Hi, welcome to Clas Ohlson Capital Markets Day 2022, live here from Stockholm. It's a great pleasure. We have been looking forward to this day for quite some time, and it's a great pleasure to also be able to welcome a live audience to the Capital Markets Day. We also know that we have quite a few people following this event via telephone conference and via webcast.
We just recently closed the Q4 and full year presentation, and so many of you will recognize the setup when it comes to the Q&A session. That meaning that we will do the full presentation at first, and then have a short break, and then come back for the Q&A session.
Just as during the Q4 presentation, it will be possible to ask questions live here from the room in Stockholm, but also via teleconference and webcast. You see all the details if you're following via webcast. You'll see all the details there. Without further ado, I'll hand over to Kristofer and take us through the start of the presentation.
Yes, thank you very much, Niklas. Again, big welcome to our Capital Markets Day. Great to have both a live audience here and then also a lot of you joining online, and we'll try to accommodate so it becomes smooth for everybody. My name is Kristofer Tonström. I'm the President and CEO of Clas Ohlson since approximately 18 months back.
Today, you'll meet a part of the group management team, but here you have an introduction to the overall group management team. There's been a few changes over the last year, and here we have the team geared up for the future. Also, we have Pär Christiansen, our CFO, who's actually gonna leave Clas Ohlson now in a few weeks' time.
We will be welcoming our new CFO, Pernilla Walfridsson, this fall. Today you will hear more from the following people. I'll talk about a couple of the topics and also the introduction. We have Tina Englyst, who's our Head of Sustainability, Legal, and the full HR team at Clas Ohlson. We have Tim Heier, who's our Chief Marketing Officer on a part of the group.
We have Lene, who's our sales and director of sales and e-commerce, so full channel sales and specifically also channel ownership of e-com. The way we were thinking about this day is that I'll start with the short trends and market environment update, the way we look at it.
I'll talk a little bit about our current position. As Niklas said, we just closed one year, and we're in the middle of starting another, but I'll take a bit of a step back and look at our total current position. I will also talk about the strategy update. We have done some changes over the last year and we'll talk about the strategy with basically the framework over the next three years.
We will be referring a lot to the next three years. Tina will take us through the sustainability agenda. As you all know, we have an ambitious agenda, and Tina will lay out some more specific actions and plans that we are working with. The majority of today, we're gonna focus on our growth drivers.
Our ambition is to grow the company, grow revenue, and we will dig deeper into four specific areas today, to talk a little bit more how to drive the growth. We'll move into a five-minute leg stretcher to refill coffees and, et cetera, and then we will move into a short summary and, the Q&A. I'll start with the trends and the market environment.
Obviously we're coming out now of two and a half years of pandemic, and we do see that some of the consumer behaviors have shifted, and we have also seen a lot of things happening in the overall retail landscape. We look at this through the lens of very much focusing on the home. Of course, the home has been more important than ever during the pandemic.
The home has now turned into a lot of different places. It's not only your home, it's your office, it's your gym, it's your place to interact. The homes have always been important, especially in our part of the world across the Nordic region, and we very much expect the home to continue to be important. As we have seen during the pandemic, there will be always shifts between different trends and different areas of the home.
Value for money is always important, but even more so now with the macro environment, obviously, with a lot of challenges with high inflation, energy price increases, gas price increases, and now also increasing interest rates. Value for money has always been important, and we expect that this trend will continue.
It's not only about the price, but it's actually the price and what you actually buy. It's the combination of the quality and the price ratio that we expect to be very important forward. Also, the general trend of health and wellbeing we've seen a lot of that during the pandemic. People have had a lot of time to also look after themselves, and the home has played an important role there as well, and also things surrounding health and wellbeing beyond the home.
The value-based consumption, i.e., companies and brands with a clear purpose, but also the trend that you're, as a company today, not only expected to deliver on your customer promise, you're not only expected to be purposeful, but you're also expected to make a positive impact.
We have seen that not least during the war in Ukraine, the pressure on companies to really act, and we also see this as a trend that we expect to stay. We need to think broader than just the core business model. Omnichannel is obviously a commonly used term, but basically the way we see it is that there's been, you know, we came from a world of focus on retail physical stores.
There's been many years of pure e-com growth. Now we very much think that, and we see that in the retail environment right now, that it's really the blend of the channels and finding the most effective way of meeting the customers, and we see that trend more than ever being important.
It's about the seamless experience, and we believe that the companies that succeed in being customer-centric rather than channel-centric will win. Then the new workspace, there is obviously a big movement back to offices, but we also expect, and there are a lot of reports showing that there is still a lot of flexible work moving, also in the next few years.
A lot of companies have adapted to post-pandemic in terms of also allowing for, a few days a week or month, from home. Looking at the traffic patterns during the last two years, it's been very volatile. These are Google traffic trends for retail and recreation on our focus markets, Sweden, Norway, and Finland. Needless to say, it's been very volatile, and of course, very much driven by the restrictions.
As you can tell from the graph, we see Norway now from an overall traffic point of view recovering, while the other markets are still fairly soft. Also looking at consumer confidence linked back to the macro environment, that has also been volatile over the last couple of years. We have seen a fairly big drop now in the spring post the Ukraine war starting, and also with the macro environment shifting with inflation rates increasing interest rates, et cetera. We do see a pretty steep downward trend on the consumer confidence, not least in Norway. Also supply chains have been under pressure over the last few years.
There's been a lot of different disturbances, obviously, pandemic driven over the last 2.5 years, and then also more recently since the war, the breakout of the war in Ukraine. We do see global logistics challenges, and we can really see how the world is connected across most geographies and raw materials.
Transportation costs have been going up driven by a lot of different factors, and we're seeing that stabilizing now, but on fairly high levels, not least driven by the gas prices. We also see a general trend in the market of moving production closer to home markets, both to drive speed versus end customer, but also in terms of sustainability reasons, having production closer to home.
Last but not least, we also see a lot of companies now talking about risk management, spreading production across more geographies to ensure that you do not have too high concentration on a few countries that drives risk. These are some of the overall trends and the macro positions that we observe. Obviously these are things most of our consumers and partners, of course, can read about daily in every media outlet.
Now let's shift a little bit gears into the Clas Ohlson position. I'll start from taking a very big step back. Obviously, Clas Ohlson was started back in 1918, so we've been around for 104 years. Obviously, the company was started during the World War I, during the Spanish flu pandemic.
Since then there's been another World War, and there's been numerous financial crisis. It was the oil crisis, et cetera. Clas Ohlson has been able to stay very proactive and been able to really overcome any market and, macro challenges over the last 104 years. Of course, our job here is to ensure we build a platform also for the next 100 years.
Of course, looking back at this, it also gives us the confidence that whatever happens out in the macro environment, we very much, by focusing on our customers and our purpose, we have a very clear role to play. We believe that we are well-positioned for the future. I mean, we do play in an attractive market, and there are compelling growth opportunities.
We have, as I said, in the overall home market, home improvement market as we define it, there's been shifts, but we do see a lot of growth opportunities also moving ahead, by being close to our customers. We also have a very well-positioned brand, and we have a competitive customer offer. We are scoring high in terms of value for money rating.
We're not a low price retailer, but we do have high value for money, which is of course a combination between what we offer, but also the strength of the brand. With more than 90% awareness, 90% household penetration, and very high loyalty, as I'll come back to in a second. We've also shown over the last years that we've had an ability to deliver results despite market conditions.
We haven't always been the fastest, but at the end of the day, we have always delivered solid results. We're also producing good cash flows, and we do have a strong financial position, and we have had an attractive yield over the last 10 years as a company. We also have a very ambitious sustainability agenda over the next 100 years. That's also another reason why we're not playing in the pure low price area, but really building the longer term quality and value for money. Tina will talk much more about that.
