Thank you. Good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to Haypp Group's Capital Markets Day. It's our first Capital Markets Day, and we're gonna use today to both give everybody a little bit of background on our business and how it works, give a little bit of an update on how we've been doing over the last two years since we've IPO'd, and give a little bit of a glimpse into the future on what we're doing. And while many things continue to change and evolve within this space and within our business, the one thing which has remained absolutely constant to us from the beginning is our higher purpose. Our mission is to inspire healthier enjoyment to millions.
And when we talk about healthier enjoyment, we take a look at the tobacco and nicotine risk continuum, which is broadly accepted around the world as denoting where on the risk spectrum, between zero and 100, a broad range of tobacco and nicotine products are. And what you can see at the upper end of the spectrum are the combustible inhalable products, such as cigarettes and cigars, and then products get radically safer as you come down to dealing with heat-not-burn products, vaping. Safer still for snus, and the safest products which are there from a general consumer base are undoubtedly nicotine pouches. We operate in the space of predominantly snus and nicotine pouches, and in the last 12 months, we have started piloting into vape, and we've been very happy with how that's been performing.
When it comes to the impact that these products can have on smoking rates across the world, we generally look at the smoking rates here across a broad range of European countries. What you can see for countries where these categories have become very well established, such as Sweden and Norway, not only are they significantly lower than the rest of the European average, where they are approximately one-third of the smoking rates across Europe, but they are almost at a level of reaching the World Health Organization's classification of smoke-free, which is when less than 5% of the population are smoking. This is definitely linked, in that case, to the onset of snus and nicotine pouches in these markets.
However, we also recognize that there's now almost 100 million people around the world which are using harm-reduced products, and nicotine pouches are not the only product which has been very successful at getting people away from cigarettes. Within the U.K., we can see the success which has occurred over the last 5-7 years, in particular, with vaping products and how those products have manifested over that time to get more and more people off cigarettes. And you can also see on the chart on the left as regards to where the U.K. is now getting to when it comes to smoking rates.
And even if we look a little bit further afield for some other products, which we don't sell, you have the likes of the heat-not-burn products and the impact that they have had on Japanese smoking rates, which has almost halved in the last eight years since these products were introduced in Japan. So this is very much the spectrum that we operate within. Now, if we are going to have a purpose of inspiring healthier enjoyment to millions, it is critical that we stand back and we measure what impact are we having. So as we reach out to new consumers and they join us on our platform, we ask them a lot of questions around what their behaviors were before they came here. "What did you do beforehand? Did you smoke? If you did, how much did you smoke?
How often were you smoking, and have you now given up completely as you've transitioned to these new products?" We look at methodologies which we've shared with some of the leading universities across Europe and the U.S., sorry, Europe and North America, and we take those methodologies in, and we plug our data through it to quantify what impact we've had on human lives. What we can see in this space is that we pick off each individual, we determine what their life expectancy was looking like, given the behavior that they were having previously with smoking, and then we look at when we interjected on that with these products and how their life expectancy has altered on the back of that.
We do this across the full range of our geographies, both for Scandinavia, our growth markets in Europe, of the U.K., and DACH, and in the US. When we accumulate all of these numbers together, what we can see is that we have now gotten to just over 5 million human years saved. This is the primary indicator that you will see when you walk onto our floor. Now, moving along from that, to give a little bit of substance as regards to what our business is and where we operate within the value chain, we are a retailer. We are an online retailer. We have a broad range of suppliers who produce products for us and sell them to us, and we sell them directly to the consumer. That part of our business, I think, is quite well known.
Perhaps what's a little bit less known is that because of the relationships we have with our consumers and the amount of data we collect from them, we aggregate that, convert it into insights, and we are the largest insights provider back into the industry at this point in time. If you take a quick look at Haypp Group at a glance and take a look at some of the points which we've been working through in the past. So we were founded roughly 14 years ago with a focus on snus and a focus on Sweden. Around about 6 years ago, we sharpened up our emphasis, and we decided that nicotine pouches was going to have a much greater impact globally on this space than nicotine pouches, than snus did. So we started to move firstly towards nicotine pouches and then towards international expansion.
We're headquartered here in Stockholm, and we're present in Sweden and Norway. We're also present in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the U.K., and most of all, perhaps, the U.S. We are the largest retailer of nicotine pouches globally. We're the largest retailer online, the largest retailer offline. We are the largest retailer in any line on where it gets to here. We have a staff of just over 190 people, of which just over 40 are operating in our warehouses. And in the last 12 months, our revenue is just over 3 billion SEK, and we generated EBITDA of 126 million SEK. We generated EBITDA of roughly 190 million SEK in our core markets of Sweden and Norway, and we reinvested roughly 60 million SEK of that in our growth markets to create critical mass within them.
And earlier on this year, we expanded into a parallel category of nicotine vape, which we believe fits very well with our overall mission and where we're going here. So if we take it from here, and we take a look at the two mega trends, which is driving this category, and which is driving our success to date. The first one, by far, is coming from the growth in the category. And the growth in the category has been driven by strong underlying demand for harm-reduced products. There's now, as I said earlier, about 100 million people which have moved across to harm-reduced products in the last decade. And while it is the smallest of the three well-established categories, nicotine pouches is also the fastest growing of these three. Legislation, in general, is extremely favorable towards this.
