Hello, thanks for being here for Clas Ohlson's Capital Markets Day 2026. My name is Niklas Carlsson. I'm heading up Investor Relations and External Communications here at Clas Ohlson, and it is my great pleasure to welcome you all of you joining online and all of you joining here in the room in Stockholm. Over the next few hours, we will explain why Clas Ohlson is structurally stronger today than a couple of years back, and that we're also updating our financial targets to reflect this transition. The financial targets, they are designed to support disciplined and profitable growth over time. Today's speakers will give you more details on just that, our position and our way forward.
We will start with an opening session with our CEO, Kristofer Tonström, who will outline what Clas Ohlson looks like today and the journey we've made since the last Capital Markets Day that we held in 2022. Our CFO, Pernilla Walfridsson, will join Kristofer on stage and talk about how we are now updating our targets after a couple of years of really solid performance. In the last session before the break, Kristofer will give us an introduction to our proven value creation model and the levers we see for continued growth. After the break, the other members of our management team, which you can see here, will talk more about how we leverage our competitive strengths. Anders Molander, he will talk about our assortment development. Helena Holmström, about brand and customer base. Lene Iren Oen and Stefan Lindwall will talk about our omnichannel customer meeting and logistics.
Then finally, Kristofer will wrap up things with a short description of further growth optionality and summarize today's key messages before we move into a Q&A. I will come back on stage for the Q&A. As already communicated, there's possibilities to ask questions from here from the studio in Stockholm, as well from our webcast, where you can post any questions you might have. Before handing over to our CEO, Kristofer Tonström, I also have the great pleasure of presenting today's disclaimer.
Yes, there we go. The stage is yours.
Okay. Thank you. Remove the disclaimer. Thank you very much, Niklas, and a big welcome to everybody here in the room in Stockholm. A full house, great to see, also big welcome to everybody joining us online. Last time we were together for this type of forum four years ago, we talked a lot about a transformation plan. Today, we will focus on something slightly different. Today, we're going to talk about how we now are going to take the next chapter on the strategy that is already working. Looking at where we are today, as Niklas mentioned, we believe that we are a structurally stronger company today. We have a more clear business model, we have stronger economics, and we also have more discipline when it comes to both growth and capital allocation.
Today, we'll also talk about how we look forward and how we are confident in that we're going to continue driving profitable growth also in the next few years. Before going into the future, let's take a bit of a step back and talk about what Clas Ohlson is today. As you know, we were founded for more than 100 years ago. The philosophy from back in 1918 still holds true also today. Our founder talked about that we wanted to sell reliable products at low prices, offering the right quality according to need. That's still extremely relevant. We still believe that customers are looking for practical solutions, the right quality according to need, but also at the right prices. What has changed since back then is our ability to do this really at scale.
We obviously have evolved from being a mail order company into a physical retailer, and today we're an established omnichannel player. What has not changed is our attention to and our dear love and focus on products. We are nerdy in terms of the right product functionality, the right innovation, the right functionality when it comes to products. Turning into what Clas Ohlson is today, we actually describe ourselves as a product-led omnichannel retailer. Everything that we do is organized around five consumer missions. You're going to hear more about that today. We're not organized around categories. We don't think that customers and people wake up and think about a category. They wake up and think about the problem that they want solved.
We are really organized around needs, and we have structured ourselves across those five consumer missions that are really there to solve problems and actually deliver on specific needs. Each of those five missions, they target a very specific market niche, and we're going to come back to the niches and the market potential. They're really designed in a way where we are needs-based and they span across tied up and organized, light up and decorate, home comfort and prepping, tech, connect and entertain, and also fix and repair. Let's now also look at how this then translates into the markets where we operate. Overall, we have a Nordic scalable platform. We operate approximately 250 stores. Today, 249. Tomorrow, it's going to be 250 when we open in Söderhamn. We have a scalable platform with physical stores being present Sweden, Norway, Finland.
Sweden being the biggest market. Norway, growing quickly, approaching the same size as Sweden. Finland remains a very attractive opportunity. On top of the physical store network, we now also have a digital ecosystem that helps us reach more customers outside of the home markets. I think the important point here is that we're not dependent on one geography. We have multiple legs to stand on. On top of the sales and the commercial focus, we also have expanded our footprint when it comes to sourcing, and Anders will talk a little bit more about that later on. If we then look at the market that we are playing in, it's commercially very attractive. Across the five consumer missions, we have done this work to really dig deeper into the missions and the niches that they are representing.
Our addressable market is SEK 350 billion across Sweden, Norway, Finland, across those five areas. It's also a market where we see underlying growth over the next few years, which is a bit more than 2%, is the expectation. Yet our market share remains relatively low. From our perspective, future growth does not rely on us having to invent completely new markets. It actually requires us to continue being relevant with customers and consumers in the markets where we already operate and where we do have capability. Also we believe that the Nordic region provides a strong foundation for our ambition forward. The Nordics really combine a strong purchasing power. It's strong digital adoption, high expectations on service, high expectations on convenience. Also we believe, and we see in our customer meeting that everybody is really expecting a seamless shopping experience across channels.
The Nordic consumers value trust, they value simplicity, and they also value quality. All of these characteristics are areas that really, we believe, play to our strengths as a company. Over time, we have also built out the Clas Ohlson ecosystem over the last four years. We have broadened our capabilities at the same time as we have stayed very focused. While Clas Ohlson remains really the core of the group, we have also expanded our capabilities through both acquisitions and also organic development. These capabilities, they really broaden our customer reach, our assortment capabilities, and also they create opportunities for more synergies across the full group. I think the key thing here is that they're not separate strategies. It's really aimed at driving towards the same ambition, solving everyday needs for our customers. We believe that this creates several competitive strengths.
If you look at all of these strengths, we believe that it's really the combination of these strengths that are difficult to replicate. The first area is that we have a broad assortment, but it's curated, it's focused on the multi niche strategy, and it's a good balance between external and own brands. We also do have a very high degree of assortment renewal every year, and we'll talk much more about that. We do have a very attractive store network that is both available, and it's also very accessible for customers. We have a profitable, growing, and strong online sales channel. Together, those two, of course, then drives our omnichannel availability. On top of that, we have high priority on our customer meeting. We are able to provide very qualified service to our customers.
Everything leans on a very strong brand with broad appeal across a broad target group. We believe that looking at one of these individually is not that unique. The compelling aspect is really the combination of all of these areas. We also believe that this combination and those strengths put us in an attractive position within the market. The way we view it, we sit in between very established retail models. Most retail models are very focused across one dimension. Price led discounters obviously focus on price. Single niche specialists focus on depth in one area. Marketplaces obviously focus on breadth, and DIY chains obviously focus on projects. Our model really combines focus with service and accessibility and also scale. We believe that creates a position that is actually increasingly difficult to replicate.
All of this feeds into what is a fairly simple value creation model. It all starts from customer needs, deeply understanding customer needs, which enables us across the five missions to develop a very relevant assortment. That relevant assortment drives traffic through our omnichannel, which is very available and accessible. That traffic drives high frequency, but it also builds a lot of scale, which might be counterintuitive, but we'll look more about that later on. We build a lot of scale through that traffic increase. With that comes strong returns, and with our capital discipline, we are then able to also produce a strong free cash flow that can be reinvested into driving further customer value. This is very much a reinforcing cycle. The model becomes stronger the more we grow. Also looking back over the last four years, each of these areas we have also strengthened.
Really brings me into the main message of today. It's pretty straightforward. We believe that Clas Ohlson is a structurally stronger company today than it used to be. We have strengthened the business model with a clearly differentiated value proposition. We have also strengthened our profitability and returns. The updated financial targets are here to support continued profitable growth over the next few years. We have also built multiple growth engines. I think the key thing is our confidence comes from the fact that it's not one initiative that's supposed to drive the totality. It's really the combination of many drivers working together.
Let's move into how we have developed over the last four years since the last Capital Markets Day. What we've talked about so far is obviously explaining the model, the next section now will go a bit more into how the business has changed, why it's stronger, and also why we believe that these improvements we've made, why we believe they are actually structural. Let's start with where the company stands today. Over the last four years, we have not only grown, we have also improved the quality of the business. Now we'll go through the strategy operating model and then financial performance and look at how that has evolved. Let's begin with looking at what we said four years ago. The ambition was to start driving top line growth, more net sales. We laid out an ambition to be above SEK 10 billion by fiscal year 2024, 2025.
We talked about assortment development, the digital and physical availability, customer base, and also how we want to win in Finland. Apart from that, we talked about our sustainability agenda, and we also updated our financial targets. When we look at what has happened then over the last four years, and when we compare ourselves to that base before we kicked off the transformation, I think it hopefully becomes clear that we see visible improvements across most of the key areas. We've grown sales significantly from approximately SEK 8.8 billion to now above SEK 12.5 billion. We have improved our operating margin from 8.2% to 12.2%. We have grown our online sales. That's been a key priority from SEK 971 million to now above SEK 2.5 billion. We have expanded the assortment.
We came out of a period where the assortment was shrinking. We have gone from approximately 12,000 to 17,000 products over those years. We've also built out our store network. In the beginning, we closed a few stores, and since then we have opened actually 30 new, but the net adds up to 249. Importantly, we have also significantly expanded our customer base with the Club Clas now having gone from 4.3 to 6.2 members. I believe that the key thing is this is not driven by one exceptional year. It's really been year after year of disciplined execution that has put us in this position. Today the company is not only larger, we also believe that it's stronger. The key thing is it's not happened by accident.