Net volatile traffic, of course, channel differentiation, but at the end of the day, we do have 200 million customer visits every year to Clas Ohlson, which means that our job is of course to turn more of those visits into value for our company and ultimately for our shareholders. Obviously we're designing ourselves as a company to be very customer-centric, and we meet our customers across a lot of different touchpoints.
We have our customer care that meets with customers and have millions of interactions every year, and we've actually been awarded the number one customer service three years in a row in Sweden. We do that across all the channels where the customers wanna meet us. We have Club Clas that we'll come back to, our membership program.
We do have a very good blend between 228 stores and our online business, and really getting that blend together is a key thing for us. We also have our Clas Fixare business, which is an in-home services business that is today mostly focused on the broader Stockholm region, but we're also expanding to a few more cities across Sweden.
We do see huge customer satisfaction and also openness for customers to let Clas Ohlson staff come to your home and help with the home improvement that you are not able to or do not want to do yourselves. Looking at the sales development over the last few years, it's been slightly upwards.
We saw a drop back in 2021, and now we see a recovery and we're growing 4% the year that we just closed. An important fact is that we have, during the last couple of years, actually decreased our assortment with approximately 10%.
We do actually now grow from a more effective base, which also means that we believe now is also the time to start expanding, and we'll talk more about that as we look forward, because we have a very effective range turning into SEK 8.8 billion revenue, with a slightly smaller assortment, actually. Looking at our sourcing and supply chain, we have obviously been in line with the trends that I talked about from a market point of view.
We have also, of course, adapted a lot over the last few years. We do have our office in Shanghai with lots of Clas Ohlson employees, many of which have worked for the company for 10, 15 years. By the way, good news is that our office is now back open in Shanghai, as of, I think, yesterday. We have our sourcing office in Shanghai, but also over the last couple of years, we have opened two more sourcing offices, one in Poland to ensure that we get even more closeness to home markets. We also source directly from Sweden, and we opened another office with Clas Ohlson staff now in Vietnam, in Ho Chi Minh City, to also have a broader reach across Asia.
We're actually in the middle of also establishing ourselves now in India, so that we have more geographical reach, also from a risk management point of view, but also back to speed and sustainability. We wanna have a broader sourcing reach. Looking at the most important part, our customers, we follow and we use NPS, Net Promoter Score, as our key indicator.
Of course, we measure a lot of other things as well, but we really believe, and we have seen, of course, this is a proven scoring method to also predict future value creation, to use NPS. We do that across every touchpoint. We measure NPS in our customer care, we measure NPS in our stores, we measure NPS in our e-com.
We measure it on members, non-members to ensure that we always strive to deliver a better and better customer experience and increase loyalty. As you can see to the left, we have had a strong NPS development. We're starting from high levels, and obviously we are already, you know, gone from good to great, and we are aiming for really being excellent in terms of NPS delivery.
As you can tell, we're around now 56, 57, but of course, this is a number that keeps changing every day. Of course, we also record the comments of our customers every day to see why they score us one way or the other so we can constantly improve the customer satisfaction. Looking at our customer traffic, we have seen store traffic has been flat to slightly declining for a few years.
Of course, driven by the pandemic, we saw a bigger decline over the last couple of years. Meanwhile, we've seen a traffic increase to our online. Of course, the important thing is looking at the number of customer interactions that we have, matter what channel. We have also done a lot of work to become much better in terms of our online presence and customer satisfaction and customer interaction.
Lena will talk much more about that in a second. As a result, we can see that actually our conversion rate over the last few years have gone up in both channels. Obviously, there's been pressure on traffic, but we've been able to drive conversion rate increases, and we're also aiming at, of course, driving both conversion rate and also our average tickets.
All in all, looking at our financial position now as we're closing fiscal year 2021, 2022, we delivered an operating margin of 7.3%. We have a net debt to EBITDA ratio of minus 0.5. We have a very solid inventory of almost SEK 2.2 billion, an inventory that consists of a lot of relevant assortment, a lot of relevant SKUs for the season to come, but also in terms of the base business. We've generated an operating cash flow of SEK 472 million.
Translating that cash flow and looking into our dividend history over the last 10 years, we've been very predictable, and we've been able to distribute cash to our shareholders with one exception, and that was the year 2020, 2021. Or, 2019, 2020, but the year 2020.
Today, we also announced that the board is recommending to the AGM to both increase the ordinary dividends from SEK 6.25 to SEK 6.75, but also that we do an extraordinary dividend of SEK 6.1025 to compensate for fiscal 2019, 2020 to make this ten-year history intact. That summarizes a bit the market trends, and the macro environment, and also then the Clas Ohlson position moving into the next chapter. Now we wanna be very forward-looking and talk about our strategy to take the next big step as a company. Everything that we do, we have made some changes to this over the last year, but everything we do relates back to our purpose.
Here we talk about that we are dedicated to simplifying home fixing for everyone in a responsible way, which means a more focused. We talked about passion for simplifying life, now we're going even more focused on home fixing, and the team will talk a little bit more about that. Our mission is, of course, to supply smart, simple, practical solutions at attractive prices.
We have our strategic framework, the Blue Heart strategy, where we have our purpose, the culture, the unique Clas Ohlson culture in the middle, and that's the representation of the Blue Hearts. We believe in the kind of flywheel, happy coworkers creates happy customers, and that in turn drives profitable growth and shareholder value. That's the foundation.
I wanna talk a little bit about where we're gonna play and how we're gonna win in these markets. Starting where to play, we focus very much on the home improvement market. We focus on the countries Sweden, Norway, Finland. We also announced today that we're closing the final part of our UK business to enable us to even further focus on those three markets.
We have our primary target customers, which are the consumers and people with the highest engagement in their homes, no matter whether you live in an apartment, house, or somewhere else. Our position is really becoming a home-fixing destination. We wanna be the top-of-mind home-fixing destination, and also then work with the right offer for our customers, but also attracting partners into that, rather than us selling at other platforms as the key priority.
Also, in terms of customer offer, we come back to that, but we are focusing in on the assortment, and we'll talk more about the five overall focus areas. Obviously, we have a heritage of being a little bit of an everything store. Now we wanna focus even more across five big areas to really drive differentiation, clarity, and a more prominent home-fixing position.
Then we have laid out six how-to-win strategies, and then we'll move into and drive clarity of what we're gonna do under each of these. Needless to say, we need to create a winning team. It's not only about happy coworkers, it's about a team that can win. Second, we're gonna focus disproportionately on our core customers. We wanna serve everybody, but we wanna focus even more on the core.
We also wanna own a few key consumer missions that we will be defining in a second, which are these five big focus areas. We have a very strong Clas Ohlson brand, but we can't take that for granted. We need to stay relevant, we need to rejuvenate the customer base, and we need to invest in brand building and marketing moving forward to ensure we stay, and keep that and grow that position.
Providing availability and convenience is all about the interaction between our channels. We really believe that our store network is a strength, combined with our e-com business, our online presence, and then combined with our ability to be flexible in our logistics and supply chain. That's under point five. We have in-home services.
We won't talk that much more about it because it's still only a Swedish thing, but I hope we will be able to come back and talk more about the in-home services under the subsidiary Clas Fixare. Our financial targets over the next three years is to grow 5% every year organically, deliver 7%-9% operating margin, and to have a dividend that is at least 50% of earnings per share after tax every year.
We wanna keep the net debt/EBITDA ratio between two. Then we have our sustainability agenda, where our ambition is fully climate neutral and fully circular. We believe that this is an important part, both to grow the brand and ensure we are relevant also more than three years.
We also believe this is a growth driver. We for the first time see our customers now also voting with their wallets when it comes to sustainability. If you translate this into two very simple targets, the first one is that we wanna become a SEK 10 billion revenue company by 2024-2025. Three years from now, we wanna break the SEK 10 billion at the 7%-9% margin.
