you can be more. That sports is really the key thing to enable your own potential. What we want to do is to build a sports position that is really enabling you to become better at other stuff than training. We think that there's so much more to it. We also think that the world has enough performance players telling you that you can run quicker and lift heavier.
But what the world don't have is a sports brand is taking a slightly different approach, reminding you that if you want to have a better Friday, well, do a workout. And so far, I never met anyone that has regretted a workout afterward, even though a few of us might be a bit hesitant before we do the workout. And that's really what we want to do. And we see that there's an underlying massive, massive opportunity for our brand to build that position, Train to Live, Train to Live life at your fullest. Looking at our long-term financial objectives, we said we want to grow a minimum of 5%, and we want to have a 10% annual operating margin. So, of course, looking at Q3, we are overdelivering by far on both those.
Of course, the business strategy as we have been repeating over and over again is really to focus on the online side of the business and really grow sports apparel. That's really the whole idea and the focus that we're currently doing. Of course, again, coming back to the net sales, so SEK 244 million, growing 6% versus last year's Q3, which was a very strong Q3, actually. Of course, here, we clearly need to focus even more on our sports apparel collection to enable even more growth numbers. Again, we're constantly becoming a bit better, and we want to be a bit cautious so we're not driving growth at any cost.
So it's a cautious, stable growth that we are planning and that we can see then since 2018 here on the graph. Looking at the markets, of course, we have a number of own markets where, of course, Sweden and Netherlands are the strongest one. We also see that we have a very strong momentum in some of our distributor markets where we have partners operating for us. And all in all, of course, one key challenge and one key opportunity for us is to build the similar strength that we're having in Netherlands and in Sweden, but also in other markets, because, of course, that's where we can see the volume growing.
We don't really need to go that far away, but just capturing increasing the penetration in Denmark and in Finland and in Norway and in Germany and Belgium, where the brand is also strong, will enable much, much stronger growth numbers looking ahead. Here we have our three channels, so own retail, of course, minus 18% in the quarter. That's due to, of course, closing down retail stores and us focusing elsewhere. Looking at comp stores, so store by store, we're actually growing 2% in the quarter. We see a small, moderate recovery of retail. However, of course, our strategy is clear. We're moving towards online with a very high pace. We believe that that's where the brand is going to deliver most value, and here we see ongoing growth numbers from our own e-com, from marketplaces, and then from retailers.
Also, of course, as I said, distributors and also a few brick-and-mortar stores are also performing really, really well. We currently can see that we have a very strong momentum with the leading department stores across Northern Europe, where our brand is really resonating well with what consumers are looking for. We can see also that they're getting a slight traffic increase during the last quarter, which, of course, is enabling us to grow with those partners as well. Here, as we've seen every quarter, we just want to showcase to you that the digital plan, the online attack is really working well for us. A bigger and bigger share of our overall business is now driven purely online. We believe that's going to be key to continue to drive profitable growth.
And with that said, of course, highlighting, and here we see some brand track data, so some consumer numbers. One of the graphs is purchase intention, so meaning if you get a list of brands, which of these are you thinking about buying? We also have a graph that is seen on social media. So we want to benchmark against a few others because, of course, we are now in a position, which is fantastic, to have a couple of other Swedish-based direct-to-consumer brands that are doing exceptionally well. So, of course, here we're getting inspired, and we can benchmark ourselves against them. And they're clearly market-leading in what they're currently doing. And we want to catch up and actually do even better than what those guys are doing. And also awareness in mind, and that's a super, super important KPI for us.
It's just how people would look upon us as a sports brand, and here we are also making inroads, which means that more and more people in Northern Europe are thinking about us as a sports brand, and that's going to be a key to continue, of course, to drive the growth ahead. Our influencer approach is working really well. It's about having a perfect mix between people that create awareness, but also content, and of course, also conversion, so we are increasing our focus on using influencers and ambassadors to also drive sales, so adding a new sales channel, and that's also a key focus looking forward, but overall, though, I think it's very clear. People listen to people, and you need to have a strong tribe of people around you that really believes in what you're doing, and here we see that we have such a strong why.
It resonates really well with people around us. People really want to be a part of what we're doing here. We live the brand inside out. I think now we are better and better in spreading that message also to end consumers, which is resonating really well. We can see that also in the performance of our brand track KPIs. Again, looking at Q3, the brand has never been stronger, which, of course, is very reassuring. I think with that said, again, if you missed that, our record quarter. Of course, it's thanks to a very, very strong team that is very, very committed. Yes, we're fewer this year than last year.
