Welcome to the Embellence Group audiocast with teleconference Q3 2021. For the first part of this call, all participants will be in listen-only mode, and afterwards there'll be a question and answer session. Today, I am pleased to present Olle Svensk and CFO Pär Ihrskog. Speakers, please begin.
Right. Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Embellence Group third quarter presentation. My name is Olle Svensk. I'm the CEO of Embellence, and with me today is Pär Ihrskog, CFO. Next page, please. I will start off telling a few words about Embellence Group. We are a group that acquire, own, and develop strong brands in wallpaper, textile, rugs, and adjacent categories. We have the mission to make the everyday a little bit more beautiful and more inspiring, and we have a vision to be a driving force in the changing wallpaper and interior decoration markets. Next page, please. We have a house of brand strategy, today we have five strong brands with Boråstapeter being the largest one.
We have Cole & Son sitting out of Great Britain, Wall&decò from Italy, Hersfal, our pure direct-to-consumer brand. Then most recently, beginning of this year, we acquired Pappelina, the first acquisition outside wallpaper, which is our home turf, if you like. Pappelina is rugs. Next page, please. Our three strategic core areas, that's first of all to continue leverage on premium and the luxury. The reason for that is that premium luxury offers better underlying gross margin, but also an interesting market growth. Secondly, we are going for further international growth organically and through acquisition. Third element is to, through digital toolbox and digital tools, come closer to our core customer, which is end consumers, but also architects and designers. This we do by launching direct consumers in new geographies, but also to develop different tools. Next page, please.
A few of the highlights from the third quarter. Net sales for the period reached SEK 135.5 million. Small growth. We can record a growth of 3.6%. The quarter itself is the smallest one typically for us, and now even more so as the markets were quite soft, affected by the fact that people were traveling more. Traveling restrictions were in most countries lifted, we also had heat wave across many markets in Europe that affected our sales and demand. Net sales of the nine months, we are up 17.1% after nine months. Adjusted EBITDA SEK 18.3 million. This is a decrease compared to last year's same period. Last year we had a very low cost levels with virtually no traveling at all or any investments or costs and participation in fairs. In general, we had a low cost base.
Our adjusted EBITDA of the nine months now is SEK 69.4, which is corresponding to a margin of close to 15%. Other important events in the period here that we have appointed Robert Shams Smolander as Head of Group Change Management. He will drive different change projects that we are running right now, but also handle and manage sustainability on a group level. Another point that we want to mention is also that we are changing the legal structure of the setup in Borås. Boråstapeter responsibility for design, brand, and sales will be one legal entity, and then the factory itself will be another legal entity.
We have recruited an MD for Borås Tapetfabrik who will join here in November. On the right side, I also want to mention that Boråstapeter, we won the Swedish Design Prize for motion picture advertising. We got this prize last week, and amongst other companies that we competing against was Volvo. We did beat Volvo with our advertising film that has been running and has created a lot of attention and traffic into our own pages and webpage. Next page, please.
Some more financial numbers then. As already mentioned, our net sales ended up at SEK 135.5 million in the quarter. That should be compared to SEK 130.8, which is an increase of 3.6%. That increase is built up by an organic currency adjusted negative growth of -7.5%, compensated by a growth from acquisition of 9.9%. Our EBITDA ended up at SEK 18.3 million compared to SEK 21.2. As Olle already mentioned, compared to quarter last year, we had some more activities within fairs and marketing activities and also our activities on e-commerce that we have quite some in the quarter 3 here. Finally, on the cash flow, it's slightly lower than
Quarter 3 last year, SEK 16.1 million compared to SEK 18.9 million. The main reason for that is the lower operating income. Next slide, please. This describes again the growth from Q3 last year to Q3 this year, where we had, as already mentioned, a positive effect from the acquisition of Pappelina, a negative organic growth, but also a positive currency effect of 1.2% or SEK 1.5 million. Next slide, please. If we look into specific of Nordic, the Nordic region represent 47% of the turnover in the group. We ended up at SEK 64 million net sales compared to SEK 64.6 million, a reduction of 1%. As mentioned already, it was primarily effects of increased traveling and warm summer weather in Sweden. Our result, EBITA, ended up at SEK 7.7 million versus SEK 7.9 million.