We wanna grow in a responsible way and surpass the SEK 10 billion. We also wanna continue to, but also, progress and be the industry leader in sustainability, and that's by delivering on our people and planet agenda and 2045 commitments. Now we'll first move into sustainability, and Tina, our head of sustainability, HR, and legal, will talk us through the sustainability plan. Then we will spend the rest of today on our growth drivers. Tina. You can stand there. I'll stay here.
Thank you, Kristofer. I'm pleased to be here today to share some insights on our sustainability work with you. As Kristofer said, sustainability is a precondition for our operations and a necessity to meet our stakeholders' demands. In addition to that, sustainability can serve as a competitive advantage. We deem that our sustainability agenda is a great base for us to be market leaders within sustainability in our market segment.
Within Clas Ohlson, we work with sustainability integrated in the organization and in our business strategy. Sustainability is not something that we work separately with, but it's integrated in what we do every day. When it comes to our overriding sustainability targets and the agenda that we have set, we talk about three areas. It's the planet, it's people, and it's the society.
When it comes to the planet, just as Kristofer said, we have set out to be climate neutral and fully circular by 2045, and that goes for the entire value chain, so Scope one, two, and three, and I will get back to what that means. When it comes to people, we want to be a sustainable long-term employer, reflecting all kinds of homes and having happy coworkers.
When it comes to society, we want to be a true child ambassador, contributing to a great future for coming generations. If we then go into some detailed targets that will serve towards our long-term targets, and if we start off with the planet, in addition to having a long-term target with climate neutrality and a circular business 2045, we have set a target that we shall reduce our emissions by 50% to 2030.
This corresponds to 20% reduction if we take into account the growth targets that we have set. Also, we want to shift our assortment, and in starting doing that to a more sustainable assortment. When we're doing that, we're classifying and starting with our private labels and classifying it through our sustainability model, which means that we will classify into more sustainable products.
We've set a target that 100% of our private label products in 2025 shall be classified in accordance with our model, helping us to shift our assortment to a further sustainable assortment. When it comes to people, we want to be a gender equal company on all levels. Also, we have a zero tolerance for discrimination within Clas Ohlson.
When we speak about diversity in a broader sense, we've said that 2025, we want to have 15%-20% of our coworkers coming from another background in another country than the one that they currently work in. Also, we want to have an employee attendance rate of 96%. Last but not least, when it comes to society, the last area that we work with, we want our suppliers to be 100% compliant with our code of conduct, including our code of business ethics.
Also, we want our coworkers to engage in our sustainability work, so we want our coworkers to perceive that we work with sustainability in a trustworthy manner, and we measure this annually. Also, we want to continue to be a child ambassador.
We've worked with children's rights for years, and we work with organizations such as Save the Children, World Childhood Foundation, NetClean, and Locker Room Talk, and we will continue our endeavors in that area. If we then do a deep dive within the planet area of our sustainability strategy, this is the area where we've increased our ambition the most the past two years.
In Clas Ohlson, as you know, we don't own any production facilities, and we don't have our own production. This means that when we look at emissions in our own operations in Scope one, it's very limited. It merely boils down to company cars and some reserve heating that we have in Insjön when it comes to our facilities owned in Insjön.
When it comes to Scope two, it's indirect purchased electricity for our stores, our warehouse, and our offices. That climate footprint is relatively small. If we look at the entire value chain, we look at production, materials, transportation, usage of our products, and also end of life, that footprint is a lot larger.
The targets that we have set both for 2045 and 2030 cover the entire value chain, so that is Scope one, two, and three. To date, we only measure, though, in concrete numbers, parts of Scope three. The Scope three that we have included in the report, in the reporting that we do today, that's to sum it up, it's business traveling and it's our transport, where we've made a huge effort in decreasing emissions.
Last year, we decreased with 7% when we look at one, Scope one, two, and the parts of Scope three that we measure and report on today. We're currently working really hard on getting robust figures and calculation methods in place to be able to report on the entire value chain, and we will get back on that in the not-too-distant future.
If we then look at emissions in our own operations in Scope one and two, we decreased with 18%, as Christopher referred to earlier today, the past year. If we then move on from the climate footprint and ask ourselves, what can we do here and now, and what do we do every day when we work with sustainability integrated within Clas Ohlson? We can help our customers to choose the sustainable alternatives.
We have a lot of sustainable products in our assortment, not the least this season with a lot of solar cell panels. We have sustainable consumables, sustainable cleaning products, and also spare parts that Christopher also spoke about earlier today. The volume sold by spare parts last year increased with 24%. We also introduced the spare part assortment in 15 stores recently.
In addition to products, we also offer our customers services to fix what they already have. We offer spare parts, as I said, but we also offer rental of products, repairs of products, video assistance on how to fix your products, and also services through our subsidiary, Clas Fixare. Do our customers see our ambition when it comes to sustainability?
We think that the answer is yes, because just as Kristofer said, we were just rewarded as being number one and two in our market segment in Norway and Sweden when it comes to the Sustainable Brand Index, and we were one of the 10 companies climbing the most in Finland. We are confident that our sustainability agenda serves as a great base for us to be market leading in our segment and contributing to our growth journey. Thank you.
Great. Thanks a lot, Tina. Lot of great progress and obviously high ambitions moving forward. Now turning into our growth drivers to achieve the 5% a year. Obviously sustainability is a huge enabler of that growth, but to try to be a little bit more specific, we'll dive deeper into three areas that we already mentioned in the how to wins, and then a fourth, which is Finland.
The first one, owning key consumer missions, is really about the assortment and what we sell, and we'll talk more about that. The second one is the availability and convenience, so we'll do a deep dive in our store network and our online sales. Then, thirdly, the customer, the core customer focus via our membership program, Club Clas. We have a specific point on our future growth market, which is Finland. We'll start with our consumer missions and the shift on what we're selling. I'll hand over to Tim.
Thank you very much, Kristofer. Good morning, everybody. My name is Tim Heier. I'm the CMO for Clas Ohlson since August last year. I'm super delighted to be here today, my first Capital Market Day, and to talk about two topics. The first topic that I would like to highlight is what I would describe as the glue that holds our entire growth plan together, our updated company purpose, and secondly, about our customer offering, the benefits and solutions we sell to our customer, or what we call internally our consumer missions.
First to start with, we are starting from an extremely strong position. We are a household brand, 90% brand awareness. Everybody knows us, and everybody likes us. We are known for a very wide range of products, which is as well something very good, but it shows as well two potentials.
One potential is that we can go deeper on certain product categories in order to fulfill more problems or needs our customers have. On the second aspect, the second potential is that we can become a bit more specific, explaining why we exist, explaining the solutions we are offering, and this is extremely important for people that haven't been in touch with us that often, young consumers and light buyers.
We embarked on a journey to resharpen our company purpose. In the past, we said we are passionate about simplifying life in all kinds of homes. That is quite a great statement, and it's quite broad. We made it more specific and clearer. Now, as of now, we are saying we are dedicated to simplifying home fixing for everyone responsibly.
Our territory is home fixing, so no matter if you're a first homeowner, if you are renting a place, if you're an expert, or if you seek help from Clas Fixare, home fixing is our territory. More importantly, we added sustainability to our company purpose with the dimension of, responsibility, making sure that everything we do supports our sustainability agenda.
I strongly believe that focusing on sustainability and home fixing will make us the sustainable and smart choice that can fight low-price competitors. How do we marry now, our resharpened company purpose and our customer offer? The answer is, it's a quite boring answer. It's a lot of data.
We dug into quantitative and qualitative data, and we looked for solutions that we fulfill today, problems that we solve with our assortment today, but we looked as well at opportunities where we do have a potential to launch new products and services. This knowledge is something we married with our assortment strategy, and that builds the foundation for our consumer missions. Our consumer missions bring customer centricity into our assortment.
They actually flip our assortment upside down from a product and category focus to a benefits and solutions focus. All our five consumer missions derive out of our company purpose. We have five consumer missions, and they are called tidy up your home, light up your home, create a conscious home environment, connect and enjoy your home, and fix your home. You see, home fixing, that is the common denominator that holds everything together.