Regulators and governments understand the benefit that this has for their society and for the pressure on their health systems. And lastly, because this category is growing so fast, there is accelerated innovation, coming through from a broad range of brand owners and producers in this space, in order to be able to capture as much share of that as possible. So what that has been driving is previously we've shared our outlook for the category up to 2025. We're now extending it out with some external help up to 2028. And what we can see is that snus has already moved into decline, but the growth is exponential on the back of these factors when it comes to nicotine pouches.
The second factor, which is driving this business very successfully, is the migration from offline to online, and this is happening across a range of categories, but our category in particular, is extremely well suited for this. We have a non-cyclical product. They're extremely small and lightweight, relative to the value of the products. There is a very high order of frequency. There's no seasonality. This product gets bought any time of the year, and there is extremely low returns in this space. So it is an extremely suitable category in general when it comes to online. In addition, there's a couple of extra factors around this category, which makes it perfectly suited for those which are big enough and with the resources and capabilities to be able to navigate it. It is a very complex regulatory environment.
Not everybody can necessarily navigate what is allowed here when it comes to youth access prevention, when it comes to marketing, terms, data, and regulatory engagement around it. So this gives us a very good basis within our space as well. If we move on and take a look at what has been driving our strategy so far, and we believe that our strategy is not gonna alter. It's been pretty consistent over the last 10 years, and it's gonna remain consistent going forward, we believe. Customers come to us, and they stay with us for a combination of 3 factors: price, assortment, and convenience. The more customers that come to us, the more we're able to invest in our infrastructure and invest in our offer, so we can improve on the price, the assortment, and the convenience.
But there's a fourth factor as well as regards to, and Hasse will speak about this in a moment, as regards to how we get to consumers regarding search, and how we dominate in that space. The larger we get, the more resources we can justify investing in this space as well. What you will see regularly going through today's presentation will be a reference to this acronym of PACS, quite frequently as we go through it. I'd also like to wrap up my piece with a quick summary of our financial targets and where we believe we will be on this space. So our original targets, which we released for the IPO, came across these three factors, and we would like to sharpen up some of these and lift them a little bit on where it gets to.
The first one was, we had previously said we would reach SEK 5 billion in revenue by 2025, predominantly through organic growth. We now state that we will reach SEK 5 billion in revenue in our current core and growth markets, solely from organic growth. Any revenue we get from the emerging opportunities, which Svante will talk about later on today, will be incremental and above that. We previously guided on profitability that we would reach high single digit Adjusted EBIT in the medium to long term. We're now bringing that forward, and we're stating that we will reach that target in our core and growth markets by 2025. We will reinvest part of that into the opportunities which we're seeing in both adjacent categories and adjacent markets, which we'll talk through a little earlier also.
On dividend policy, we previously had a very clear statement that we would not, in the foreseeable future, be declaring any dividend. We're now coming back to a position of saying that we see we're going to be generating substantial free cash flow from this business, and it is not highly leveraged, and our debt has been coming down. Unless we can see good opportunities for us to be able to continue to invest that capital as we go forward, and we're seeing the sort of return on employed capital that we've seen in recent years, if we do not see those opportunities continue to manifest beyond 25, we will return capital to our shareholders. That's pretty much it from me.
What I am gonna do is I'm gonna take a moment out and introduce you guys to the people who will be speaking today, which is the management team along the way. I'm gonna start here, first of all, with Svante, who's our Chief Operating Officer. Svante joined six and a half years ago, along with myself. He previously had worked in the tobacco industry and spent a couple of years in the tech space. He spent his first five and a half years as our CFO, and earlier this year, he converted across to becoming the Chief Operating Officer. Next to Svante on the screen here, you will see Peter, who's our CFO, who took over from Svante.
Prior to that, Peter was our business controller for the previous three years in the group, and he held a lot of the business together as Svante and I were focusing on the IPO 2 years ago. Next to Peter, you will see Gabriel, who's been with the business for almost four years at this point in time. Gabriel started off initially with us, focusing on developing the insights capabilities. He then structured the European markets of DACH and U.K., got them up and running, and from earlier this year, took over as Chief Commercial Officer and is responsible for the commercial performance group wide. Markus, who's our Head of Regulation and External Affairs, has over a decade experience within tobacco regulation, and prior to that, within the pharmaceutical space. He joined us five and a half years ago and has been leading this space since.
Janne has a deep background within the technology space, having worked with many leading platform businesses around the world. Joined us five and a half years ago, spent the first five years as the CTO, and then extended across to covering the entirety of operations and infrastructure. Hans or Hasse, who is covering marketing, is the new kid on the block, so he's just been with us for three years, and he leads on the marketing space with a deep background in analytics and tech prior to joining. And last, but by no means least, is Johan, who leads all of our relationships with our suppliers and manages both the insights and the commercial relationships around that space, and prior to joining us, he'd spent nine years in the tobacco industry also.