The results that we see today are really driven by deliberate decisions that were made and deliberate focus areas that we have worked with. We have moved from a very broad assortment offering. We used to be seen as a bit of an everything store. Customers didn't really know when to go to Clas Ohlson, and we have focused in on our five consumer missions that I've talked about. The second thing, apart from also expanding the assortment from 12,000 to 17,000 products, we have also renewed the assortment with 30% every year, which means we have launched 5,000 new products every year since we kicked this off. As a proof point on the omnichannel retail side, we have also gone in terms of online sales as percent of the total, it's gone from 11% to 21%, and in the quarter we presented this morning, it's actually up to 24%.
We've also done a lot of work to diversify our sourcing base. In the past, we used to be very focused on the Nordics + China, where we've been for a long time. Now we're actually covering two out of the three global sourcing corridors with own operations across five countries. Anders will talk more about that. At the same time as doing those things, we have also lowered our cost base. As one indicator, if I look at the number of white collar FTE colleagues within the company, we are actually 35% fewer than we were four years ago. We have kept that strict and we have kept that cost base intact.
At the same time, despite the high degree of assortment renewal, expansion of new categories, we have also been able to deliver better and stronger capital discipline, and we can see that in our return on capital employed, that has gone from 17% to 34%. I think each decision that we've made has been important, but it's also together that this fundamentally, I believe, has actually improved the quality of the business model. Looking at then the financial development, it also reflects just that. Historically, we've had years of good performance, but the pattern has been a bit scattered, as we can see here on the slide. Growth has fluctuated, margins have fluctuated, returns have fluctuated. Over the last four years, the trajectory has become significantly more consistent. Our growth has accelerated, our margins have improved.
Also, I think the performance has become a bit more predictable. This is really what we mean when we talk about becoming stronger. It's not about one exceptional year, it's about higher quality business. I think that also becomes clear when you look at returns. We actually believe that one of the clearest indicators of quality and quality growth is also the fact that we can actually drive a stronger return on capital employed. Historically, the returns have varied significantly. Today, it's a different level. I think also here, the key is not the numbers in itself, but it's really what we have done to drive that returns development. We've had a stronger operating model, as I said. We do have better assortment productivity despite the size of the assortment. We have higher margins.
We have improved inventory efficiency. We'll see more about that later. We also have much stricter capital discipline. That's why we believe actually that return on capital employed deserves a more prominent role as we look at this forward. I would almost describe it as when we operate and work, this is more than just a financial target, it's a bit of a management philosophy to ensure that we drive high value growth. I think the other area that we can look at to just see also the consistency of delivery is the development that we've seen now over the last 37 months. As you know, we've had a growth target of 5% sales growth every year, and we have actually consistently delivered on this consecutively for 37 months in a row, and we just this morning reported the main number.
I think the key thing is, again, just visualizing that it's not just one year, one month, one quarter, it's been consistently going in the right direction. This does not mean that we expect every single month of the next 36 months to look exactly like this, but it gives us the confidence that it's a bit more predictable and also that we are moving in the right direction. Also importantly, looking then across the financial metrics, I think the good thing is it's not isolated to one metric. Over the last few years, we have consistently delivered at or above the financial targets we set out to deliver. Sales above target, profitability above target. We have a strong cash position and a strong balance sheet, and we've also followed our dividend policy.
I think it's fair to say that our confidence is not built on ambition, it's really built on delivery and consistent delivery. That's really what we focus on. Hopefully, looking at the track record, that also demonstrates this. At the same time, financial development is only one part of the story. We've also made meaningful progress when it comes to the work we have done on sustainability. We've significantly reduced emissions in our own operations. Our supplier compliance remains very high. Also here, the key thing is we're integrating sustainability into everything that we do, into sourcing, assortment development, supplier management. We really view sustainability as part of doing good business. It also strengthens our resilience, it supports our customer trust, and also it increasingly actually drives a lot of decisions that we make across the sourcing network, across the value chain.
When we do this well, it also actually drives efficiency, and it also enables us to have more cost effectiveness. Now, all of these changes and that progress has happened in a fairly challenged environment. The recent performance, we don't believe has been driven by an improved consumer sentiment. It's actually been pretty fragile across the Nordics over the last few years. While we have continued to grow, we have continued to improve margins, we have continued to gain relevance despite the market context. This also gives us the confidence that the performance we see here today and that we have seen is very much driven by the things that we can control and influence ourselves. That's really the core of the culture at Clas Ohlson.
We work on things that we can influence. We can see that also in a fairly fragile environment, we've been able to deliver on that. It also leans back on the strength of the assortment, the strength of the brand, and also the strength of the customer meeting and the service we're able to provide every day. Ultimately, it comes down to the right people. I actually think that one of the other strengths of Clas Ohlson is the company culture. Retail is obviously a people business, and our customer experience is delivered every day throughout our organization with more than 5,000 colleagues out there. What we can see today is a highly engaged organization. We have strong internal promotion rates. We also have a long employee tenure.
Just as one example, 55% of all the store managers, almost 250 of them, have been with Clas Ohlson for more than 10 years. Looking at engagement rate of eNPS 38, the global retail average is around 15, so we believe that this is also a strong number. We don't think these are soft metrics. They actually translate into the customer service and the customer experience. It translates into productivity and executional quality. We also believe that culture is pretty hard to just replicate. I think if you put this in combination with what I mentioned before, with the leaner overhead, I also think that with fewer people and this high engagement, I think we're really creating real talent density as we now also move ahead. This culture has also enabled us to be more focused.
Instead of talking more about the culture, I just wanted to show a short clip. This is not produced for today. It's a compilation of a few short internal videos, just to give you a bit of the sense of what we see across the organization.
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When I move around the company, I really truly see this everywhere, wherever I go, wherever I go to any of the offices, stores, or distribution center. It's really truly genuine drive, it's genuine leadership, also genuine energy. I always reflect on that every time I've worked in one of our stores, which I do every year. I always ask the colleagues, "Are the customers always this happy?" If someone has worked somewhere else, they say, "No, it's actually not that common." People come in with a smile. They expect this when you come to Clas Ohlson, and I do believe actually that is pretty unique. What I also think that the culture is doing is really driving focus for us. I think this has been one of the most important areas across the last few years. We've really deliberately gone after becoming much more focused.
As I also talked about, I think we have gone deeper into fewer but relevant customer needs and focused in on those. Historically, maybe we have been a bit focused on too many needs and not really making the biggest difference across all of them. Today we are, as I talked about, winning through carefully selected consumer missions. It's really making us into a destination now across those. The organization is much more focused because of that. We're not trying to do everything. We're doing fewer things. It also enables strong customer service because you have to be an expert in slightly fewer things, but we can go deeper into those expertise areas. I think that creates relevance, it creates expertise. Really for us, the objective is not to have the largest assortment.
The objective is to have the most relevant assortment for our customers. I think that is an important distinction. Focus, I think is also the same philosophy holds true when we look at acquisitions. The acquisitions we've done have followed the same logic. We're not trying to acquire to just diversify. We are acquiring businesses that can strengthen ourselves in our prioritized consumer missions and also that can help us evolve and develop our capabilities across the organization. The businesses you can see here, the three companies we've acquired over the last four years, Spares, Phonelife, Reservdelaronline. It helps us to deepen the expertise into carefully selected niches. It helps expand our assortment. It increases our digital reach. They are all digital native companies, pure online players.
It has helped us to really drive relevance across categories where we have already seen attractive opportunities, but where we are not able within Clas Ohlson to give the same breadth. If you add this all up, we have access to more than 200,000 products on top of the 17,000 product that we carry today. Of course, this creates a lot of synergy opportunities. We're already pursuing a lot of areas where we look at common joint sourcing, customer insights, assortment development, customer relationship development, et cetera. I'll talk more about that later. M&A remains a tool for Clas Ohlson, but it's not the strategy. It's a tool, it's not a strategy, and I will talk more about that.
Just looking a little bit, we can also see that the results are becoming visible. This is one example of Spares that we acquired 2.5 years ago. Since we acquired Spares, obviously the main focus for us has been the business to consumer part of Spares. B2B has been a bit more volatile for external reasons, looking purely at the business to consumer development, we have seen a 25% net sales CAGR since we acquired Spares. Also when it comes to profitability remains very attractive, this also gives us a platform to start expanding to new markets, learning new things for the future. Over the last few years, we have taken Batteriexperten, which is one of the brands into Denmark, launched it into Finland, we're just as we speak, launching Batteriexperten into both Poland and the Netherlands.
What I think is also encouraging here is not only the growth in itself, but it's also the quality of growth. It's asset light. It's digital, and it's also very specialized. We're not trying to solve everything, but we go really deep into these niches. Importantly, it's also complementary to what Clas Ohlson is today, but it's deeply rooted in the same needs that we're able to solve in a new way. This gives us a source of optionality also as we look forward. This brings me back a little bit to the main message. Before discussing now a bit more about the future ambition, let's briefly summarize a little bit. First of all, we believe that we are structurally stronger.
We have a stronger operating model, we have a stronger customer proposition, and we have a stronger balance sheet, and we have stronger returns. I think the key thing here is also that we have built multiple growth engines. We're not relying on one silver bullet to solve everything for us, and that's what we'll also move into. I think we've also demonstrated the ability to execute consistently. That's the foundation for what the next phase then is based on. Let's then turn into the financial framework that we have guiding us now moving forward. I think one of the most important lessons for us over the last few years is that growth and discipline must really go hand in hand. That's why we have also formalized a structured capital allocation framework.