The nice thing about this is no matter on which consumer occasion we focus, as they are all connected to our brand, we do brand building, and we continue to drive mental availability for Clas Ohlson being the destination for home fixing in a responsible way. This approach is something we plan to do with increasing mental availability for what we stand for. This doesn't mean we have to rebuild all our stores. This is something we try to achieve in the minds of our customers.
Cutting across all our consumer missions is something that is very important to us. These are consumables. We have a very solid position in regards to consumables in Sweden and in Norway, and they have the extremely nice benefit. They drive traffic to our store, and they increase the average ticket value per purchasing interaction. Let's have a look at a video of my colleague, Eva, who explains our new ways of working around consumer missions.
Welcome to Insjön. My name is Eva Berg, and I'm the Head of Product Management and Sourcing. Right now, I'm standing in the showroom here in the head office. In this showroom, we present news for the coming season, and we also present that, of course, to our colleagues and different functions to get them to understand what it is that we want to give to the customers and also how the product is functioning.
I also know that you heard a bit about consumer missions, so I will try to give you a glimpse of how working with consumer mission will help us to create even a better offering. We have, for example, put a lot of effort into our organized range. We want to help customer to get organized in their home, for example, in the kitchen.
With organize as an example, this means new, clever, products together with services. One example is Vinden. It's also important how we present the offering to our customers. Now, by adding in cleaning into the work stream of organize, we truly take our offering one step further by offering full solution. I would say you rarely organize without cleaning, and you don't clean without organize.
This mission is called Tidy Up Your Home, and it also means that we will broaden our assortment in selected categories. We have different competitors within the missions, and it's important for us to make sure that we have what the customers wants to have, so they do the business with us. The same goes for brands.
In some areas, it's much more important for us that we work with strong external brands, and in other areas, it's very important that we work with private label. All in all, I will say we learned a lot, by working this way, and I think we have great potential for future when applying these ways of working into a bigger part of our assortment.
As Eva mentioned in her video, it's all about a healthy mix of external brands and private label brands. Both product categories help us to own consumer missions, but in a slightly different way. External brands, always at the right price, help us to attract customer, to drive traffic to our stores. They help us as well to be a signpost, and a signpost means they help our customers to navigate in store.
Let me give you an example from my past. I used to work for Red Bull. When you are seeing a can of Red Bull in a store, you know you are in the energy drink section, which is most likely surrounded by drinks. This is something we plan to do as well, depending on the mission and with our respective external brands in our stores.
Last but not least, external brands help us to complete our offer. Private label brands, on the other side, they make us unique. These are products that you can only buy at Clas Ohlson. They are supporting our margin, and they are creating customer value, which is, I think, predicting what the future brings quite important for us, that we have a value proposition in place at a lower price point and using these lower price points to drive loyalty.
In summary, we have a quite strong position that is, on the one side, clearer and on the other side, quite flexible in terms of developing future propositions, in terms of solutions what our customers need in the future. We talked about our clearer positioning around home fixing, about embedding sustainability into our company purpose.
We talked about our broader assortment and how we use our missions to bundle them and link them back to our brand, that everything we do does as well as brand-building to drive mental availability for Clas Ohlson being the destination for home fixing in a responsible way. We talked about the healthy mix of external brands and private label products to drive traffic to our product, to help consumers navigate in our stores, but on the other side as well, to drive margin for us and loyalty.
Last but not least, I think it's quite important that the flexibility is given that we can navigate between different wallet sizes and be attractive to our customers. I think by doing this, we will increase the relevance for Clas Ohlson, increase our market position, and have a future in which we are growing significantly. Thank you very much. Back to you.
Great. Thanks a lot, Tim. Moving into the second growth driver, which will be the availability and convenience, and here we are aiming at growing sales both in our stores and online. I'll start by talking a little bit about the stores, and then Lena will talk about our online business. Obviously, today, our store sales is the biggest part of the business, with 89% of sales still goes via our store network, and this gives us a great opportunity for personal guidance and service.
We do see that in the NPS, that one of the key reasons for people coming back is the great service you get at Clas Ohlson, and that is also very much a word-of-mouth strength for us. We also have a good shopping experience that really strengthens the brand, and I'll come back to that.
We have also done a lot of work, and we will continue to use these stores much, much more as a logistics hub to ensure that we deliver also on the last mile part of the online business. We have clarified pretty clearly, you know, what do we think is the role of the Clas Ohlson store, and this is with the kind of next three years' scope, and then who knows what will happen longer term.
Looking at the way we're prepping and planning right now, we're very specific on the fact that we still believe and we still see a need and a want from our customers to buy in our stores. We are focusing a lot on our physical sales, which means we need to have the right products, the right guidance. We need to have a lot of helpful staff that can help you find what you're looking for and then hopefully also selling more solutions.
Of course, the services, as Tina talked about, spare parts is becoming more and more important. We see that with new EU regulation, et cetera, coming with the Right to Repair, et cetera, that people will also start going more to stores to find ways to repair what they've already bought.
We've also been pretty deliberate in saying that, you know, we are not trying to build huge centers of experiences, building showrooms, just, you know, having a place where you buy a cinnamon bun and a coffee. That's not if you wanna go to Clas Ohlson. If you go to Clas Ohlson, it's really about that you want a problem solved, linked back to the missions that Tim talked about.
We've been very deliberate on that to not end up in kind of that rabbit hole of finding other reasons, but really driving the core reason of Clas Ohlson because that's what the customers tell us. That's why they come to us. But then, of course, the store is playing more and more of a key role within our omnichannel experience. Of course, we've been a pickup point for a long time.
We can do returns, you can do customer service from online orders, and we're becoming more and more of a logistics hub. Here we see that Lena will talk a bit about related back to missions. We see an opportunity to also expand our assortment of online products. Here we have a good opportunity to use the store as a way into a category.
As an example, we have the black Moccamaster in the store, but then we might have the red and the pink online. Then we display that clearly in the store, and then you can easily order the pink version if that's what you're looking for. In that way, we don't need to keep every single color of the Moccamaster range on stock in 229 stores.
It's really a way to also drive a broader customer basket, even if consumers then are converting online. That's the pretty pragmatic way that we look at our store network, and that's what we use as a guidance as we're evolving the store network forward. Looking at the store in the role of the e-com fulfillment, now almost half of sales online actually in one way or the other passes our store network.
Here we do have a pretty unique position because we actually have huge coverage across all our countries. Basically, we do have stores spread out across the three markets. Of course, we're focusing on optimizing. Right now, we're closing a few stores, but we're also planning to open, to relocate, to rebuild.
We always look at the stores with the pragmatic lens of does it tick the boxes of the role that we want it to play? It also needs to contribute in terms of sales and profit. The geographical reach is a very competitive advantage. I mean, if you look at pure play online companies, most of them have maybe one fulfillment center serving three countries, maybe open another in another country.
We potentially have 229 fulfillment centers that actually is extremely close to the customer, but also then with the opportunity of getting the personal service. The good news is that we have a pretty diverse store portfolio. Of course, with the pandemic, there's been shifts. If you look at the current store portfolio, we have almost half in city centers and half outside of cities.
Of course, we are constantly looking at traffic patterns and how different geographies evolve, and we will always adapt to changing customer needs. We do believe that we have a pretty healthy, balanced mix if we look into the expected future customer needs. Looking at store sizes, store concepts, we have done a lot of tests over the last few years, playing around with smaller formats, bigger formats, et cetera. We're very much concluding that, you know, the store size 800 to 1,400 square meters really serves us well in order to fulfill the role of the store. Also in a lot of opportunities, we still then have the size to also do great online fulfillment in that space.