The agenda which we'll be dealing with today is gonna kick off with Hasse leading us through our relationship with consumers, how we get them, and why they stay with us. Followed by Johan discussing our relationship with our business partners, and why that's critical to our offering to the consumers, and how well that cycle works together. Then Janne will step up and talk about our overall infrastructure, how it pins together, and why it has been so successful at scaling the way that it has in the past, and why those principles will be equally successful going forward. And then, having those three walk through the fundamentals of what the operating model is, Gavin will then step in and spend a couple of moments on each market, regarding the dynamics of the market and how well we have been performing within it.
We will then break for a moment, grab a coffee. We'll do some questions and answers at that stage as well, before we move into the second half of the day, where we'll open with Markus talking about the regulatory environment and what we can see on the horizon around this space. Followed by Svante stepping up and talking about the adjacent opportunities that we see emerging before us, and what our principles will be going into that. Followed by Peter, who will wrap it all up together and talk about how all of this fits together when it comes to our overall financial performance as a business. From there, we will do some concluding remarks, and we will open up for the second and extended Q&A.
For anybody who has time and is here in the room, there will be an opportunity to extend that time on the Q&A. Have a glass of wine afterwards, and if you have any additional questions, we'd be more than happy to take them. So without further ado, I'm gonna pass over to Hasse, and he can walk us through the first chapter. Thank you, Hasse.
Thank you very much, Gavin. Hello, everyone. So what I will talk to you about today is how we attract, how we convert, and how we retain our consumers. Simplified, you can say this is about how we drive traffic to our sites, how we work with customer experience to drive conversions, and CRM to drive retention. Now, nicotine is a quite unique category compared to many other consumer categories. We cannot use all the same tools as regular e-coms do, and this is particularly apparent in the attract phase, how we generate traffic to our sites. You can say that this is typically done by buying traffic through Google Shopping or Google search ads, or you earn it by high rankings in the organic search. Global media houses such as Google and Meta, they all have policies around addictive products.
Hence, we cannot market ourselves in the same way you do for other consumer categories, such as shoes, bikes, or whatnot. There are exceptions to this. Adverts do slip through, but they're increasingly shut down rapidly before they can become efficient. Hence, the only sustainable way for us to generate consumers to our platforms is by dominating the organics positions in search engines, in particular Google, which stands for 90% of all the search volume. And Google is by far the most important way for us to get exposure and drive consumers to our site, and the goal here is to control the triple A locations, the top of the search results. This is also a good time to expand on why we carry multiple sites in each market. Typically, it can be said that the first result will get 28% of all the clicks.
The second one will get 21%, and the third will get 16%. So by carrying multiple sites in each market, we're able to capture the majority of the traffic within our category and also the expansion. As a result of this, our marketing spend in comparison to net sales was at 1.4% a couple of years ago, which is already very low for e-commerce, and it has gone down to 0.6% in a couple of years. And of our traffic, 97% is from organic channels, with organic search accounting for the majority of the traffic. And this creates a sustainable growth engine from a regulatory perspective and also a very scalable one. So if the demand or the search volumes doubles, we will still get our share of that, our percent of that, but with zero variable cost.
However, ending up on top of the search engines doesn't come by accident. It requires a lot of hard work, and it takes time to build that trust within search engines. Google is constantly updating their algorithms to make sure that they serve their consumers in the best way, all of us who uses Search. And what they reward is relevance to the search intent, that you're able to answer the question that the consumer is looking for. That, combined with an exceptional customer experience. In our category, assortment is key for relevance, and we carry the widest and a unique assortment, which Johan will talk more to in the coming sections. And we have designed and built our sites in-house with all the knowledge that we have on SEO to ensure the right architecture and also the ease of use tailored to our category....
When it comes to content, given our size, we're about 12 times the size of the next biggest player on a global level. We're able to produce quality and quantum of content that is unrivaled in this market. Apart from the content that we produce in-house ourselves, we also get a substantial amount from the brand owners, which is unique to us. Once again, Johan will talk more to this on, in coming sections. The more relevant the content is, and the more time people take to consume it, the higher our rankings will be. Combined, this shows Google that we are an authority in our category, and by that, we're earning the top positions in the search rankings. Given the importance of SEO for our growth, it's been critical for us to build this capacity and this expertise in-house.
But we have taken it beyond just the SEO specialists working with it hands-on on a daily basis. It is ingrained in all of our decision-making in this company. All the content that we produce and goes up on our site comes with the intention to drive SEO. Our assortment is influenced by SEO, and our tech function don't do any changes to our platform without checking with the SEO team to make sure it doesn't have a negative impact on our rankings. And even in the management team, we are discussing SEO on a regular basis. We're considering what impact our decisions might have on our rankings since it's so important. And I would say that Gavin is one of the few CEOs out there who actually understands how this hangs together and understands the importance of this for the long-term growth.
Our strategic focus and dedication to SEO has solidified our position in this space. SEO is not something you just buy yourself into. It takes a lot of time, and this creates a moat to competition. To show that our internal process is working, in Sweden, we are six times bigger. We have six times more traffic than our closest competitor. In the U.S., we're also six times bigger, and in Norway, we're five times bigger. This strong position when it comes to traffic, in combination with a best-in-class conversion rate, ensures that we capture the expansion in our category. We have a 14% global average conversion rate, and if you compare that to other e-coms, it's typically between 1%-4%. We're able to capitalize on the traffic that we are driving to our sites.