Our first priority is always to invest in the core business, invest in our assortment, our brand, our customer meeting, and then of course, the supporting infrastructure to enable that, i.e. both logistics and IT, et cetera. The second area is, of course, selective growth investments, where we can do store expansion when we see that the returns justify the investment. We can also do rebuilds. We will talk a bit more about that later. We have done a lot of rebuilds, and that's a big opportunity for us. We can also do selective M&A when we see and if we see that there's an opportunity to strengthen ourselves in one of the prioritized consumer missions or if it builds out our core capability.
Finally, we will return excess capital to our shareholders. That's a very simple framework, but it helps us to drive clarity. It helps us to drive discipline, and importantly, it also ensures that growth never comes at the expense of returns. As I said before, the objective is not just to become bigger, it's to drive more value per share over time. That philosophy is then what sits behind the updated financial targets that we are introducing today.
With that, I'll welcome my colleague Pernilla on stage to talk a bit more about the updated financial targets.
After a couple of years of strong performance, we are now raising the target to support a disciplined, profitable growth over time. The last time we updated our financial targets was in 2022, when we raised the profitability target to a range of 7%-9%. As you already know, we have reached and over-deliver versus the target for some time now. With the new target, we are clearly stating that we are structurally stronger and more focused company than we were when the previous targets were introduced. Looking at the new financial targets, we have decided to keep our growth target 5% organic growth per year.
Even if we have been on higher growth figures recently, we believe that this is a good level and a level that will compound over time to an attractive pace if we manage to deliver on this target year in and year out. Please also note that we are talking about organic growth and growth from potential acquisition is not included. We are extremely committed of driving like for like, and at the same time making sure that we can drive growth without compromising on profitability, which lead me to our next financial target. With a new operating margin target of around 12%, we indicate that we believe that we can maintain the strong performance from recent years with a solid growth and a solid operating margin.
We also indicate that the company has structurally improved and therefore can deliver at a higher level compared to most others in the industry. The wording around is very deliberate as we are now leaving our target range, meaning that we still need some flexibility both upwards and downwards, but at the same time being very clear on what we are aiming for. Besides adjusting a profitability target, we have also decided to introduce a new target, return on capital employed. We believe that this is a relevant KPI for capital discipline for Clas Ohlson. Speaking about the disciplined capital allocation, we had also decided to keep a dividend policy as is, meaning that dividends are to comprise at least 50% of earnings per share after tax with consideration to the financial position.
Perhaps even more important than the target themselves, I would like to highlight some of the factors that makes us confident in resilient 5% organic growth. Firstly, just as Kristofer mentioned before, we are addressing a growing market. Right now, we expect 2.4% compound annual growth rate at our selective product niches the years to come. We have also shown that we are capable of driving like for like through assortment renewal, which we intend to continue doing. We also plan to continue opening stores at a balanced pace, and we see further potential for our online offering to continue growing faster compared to total growth. In addition, we have more tools to utilize. The potential to grow by adding additional product niches and selective M&As that over time can contribute to our organic growth. It's worth remembering that 5% today is very different from 5% four years ago.
We are a significantly larger company today. Maintaining the same growth rate from a much larger base requires substantially more value creation every year. We believe that 5% remains achievable while still allowing us a balance for both profitability and capital efficiency.
Thank you, Pernilla. Moving into operating margin, I think here, as for sales, actually, it's not dependent on one single lever. It's really a combination of structural advantages that we see interacting to ensure that we will deliver around 12% also in the next three years. First of all, when it comes to cost discipline and lean overhead, we've already showed that we are able to make the changes to become more cost effective. The key thing is for us to ensure that we maintain the discipline of not scaling cost as we grow. We've done that so far, and we're going to commit to be really committed and disciplined also there forward. The second thing is on the purchasing platform, we have growing scale.
Also, as we will hear more about, we have a much more diversified sourcing platform, which gives us a lot of opportunities to also drive margin from a sourcing point of view. Third, we also see opportunities to drive group synergies with the acquisitions we've made. There are opportunities to work closer together and driving synergies that way. Fourth, we also benefit from a very strong brand. With a strong brand comes marketing efficiency, lower cost of acquisition. Every krona that we spend in marketing will produce and work for us harder given the strength of the brand. Maintaining that is critical. When it comes to omnichannel, it's key. The stores strengthen our e-commerce, our e-commerce strengthen our stores. Together, it really becomes a profitable proposition. Evolving that further is also a critical area.
We also continue to work on our assortment economics. Here, obviously, private label development is a key focus area for us. With private labels, we drive diversification, we drive uniqueness, but it's obviously also a gross margin and a margin driver. Finally, we also do a lot of things to drive excellence across pricing and campaign. Not by doing massive price increases, but really working analytically, working with our category management in a smart way to ensure that we're always priced at the right way for our customers, but also to optimize our margin profile. I think the key thing is none of these are dependent on a specific economic cycle. They are really focused on things we can influence ourselves.
We also believe that these areas are now structural and a structural part of the company, and they are within our own control. Of course, profitability is important, but profitability alone doesn't drive value. We also want to ensure that we convert profits into returns.
With that, I'll hand back to you, Pernilla, to talk a bit more about.
Thank you, Kristofer. Moving on to the completely new financial target, return on capital employed, I would like to start by underlining that our business model is efficient and asset light, and that we have demonstrated strong discipline in how we allocate our capital. We have pulled great speed and accuracy in forecasting, strictly return requirements on all investment. We don't have any factories of our own, but instead we have good relationships with our suppliers, just to mention a few examples. Combined with a strong operating margin, we get a high return on capital employed, and we intend to keep it that way. With a target of around 30% return on capital employed, we aim for maintained discipline capital allocation. Sales margin and return on capital interact in a good way and help us to ensure discipline in investments throughout the company.
The return on capital helps us to ensure that growth and margins are not achieved with excess capital. The same time as we are introducing a new target, we have also decided to remove our target net debt EBITDA ratio below 2x. This should not be seen as a sign that we intend to start building debt. The reason is simply that we don't see this target as relevant where we are as a company right now. As you can see on the slide, we have not been near 2x limit, and with the new return on capital target, starting increasing debt is not on the table. It comes to dividend policy, we have decided to leave it as is, distributing at least 50% of earning per share after tax.
We believe that this is well-balanced between distributing to shareholders, but at the same time being able to invest in future growth. From an historical perspective, we have distributed all profit, sometimes more, but in recent years, we have first and foremost been committed to increasing earnings per share, and in that way, enabling a growing dividend. As you may have seen already, the board proposed a dividend of SEK 9.25 per share for the financial year 2025-2026. Being disciplined in capital allocation is a key priority. Additional distribution can be considered when capital exceeds attractive investment opportunities. Therefore, the board also proposed an extra dividend of SEK 4.75 this year.
All in all, these are our updated financial targets, 5% organic sales growth, around 12% operating margin, around 30% return on capital employed per year. Our dividend policy will leave as is, as I just explained. We look at this as a clear signal of us committing to disciplined, profitable, and growth, and to maintain a performance on a very competitive level. We are also updating our climate target. Isn't that right, Kristofer?
Thank you. Yes. Thank you very much, Pernilla. Yes. Before moving into the growth opportunity, let's also briefly touch on our sustainability targets. As I've already said, sustainability is obviously completely embedded into the strategy of Clas Ohlson and the way we work. The climate targets per se are also validated by the Science Based Targets initiative, which is obviously good because it creates external credibility and also clear framework of how we decrease emissions over time. The key thing here is that sustainability remains a key focus and that is embedded in the Clas Ohlson strategy. We do work to make the life of our customers better every single day, and we also have a proposition where we sell high-quality products that will work for a long time.
We also offer a huge spare part assortment, repairs, to extend the product life cycle of the products. It's not only about reducing footprint, it's always about constantly evolving a more sustainable business model. If we do all of these things well, it's going to help us on also the customer proposition side, and also as alluded to before, it's also going to make us use our resources overall more effectively. With that, quickly reconnecting as we move into the next stage. We believe we are structurally stronger. We have sharpened the business model. We have improved our profitability. We have delivered stronger returns. We've also now introduced a framework to help us continue that journey forward to drive disciplined, but also profitable growth with high returns going forward.
I think the key thing that gives us confidence is that there's not going to be one single factor driving this. It's really the combination of different levers, combination of different growth initiatives that gives us the confidence to continue forward. That's why we believe that the financial target is a good framework to continue this. To more specifically then frame what will drive growth as we now look ahead, I think the key thing is, and the most important area is that we do see significant room to grow. I've already talked about the SEK 350 billion as addressable market, our relatively modest market shares across those five market niches. We have a very strong brand awareness.
We only have 25% of the population being members of Club Clas. We see that the more we have been able to grow that, we have also seen a higher activity rate with the members. The key thing is also we do not, with the targets we're setting ourselves, aim at unrealistic market share gains. Also we don't need to invent completely new categories, invent new markets. It's really about continuously playing from our strengths while being innovative and continuously evolving ourselves moving forward. We believe that is an attractive starting point. To lay it out into a bit more of a structured framework, here are the levers that we want to pull and that we're going to work with that also relies on the competitive strengths of Clas Ohlson.
First one obviously being assortment. We know that we are a product company that are here to develop products that fulfill specific needs of our customers. We're going to continue working with our assortment renewal. We have an opportunity. We have five consumer missions today. We have an opportunity to expand and add more niches and more missions. We also see a big opportunity of continuously evolving the work we do on private labels. As I alluded to before, group synergies and pricing campaign remains important. Second thing on the brand, again, marketing efficiency comes out of the strength of the brand, but we also have seen over the last few years how much we have broadened the target audience, and Helena will talk more about that. We also now have some other strong brand assets across the Clas Ohlson group.