We will, of course, continuously evolve, experiment, test concepts, but we're gonna be very focused on optimizing the network in a way that we see the customer wants and a way that really works. We'll move into the reality bit and we'll listen in to Johannes, our Director of Retail Operations. He's in charge of the store network across all the three countries. We'll listen in to Johannes for a couple of minutes, and he's actually in the most recent concept that we have qualified now for the group, and that is in the store in Norrköping, and he will talk a little bit more about that.
Hi, and welcome to Norrköping, Ingelsta. My name is Johannes Åverling, and I'm Director for retail operations, which means all our stores. We are constantly developing and optimizing our store network, and we really believe that the stores has an important role to play. We have a view of the future of the stores, and we will show you a little bit of our latest concept here in Norrköping. There is a special reason for us being here in Norrköping today.
We want to show you an example of the new concept, our new visual identity, and our improved navigation in the stores. We truly believe that in the customer meeting, when we involve ourselves trying to fix the customer's problems, that we will create happy customers, which is the key for continuous growth.
Even though that we have seen declining traffic to our stores the last couple of years, we have thousands of visitors coming in every day, and that is a great opportunity for us to create happy customers, a situation we think most competitors envy us. In Clas Ohlson, we have a culture where the people in the stores have some mandate to do everything they can to make the customers happy.
We're doing it two ways, in the customer meeting and with our product knowledge. We do train ourselves in a sales coach program, and online we have a digital platform where you can learn about our new products for each season. In the end, converting visitors to customers drives sales.
We also do that by recommending complementary products that makes it the more complete purchase, that increase the sales for us and also creates happier customers, and that is what counts in the end. Here in Norrköping Ingelsta, we have had a positive trend since we opened. The customer really loves the store. They appreciate the new concept.
It's easy to find with the new navigation, and we can also see it in the numbers. Increasing visitors, increased sales, increased average ticket of the receipts. I think this is a great example where we do everything we can with the factors that we can impact despite external conditions. This is a great example of a store that will continue for the growing of the company. We do believe in our store network and that they will contribute to the growth.
Okay. As Johannes talked about, we do, we have launched updated store concept. As you could tell, it's also you know very focused. It's clean, simple, easy to navigate, and we need to fit in a lot of a big part of the assortment. We don't wanna make it complicated because the customers don't want that. Today we have this updated concept now across approximately 10 locations across the three countries, and we have done a bit of a gradual rollout. We've, you know, changed a few things before we roll out the next to really ensure that we optimize it in a way that drives the KPIs in terms of traffic conversion and ATV. Then we will do a gradual rollout of this.
We will not rebuild all the 200 and remaining 18, 19 stores. We will really do a gradual rollout as we then optimize the network. We're gonna also optimize the concept. Also as Johannes was talking about a little bit, I showed you the NPS for total Clas Ohlson. As you can tell on this slide, we do have an NPS in our physical stores that is actually 10 points above the total Clas Ohlson NPS. We see that one of the big reasons for that is our colleagues working in our stores. We have a combination of colleagues that have worked with us for 25, 30 years, and we have colleagues that have joined in the last few months.
What we try to do is to also give the store teams a lot of power and freedom to really drive the store to focus on optimized sales margin and customer satisfaction. We, of course, will also upgrade and ensure we are relevant from a digital tools point of view, but we still very much believe in real people driving and owning and leading real stores.
The one big thing we're starting to look more and more at is, you know, as we talk about marketing and brand building, given the fact that the NPS in our stores is significantly higher than the NPS for the total business, we can also tell that the customers that are visiting a store with high NPS, they are becoming more loyal, and they are becoming more satisfied.
For us, the question is, you know, what's the marketing value of that delta? I mean, if it costs us $0.08 to buy an interaction on Facebook, how much is a five to 10 minute conversation worth in a store with a Clas Ohlson representative that can guide you very specifically to the different solutions that we offer? We are looking more at this, but it's also key for us as we look at the core retail KPIs of sales conversion, ATV, and also profit per store.
We're also starting to look more and more at the broader value it re-drives to the company, both from a brand and a customer point of view. That concludes the focus on the store network. We will continue to optimize. We will continue to work on ensuring high satisfaction and loyalty. I'll hand over to Lene to talk more about our online part of the customer interaction.
Thank you, Kristofer. Hello, everyone. My name is Lene Oen, and I'm the director of Sales and E-com. Today, customers expect a seamless and convenient shopping experience both in physical stores and online. When we combine the two, the experience becomes a fully integrated part of our customer journey.
We have already seen a level with very high customer satisfaction in integrating our online in our customer journey. The growth potential with endless aisle and omnichannel associates in our store, this combination is a winning formula. Clicks and bricks. 25% of our customers uses our online to research and navigate before visiting a store. 30% finds our click and collect service smart and reasonable within 30 minutes.
Mobile first with 75% of the sessions. Browse and find easily what you search for is something that we obsess about when navigating in the customer journey. Customers want flexibility and fast deliveries. We offer all different delivery methods in Clas Ohlson and meet the customer needs. Customers can choose from 30 minutes click and collect, same or next day delivery by our feeder stores, and 2 to 3 days from our automated warehouse in Insjön.
Customer-centric deliveries is a must-have today. Fast, sustainable, and to a reasonable price is what customers ask for. Returns can easily be handled in store, which gives us a great advantage in terms of online only or international companies. We have also made a lot of improvements behind the scenes. Our automated center in Insjön is now fully automated for pick and pack.
The capacity and the cost levels are important factors for successful e-com business moving forward. We have established feeder stores across the Nordics to be closer to our customers. Feeder stores is something really sets us apart from competitors. To put it simpler, feeder store is a way to benefit from our geographical reach and coverage in the whole Nordics.
Optimizing reach within short lead time and quickly scale if needed is a possibility we have. Coverage in high density areas is already very good and increasing. We have today nine feeder stores, three in Norway, which two actually opened last week. We have two in Finland covering 90% of the Finnish market, and three in Sweden. We can now serve the customers in north of Norway with very short lead time, and that's something our competitor most likely cannot.
Feeder stores offer extended assortments and same to next day delivery, and this is a competitive advantage that stands out in the market. Customer satisfaction is increasing as a direct response to this availability that we have been able to work out the last couple of years. The development is an important factor for how likely it is for customers to return to Clas Ohlson.
We are obsessing about removing frictions in the customer journey and use direct feedback from our NPS survey to improve constantly. We already see growth potential across our assortment in the five missions to expand the online assortment. A broader assortment will not necessarily have to fit into our physical stores to create a better experience online and offline. Supported by more convenient delivery methods, we have the foundation for true endless aisle where our customer can choose to interact with us.
To wrap things up, we are constantly working on making our customer experience better. Right now, we are working a lot with the e-com site to make the purchase decision even easier. A lot of the interactions when you do online shopping is happening in what we call the messy middle, browsing, searching, back and forth. We would like to increase add to basket conversion by optimizing the customer journey in the first phase of the shopping experience.
Looking long term, we have started to implement a new e-commerce platform, which is estimated to be launched in 2023. The reason for this is our current e-com platform is ending heading end of life, and we will enhance customer experience with a more modern platform. Of course, this continues the seamless customer journey online and in store.
The cost for the new platform is within our investment framework. All in all, we have reached a new level for our e-com business and customer satisfaction. Our omni experience is highly valued by our customers, and we will in the future benefit from even more extended assortment and endless aisle for our omnichannel associate in stores. Strong infrastructure in the Nordics with stores, feeder stores, warehouse. Moving forward, we'll combine our sales target regardless of channel. Takk.
Great. Thank you very much, Lena. It's really fascinating with the feeder stores 'cause it's. We're not picking and packing products from the actual shelves, but we have a full e-com warehouse almost in the back room of the store, which really gives us unique capabilities to pick and pack fast and also then have the pickup points in the store.
That also links back to the point on the role of the store because it also gives our colleagues working in the store a much more closeness to our customers 'cause they see the e-com orders coming in while they serve the customers physically. It's also a way to really drive that on the journey.