That helps a bit to improve the profit, but also showcase the strength that we have internally of people that are really going above and beyond to make sure that we're continuing to deliver shareholder value. And, of course, one of my key players, of course, that is working very closely to me to make sure that we are making progress is Jens. So I'll leave it to Jens to run through some of our other sort of record numbers for the quarter. So I think with that said, stay on, and Jens will run you through some of our other KPIs. So, Jens, fire away.
Thanks a lot, Henrik. Yeah, I'm happy to take over in this record quarter. I'm not sure we said that enough, but we're clearly very happy with the quarter. Again, even Q2, we presented it last time, was a record quarter.
We're on a roll here, and we're very pleased with that, obviously. Gross margin is one of the drivers for these good numbers that we see. We're increasing from 50.4% last year, same quarter, to 54.4%. That's quite a big increase in the gross margin. This is coming then from the profitable growth theme that we have adopted, let's say, where we have cleaned up the customer base. We have reduced our discounts in the wholesale channel, etc. We have much more focus on profitability, which is then clearly seen in the margins. In terms of operating expenses, that's the, let's say, the second part of the good operating profits that we see in the quarter. We have reduced this quite heavily, which then clearly have a good financial impact on the P&L. SEK 82 million in the quarter versus SEK 87 million last year.
That brings us to this record EBIT of SEK 52 million. Last year, we had SEK 33 million in the same quarter, which then was quite a good EBIT number for the Q3. It's just fantastic to see that all the hard work that's been done in this organization is really paying off. We're super proud about that. In terms of net income, clearly that follows the same trend, SEK 40 million on the bottom line. If we look at the EBIT margin, which this slide is supposed to represent from 18 to 21, split by the quarters, we can see the top line representing 2021, where we're now at 22% EBIT margin in the Q3, which clearly is then, again, higher than any quarters that we've seen earlier. Even Q1 and Q2 was quite good.
Year to date, we're at a good EBIT margin, and we just continue to fight heavily to keep this momentum, obviously. If we look at the more, let's say, financial KPIs that we look at, so net working capital has been reduced with 2%, is now at SEK 218 million when we closed the quarter. And this is predominantly coming from a reduction in the accounts receivable while we were during the pandemic last year, but also before that, have a very high focus on collaborating with our customers, but also ensuring that we get paid and we get paid on time, and also to secure that we can be a partner with our customers so we have a long-term relationship. So there's been quite a heavy and tight discussion with our customers to ensure that we are staying in line and getting paid, basically.
Also, in terms of the accounts payable, they have, let's say, gone up with better terms with our suppliers throughout the years back. Net debt has decreased. So with the good results that are coming, also net debt is decreasing, actually 41% year over year. So quite a large reduction. And the KPI that we use to measure this is then the net debt versus the EBITDA on rolling 12 months. And that's now at 0.5. And that's quite a large reduction of 1.9 versus last year. So in terms of cash flow and net debt position, the financial items, we're really in a good position at this point. So if we then continue to break this down a little bit, we can see the equity/assets ratio , which is going up. We've been on our low 50s or just below 50% even.
It's now at 53% when we closed the quarter. Net debt, as I said, and here you can clearly see the massive reduction in nominal value. So from around SEK 130 million of net debt to now SEK 53 million, which is really a good financial situation for us. Working capital in relation to the rolling sales is also going down, even though it jumped up a little bit in the Q3. We're at 23%. And clearly, this is somehow a bit of a snapshot of, of course, depending on the seasonality of when we distribute our products, clearly. But if we look over historically, we can see a downward trend, which is the main purpose of this. So if we try to summarize and close up, obviously, we said that a number of times now, record sales, record profit.
Overall, we're super pleased with the quarter, this quarter, last quarter, the year so far, so we just keep fighting to continue like this. The EBIT development is massively going up, and as we heard from Henrik earlier, rolling 12 months, we're now above SEK 100 million, which is, let's say, a mark that we want to pass, so that's fantastic. I mean, the online we heard, we are focusing all our efforts on online marketing, online sales, online everything, so we're taking the brand to be an online brand. And that's where our focus is in terms of distribution. The brand is developing well, we heard from Henrik. All the KPIs are really pointing in the right direction, and we continue to focus on our sports apparel, so we are market leaders in underwear.
We're going to keep that, maintain it, because that's something that we are, let's say, known for. But we want to take a bigger share in the sports apparel arena, and then, obviously, the marketplaces is a focus for us as well. That's part of the online strategy, of course, but that's where we need to put our efforts going forward, so with that said, it's Friday. Join us at 11 o'clock. If you want digitally, follow our Instagram account and join us for a workout, or why not join us physically at our headquarters in Frösunda, where at least me and Henrik will be at 11 o'clock sharp. Thank you. Thanks to the team at Björn Borg who have done this possible. Fantastic result. We're super proud. Let's go.