Those together with our private labels will also represent an opportunity for us to continue to expand. When it comes to the customer meeting, we will continue to evolve the store network, both with new stores and rebuilds. We're going to continue to drive the e-com penetration, which supports then the very profitable omnichannel offering that we have. The customer-centric culture is obviously a requirement to make all of these things come alive. On top of this, we also have additional growth levers. M&A can be a way to strengthen ourselves in one of the selected product niches. As I said before, it's a tool. It's not a strategy in itself. Also the operational efficiency remains a critical focus area for us to ensure that we can scale without driving cost. Again, we're not dependent on one growth engine.
We have a lot of levers to pull from. If we do that well while maintaining discipline, there is a lot of growth to be had. In the next section, we will go deeper into each of those three areas, assortment, brand, and customer meeting. Before we do that, we will take a short break, 25-minute break starting now. Let's have some coffee and mingle, and then we'll see each other back in 25 minutes.
[Break]
Welcome back everybody here in the room, and welcome back everybody online. Now we will continue with the second half of today. Now we will go deeper into how we intend to leverage now the competitive strengths that we've spent some time explaining. The first step is really digging deeper into our assortment development.
With that, I will welcome my colleague Anders up on stage.
Thank you. Hi, everyone. I'm very happy to be here today to share some insights to assortment and sourcing at Clas Ohlson. Before we move into the more details in the A in our ABC, meaning the assortment, I would like to share an overview of the addressable market in the Nordics. As you heard before the coffee break from Kristofer and also Pernilla, we operate in a very large and attractive market, which we estimate to SEK 350 billion. We're growing at approximately 2.4% estimated the coming years between 2025 and 2029. What is more important is that our market shares remain very modest across most categories. That means that the future growth opportunity is not only in the market itself, but it's also dependent on our ability to continue gaining market share.
If we look at the categories more individually, we see different type of opportunities. Fix and repair, being the largest segment is estimated to be more than SEK 141 billion, and that includes categories within lawn and garden, for example. It is excluding building materials, which can typically be found at DIY retailers. At the same time, in this category, we only have 2% market share. Even a small market share gain in this category could translate into significant growth for Clas Ohlson. Home comfort and prepping is the fastest-growing segment with a CAGR of 4% in this period, or expected CAGR. This reflects several structural trends within the Nordics, including energy efficiency, air quality at home, preparedness in general, also called prepping, and also an increasing interest in smarter and more self-sufficient homes.
In categories like tidy up and organize and also light up and decorate, we already hold stronger positions with a market share around 7%. For certain categories, Clas Ohlson is actually holding the first position when it comes to mental availability when asking consumers, and lighting is one of those. Other strong categories are kitchen and personal care, these are areas where we believe our brand, assortment, and customer relevance are particularly strong. Finally, adjacent segments illustrate that there is still substantial room to expand also where nearby customer needs over time. Of course, we see good potential in tech, connect, and entertain as well. As you can see, we have slightly higher market share in that category and also a slightly higher CAGR than average.
The overall key takeaway is that we see combination of large markets, a positive structural growth, and still relatively low market share for Clas Ohlson. Combined with our strong Nordic brand, our omnichannel model and our ability to continuously renew the assortment based on changing customer needs, we believe that this creates headroom for continued profitable growth. The overall flow behind how we renew and develop the assortment at Clas Ohlson can in short be divided into three steps. We start with what we call trend sensing. That's a data-driven approach where we continuously identify trends, we look at customer behaviors, and we look for new product opportunities. While doing that, we also of course then assess the commercial potential.
From there, we move on to what we call experimenting. This is where we test products quickly and cheaply, often in limited channels or volumes, that is done to learn fast from real customer demand. Then finally, we move into scaling. This is where products that demonstrate strong demand, profitability, and long-term potential will be scaled up through broader distribution, optimized sourcing, and increased investments. In simple terms, we sense trends, we test fast, and we scale what works. What you see on this slide is the logic behind how we think about assortment renewal at Clas Ohlson. With a wide assortment now ranging to more than 17,000 SKUs and a 30% renewal rate annually, this is of course one of the absolute key focus areas for us. At its core, this is about balancing stability with speed. Traditionally, retail has been very forecast driven.
You predict the demand upfront, you then commit to quite large production volumes, and then you optimize for low unit cost. That is a model that works very well for stable demand and long life cycles. That is actually a model that works very well for us as well, and that is important for us. A purely forecast-driven model can also create a very conservative assortment, where the cost of being wrong can be very high and change happens very slowly. What we are building instead is a hybrid model. For our proven core assortment, we continue to focus on forecasting excellence, replenishment, and scale efficiency. Alongside that, we increasingly apply a more experimentation-driven approach for selected parts of the assortment. The principle is, I would say, simple.
Instead of trying to be right from the start, we place many small bets, testing both new products and category opportunities quickly and cost effectively. Then we scale what proves to be successful. That means using low minimum order quantities, flexible sourcing, sometimes simplified packaging, and limited rollouts, often online first or in selected number of stores. If we then get signals on strong demand, we would scale the volumes, we would optimize the sourcing, and then gradually transition successful products into our core assortment. At the same time, weak performers are quickly removed, and this is one of several reasons why we have been able to expand the assortment from 12,000 SKUs to 17,000 SKUs, almost a 40% increase, without increasing the inventory in absolute terms. Stefan will present that later on in more detail.
This creates a continuous renewal engine, where products and categories earn their place in the assortment based on real customer demand, not upfront assumptions. Importantly, we do not apply the same governance model for all type of product decisions. Test products and category initiatives, they require less upfront approval and process, but a tighter post-launch evaluation. That allows us to move faster while maintaining a very strict discipline on both profitability and capital efficiency. Those two metrics are extremely important for me, my teams, and I would say Clas Ohlson as a company. Over time, we believe this really creates several advantages. One, it creates or increases the customer relevance because the assortment adapts faster to changing customer demands and trends. It improves capital efficiency because risk is spread across many smaller experiments instead of few larger bets.
It also actually increases innovation capacity because we can do that without driving wide assortment expansions. Quite disciplined, I would say. Ultimately, this is about combining the strengths of two different operating models, the efficiency and stability of a strong core assortment, and together with the speed and adaptability of a modern experimentation engine. Let me now move to sourcing, which is a very critical capability behind both our margin development and also securing resilience now and forward. Over the last few years, we have significantly expanded our global sourcing footprint by opening new sourcing offices outside China. Still, we are less people today than we were in mid-2022, when we look at the sourcing organization globally.
Today we cover two of the world's three sourcing corridors, through offices and sourcing capabilities in the Nordics, in Poland, China, Vietnam, India, and now most recently, Turkey in this year. This gives us direct access to a much larger supply market and a significantly larger supply base. That is strategically important for several reasons. First, it improves speed. Being closer to suppliers and production markets, makes or enables faster decision making, shorter lead times, improved time to markets. We also aim to source closer to our selling markets, in order to benefit from lower transportation costs, improved working capital efficiency of course, and also some sustainability benefits. Second, we think this strengthen our resilience because we are actively working to identify alternative suppliers both for new and existing products.
By diversifying our sourcing across multiple regions, we reduce the dependency on individual countries and by that, mitigate both geopolitical and operational risks, at least to some extent when it comes to geopolitical risks. At the same time, the broader supply base creates stronger opportunities for benchmarking and competitive tendering, which contributes to continued margin improvement over time. I can tell you that competition between suppliers is by far the best lever to use if you want to have a strong margin development over time. We will continue to work on that. Product quality and compliance also, of course, then remains a critical priority for us. I think this becomes even more important when we have new actors entering the markets with, let's say, sometimes less focus on quality and compliance.
We work continuously and systematically to ensure high product quality and very strict compliance processes. That is done all in-house with our own engineers, technicians, and specialists. In addition, we receive, I would say, on average, 150,000 reviews per quarter, product reviews from our customers. I saw this morning that we had 90,000 last quarter, but typically it's more than 100,000. We actively analyze these reviews and use the insights to both improve the product quality and improve our internal processes as well. Finally, innovation remains also a very critical capability within sourcing. While we are expanding our footprint outside China still is in the lead when it comes to innovation, product development capabilities, and to a large extent also, manufacturing ecosystems like raw material, et cetera. That goes for most of our categories, to be honest.
That is why we maintain a strong team and a very strong presence in China through our sourcing office in Shanghai, where we today manage more than 500 suppliers and some 600 factories too, I think. Overall, our sourcing strategy is not about replacing one sourcing market with another. It's about building a more diversified, flexible, and resilient sourcing platform. One that supports speed, innovation, risk management, and of course, long-term margin expansion simultaneously. Finally, a few words about our assortment from a brand perspective. You can see on the right-hand side our own brands, and on the left-hand side, a few examples of external brands that we offer today. At Clas Ohlson, we believe in maintaining a healthy and deliberate balance between private label brands and strong external brands. Our own brands are important because they allow us to differentiate products and also strengthen margins.
At the same time, the well-known external brands remain a very important part of our customer offering. Brands such as Apple, Bosch, Philips, P&G, and Husqvarna, for example, they help strengthen our customer trust. They increase relevance, and they ensure that customers can find both innovation and leading products within important categories. In addition, external brands typically support high inventory turnover and a very strong capital efficiency, which both, of course, then contributes very positively to our return on capital employed over time. We also see significant future potential to continue to develop our own brands further. Today, many of these products receive very strong customer ratings, and they are recognized for combining high quality with strong value for money.