To conclude, we have a strong position when it comes to the most important growth channel for us, and we're in a good place when it comes to conversion. The next chapter is about how we keep the consumers within the company. The last couple of years, we have brought in a substantial amount of new consumers, but more importantly, we have been able to transform them to repeat purchasers. The last five years, we have had a CAGR of 35.4%. On top of that, we have been able to develop our consumers in the sense that we have made them increase their order frequency by almost 50%, at the same time as increasing their order value. The way we have been able to do this is by being personalized and relevant in our communication.
Now, keep in mind, we are changing consumer behaviors from buying can by can in a convenience store to buying in bulk from us, and it's quite tricky to change people's behaviors. We operate in 7 different markets. We carry 15 different storefronts, so we need to understand our consumers through analytics and machine learning. We also need to cater for different types of consumer needs, from the explorer, that constitutes the vast majority of our consumer base. They are seeking inspiration. They want product recommendations. Then we have the product loyalists, who buy the same product over and over again. There, we provide a one-click repurchase of your last order experience to make it simple for them. Down to the ultra-convenient ones, who just wants their product shipped to them on a regular basis, automatically.
But apart from being personalized in communication and providing, or catering for different types of customer needs, timing is key. We're able to predict our consumers' consumption rate, and by that, be able to send the communication at just the right time, just before you run out of stock at home, and by that, ensuring that we capture as large share as possible of their total consumption. So with the loyalty that we have, in combination with our ability to develop the consumers, we are generating 83% of our revenue from existing consumers. However, this communication wouldn't be as effective if we didn't have the underlying customer satisfaction as a foundation. Johan and Janne will talk about how we work with assortment, how we work with price, and how we work with convenience.
Simply put, you can say this is about creating a seamless journey for the consumers. From the moment you think about purchasing the product, finding it on our site at an attractive price, checking out, and getting it in your hands as fast as possible. Haypp Group has a global average NPS, Net Promoter Score, of 70. This puts us in the very top of best-performing companies in the world. Another evidence to this is that almost 40% of our new customers state that they come to us based on a recommendation. It also gives us high ratings on review sites, such as Trustpilot, and this creates a trustworthiness that has a proven effect on conversions. But the biggest testament of all is that the consumer themselves actually come back. From the second order and onwards, we have a 90% order retention rate.
To summarize, we are 5-6 times bigger than our closest competitor in our biggest markets. We have an outstanding conversion rate compared to other e-commerces, but most important of all, we have very satisfied consumers. Thank you so much, and I hand over to Johan.
Thank you very much, Hasse. All right, let's see how we do this. Exactly, so I'm gonna talk about our relationship with brand owners and the benefit to consumers. But let me start with this quote, because I think it very well summarizes what we do. "Our role i s to help consumers navigate brands and to help brand owners navigate consumers." But before I get into what the consumer wants in this space, which is around the assortment and the price, as you've heard before, I'm gonna focus on why the brand owners appreciate us and what they get out of us. And here I'm gonna talk about our attractive consumer base, that unique launch platform, the profitable partnership, and the insights capabilities. But first off is the consumer base.
Now, of course, the brand owners want to have access to a large and growing consumer base, but what's more important is which consumers. Ours tends to be more urban, digitally oriented, gender balanced, and the vast majority of the sales sits within the 25-40 age gap. That's quite natural because we're dealing with bulk purchases here, so the out-of-pocket outlay is higher. All of this is underpinned by youth access prevention. It's something that's very important for us. You're gonna hear more around that throughout the presentation today. But because our consumers looks like this, they tend to be more, demanding, but also more open-minded. Hence, you will see trends emerge with us long before you see it in other retailers. There are numerous examples of this.
One obvious here is nicotine pouches, where we have constantly been 12-18 months ahead of offline. I'm using an example from Sweden here, because Sweden is the birthplace for nicotine pouches. We tend to see trends emerge here, and then they materialize into less developed markets as they grow. But I think it's fair to say that trends are born at Haypp. The second thing that brand owners want is the opportunity to test and learn, especially since the category has grown, it has attracted a wide range of new players to the market, who are all driving this accelerated change. And to showcase this, I'd like to show you three examples. So one, how much of our sales is made up today of products that didn't exist a year ago? That's almost 30%.
So almost 1/3 of everything that we sell are new products. Two, how the pace of new launches with the nicotine pouches keeps accelerating. And three, how the brand owners have responded to this by accelerating the share of new launches that are withdrawn from the market within a one-year window. So what we see here, we can call this the product life cycle or the survival rate. We have two lines here. We have the blue one, which is the older period, 2018 to 2021. Then, 50% of the new launches were delisted after 22 months. That number is now down to 12 months, so the product life cycle is becoming shorter.
Hence, we have moved into an era where brand owners want to launch their products to targeted audiences as fast as possible and take those which work and leverage them to scale. Our media ecosystem is perfect for this. Here we have a wide range of tools to use, depending on if we wanna drive awareness, if we wanna drive trial, or a combination thereof. Here I have a few examples. So for instance, we have the on-site communication. This is our richest awareness offer with a broad reach. These are all the banners on site. We have a new functionality, which is a search bar visibility, where brand owners can buy top real estate in the search result. Also, a new one is the sponsored listing, where new launches can be temporarily boosted in the product grid.