We have positive effects coming from the increased share of premium sales, which now is 31% of the total sales in the Nordic, which is 2% higher than last quarter, and 10% higher than last year. We also have negative effects affecting the EBITA, which is input materials to our craft production in Sweden and also, of course, the activities around e-commerce and digitalization. Next slide, please. If we take a closer look at Europe, our segment Europe. Europe represent 14% of our total turnover, and the net sales ended up at SEK 54.3 million compared to SEK 51.7. Again, of course, we have the positive contribution from Pappelina, also Germany, a very important market for us, was strong in quarter three. Some other key markets in Europe, we saw a slightly negative growth, France, U.K., and Italy.
Our results, EBITA, ended up at SEK 8.3 million, which is lower than quarter three last year, where we had SEK 11 million. Again, here, it's our activities around e-commerce as well as new launches, marketing activities, and trade fairs, which we participated in the quarter three, which we didn't do last year. Finally, rest of the world. Here we see a good increase in net sales. Rest of the world represent 13% of the total turnover, and we ended up at net sales of SEK 17.2 million, which is an increase of 19% compared to Q3 last year. We had a positive organic growth in the region as well as the positive effect from Pappelina. Our result ended up at SEK 2.3, more or less the same as last year, quarter three. Also here, we have activities around our e-commerce which drive some cost.
Just a recap where we are on our financial targets. The first target is net sales growth, where we say we should double our sales until 2025. We have communicated earlier that means on average approximately 15% per year growth. That should come both from organic and acquisition. The growth in Q3 was, as I said, 3.6%, and after 9 months, our growth is 17%, where organic growth for the first 9 months is 7.4% and acquisition 10.7%.
On the operating margin, we should be at least at 15% EBITA margin over a business cycle. In the quarter, we had EBITA of 13.5%, and after 9 months, we had 13.2%. Our adjusted EBITA after 9 months was 14.7%. The third target is the leverage, where we should not go above 2.5 net debt ratio to EBITDA. End of quarter 3, we were at 1.0. Dividend is not applicable at this stage in this quarter. Next slide, please.
Trying to sum up the third quarter. Continued growth in revenue with 3.6%, much softer than the second quarter that was up 33%. It is important for us to really see what is short-term variations and fluctuations and what is the long-term trend for us. Needless to say, demand was affected by the increased traveling and also by warm weather in some countries that really had a spike on sales. Goods supply is strained, in better balance now compared to last year. Last year, we had hardly any delivery into our warehouse for Cole & Son and Wall&decò in the second quarter. This year is much more balanced in the second and the third quarter.
We have made a very important recruitment here of Robert that will join here end of this year, who will drive our change agenda, but also sustainability, and will be involved in add-on acquisitions. The legal and operational change of Boråstapeter is something that we're working hard on now and that will fly as of January this year. Summing up more the long-term trend of the nine months, our revenue is up 17%. We are in line with our five-year plan, even though we have just started, only nine months in a five-year plan. It's really in the beginning. We have said that we will double our sales. We will have solid profitability. We are right now in an adjusted EBITDA of the nine months of 14.7%, which is ahead of last year.
We have a high activity level in our digitalization and also in improving our sustainability offering going forward. Thank you very much for this. Now we are ready for any questions, for some questions if there are.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we are now ready to take your questions. If you wish to ask a question, please press 01 on your telephone keypad. There'll be a brief pause while any questions are being registered. Just as a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, that's 01 on your telephone keypad. There are no questions on the audio lines currently, so I'll hand back over to our speakers.
All right. Thank you. Yeah, as I said before, this is a marathon for us. This is not a 100-meter run. We are in line with what we have said as our long-term target to double our sales in 5 years. After 9 months, we are up 17%, with an adjusted EBITDA of 14.7%. We will continue, and we are absolutely certain that we have the right strategy. Just up to us now to execute on it. Thank you.