Brilliant. Great. Thank you very much, and congratulations on a very strong quarter. It's a very impressive EBIT margin.
I was wondering, could you shed some light on the OpEx base for the quarter, maybe in which lines you saw the furthest reductions and how you managed to achieve this great level of EBIT?
Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, during the pandemic, we had to take some tough decisions of reducing our staff. And that, even though a tough decision financially, that obviously has triggered a lower operating expenses base, which is helping the P&L clearly. Then we have also taken lots of initiatives in reducing, let's say, traveling. We've done optimizing our logistical costs in the warehouse to make sure that we have as low and lean costs as possible. And clearly, we had some customer bad debt last year, two larger ones in Sweden, as I'm sure you all remember, where Intersport being one of them in reconstruction, where we lost some.
So comparing to last year, obviously, that has reduced in 2021, where we haven't had any really bad debt. So due to the very close collaboration I talked about earlier with our customers, we've tried to avoid this and has been quite successful, I would say. And also, you keep growing online and your own online sales keep growing.
Could you elaborate a bit on your perceived strengths in the online segments? Is it a matter of utilizing user data? Are you great at advertising or what strengths do you see in the online segment?
Well, I think there's a couple of different components, of course. I think one is that we saw many years ago in our consumer research that there was a disconnect between what people wanted to buy and what they actually ended up buying in terms of Björn Borg products.
We saw a long time ago that when we asked consumers around which other product group they would want to buy from us, they said sports apparel. And then when we asked them, okay, but where would you buy that then? And they said, well, we don't know where it is. So it was clear for us a distribution challenge. And with brick-and-mortar stores, of course, it's tough. So you go to one of the leading sports retailers down the street, and you come in and say, hey, we want you to expose 10 sq m of Björn Borg products. And even though they like the stuff, they know that they need to take out someone else. So then a Nike or an Under Armour needs to go out, and we can go in. And of course, at the same time, almost all of them are reducing their space.
So it's less and less space, of course. And of course, we saw that some of the buyers, they perhaps didn't have that strong conviction that we could take over and do better than some of the other brands. However, of course, if you look at the online world, the possibility to expose products are limitless. It doesn't cost more to put up another brand or another T-shirt, a bit in the warehouse, of course, but in terms of exposure, it doesn't really require us a lot. So they saw the opportunity gap. They saw that, hey, people want to buy Björn Borg product, but they can't find it. So that's what we're going to buy in. And of course, they did that. So it really trickled, of course, a massive, massive growth with our retailers, like Zalando, doubling every year the last three, four years, but also all others.
And of course, it is clearly this mix between having a very, very strong brand. So people want to buy from you, but they couldn't just find you. And then, of course, the pandemic happened, and of course, the change of behavior came along, which meant that fewer and fewer actually went into the physical stores where they potentially couldn't find us. And instead, of course, they went online where we were. So of course, that, of course, also triggered the online growth. And when it comes to our own e-com side, well, it's really, it's all about the guys and the team, of course. You need to pick the best people. And I think we're lucky sitting in Stockholm. There's a massive, massive competence in Stockholm from other D2C brands, from other online players, global market leaders that we have picked individuals from.
I think we have a very, very strong own e-com team. Clearly, the success of e-com is purely data-driven. It's very non-emotional. You need to A/B test, don't guess, don't think, check again, do it once more. Just looking at August until now, we've done almost 800 smaller improvements based on consumer input. Of course, that's a constant, constant work. You always need to sort of work on your own e-com side to optimize it. I think we're doing that really, really well. I think it's a combination, of course, then. Consumers are more and more used to shopping online. We have a very strong team in place, and we see strong growth numbers because there is a disconnect between what people want to buy and what they can find.
And of course, now with a strong e-tail focus, they really can find our products, and they're picking that up, and it's working fantastically well. So I think that's a combination of those three.
Thank you. And also you mentioned as a part of your online strategy, of course, the marketplaces. And I believe that there are, of course, Zalando and Amazon. Could you elaborate a bit on, do you see any differences between those? And do you see any greater potential in some of those? And what can we expect?
No, absolutely. I think clearly it's a high focus. And then, of course, all the bigger retailers, so like Zalando, they also have a marketplace setup.