Or lastly, here, we have the checkout upsell, which is one of our primary trial drivers. Here, we have the possibility to personalize offers in the basket at checkout to consumers. So this combination with our discerning consumer base and our ability to generate awareness and trial, that makes us, in some markets, stands for the bulk of the trials created. And this is a good thing because this leads to accelerated share growth for quality products. In addition to the more mainstream launches, many of the brand owners wish to launch more fundamentally different products with us. We are the perfect store for this because, A, we can showcase much richer content around new launches as an innovation, and B, our consumers spend more time engaging with brand content versus offline. Now, that's quite natural. You all know what it's like in a store environment.
It can be difficult to absorb information, difficult to navigate the category. This is why brand owners create unique content and products for us. This can be anything from pre-launches, so us launching ahead of the rest of the market in order to drive traction for that particular launch, or it can be exclusive products and limited editions, more catered towards brand building. Here, I'd like to call out two examples here that you see on the slide, which are collaborations between one of our store brands, Snusbolaget, and the brand owners. You see that they carry the Snusbolaget logo on them, so we're able to create, together with the brand owners, very unique content for us. And lastly, we have completely new and different innovations, where the purpose is more around concept trialing, understanding how this resonates with the consumers.
Furthermore, brand owners want to make money. Now, the good thing for them is that we are the most profitable account for them to invest in. Now, why is that? Well, first of all, we have no returns. This is a big problem in offline. We have basically no returns. Janne will touch more on that later, how we're very efficient in the back end to make sure we don't have it. We do not require visits from an expensive field force. We do not require investment in a lot of fridges and gantries, no printed point of sale material, and one point of delivery instead of thousands of stores, and 100% contract compliance and speed to market. Again, no need for mystery shoppers or for the reps to go out to the stores, making sure that the campaign is up, et cetera.
All of this equates to an aggregated cost saving of around 15% in our core markets. That 15% can then be shared between us and, us and the brand owner, and we can choose to reinvest our part back into the consumer offering. Now, in addition to everything I just said, the last thing that makes brand owners really prioritize us is our insights capabilities. And here, I speak from personal experience. Brand owners, they wanna know what's going on, they wanna know it fast, and they wanna know why. So four years ago, we built state-of-the-art insights capabilities in order to help the brand owners leverage our data to better understand consumers. And because we're online, we have a lot of data on the consumers.
We know exactly how they have behaved, we know in real time how they are behaving, and we have direct access to them. So if we see a switching pattern happening or something, something happening, we can directly get in touch with that consumer and ask, "Why did you do that? Why did you make that choice?" et cetera. And it's this combination with the transactional data, the direct access to the consumer's feedback with very high speed, that makes this offer so unique. We have a wide range of tools to use to guide the brand owners throughout the funnel, from the very top, where it's around, portfolio ideation and concept trialing, so understanding what to launch, down into the launch phase of really understanding: What's happening with my launch? What's my repurchase rate? What are the switching patterns, cannibalization, et cetera?
Then we can follow the consumers throughout that funnel, from aware down to loyal. We know exactly who are following the desired path, so to say, which ones of them drop out, at what level, and why, and then we can try to get them back into the funnel. And this is a very, or these are very appreciated tools by the brand owners, and as Gavin said, we are now the world's largest insights provider within nicotine pouches, and this is a positive and meaningful profit contributor to Haypp Group.... Now, in addition to the more, shall I say, the more commercial insights around behaviors and new launches, et cetera, in recent times, we've been also involved in quite a few M&As, involved sort of from the perspective of sharing our data with brand owners who are acquiring other brands.
We've been also asked by brand owners to share our data with researchers, governments, and regulators, not only the data on human years saved that Gavin touched upon earlier, but also different kinds of data, such as certain flavors, propensity to move people away from cigarettes versus attracting new one to that category. So I'd say that we are very much a part of shaping the future of this category through our insights. So to wrap this whole section up, we have a mutually beneficial relationship with the brand owners. Why? Because we have the most attractive consumer base, we have that unique launch and activation platform, we are the most profitable partner, and we have groundbreaking insights capabilities. All of this underpinned with 100% youth access prevention.
All right, so now, having looked at why the brand owners, why they love us, let's flip the coin and look at the same thing, but for the consumers. In this section, I'm gonna touch on assortment and price. So when it comes to the assortment, as we've already seen, we have a unique and we have a wide assortment. We have more than 700 nicotine pouch SKUs globally. Now, that is 7-20 times more than your average point of sale offline, depending on market maturity. Now, that's great, but what's critical is our ability to be the first ones to launch new products, especially in an era where the quality of the new products is superseding those existing in the market.
So the benefit for the brand owner here, they get to pre-launch their product, they get the traction, they get access to our consumer base. But the very good things for our consumers is that they get the opportunity to test and explore, and they really love exploration. So here I have a few metrics on our Swedish loyal nicotine pouch users. I think that the most interesting one to focus on here is the last one, the blue one. So this group tries 8.4 new nicotine pouch SKUs each year. So they really, really love the exploration and really immerse themselves into the assortment. What they also appreciate is that they can trust the products that we sell. We have very high product standards, and all the new launches are held up against those standards and tested and verified through an independent lab.