Following recent acquisitions within the group, we are also expanding the portfolio of brands across the group, and this creates additional opportunities, both for knowledge sharing, for synergies, and new commercial opportunities within the group and between the companies. This is not an either/or strategy. We see the combination of trusted global brands and our strong private labels, and that creates a real competitive advantage that enables us to offer both value, innovation, and the proper range in the assortment. All of this while maintaining both flexibility and profitability over time. On this slide, you see a quite wide mix of products. Some recent or upcoming products. It's not, I would say, rocket science. It's very basic stuff, and that's the idea.
What is important is to note the breadth of our assortment. We focus on everyday needs and practical solutions across multiple customer missions or consumer missions, rather than relying on few seasonal trends, for example. This helps us maintain a relevant assortment throughout the year with limited dependency on things like weather, for example. We think we have a very strong all-weather, all year-round portfolio. Basically, we help consumers fix whatever needs to be fixed. Yes.
Great. Thank you very much, Anders. Hopefully that was a helpful sneak peek behind the curtain when it comes to the renewal engine of our assortment. That's the first competitive strength that we're going to be leveraging further moving forward. Now we're going to be moving into the next one, which is all about our brand and also our expanding customer base.
To present that, I welcome my colleague, Helena, up on stage.
Thank you. All right. Hi everyone. It's really a privilege to represent and talk about the Clas Ohlson brand here today, one of our most important assets. Across Sweden, Norway, and Finland, we have built a strong level of awareness and consumer trust over decades. In the region today, we have a total awareness of around 85%. For a company like ours, this is of course enormously important. We operate in categories where purchase decisions might be unplanned. They're highly habit driven. Mostly they're need driven. Being top of mind in these decisions, whenever a consumer needs lighting, storage, batteries or really any type of problem-solving product, that is a key competitive advantage. Pushing awareness alone, though, that will really not move the needle for us. That's not enough.
What really matters is being mentally available in the right purchase situations and for the right category entry points. For Clas Ohlson, those are our five consumer missions, as Anders and Kristofer talked about here before. When consumers think about organizing their kitchen, fixing or repairing something, upgrading their mobile device, or simply solving something that is a pain point in their everyday life, that is where we want to be the number one destination. This is strategically important because our addressable market, it's large, and it's also fragmented across many everyday categories. The more often consumers naturally associate Clas Ohlson with our chosen consumer missions, then the greater our opportunity becomes to drive more traffic, increase shopping frequency, and build market share over time.
If you look at the chart on the right, you can see that our mental availability for our five consumer missions has strengthened over the last three years across all of our markets. In other words, that means that consumers are increasingly thinking about Clas Ohlson in more situations and for a broader range of needs. Norway remains our strongest market from a brand perspective, and what this figure here really means is that 69% of the Norwegian population are spontaneously mentioning Clas Ohlson when asked upon where to go when in need of things related to any of our five missions. We're protecting also our very strong position in Sweden, and in Finland, we see the relatively highest growth, but coming from a lower base.
This development, it's important because when you combine a trusted and well-liked and well-known brand with growing mental availability and a broad and relevant assortment, as Anders talked about, products that people actually need and want to buy, then you create strong marketing efficiency. That means basically that every krona that we invest in marketing are giving us a lot of business back in terms of lower cost of acquisition, obviously, higher conversion rates, larger traffic volumes, higher conversion rates, basket sizes goes up. That is really what our commercial engine that media marketing is for us. That's how it works. Our position also gives us a lot of resilience. We've seen that not least, given the last few years in the Nordics where we have experienced a tougher consumer environment that Clas Ohlson, as a trusted and familiar brand, really tend to win.
I'd really like to point this out, that Clas Ohlson is not just a well-known retailer, but we have built consumer trust consistently over decades, really. It is a combination of things that makes the uniqueness of our brand. Strong value for money, we talked about that before. Reliable quality, a consistent customer experience, and of course, everyday relevance. Customers, they know that our colleagues in store and in customer service will help them to land an informed decision on what product to buy, and hopefully they will be very happy with that purchase, and they will use, and they will like that product, and it will serve the purpose for them, hopefully over a long time. They would also know that we have the right quality, but if a spare part would be needed, that would also be available in any of our stores.
You saw the video also earlier, and I hope that you here, and everyone in the webcast as well, are familiar with that description, that you can actually feel that when you enter any of our touchpoints. That people expect to be met with a smile, and we deliver upon that year in, year out, and day in, day out. We see it every day. All of these things in total make the Clas Ohlson brand, well, not only unique, but also durable, and our customer meeting very difficult to replicate. That creates advantages in both in terms of growth and in terms of marketing efficiency. Our second structural advantage is our customer ecosystem and loyalty program, Club Clas. We have approximately 6.2 million members today, that was also mentioned before, across all our markets. This gives us a very strong foundation to truly understand consumer behavior, and doing so at scale.
Importantly, it's not just a database. I would like to be very clear on that, but it's a highly active and highly relevant customer base. As an example, we have 9 out of 10 customers making a purchase at least once a year, being then active on a rolling 12 months basis. On average, a customer makes around five purchases a year with Clas Ohlson. In addition, we have around 70% of total sales being member-registered purchases. I would say that is a lot for retail. Again, that gives us a rich understanding which we can leverage, both across categories analysis, obviously, but also channels and life stages. This gives us the opportunity to continuously improve across several areas.
Anders, you talked about that before in terms of assortment relevance and assortment development, but also our communication, campaign efficiency, and the overall customer meeting. Over the last three years, we have grown the member base with a CAGR of around 7%. We're at the same time growing the base, we're increasing the quality of customer data, and we're improving our ability to all the time act upon these insights in various ways. Because again, the better we understand the customer, the more relevant we can become. I think relevance is the point I'm trying to make here. Whether that is through assortment recommendations, improving our communication, more precise campaigns, or a more seamless omnichannel experience.
It's more than a traditional loyalty program, Club Clas. It's becoming a core commercial capability and a true part of our marketing and commercial engine, supporting, again, both growth, retention, and efficiency across all of our business. Clas Ohlson, we have a very diverse customer base. Historically, the typical Clas Ohlson customer was more concentrated, fairly more traditional profile. Typically male, middle-aged, living in a house, owned a car. And that customer group remains very important to us still. They're highly loyal, highly valuable to us. Over time, and over these last few years, we have significantly been able to broaden the relevance of both the brand and also the assortment. Today, our customer base is much more diverse across age and gender, life stages, housing, and other types of life situations. We now see very strong representation amongst younger consumers, families, but also customers living in more urban apartments.
We have a close to 50/50 split today in the base, looking between house and apartment living. We have slightly more female than male customers overall. I'd like to point this out because this evolution is strategically important for Clas Ohlson because it expands the addressable market. It also reduces dependency quite significantly on any single customer segment. What we conclude at least, is that we are fulfilling much more consumer needs now than we did before. Those needs, they have a broader appeal and that they apply to broader demographics. We see that younger customers are growing faster than the overall base. That's particularly encouraging, I think, because what it means is that we are attracting new generations of customers and doing so early in life.
Because as customers then move through different life stages, they are moving houses, they're hopefully having children, renovating, organizing, or keeping themselves busy with different passion projects, then many of those needs align very well with our assortment. We also see that newer members tend to be, or have a stronger digital shopping behavior, which supports our omni-channel development and that roadmap, which Lene will talk a bit more about later. To conclude, we see a customer base that is becoming increasingly broad, increasingly relevant, but it's also pegged up for the future. My next point would be that we're not just only growing the customer base, but we're also increasingly able to grow customer value over time. What you see here in this chart, it's the development of the Club Clas member base over the last three years, but it's broken down into recruitment cohorts.
What becomes very clear here is the strength of retention, that Club Clas members and our customers, they tend to stay with us. They stay with Clas Ohlson. As an example, we have a large majority of customers who made registered purchases in 2023 who were still active making purchases last year in 2025. Roughly 30% of our member base account for close to 60% of registered sales. What we can see in this core group is, of course, they reflect both high engagement, they engage with us in all of our channels, they have strong shopping frequency, but they're also characterized by the fact that they are exploring our whole assortment breadth. They do shop within many of our categories. Again, for them, Clas Ohlson seems to be the number one destination for multiple everyday needs within our five consumer missions.
At the same time, we continue adding new members every year, which means the overall base keeps expanding, while retention again remains strong. This combination is very powerful. Another important driver behind retention is customer satisfaction. We continue to maintain a very strong Net Promoter Score of around 56, and we are solid on Trustpilot scores of around 4.3, 4.4. That's primarily driven, again, by strong service, trusted quality, and assortment relevance. Overall, we see a customer base that remains highly active. We are continuing to grow through new members, but also by strengthening the relationships with our existing ones. We truly believe that we have only started to unlock the full value of our customer base. Continued growth for Clas Ohlson is not solely dependent on new customer acquisition.
I think that's an important point to make because with more than 6 million members and high activity levels, only very small behavioral improvements in either direction makes a big business impact on the total. There are, of course, multiple levers to explore here when trying to steer existing customers towards more profitable behavior. To mention a few, the first one being assortment exploration. We have a major opportunity to help customer continuously discover our whole range. The second, to increase purchase frequency and basket value. We have potential to become even more embedded in consumers' lives. As they explore more of our missions, they find us more relevant for more missions, they explore more categories. We believe there is potential to have customers interacting with us even more frequently.