The third area, the first two growth drivers is, you know, we've gone through is really what we sell across the consumer missions. The second one, the availability, and the convenience via the two channels, and we wanna grow both. The third one is our core customer focus, and here, of course, we have seen a lot of changes over the last few years when it comes to the marketing landscape.
The value of really having direct access to our customers and really having a relationship is, of course, that we can, as Lena talked about, follow the customers and then improve, but it also gives us an opportunity to be more relevant in our communication to the customers.
Of course, the other thing is that with all the integrity, all the positive things happening in terms of protecting consumer integrity with GDPR, but also, Google announcing the third-party cookies will be removed. Of course, also driving relevance across your marketing mix is gonna be more difficult if you try to or if you work mostly on mass marketing. The value of having your own membership database is gonna be extremely important as we look forward. When we look at Club Clas, so we think about Club Clas, it's not just a traditional, you know, loyalty card program.
It's really an ambition to build up and build out the membership database to allow us to be relevant, drive loyalty, but then also drive value per customer so that we can really go beyond the channels and think customer value. We do have 4.3 million members today in Club Clas, and now it's been launched across all three countries. If you look at the membership database impact on the business, actually the active members represent 60% of Clas Ohlson sales, which means that this is a disproportionate part of the value creation. Also, as you can tell from the graph here, we've seen growth in terms of active members, but we also see that the sales index for the members is higher than total Clas Ohlson.
That's why we wanna really build out the number of active members over the next few years, and we wanna drive value per member. The more we do that, the more sophisticated we can also become in terms of optimizing margin, et cetera, 'cause there might be high-value customers that sometimes do low-margin transactions, and it's important for us to understand who is shopping with us and not only individual transactions.
The good news is that that member performance and the sales is really driven by that all the KPIs are stronger with our most active members. We see both across average ticket value and the basket sizes that our members are even more are performing higher than the average customers and average members.
Also, something very encouraging is if you look to the right, and we'll talk about Finland as the final growth driver. We can also tell that the few customers that we only today have as members, they are very satisfied, and they are actually very active. There is more about building scale and getting more members. The other thing is, again, that our members are the most satisfied and loyal.
That's why we really look at our members as also being ambassadors of Clas Ohlson. The more we can be relevant, the more we can be personalized, the more we believe we're also gonna build the brand. We have done a lot of things when it comes to these type of programs. It's not about one big bang launch. It's about constant improvement.
Here's just a flavor of all the things we have done over the last year in terms of driving that relevance and loyalty. Remember, we've added more than 1 million members now in one year, and we are delivering the value per member, as you could tell. The key thing is really driving this as we move forward. When it comes to investments forward, it's really focused on what Lena talked about, the online experience on the platform, and the second thing is really building out the capabilities to do this in a very sophisticated and personalized way. Those are the two major digital investments that we're looking at ahead. We are obviously looking at this as a very positive flywheel.
By looking at the customer data, getting closer to understanding what the customers are looking for, we can leverage the brand, and the offer that we have and then drive further loyalty. It is a positive spiral given that the KPIs per customer and the member group is significantly above the average. That's the third growth driver, continuously investing in Club Clas, and that obviously goes across all the three countries.
Then to move into last but absolutely not least, we're gonna do a bit of a deep dive into Finland. I'll lead us through this, and then we're gonna soon also listen in to our sales leader, Kimmo, in Finland, that will talk a little bit about the local insights on where we are.
Just to give you a snapshot of the Finnish business. We've actually been around now for 20 years this year in Finland. We have 39 stores, and as Lena said, we have now opened 2 feeder stores, so we actually cover 90% of the market with fairly quick e-com fulfillment. We are primarily in city centers and shopping center locations.
Today we have 400,000 members. We grew the membership database with 20% in Q4, but it's still fairly underdeveloped versus the other countries. As you can tell, sales per inhabitant, sales per capita is half of Sweden and four times, or Norway's four times higher. If we can drive value in the Finnish market with the Finnish customers, there is huge upside.
This is also one of the other reasons we're deciding to close down in the UK to really ensure we focus everything on the biggest, growth opportunity that we have in front of us, which is Finland. We've been in Finland for 20 years, and then you might ask yourself, okay, so what's, you know, I mean, we do have an almost SEK 1 billion business, so it's not like we don't exist.
Why haven't we yet taken the step as we have done in Sweden and Norway? I'll let Kimmo from Finland talk a little bit, and we have spent a lot of time digging deeper with thousands of Finnish customers to really understand what the key reasons and differences are.
Hey, my name is Kimmo Ylönen, and I'm the CS leader for Clas Ohlson in Finland. I'm here to share the exciting story we have embarked on in the Finnish market. Now, we've been on this market for almost 20 years. We have a great team and happy customers. In fact, our customers are more satisfied on average than in other markets.
Saying that, we haven't quite reached our sales and profitability targets as we have in Norway and Sweden. That's why we have made a thorough analysis of where we are, where we want to be, and what we need to improve to be a vital part of Clas Ohlson's future growth. The conclusion of the situation is, to put it mildly, that we have many strengths, but Finns see our brand somewhat vague.
This has, of course, impacted the visitation, especially in a pandemic situation where restrictions have limited customers' mobility. Finland is a rich market with lots of competition. Finns love to buy their home furnishing products in external locations and hypermarkets. The market is filled with a lot of local players like Prisma, Tokmanni, Verkkokauppa.com, and Puuilo that have been around in this marketplace for years. We are primarily located in urban locations.
This has, of course, attracted a younger and a more urban customer, which is great and a strength. What we still need to address, a broader customer base. We want to simplify home fixing for everyone, and hence, more Finns need to know what they can find at Clas Ohlson. Another interesting find is that Finns see Clas Ohlson a bit expensive. We see the connection between a vague brand rather than being expensive.
Finns don't simply know if they compare us to low-price retailers or more upscale brands. That is why we have launched a new price comparison guarantee, and we are very excited about it. To sum it up, despite some weaknesses, we have reasons to be really optimistic. The Finns that already interact with us, they really like us. Our staff is motivated, and we can see a positive sales trend. There's great potential in building further on this and developing the customer base in Finland for the benefit of the entire group.
As Kimmo was talking about, the primary opportunity is to really build the brand in Finland because the customers that find us and keep coming back are very satisfied, but we need more customers. Also digging deeper into the areas of the brand that we wanna strengthen, it's also pretty clear that it links a lot into what we're doing for the full company, i.e., clarify and strengthen what we're selling.
The missions are extremely relevant across the Finnish market as well, and we just need to be even more simple, clear, and deliberate there. The second thing, as also Kimmo talked about, is, of course, the weaker brand is also then resulting in us appearing as more expensive. In price comparisons, we are not that much more expensive, but also we're not a low price player.
It's really about building the value perception. As Kimmo showed, that's why we also just a couple of weeks ago launched our price comparison guarantee to test new ways with our customers, build trust in that you can find what you need in Finland. The other thing is if you do look at Sweden and Norway, the communication in Sweden and Norway has worked extremely well across the two countries.
It's been a way to build the brand in a similar way. Whereas in Finland, obviously, the way of building the brand, reusing and launching with the similar tools as Sweden and Norway has not had the same effect. We are making some changes to that. To be very specific, it's a brand opportunity.
We have already started to drive increased marketing spend. Of course, we need to be very deliberate in terms of what we're saying instead of just reusing the same tools as Sweden and Norway. We are based on the insights of the Finnish customers, finding a slightly different position in Finland, and we're starting to push that message now across the summer to really establish our position and being even more clear on what we have to offer. We're also optimizing our store network. We have announced a few store closures, and that's a way to really drive focus on the ones that we are investing in for the future. We're also daring to adapt our e-com channel.
We're recruiting some local talent, and with the use of our fulfillment centers in the feeder stores, we have an ability to actually have a bit of an upper hand in terms of availability on the Finnish e-com market. We're investing there as well. When it comes to Club Clas, the Club Clas membership program has been around for a fairly long time, but now we've also done a pretty clear mapping of Club Clas versus other very popular membership and loyalty programs.