And then we also do spot checks throughout the year to make sure that the assortment is up to scratch. All right, so that was assortment. Now, price. We all know that the consumers appreciate a good price. We aim to position ourselves at a 30% discount to convenience stores and a 20% discount towards grocery stores. That's in the core markets. In the growth markets, those numbers are around 50%-40% for the same type of stores. Now, we know that we don't need to have this price gap in order to keep the consumers, but it helps accelerating the migration from offline to online. It's also critical for our long-term sustainability that we're able to offer competitive pricing without it being to the detriment of the brand owners. Now, if we then look at our business model here in the core markets.
So in the core markets, we have retail margins, which are in the mid-range. However, we have a high contribution from the Media and Insights, and hence, we are profitable. In the growth markets—or sorry, I should say, this leads us to believe that we're even better equipped to deliver profitability in the growth markets, because there we have high retail margins on nicotine pouches. Yes, our Media and Insights contribution is lower today, although rapidly growing. But the good thing with this one is we know that it scales with volume. So we think that we're very well equipped to deliver profitability in the growth markets. All right, so how can we then sustain the price advantage to the consumers? Well, one, we have that sharing of the 15% with the brand owners. Two, we have material revenue stream from Media and Insights.
And three, we have economies of scale in distribution and overheads. So if I now try to wrap all of this together, my entire section here, I have a beautiful flywheel for you, for you. Of course, I'm gonna start with the consumer in the middle... I'm gonna try to portray the benefit for the consumers and the benefit for the brand owners. So in the first step here, the consumers, they are offered the latest and greatest when it comes to new products. The brand owners, well, they get access to that state-of-the-art launch platform that we saw. In the second step, the consumers, they can engage with a wider relevant assortment, and the brand owners, they get the insights. Because of our scale, we're able to offer a better price to the consumer, and because of our model, the brand owners can make more money.
That's good for them because that leads to them being able to launch even more innovations, which then attracts more consumers, and so it all goes around. Thank you very much. This was the last part from me. Now I'm gonna hand over to Janne Kalian, our COO, who will talk about building the infrastructure for accelerated growth. Thank you very much.
Hi, everyone. I'm Janne. I'm going to talk a little bit about how we underpin all of this with our infrastructure. So as the previous speaker has said, we are all about scale. We're doing this in many markets and many storefronts, so we need the benefits of scale, and we achieve a lot of that through our infrastructure. So we have a couple of principles, when we look at infrastructure in general. All of this is aimed to support the PACS, the price, assortment, convenience, and SEO at scale. So the first founding principle we look at is, it needs to be efficient and agile. So we have a category that's evolving all the time. It's developments within suppliers, within consumer behavior, within regulation, so we need to be adaptable and efficient in a changing landscape.
And all of this, one example, as Hasse mentioned, is we have built something ground up, adapted for search. We haven't adapted it after the fact. It's a founding principle in our infrastructure. Secondly, it needs to be scalable. So whatever we do, we need to think 2x, 4x, 10x. How does this thing scale globally? And thirdly, it needs to be replicable. What we do in one market or one category, we should easily be able to transition to other areas as well as we grow. And fourthly, it needs to be expandable. We learn as we evolve. We need to add new tools and capabilities, and we want that to transcend our entire infrastructure so that we can leverage it where we are and where we're going.
So we do this by bespoke processes and systems that we combined with top-class suppliers and products to fill our different needs. And this is built on our accumulated experience, so it's more or less a codification of the Haypp model. This is where we tie everything together, and when we go to market, we go with our entire model. In general, an overview of our infrastructure is not that dissimilar to many other e-coms. We have a layer of e-commerce stores that we operate. We underpin this with ERPs to keep track of the financials, inventories, and all of that. And in the bottom layer, we have a number of fulfillment systems. We need to make sure this transcends all the way to the warehouses. And this is an overview of how we built this.
So during the years, this is the toolbox we evolved, and this, the first founding pieces of this was put in almost ten years ago and has been expanded as we've gone along. And it's actually what's been fueling our growth, roughly 50x during this period. So we have all the pieces we need to drive this business, but it has become slightly scattered over the years since we've grown so fast. So it's been excellent for taking us to where we are, and it's what's fueling our growth right now. But we've also put in a lot of work to gear up for the next phase of this. As Gavin showed you earlier, this is a category that's not showing any signs of slowing down, rather the opposite. So where we're going with this is to refine what we've done for the coming years.
So we are consolidating our e-com layer onto one single version of our platform for all the European markets. We're consolidating our diverse ERPs to have one global system that can support all geographies and categories easily. And we're tying this together, the e-com, the ERPs, and our fulfillment structure, with an integration layer that is much more loosely coupled than today. So that means, more or less, it will be much easier for us to plug in pieces, to replace pieces, to add to the toolbox without touching all parts of the ecosystem. So a lot of new pieces. As I said, we've been working on this quite a while, and we're quite far along the journey. It's built on the exact same principles as the old one, the four founding principles, just armed with more experience and knowledge after having done this for quite a while.