The third lever being omni-channel engagement. We know that customers who shop with us in both physical and digital channels demonstrate both higher engagement but also a higher customer lifetime value. We will continue to improve that seamless customer experience across channels. At the same time, of course, attract new customers and build a base across all of our markets. Finally, what gives us confidence in pursuing this opportunity is really the combination of where I started out with a strong, trusted, well-known, very well-liked brand, a strong team, engaged customers displaying omnichannel behavior, strong capabilities within customer insights and working data-driven, leveraging all available technology there is in doing so, and an assortment, of course, that remains relevant.
We believe we have a strong and resilient customer platform that will help us continue to grow both the business and customer value going forward. There is more potential ahead. Thank you so much.
Thank you so much, Helena, for giving more flavor to all the work going on in terms of our brand and our customer base. We will move into the third competitive strength that we're going to be leveraging even further moving forward, and that's our omnichannel customer meeting.
With that, I will welcome back my colleagues, Lene and Stefan. Welcome up on stage.
Thank you. As previously mentioned, our business model really makes us different from our competitors. You can see that in how we engage with our customers and where they choose to meet us. We have built a solid network of stores with city locations and shopping centers, and around 85% of our stores are located in these areas. At the same time, we are present in selected retail parks. Thanks to our footprint across the Nordics, most customers are located close to a Clas Ohlson store. We're in attractive locations with high traffic and strong neighboring brands. What really makes the difference is our service. We focus on customer missions, and our store teams are genuinely passionate about our products. This allows us to deliver strong service over time.
All our 3,800 store employees are trained to guide customers, and we invest continuously in building both product knowledge and deep understanding of the problems our products are designed to solve. As a result of this, we consistently deliver strong NPS scores over time. We built a knowledge base in our stores that customers truly value, and we keep investing in that expertise as well as in personal customer interaction. That's obviously a clear competitive advantage for us. At the same time, we are very disciplined on costs. We're committed to maintaining a lean overhead, and one important reason for that is to make sure that our stores are properly staffed so there's always someone there to help customers. Our store format is flexible, but built on a consistent concept.
Our sweet spot is around 1,000 sq m, which allows us to offer a full assortment of 10,000 to 11,000 articles. When locations vary in size, we simply adapt. We're continuously also upgrading our stores, and we clearly see sales uplift after renovations. That's why in addition to opening new stores, we are investing even more in upgrading the ones we already have. Finland is a good example of this. We upgraded store there to better align our assortment with the customer needs, and we're seeing strong results. Over the past four years, we renovated around 50 stores, and we plan to increase the pace by another 50 in the next three years. At the same time, we will continue opening new stores at around 10 per year.
Now if we move further to e-commerce. We built a strong e-commerce channel that reaches customers, expands our assortment, and drives profitable growth. A key part of this is our web-only range, which allows us to move faster both in terms of innovation and testing. We can launch new products online without the space limitations of physical stores, which means we can quickly see what works and scale it. Our endless aisle also plays an important role. It increases both the size and the relevance of our assortment. It allows us to go both deeper and broader in our categories than we can in stores alone. Tech and accessories are good examples here. At clasohlson.com, we offer exactly that.
On top of this, we further strengthen our offer by the different online companies in the group, which offers another tens of thousands of products. We can also offer a broader price range online. By including premium products, we increase the average transaction value and profitability. In fact, ATV online is 3x higher than in stores, supported by the strong brand mentioned earlier. Our online store is not just a place to buy. It become a key part of the customer journey. Customers use it to explore products, find inspiration, read product information, and check availability in their nearest store. All of this drives more frequent traffic, both online and in physical stores. We also see that online sales are growing faster than total sales, and our recent acquisitions are adding further to this momentum.
With Teknikdelar, Batteriexperten, and Teknikmagasinet, we now operate more than 20 online storefronts compared to just one before. That brings us to how everything comes together in our omnichannel model. Our omnichannel model is built on a unique store network that's closely integrated to our e-com operations, creating value both for customers and for us. For customers, this means a very flexible experience. They can easily move between online and store and pick up their order in stores at no extra cost. This is where it becomes really powerful. When customers choose to collect their order in our physical store instead of traditional pickup points, it creates an important touchpoint. That's where we can meet the customer, offer guidance, build relationship, and drive additional sales, strengthening both the experience and the value per customer.
In this way, our stores are not just the distribution channel, they're an active part of sales and the overall customer experience. Together, our channels complement each other and help drive both loyalty and profitable growth. Internally, it's really about using the full platform as effectively as possible. We use our store network as part of our e-commerce engine, both for fulfillment and collection points. That helps reduce costs, increase availability, and drives traffic back to stores. The fact that more than 50% of our orders are fulfilled by our store network really shows how well integrated our channels are.
With that, I hand over to you, Stefan.
Thank you, Lene. Being this growing omnichannel company creates exciting challenges for our logistics team and infrastructure. Sorry. As Lene just mentioned, 50% of our e-commerce orders are fulfilled through our own store network. The rest of our e-commerce orders are produced and shipped out from warehouse in Insjön, Dalarna in the middle of Sweden, with good transport infrastructure to Norway and to Stockholm, where the ferries to Finland depart. While e-commerce orders volume continue to show growth annually, the channel still represents a relatively minor share of our total logistics volume compared with the roughly 2,000 pallets that we ship daily to the 249 stores. The Clas Ohlson Distribution Center is a well-maintained logistics hub covering approximately 70,000 sq m. To be cost efficient, we normally operate only daytime, but in peak season, we go for 24/7.
The warehouse has a high degree of automation technology, hence an opportunity for further scale effects. Although this level of automation also comes with the responsibility and require long-term planning together with other parts of the organization. We stay very close to our colleagues in sales and assortment to make sure we invest in time, but also in the right capabilities. We should, for example, be capable to handle everything from a small, tiny AirPod to a large 110 kg snowblower. I told you logistics in Clas Ohlson is exciting, didn't I? As illustrated on this slide, our group currently operate warehousing facilities at four locations in Sweden. Our subsidiaries, with 100% e-commerce offering, have their facilities in Stockholm and Malmö. From Malmö, we can actually reach over 100 million European customers within two to three days of lead time.
As Kristofer and Anders previously pointed out, we strongly believe that the roughly 30% assortment renewal rate has been and is a key success factor. Maintaining this pace of assortment renewal requires a high degree of discipline and operational excellence across all the organization. As pointed out earlier today, during the past three years, we have increased sales, expanded assortment size by 40% from the 12,000 to the 17,000 SKUs. As you can see on this slide, simultaneously improved inventory efficiency by reducing inventory's share of sales. This contributes not only to a stronger return on capital employed, but also to the release of valuable warehouse space. Talking about space. As we speak, me and my team are engaged in the biggest investment from logistics perspective in Clas Ohlson's history, investing roughly SEK 450 million. We call this Project Flow. This investment is about three things.
Increase our total capacity to support the planned sales growth for the coming years. Also note that we design it today to enable even more room to scale in the future. This growth opportunity can actually be seen in this slide. The space between the blue and the brown shuttle area is room for further expansion. Secondly, we add capability to build our outbound pallets a bit smarter to enable our store staff to spend even more time on customer facing activities and less time on logistics. The third goal is to strengthen our omnichannel capabilities while improving operational efficiency. By increasing productivity in our distribution center, we ensure a cost competitive operation regardless of whether we should ship an e-commerce order or replenish our stores.
These new capabilities are expected to go live in the second half of 2027 and deliver annual efficiency gains of approximately SEK 100 million. That was a brief introduction of our logistics operations, and with that, I hand over to Kristofer.
Thank you very much, Stefan, and thank you very much, Lene, for going deeper into our omnichannel capabilities, including logistics. Before we conclude, what I would like to do is to briefly touch upon one area of optionality. That's basically acquisitions. Over the last few years, we've demonstrated that we can identify, acquire, integrate businesses into Clas Ohlson. Importantly though, acquisitions are not required to achieve our financial targets. The financial targets are rooted in the strength of the core business. We do see acquisitions as a helpful tool when we want to strengthen our consumer missions, evolve our capabilities, or deliver attractive returns. As always, growth alone is not sufficient. It's really about ensuring that we have the strategic fit and also that the economics work for us. Our approach here remains very disciplined and also very selective.
The philosophy is really reflected also in the simple approach that we apply to M&A. We have intentionally a very simple M&A framework. We look for businesses that basically strengthens our existing model and businesses that can deepen our expertise, and I think the ones we have done is really an example of that. An area where we can expand our customer relevance, add capabilities, or build things that are difficult to do ourselves organically. Every opportunity is evaluated through this same lens. Does it strengthen our strategy? Does it culturally fit with Clas Ohlson, and can it generate attractive returns? It's not more difficult than that. If it's not, then we simply walk away. That discipline is critical, and as I've mentioned multiple times today, we are interested in driving value, not simply just increasing the size of the company.
With that, let me bring the different parts of today's presentation together before we start moving into Q&A. We've covered a lot of ground this afternoon in a fairly short period of time, and we have discussed how the business has evolved over the last four years. We have tried to explain how the operating model works, how we think about growth moving forward, how we think about profitability, but also how we would like to allocate capital moving forward. Before we open up for questions, let me try to summarize some of the key messages. Some of the key messages can really be linked into the three big overall areas. First of all, we believe that we are a structurally stronger company. We see that based on the transformation, and also the improved quality of the business model, as well as the more clearly differentiated value proposition.