In Finland, loyalty programs, membership programs are very popular, and we are adapting and localizing Club Clas to really serve what the Finnish customer is looking for. When it comes to pricing, it is linking into building the brand, but it's also about even being even more strategic on the way we do pricing.
That's why we're also now rolling out the price comparison guarantee, which basically tells the customers that if you find something cheaper elsewhere, we will match that price to really build trust in the Clas Ohlson brand. In combination with everything else that we're doing, given that the brand is also slightly weaker here than in the other two markets, we're also introducing more external brands into the Finnish business with stronger local brands in a way to also get drive more clarity of Clas Ohlson and also to drive the Clas Ohlson brand in Finland.
A lot of things going on, and the good thing is that this is not something that's gonna happen two years from now. We have actually already started and tried out a few things. We have based it on deep dives with thousands of consumers, but then we are really starting with trial and error. We've started with the price comparison guarantee. We have doubled the feeder store capacity. We have started to optimize the network, and we have also started to increase marketing spend.
There's some early positive indications. Three months in a row now, we actually have double-digit growth in Finland, but of course from fairly low levels. The focus is to really drive that now as we look forward. Basically, that concludes the presentation part. We've talked about the four specific growth drivers, and we have also talked about the updated strategy, the financial targets, and the overall three-year plan. With that, we'll take a five-minute break, right, Niklas?
Five-minute break, and then we'll be back, and then I'll quickly wrap up, and then we move into Q&A. Okay, welcome back. Before moving into the Q&A, I just wanted to quickly summarize a little bit what we've talked about here today. First of all, we're aiming at taking the next step in terms of growth to become a SEK 10 billion company within three years, and we wanna be industry-leading in sustainability.
We have talked about four growth drivers that we believe will drive the growth to above 10, and that's the consumer missions, i.e., the assortment and the offer, the consumer offer, customer offer. We have our physical stores and online where we wanna grow on both sides.
We have Club Clas, which serves as a unique opportunity to build and drive growth over the next three years but also to create longer-term value. Last but not least, we have Finland. We will not specify more in detail exactly how much each of these four growth drivers will contribute because they are all very, very interlinked.
In our business plan obviously these are the four key things that will help us take that next big step. Also, we have talked about our targets, so the 5% growth that then takes us above the SEK 10 billion in three years. We have a 7%-9% operating margin. We have our dividend policy and our net debt/EBITDA below two. That's what we're aiming for.
We have also our sustainability targets, which is both the longer term fully climate neutral and fully circular by 2045, but also the more near term targets as displayed and talked about by Tina. Net-net, we believe that we are actually playing in a very attractive market with compelling growth opportunities with the focus on the home. We're well-positioned. We have a competitive customer offer that we are making even more competitive now with the work that we talked about on our consumer missions.
We have shown a strong ability to deliver result and, our good cash flow and strong profitability has helped us have an attractive yield, and that's the ambition to continue that. Net, last but not least, we have, of course, an ambitious sustainability agenda for the next 100 years.
What we've talked today is of course in a bit more the shorter scope, the three years, but of course in parallel we're also planning beyond. To keep it very focused, this is the scope of today. That summarizes the presentation part, and then we will move into to a Q&A.
Yes, we are. We will do just like we did during this previous session where we have the possibility to for our live audience to ask questions from here. We also open up to questions from the teleconference and from the webcast audience.
For those of you who aren't in the room, I can assure you that our presenters, not just Kristofer Tonström, but also Tim Heier, Tina Englyst, Lena, and also our CFO, Pär Christiansen, are still in the room. With that said, we open up to questions, and I think we have a first one up there. Please wait for the microphone.
Thank you. Magnus Roman. I believe you've mentioned historically that margins online are a bit lower than the group average or in stores. Now I think you say that you expect online to be disproportionately large share of your growth driver in the coming years. Should we expect this to be margin dilutive to the group or how should we view that?
Looking back obviously, e-com has also been a disproportionate part of the growth if you look back at the last few years, and we expect that to continue. Each part of the business needs to contribute to our bottom line profitability. But of course there are parts of, especially when you buy known brands online, especially there are a lot of transactions that might be on a lower margin, but we're not revising our margin targets. It's really within the framework of delivering 7%-9%. Everything needs to contribute but in the bigger picture.
Great. On your Finnish focus that you talked about here, get the sense that you will be a little bit more perhaps price aggressive in Finland, at least with the price guarantee and so on that you mentioned. How should we think about that? Would that have any meaningful impact, do you think? Or, will it be compensated on anyplace else or?
I mean, in general, if we look at it, you know, we are not de facto more expensive versus a lot of competition out there. We are actually following similar pricing strategies as the other countries. When we're launching the price comparison guarantee, it's really to you know build the credibility versus our customers that you can trust to find good offers at Clas Ohlson.
We do not expect, you know, if we do have good redemption on that offer, of course it also is a signal that we need to do something with the pricing. We are tracking the market prices, and we see that we are fairly competitive in the market. We're not expecting that to have a major impact, and we're not expecting and planning for a lower margin in Finland because of that.
All right. Will it also include online competition, that price guarantee?
Today when we launched it, we focused on the physical stores. We'll see how it evolves. It starts with the physical stores now.
Right. Just a final one from me. In terms of it's very exciting to hear you talk about the stores and how they, some of them are feeder stores, and there are a lot of trends of these ultra-quick deliveries now where the sort of prepared food deliveries are very rapid. They might branch out to deliver other goods. Is that something that you're looking to pilot cooperation with Uber or Foodora or any of the likes to do ultra-quick deliveries out of your stores?
I mean, today we have, as you saw, the NPS development. A big driver of the NPS development online has been driven by much, much faster fulfillment. I placed the order on Sunday night on a lot of Gardena stuff, et cetera, and then by Monday afternoon it was on my doorstep. Now we are good on that part, which was where we were lagging a bit behind before. Looking forward, of course, we will always evaluate based on what our customers want. Of course, there's a huge difference between categories. Some things you might need immediately, other things you can wait for. The objective is to have multiple choices for the customer.
We haven't, you know, we don't have any ready set plans for that here and now, but we might look at those type of collaborations, as we've done with Wolt in Finland as an example. We have done some of those collaborations, but we are very much focused on our own speed to market to ensure we, you know, deliver on the basics. Let's see what happens, but nothing concrete.
Thank you.
I think we have the next question over here.
Thank you. Carl-Johan Leinberger from Carnegie. I think I will start with a follow-up on Magnus' question, and that is on the Finnish market. I think, if I've done my calculations correct, I think you're somewhere 30%-35% below Sweden and Norway on sales per square meter. I'm just curious, at what stage are you satisfied with the development in Finland? Do you see the potential of having sort of the same sales per store there as in your core markets? Or where do you think it could be in a longer period, three to five years, let's say?
I mean, as you say, we do have literally lower traffic in Finland, and that's a result of a slightly weaker brand and fewer customers. Everything we do now really aims at driving traffic. I don't wanna, you know, say anything any specific targets where I expect us to be, but it's really about driving traffic because we see that when customers come in, they are as even more satisfied than the other markets. The traffic is the number one thing.
Yeah. Yeah. Fair enough. A follow-up on another market, in the Norwegian market. You talked about in the beginning of the presentation maybe that the recovery has been somewhat, let me say, better there, post-pandemic compared with Sweden in particular. I'm curious sort of looking forward also on consumer confidence, Sweden versus Norway, and given that their economy is a bit differently structured. Do you see a sort of better consumer confidence in the Norwegian market, in the near to medium term, or how's the difference there in your customers?
I mean, the consumer confidence data that we shared in the beginning is obviously public. It's not Clas Ohlson data.
Yeah.