So it's actually a refinement of the model that we've evolved during the years, rather than something completely new, building on experience. And we're actually just consolidating, making sure it's more flexible, and putting it together in an entirely new way to drive us forward. And as I said, this is actually not just a plan, it's something we've been working on for quite a while. So parts of this are actually powering our business right now. Some of the pieces of the e-com structure is actually in place. The ERP, the new one we're switching to, it's powering parts of our geographies right now, and we have connected all our warehouse systems and fulfillment through this, and are just rolling it out to different markets. So we are basically into the expand and replicate phase to get this new infrastructure fully in place.
We expect that the ERP and integration piece will be fully in place during H1 next year, and the e-com parts during H2, having completed the transformation during next year. Johan earlier touched upon data and how this powers our external insights, and it's also one of the founding pieces in our infrastructure. So we're not just rolling out e-commerce platform for transactions, we're rolling out insights gathering, and this is first-party insights gathering. We're not reliant on external tools, which means that we can choose which data points to pick up. We can add data points as we go along, and this fuels both Haypp Insights, our external business, but also a lot of our internal decision-making, and also actions in our storefronts, which we base on the data we collect on consumer behavior.
And since this is part of our core infrastructure and the Haypp model, that means that whenever we go to market, this is not something we add as we reach critical scale; this is something we get by rolling out our model. So the first unit is, be it a nicotine pouch can or a vape that we sell on the market, we start collecting these insights. And we set this up roughly four years ago, this insights business, the team capabilities, the data gathering, but we also picked up the historical data we have here. So we have roughly 10 years of unique data in this category around products, consumer behavior, and patents that we have in our data warehouse.
Once again, coming back to the earlier flywheel, there's actually a very virtuous cycle here, where our e-commerce platforms pick up data when people interact with them. We enrich this from external sources as well to learn more about our consumers. We store it, we analyze using machine learning and analytics, producing insights for our own decision-making, and actually feeding things back into the platforms to change how we interact with consumers. When we set this capability up, it was primarily to drive our own decision-making and external insights. However, I would like to say that we had the foresight to see the rise of AI and large language models back then, might not be true, but we could see that this space was going to develop rapidly. The tools were going to get better.
We have structured this data in such a way that is not just tailored for the use cases we have. We have a lot of general data around this category, and as the tools to analyze this evolves, we are actually in a very favorable position because there's a lot of public data available to use these tools on. But the bespoke data in this category is quite unique, and we have almost 10 years of it, so we are actually just scratching the surface on the value of our data so far. A big part of our infrastructure is built for the convenience piece. Our definition here of convenience is that you, as a consumer, you get your product how you want it, where you want it, and as promised.
We can see from both our data, the surveys we do, and the direct consumer feedback that we get, that this is one of the main drivers for our ever-improving retention numbers, that we actually deliver on the convenience promise. Convenience can be different for different consumers. Not everyone wants the same. Some wants it fast to your door, some want to pick it up in a box when you get your groceries. We aim to offer a wide variety of convenience options, with a common factor of we keep our promise to the consumer. All of this hinges heavily on the logistics part of our business. There are a couple of specifics around our category when it comes to logistics that are very favorable to us.
As mentioned before, we have a very low degree of consumer returns compared to many other e-com categories, where you might deal with a 30% or 40% consumer return rate, such as fast fashion. We have virtually zero returns, so I think we're around sub 0.4% of consumer returns right now. We have a very low weight to mass value on the products. They're very pick, pack, and ship friendly. There's very limited seasonality, so it lends itself extremely well to accurate demand forecasting. And even though we have the widest assortment globally here, compared to an awful lot of other e-coms, there's a limited number of SKUs available here. So with these factors, it allows us to build a very streamlined infrastructure for logistics, optimized for this particular category.
So once again, we have kind of a pre-made model for how we scale this in an efficient way. Our mission, our higher purpose here, is healthier enjoyment to millions, so we always think scalable here, from the first time we plant the flag in the market to how we bring that all the way to the full scale. And this model starts, of course, with sourcing. We need to make sure we have the products available that the consumers demand, and we accomplish this through central forecasting and replenishment. So we run this centrally for all our warehouses, all our markets everywhere in the world. It's highly efficient, which results in us having a sub-1% average out of stock, which means that the product that the consumer wanted is actually not available on the shelf.
So we're minimizing lost sales because of out of stocks by a very efficient process here. And we're not accomplishing this by overstocking. We're very efficient with our stock, so we are turning over the stock roughly 15 times per annum. So it's a very efficient process here. And as a result of that, as Johan mentioned, there are virtually no returns to suppliers. Because of our demand forecasting, we can make sure that we sell out the product. If we know it's going to be delisted, we make sure to optimize for that so that the supplier doesn't have to take returns from us. And in the offline universe, this is usually in the 3%-5% space of returns going back to the suppliers. With us, it's virtually zero because of our efficient sourcing and replenishment.
Secondly, we need a warehouse, of course, to store these products in as we buy them. So when we first go to market, we start out with a 3PL warehouse, and 3PL is a third-party logistics, basically an outsourced warehouse. And this is highly efficient to get to market quickly and flexibly. It's pure variable cost per order. It's highly cost efficient for low- to mid-volumes. We get certain limitations of which shipping methods we can use. We're depending on the warehouse, so we make sure to find good partners to support us in this space for each and every market we go to. When we see scale starting to come to market, we move on to the next step in the ladder, which is that we insource. We put up a Haypp warehouse in that particular market.