Second, we have a repeatable value creation model. It's a model that is really centered around the consumer missions, our constant assortment renewal, and also our omnichannel capabilities, and also the discipline in terms of how we then allocate capital across those areas. At the same time, we see multiple opportunities for growth. As I've repeated a few times, it's really about a combination of multiple levers to drive that growth. We're not dependent on one single initiative. We have a broad opportunity range. Taking into account, it's really those things that give us confidence as we move forward. As I showed before, we have this simple framework to explain how we focus forward.
At the center is really where we create a lot of the value for our customers. It's our assortment, it's our brand, it's our customer meeting. This is where we create relevance, it's where we build trust, and it's also where a lot of the future growth will come from. Obviously supporting this, we have some supporting levers with selective M&A, as I just talked about. Also operational efficiency, which remains extremely important so that we can continue to scale with efficiency without adding cost. Importantly, none of these elements stand alone. They really work together to strengthen the totality, and they reinforce each other.
Together, they're supposed to support value creation over time, which is summarized in our very simple value creation model, where it all starts with the consumer needs, which drives relevance and traffic into the structured omnichannel capabilities, which builds frequency and scale, and in turn, that should deliver strong returns and also produce a strong cash flow that can be then reinvested into further customer value. That logic, we believe, is reflected on in the framework for the next few years in terms of the financial targets. I do believe that the target is really an outcome of the fact that we're becoming a stronger, more focused, and more disciplined company than in the past. As I said before, this is really grounded in the strength of the business today, and it's supported by different growth engines. We also have some clear growth optionality also as we look ahead.
With that, let me simply conclude with the fact that we believe that we are a stronger company. We have a clear strategy, stronger operating model, stronger financial profile, and also a more disciplined framework in terms of how we will continue to drive value over time. We will, of course, not be able to know exactly what the future holds, but I really believe that we are in a better place today than we were a few years ago, which provides resilience, but also discipline in terms of moving forward. Thanks so much for the attention.
Now we will move from presentation mode to Q&A mode. Before we start taking questions, we will rearrange a little bit on the stage, right? That we can get all our colleagues up here on stage. In order to have eager hands in the room. That's good. As promised, time for Q&A, and we'll start by taking questions from the studio here in Stockholm. Please raise your hand if you have a question and wait for the microphone. I think Magnus Råman, perhaps you are first.
Thank you. Magnus Råman, SB1 Markets. I'd like to start asking about the private labels. You've mentioned them here in the presentation, but you have not disclosed over the recent years or for that matter, any time, I think historically, the exact percentage of your sales. You talk in your annual report about a rough number. Could you perhaps let us know what your private label share is today? Or alternatively, how it has developed in the recent, say, three years, and what you expect for the coming years?
Yeah. No, I think we have been fairly transparent that we are 50/50. It's approximately 50% of sales in owned brands that we source ourselves and 50% in known brands. We believe that is a healthy split. As Anders talked about, they serve different purposes. We want to grow the total. We also believe that it's important to find a balance to ensure we drive the right relevance and also the right margin profile. We have a 50/50 split in terms of sales today, and we also expect that split to be more or less the same. Of course, we work a lot with developing the private labels. We now have more private labels, at the same time, of course, innovation speed, et cetera, on known brands goes hand in hand.
We want to grow the total, and we believe 50/50 is a pretty good balance. I don't know if you want to add something, Anders, to that.
No, I think you summarized it very well.
Okay.
Over the recent years, when you have developed your assortment quite a lot and you have, in my opinion, grown your consumables offering, hasn't that led to an increase in your private label share?
On a total yearly basis, there are periods where it might be higher than 50%, but if I look on a yearly basis over the last few years, it is actually fairly evenly split. I think if you look at the total growth, it's really driven by both. As long as we can, in the disciplined way, deliver on the targets and deliver on profitable growth, it's not the end in mind in itself that's key, are you having a high private label share. We believe the balance is actually pretty healthy.
Sure. When you say 50/50, you mean of sales? Gross profit, it's a higher share, of course. Would you care to say anything about what the gross margin difference is very roughly in percentage points?
No, we don't want to go into that into detail. Obviously, the gross margin overall is higher on private labels than they are on known brands. While as also Anders pointed out, I think a key point is, of course, that the private labels obviously have a longer product life cycle, takes longer to develop, ship, all of these things. Whereas the known brands might have a lower gross margin, but the capital efficiency is high. The inventory turnover is high, lead time is shorter, and also importantly, if you look at the website right now, for example, I think we have, is it 11 different known brands now on robotic lawn mowers? I think the most expensive one is around SEK 40,000. Even if the gross margin percentage is slightly lower, it still delivers a lot of value and opportunity for strong microeconomics.
Yeah.
We don't want to disclose in detail the exact margin, but it's really about balancing those two in an effective way.
Great. I have a question about online. You mentioned here, or you showed both in numbers and in penetration how online has been growing a lot. I assume that a lot of this growth is driven by the acquisitions you have made as of recent years. Would you care to let us know what the online penetration is for your core Clas Ohlson banner?
I think roughly our online sales, I talked about SEK 971 million, I think, four years ago. Online sales only on the Clas Ohlson site has almost doubled over those few years. Now we report everything in one segment, as you know. I think we have, in a few of the quarters, also reported the clasohlson.com sales, and it has varied between 15%-20% over the last few quarters. The acquisitions obviously add scale, but we also see the Clas Ohlson online sales growing faster than the total Clas Ohlson development.
Great. I have one final before we roll over. More people want to ask questions, naturally. A little bit of a futuristic question perhaps, you talked about also the strength of your brand and how that helps you in terms of marketing/traffic generation cost to your Club Clas and so on. How do you view the development as of recently in terms of competition for AdWords, the cost to drive traffic in the market out there? If you can compare that a little bit to what you see internally of your cost to drive traffic, especially now when you say that you have an ambition to expand online further as a share and totally.
Maybe if you want to elaborate of your views of how this is going to change in the coming few years when people do their searching, maybe in an LLM instead of on Google, and how you position that.
Helena, do you want to give some flavor?
Yes.
Do you want me to?
Yes, sure. As I talked about, the core in our commercial engine is, again, the high trust and the awareness and the strength of the brand itself. It gives us a lot of competitive advantages, obviously. That together with a well-orchestrated and data-driven system that allows us to continuously optimize across channels, across categories, across markets. Doing that, we look at all types of data points and traffic acquisition sources, where LLMs is one of them. Looking at that mix in total, we have a strong foundation to continuously optimize that and keep a close eye on it. In terms of Clas Ohlson, we also have our stores, obviously, that gives us a whole other foundation to build on. Whereas our subsidiaries with a pure online business, they have another business model and also a different way of continuously acquiring traffic and customers.
I think that will probably hold, in comparison with Clas Ohlson. We have a lot of synergies to capture there as well, looking into the whole media landscape that is obviously evolving quite fast. Yes.
Maybe just to complement on that is also those of you following us in detail, you have also noticed that we have reported slight increases in marketing spend over the last few quarters and the last year. That also relates to the fact that we are working more dynamically with marketing also on the Clas Ohlson side, which is also, as Helena talked about, we have our acquired companies that work in a slightly different way. We are also becoming more of an online-centric player in terms of spending dynamic marketing where we do see strong return on investment. I think that's to just add a bit of flavor on that.
We plan to continue with that, obviously, making sure that whatever money is on the table, that's the ones that we want, but not overpaying.
Niklas Ekman here from DNB Carnegie. I was at another Capital Markets Day for another company a couple of weeks ago, and I think 50% of the time was to discuss AI, which has hardly been touched upon at all today, which is actually kind of liberating. I assume that this is still a core part of your strategy internally in the company. I'm curious about your use of AI, what kind of benefits you see from that, what kind of tech investments you've done, whether these are going to increase, and what kind of benefits you expect from that.
Yeah. No, I think it's a really fair question. We were joking about that the other day, that we might be the only management team in 2026 having a Capital Markets Day without a lot of AI slides. I think for us, I would give a couple of perspectives and then happy to fill in. I think the first point is, for us, AI is a huge opportunity. It's not a threat. We're not a SaaS company. We are a company focused on products that solve customer needs. It's a huge opportunity. I think the second one is where we have pursued this the most is really when it comes back to operational efficiency. I talked a bit about the white collar employee reductions we've done over the last few years being now 35% fewer.
I think we launched our first only developed GPTs back in, was it 2023, 2024?
I think it was.
2023, I think.
I think it was on the spring 2022.
Yeah. Right after. What we have learned is that you need a trigger to start driving behavioral change within the company. It's not enough to come top down and say, "Let's work AI." We have created triggers by becoming more effective and then obviously relying on effective tools internally to get more done faster. If you look at our product enrichment, product information, imagery, a lot of things are automated today. I think we are operating a big part of the product information with fewer people, and then obviously you have seen the size of the launches, et cetera. I think this is a concrete example. We really believe AI being an enabler across the whole company, and of course, we are applying this anywhere possible. I think and I know that all of us use it every day as an enabling tool.
We look at it as an opportunity for Clas Ohlson. It's already helping us scale things operationally. Then, of course, there are also all kinds of customer-facing opportunities as we move forward. Here is also where we have the acquired companies being early on in terms of customer service, all of these things that we're collaborating with. Big opportunity, and we are working with it. We feel that's a natural way of doing business today, right? Otherwise, you're going to miss out a lot.
Very good. Thanks.
We have a question over here. Andreas?
Yeah. Andreas Lundberg, SEB. On the investment in Insjön, how do you think that will affect your capital efficiency? That's my first question.