However, as a brand, you need to, of course, take control and make a cautious decision whether you want to operate with them from a purely buy-you-sell model or whether you want to be a marketplace, which means more that you're managing your own inventories and your own sales on their platform. With Zalando, we're operating a pure sort of wholesale model. We believe that's the best one, meaning that they're buying from us and they're selling. We have a very, very strong key account manager. Also, we're getting very, very good sellout data from Zalando that gives us good input to also improve the collection. In terms of marketplaces, then clearly we have two focuses or two focus accounts. One is bol.com, which is the leading marketplace in the Netherlands, partly in Belgium as well, but predominantly Netherlands.
There we also see very strong year-on-year numbers, but there we're really managing everything ourselves. It's a bit like having your own e-com side, but we're using their traffic, we're using their platform, we're using their end consumer services like deliveries, for example. The same approach we will have with Amazon. Amazon, of course, will serve us at a different purpose depending on where we are. Looking at Amazon Sweden, where here we have a strong penetration, we are well known, you can find us almost everywhere. Of course, Amazon plays less of an important role here. Looking at Amazon Germany, their second biggest market in Europe, there I think we can do much better, much more. That will be then a pure marketplace setup.
So we will pick the range, we will build a brand store, and we will sell them directly to consumers by using, of course, the Amazon fulfillment scheme. And then, of course, clearly, as I think we also said last time, we will enter Amazon U.S., and we see massive, massive potential in also the U.S. market. We see that there's consumers wanting to buy the stuff. They already do it from our own e-com side, but of course, delivering to a guy or a girl in Florida from Helsingborg is not optimal from a sustainable perspective, but also not in terms of delivery time. So we believe that there's a massive opportunity given how strong the brand is in the U.S. to use Amazon and Amazon's platform as driving growth also in the U.S. market.
So that's really our approach for two sort of pure marketplaces, Amazon and bol.com, serving slightly different purpose depending on which market that we talk about.
And you mentioned Germany where you see a great potential. Could you elaborate a bit on the German market in terms of maturity? Of course, in Sweden, we trade a lot online. Do we see the same picture in Germany and how does it differ?
No, but we see there's a very, very strong online growth trend in Germany. And we also see there's a number of Swedish-based sports brands that are performing really, really well. They also have a few own D2C brands that are sort of founded in Germany that are doing exceptionally well. So we see that there is a strong opportunity to do much, much more in Germany.
And I think the idea, of course, is to first work with Zalando and, of course, closely monitoring our German business with Zalando, because that's still growing, plus I think 70% or 80% versus last year. Still smaller numbers, of course, compared to what Zalando is selling into Netherlands or even Sweden. And then, of course, we also have added a few other German online accounts. So I think the approach in Germany for us is really to drive it pure online. Just last week, we rolled out and we localized our own e-com site. So now it's in German. And we picked up sales with 54% in just one week, just by doing that. So, of course, we believe massively in the German market. And in terms of future potential, of course, Germany has the potential to turn over as much as all our other markets combined.
So that's how big it is. And that is a very, very strong sports trend also going on in Germany right now that a lot of the D2C brands are capturing, and a few of them also Swedish-based, actually. So high focus on Germany. We believe that there's a massive potential in the German market.
Thank you. And lastly, we received a question regarding raw material prices, because, of course, they have been volatile. Is this affecting you in any way that you can see at this point? And what can we expect going forward?
Well, we can expect that raw material prices will go up. For sure, there will also be a shortage. I think that's also clear. That's going to be a massive challenge for the whole industry, together with most likely maintained high logistical costs.
Most likely, they're not going to go down, but probably be maintained at a quite high level as we've seen last few months. However, of course, building a very strong brand will allow you to mitigate those impacts by price increases, changing your product mix, changing materials to allow yourself to continue to drive profitable growth, but I think clearly it will impact. So if you do what you did and not changing anything, then that will have a massive impact on everyone's gross margin. But we're already acting on it, and I think that's just a part of what it is to run a company. And as I said this morning at Dagens Industri as well, what the pandemic really taught us was that you never know what's going to happen, and no one really saw that coming.
But if you have a strong team, if you have a very strong long-term goal, and then you have the courage to be consistent towards that goal, then you can use everything to your advantage and make it and turn that into an opportunity. So looking at 2020, of course, a very, very tough year, but we actually closed that year with a stronger financial position than when we started. And of course, we see now that the stuff that we did back then is now, of course, allowing us to break record after record. So I'm sure that with these new challenges, also new opportunities will pop up. And you just need to have a strong team seeing those. And of course, that's really the plan for us.
Thank you again, Henrik and Jens. And yet again, congratulations on a very strong quarter.
Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you, guys. Have a great Friday. Bye-bye.