It's general data. Honestly, I was a bit surprised when I saw that data, the fact that Norway was actually below the other two markets now. 'Cause usually in times of crisis, Norway's always stronger.
Yeah.
We were expecting maybe lower consumer confidence in Finland. I think it's very hard to predict the overall consumer confidence.
Yeah.
What we look at is, of course, kind of the Clas Ohlson customer confidence and satisfaction, and we track and measure that via NPS, et cetera. I think it's very hard to predict 'cause I think it was a little bit unexpected with that consumer confidence drop in Norway. We're trying to understand more, but I don't wanna make any predictions.
Yeah. Final question on another topic that we didn't discuss that much is on the private label offering. Or we did touch upon it, but maybe if you could elaborate a bit on profitability-wise. I would assume that you have higher gross margins in your private label offering but maybe slightly lower basket values. Do you have ambitions sort of outgrowing your external brands with private label brands or how does that look in the medium term?
I mean, we really believe in the power of both. Because only doing private label, you will have a narrow customer offer. Only doing external brands, you will be under more margin pressure, and it will make you a little bit less unique. We can see that, you know, in terms of market trends, a lot of companies now, of course, are trying to catch up on private labels.
We are already at 35%, and if you include all the no-names, it's almost half of sales. We do have a very good, healthy mix, and then we wanna grow the totality. Also as Tim talked about with, you know, with the Red Bull example, having the right brands as a signpost is a way to drive traffic either to a category in a store or to an online site.
Of course, our job and our ambition is also to convert to private labels and also add baskets to private label. We don't specify any specific targets. We believe that is a healthy balance, and then we wanna grow the totality by leveraging the uniqueness of both parts of the offer.
Yeah. Yeah.
Maybe also last point is, I mean, we do have 200 million customer visits. We're a strong brand, so we also see a lot of interest from the best brands and a lot of external partners to work with Clas Ohlson to get access to our customer base. That's another benefit where, of course, we can grow together, 'cause in this environment, everybody is looking for growth.
Yeah. Yeah.
That's another thing where we've seen, you know, co-marketing activities, investments from brands to grow together with us.
Yeah. Yeah.
Which is also another reason to build out Club Clas to make us even more relevant.
Yeah. Yeah. Maybe a final question also on the topic of external brands. We've seen some retailers here recently in Q1, Q4, maybe not in your category specifically, but talking about generally high inventory levels and price pressures on external brands in particular. Given slightly lower sales in calendar Q4 with the new unexpected restrictions, do you see anything of this fierce price pressures within some categories or...
I mean, certain categories are always under pressure.
Okay.
At the end of the day, what we try to do is to constantly track our categories. We also know that the price sensitivity and the price elasticity is different across different categories and brands. I wouldn't say that it's more than normal, if I look at it from a market point of view.
Yeah.
Let's see what happens now. Of course, it's our choice then to either be competitive or to take out a bit more margin depending on.
Yeah
those factors.
Yeah. Perfect. Thank you very much.
We have a question up there, please.
Thank you. Niklas Gugenheim, Handelsbanken. If I can ask on the 5% organic growth target, if you could please frame that, sort of looking at the market as such, you know, mature Nordic markets, what is the underlying growth? Do you expect to take market shares? Or how do you arrive at the 5% being sort of the pace you wanna grow at?
I mean, the good thing for us is we're playing in a bit of a Clas Ohlson universe. We don't have one competitor, which means that when we are defining our market, it's very much a combination of lots of different things. Our assumption is that that market, which we talk about being SEK 90 billion, is gonna be more or less unchanged over the next few years.
We're not expecting huge market growth because I mean, we see shifts. I mean, one day there is more growth on home and workspace, other day more sales on travel accessories, whatever. We have, in terms of our plan, assumed a fairly flat to stable market, which means that our ambition is to grow share, to grow the 5%.
Where do you plan to grow that share from? Is it, you know, expanding the categories or taking share online, taking shares from the discounters or mid-market players?
I mean, that goes back to the five consumer missions, those five areas. Those are the areas where we wanna grow share because we see we have a position to play there. If you look at those five bubbles, there are slightly different competitors in each of the bubbles. There is also slightly different channel mix across the five bubbles.
As we look at those five areas, that already represents 60% of our sales, and that's where we wanna disproportionately grow. That's the number one. Then, of course, that will translate into more growth in store, online, et cetera. We're really starting at it from a category product point of view to have a more complete offer, and also dare to expand our assortment across the areas where we see upside.
Okay, thank you. Going back to that price comparison thing in Finland, is that purely on branded products in stores? If a customer finds a difference, you match that price? There's no additional sort of money you give them as a compensation or anything?
It's on external brands 'cause you can't find Clas Ohlson products anywhere else, so there's nothing to compare to. It's known brands, and it's in the physical stores. Yes, we then match the price of the lowest price that the customer can find from someone else. If that was your. I didn't hear the final part of that.
Yeah. If that's the price they can find at that point in time.
Yes
is, you know, understood.
Exactly.
Okay. Thank you.
Okay. Perhaps I can do a follow-up then on Clas Fixare. Can you give any leads on the progress of Clas Fixare? Any number of orders or revenue perhaps or anything?
I mean, Clas Fixare has been around for a while, and we have focused it very much on the broader Stockholm region. The progress has been good. The, you know, the customer satisfaction is high. Also, of course, during the whole pandemic, it has been a little bit on hold because people didn't wanna get people home to visit them.
Obviously now is the time for us to really look at it and take the next level. But if you go to the website and look at what we're currently offering, you know, we are also trying out slightly different business models here. Of course, it started as small fixing. We also help with installation.
If you buy an electric car charger from Clas Ohlson, Clas Fixare can help you install it. We also started to try out a bit bigger jobs to actually help with more complex projects. It's still on a you know development phase, and we don't wanna expand it too quickly before we have a kind of operationally scalable profitable potential. That's why we're not talking about it too much today, 'cause it's not material enough for the totality, but it is something we're working a little bit on the side in parallel. As soon as we have more clarity and more specific things on Clas Fixare, we'll talk about it.
Can you remind us, is it Clas Ohlson employed staff who will do the services or?
I mean, today, the way we work with it's, we have a lot of employed staff, but we're also, working with a bit of a gig model, where we also, especially on the small fixing, leverage freelancers, which might be someone working in a Clas Ohlson store, actually. I mean, we are working with, a parallel business model there, but we still have, a lot of full-time employees. 'Cause we really wanna build a good workplace as well in that, in that industry.
Right. You also mentioned in the presentation here that store staff has a certain mandate to make sure customers are satisfied. Can you elaborate on what these mandates are, and how they differ to competition?
I mean, I think in one way it's the mandate that, you know, you should always help ways to solve problems for the customer and, go above and beyond to do that. That's what we reward, what we motivate, what we train, to find new ways of always giving above and beyond. Of course, it's always a fine balance between what you automate in terms of stores and what level of freedom do you actually give.
What we're trying to do is to ensure we have. As you might remember, a couple of years ago, we launched an automated order system, et cetera. Of course we wanna automate things that are repetitive tasks to give as much as possible time back to our colleagues in store to then focus on the customers.
Given that we measure everybody apart from the business side also on NPS, it's really about finding then the creative ways of solving problems for the customer. It's really a big cultural thing, I would say, to always obsess about that in everything that we do.
You will not work with store staff incentives of any kind, commissions or as such?
I mean, we also from a rewards point of view, we have some of that as well, yes.
Thank you.
Do we have any additional questions from the room? 'Cause I see that we have no one lined up in the teleconference. So unless someone else wants to take the chance to ask a question, we are approaching the end of the Capital Markets Day.
Yes. Okay. Very good. Thank you very much for investing two hours almost with us this morning, and three hours for those of you that are also listening to Q4. So thank you very much. Great questions, good discussions, and we are as a full Clas Ohlson team, very, very engaged in now executing on this plan. And I hope it provided a bit of clarity on the future direction. So thank you very much, and see you all again soon.