The investment in DC?
Yes.
It's going to help us, because obviously the intent on the investment is obviously, as Stefan talked about, to increase capacity, but also, of course, to drive efficiency. We're investing between SEK 400 million and SEK 450 million, and we are looking at efficiencies of approximately SEK 100 million a year, which means four-year payback. The intent, of course, is to continue doing what we have, I think, especially Stefan and Anders have talked about, maintaining the assortment expansion, assortment renewal, without driving net working capital. I think that it's an enabler of maintaining discipline on the inventory side. We want the graph that Stefan talked about to maintain under control. I think that's where, if I look at our business model that we've talked about today, it is slightly different from lots of others.
A lot of other companies focus on small assortment, high volume per SKU, low price per SKU. You need the limited assortment to drive high stock turnover. We are trying to do something fairly more complex. The investment in Insjön, back to your question, is an enabler of maintaining capital discipline.
That goes to the other question I have about balance sheet. Obviously, you generate a lot of cash and will likely continue to do so. Even with the extra dividend now and with the investment in Insjön, you will be, at least in my view, over-capitalized very soon again. At what level of cash do you think you are not over-capitalized?
We're taking one big step at a time. I think, looking back over the last few years, we showed some history here. Obviously, we want to and we take pride in a strong financial position, a strong balance sheet. I think we have, over the last few years, shown now more structural discipline and also the fact that we are able to structurally improve the company. Now we are in a position where we feel a good balance. Of course, it's a good thing that we can invest both SEK 600 million now in the year to come, so a bigger investment than before, and at the same time, do an increased dividend. We take step by step.
I think the capital allocation framework is, of course, here to drive that discipline, to ensure that we invest where it really delivers a return, but also that we will continuously also distribute cash to our shareholders. I think this is another reason, of course, where return on capital employed is a good metric, because with too much cash, that's also going to impact Return on capital employed. We're taking steps, and we also believe in having resilience. We believe in having a strong balance sheet. We are very long-term and are obviously always looking for the right investment opportunities that deliver the return.
Thanks.
We have Erik coming up with a question as well.
Yeah. Thank you. Erik Sandstedt at Kepler Cheuvreux. I got a question about growth opportunities in light of your strong performance now in the Nordics and your new financial targets. Have you basically ruled out any international expansion other than the companies that you have already acquired? Ruling out new stores outside of the Nordics, is that not on the agenda at all?
We're not ruling out anything. We've been around for 108 years. We're building a structure to be around for a few more hundreds of years. Of course, we're not ruling out anything. I think the message today is that we see significant growth opportunities where we are strong and profitable, and obviously we focus a lot on that. With expansion of the acquired companies, of course, we're learning a lot of different things. We're learning new markets, we're learning and getting new insights. We're not ruling anything out, but I think it's fair to conclude that looking at the financial targets we're going through here today, they do not require us to move outside of the home base, but we're not ruling that out.
Yeah. Thanks. Perhaps a specific question on like-for-like sales, 7% now in Q4 and for the full year. Obviously, you're growing faster in the online business than in the store network. Could you share any details about like-for-like sales also in the store network?
That's an incredibly important metric. That's the one that we look at, I would say the most within the company, because we have seen far too many examples of when you start looking at the total growth and you lose track of what's happening like for like. Without going through the details, I can confirm that the like for like that we have seen over the last few years is a combination of strong like for like in the store network and then together with the online sales. We don't want to end up in a situation where we compensate by expanding into new locations, new stores, and start losing sight on the like for like. The like for like is really a quality indicator and extremely important.
We have seen like for like on the store network over the last few years, and the intent is to continue that.
Maybe related to that, just coming back to the financial targets. A lot of companies frame the targets as achieving at least 12% or at least 5%. You're fairly specific here. Is that just conservatism or is it rather so that growing, for example, more than 5% may not be good for the business in terms of finding good store locations, the right staff, and so forth? How should we think about that?
I think as we have outlined, the financial targets are designed as a combination to drive value creation longer term. I do not think that looking at any of those individually is a cap. We just reported May numbers this morning where we grew organically 9%. I think the key thing is, the numbers are not the cap. It is basically our estimation of where we think we are going to be around. I think it is also important framework to ensure that we do not start running after growth that is not creating value. We are very long-term, and we ensure that all the growth that we deliver, it also produces value, and it also translates into returns. Obviously I would not look at it as caps. We are going to do as much as possible, but we will not fall for the temptation of running after growth at any cost.
Thanks. Maybe finally, if I may, in terms of the assortment, you mentioned that you're quite quick at removing underperforming products and making space for new products or good products. How do you actually do that in practice? Is it just by discounting or are there any other tools that you can use?
I would say that discounting is the primary one, and it works very well, I would say. 249 stores are doing their job, and the online storefront is probably the quickest one that we can use as well. Easier to change price on those 5,000 e-com only products than changing price tags on 249 stores. Yes, discount is one. We start very systematically with phase out as soon as we see that this is not a winner that we would like to scale. Yes.
I think the key thing is, as well, as Anders talked about, we don't want the consequences to be too big, and that's why we're trying to work in a very flexible way, as Anders laid out, that we're not having too high volumes of things to phase out. Yes, fully agree.
Thanks.
Any more questions from the live audience? Yes, one more. Magnus.
Thanks. Quick follow-up on, I think it was interesting your reply about store expansion. You're not ruling out anything, you're saying. As a follow-up to that, what do you think are the main learnings you would draw from your previous internationalization adventures when you went into U.K., Germany, even to Dubai, with stores? What went wrong or what would you like to do differently if you would attempt again?
First of all, my comment about ruling out should not be interpreted as we are sitting here with a plan to expand. It would be stupid to rule anything out, I think. I think we have shown that we can develop and evolve. That said, I think it's very fascinating to follow how you expand in 2026 versus in 2008. We entered the U.K. back in 2008, and obviously the world looked in one way then. It looks in a completely different way today. I think the most recent website translations when we entered new markets with Batteriexperten and it cost us like SEK 20,000. It's really about the discipline of doing things in a customer-centric way with the right assortment, pricing, right fulfillment, payment options, all of these things.
I think the key thing is it's very easy today to enter new markets, but just by entering new markets doesn't mean you will be the winner in a new market. I think what we have also learned as, I think, explained from a lot of my colleagues today, is also that Clas Ohlson as a business model is slightly different. Just opening up a store saying, Clas Ohlson, welcome, it's not that easy for customers to understand exactly what it's about. As I talked about in the retail models, we're not a discounter, we're not a DIY projects, et cetera. We are slightly different. Of course, the Clas Ohlson brand requires also to be very explicit and clear on the customer proposition.
I think Finland is a good example of that. You go to Finland today and you look at what we're promoting and merchandising in our Finnish stores, it's the same base assortment as the other two countries, but it's slightly enhanced in some areas and decreased in others. You always also need to adapt to the local context, what the customer needs are, what the competition looks like. I think we're also training on understanding how we have to adapt to be relevant to different certain countries. There are a lot of different learnings, both on the countries where we're existing today and also on the learnings we're getting by expanding on some of the Spares brands, for example.
We're collecting a lot of insights, learnings, again, that said, the market is huge here. We are profitable, we're growing, and it's always good to focus where you're strong, where you can produce strong returns, and build ourselves stronger and not spreading out ourselves too thinly.
Great reply. Just final growth avenue, viewing new growth opportunities. A number of years back, you launched an initiative in services that you actually mentioned here also in your presentation, Clas Fixare. We haven't heard much. Perhaps you can give us a little bit of an update, maybe some revenue number for the Clas Fixare business or margins if they dilute or accrete your group margins.
Basically, I think the first most important thing is to comment that the purpose of Clas Fixare is to drive fantastic service to our customers and to continue to build the strong Clas Ohlson brand. Looking at what Helena talked about in terms of brand, obviously, we are very established in Sweden. Fixare is still only available in Sweden, it's an opportunity. We say to our customers, we fix it together. For Fixare, it's if you can't fix it, we fix it for you. It's a very appreciated service. It's a way to build the brand. It's a way to build and deepen the relationship with customers. It's not identified as one of the growth drivers or profit drivers of the total company. It's part of the customer proposition. It's doing well.
I don't know whether you want to comment anymore, but it's doing well. It's part of the service, but it's not a standalone growth driver. It's a way to further drive the brand in a very mature market.
Thanks.
I'm trying to see if there's any more hands in the air. No, not right now. I'm also keeping track of the webcast. It seems like the webcast viewers think that you have asked really relevant questions. I have a fairly open question here from the webcast about your outlook for this financial year. If you want to comment on that, Kristofer?
No, we have talked about the overall targets, and obviously, the targets are effective as of May 1st. Of course, we've had a good start to that year from a sales point of view with good growth, and I don't think I want to guide more than that one month into the year.
If that was it in terms of questions, I think it's time for us to wrap up. I'll hand it over to you, Kristofer, for just some final remarks.
Okay. Yeah. Thank you very much. Great to see a filled up room with engagement around our journey and also lots of people calling in today during the web conference. I hope we've been able to explain a bit more about our model, what has taken us to where we are today, and also what our plan is to continue this forward. We've been around for 108 years, I think me and my colleagues here on stage representing 5,000 other people feel that we have more in front of us than behind us, which I think is a good signal that there's tremendous opportunity, and it's a privilege to work from a position as a brand of like Clas Ohlson, where there are so many different opportunities.
I think that's it for today, and thank you so much for taking the time out to be here today.