So when we do that, we put in the full machinery, more or less. We have all the pieces in there from this point and on to be able to bring that up to the fully automated warehouse, which is what's present in our core markets. So here we flip to a higher fixed cost and a very low variable cost per order, which means that as the volume scale, we get very cost efficient. We see improvement in lead times and efficiency. So lead times from that an order is placed by the consumer to that we have picked and packed it, and it's ready for shipping, is a very important part of the chain, because the shorter the lead times are there, the quicker we can deliver to the consumer.
As I mentioned, once we get to here, we have actually the full suite of Haypp tools available. So all the shipping providers available to us, all the systems, the processes that we need to really scale this, comes into play when we plant the first Haypp warehouse in a market. As volumes grow, we see this becoming more and more cost efficient. But as we reach a certain point, as we have done in our core markets, the last step of this model is actually to go to the automated Haypp warehouse. So here, once again, the cost is to a very large majority fixed. It's basically down to the packaging material. That's a variable cost per order.
As we invest in automation here to get efficiency up in picking and packing, we can see further improved lead times, even more efficiency, and above all, we can scale this to really large volumes. When we put this in, it's a very modular and upgradable model, so when we go in with an automated warehouse, we can expand that by slotting in more pieces. We don't need to go back to the drawing board. Basically, we need a very big square room when we start out, and then we can take it all the way to the automated fulfillment center. The result of this is that we see that the warehouse cost, as a percentage of the order value, goes down from starting around...
This is an average across the markets, of course, but around the 5% mark, we can see this coming down all the way to 2% of the order value in warehousing costs as we scale and we automate. The beautiful part about this is it's, of course, good for our finances, but it's also very good for the consumer because we see lead times from that an order is placed to that it's packed and ready for shipping, coming down here as well. We see benefits of scale, both in cost going down and in actual convenience level that we can deliver to the consumers. At the top of this chain is our automated fulfillment centers, and we have one here in Stockholm, roughly 30 minutes south of here.
I'm going to show you a little piece of how this looks once we get to the highly automated warehouse. So like all warehouses, of course, it starts with our inbound. We get deliveries, we process them, we re-register them in our systems to keep track of everything, stacking all the shelves. And then we have our picking stations. So we have a conveyor belt, basically, where our pickers can work in a highly automated pace. We use a pick- by- light system, which basically means a number lights up, you pick that SKU, you place it in the box, and you pass it on. So it's extremely efficient to do picking and packing in this way. An illustration of this here, you basically, you pick the product in front of you, you acknowledge it, you send it on your way.
Once an order is completed, it gets conveyed to our packing machines, where packing is automated as well, so the packer just places the goods in the machine. The packaging material is cut to the exact size needed for that package. They acknowledge. It actually gets photographed, so we can see afterwards that everything was packed correctly. It gets automatically labeled with the shipping option that the consumer chose. Conveyed to sorting, once again, highly automated. So depending on the shipping provider you choose, you'll get slotted into the correct cage. We can actually do this by postal codes and pickup times to make it even easier for the shipping providers to pick it up and further drive down cost. So to summarize, basically, from the point where we planned the first manual warehouse, all the capabilities needed to go up to the fully automated distribution center is there.
We can slot in pieces as we go along. Once it's picked and packed, it's ready to be shipped, taking it the last mile to the consumer. When it comes to shipping, this has become a commodity available to everyone, basically. But the differentiator is how you apply, fine-tune, and handle this as we scale. We've accomplished all of this in our old infrastructure, as you've seen. We've integrated with a new logistics partner to make this even smoother going forward, and parts of this is already in place in our old infrastructure, but with the new rollout, we're actually getting those capabilities everywhere. It's a fully integrated process from actually choosing shipping in your checkout, through the warehouse systems, all down to the shipping providers, including tracking of your parcels as they transit to the consumer.
This gives us a couple of key capabilities, so we can quickly and easily onboard new shipping providers as they emerge, and that we see that there are relevant choices here. We can prioritize dynamically, both how we price the shipping options and depending on what you've actually ordered, where in a certain geography you're located, what local regulation might apply. We can choose the shipping option that is best for you as a consumer. Throughout this process, we get full end-to-end access to all the data points, both in our end and in the shipping line. We can evaluate, and we can tweak, and we can see what shipping providers actually provide a good consumer experience, which manifests in the form of retention for us. We can steer volumes between shipping providers in many different ways. We can optimize for retention and consumer satisfaction.
We can also pool volumes to give us better bargaining power to drive down prices and offer further attractive convenience to our consumers. And lastly, Youth Access Prevention is something that's also ingrained in our infrastructure. So to secure that no one who is underage can ever get an order from us, we work with various tools throughout the chain. So we work with age verification at point of sale. So in our core markets, we do this primarily through our payment providers. You don't actually notice being age verified, but since in the payment process, we can identify you, we can stop any underage purchase here. We also work with specific online age verification tools in certain markets. We choose the top partners for those markets, and we apply that at the point of checkout.
We also rely on our shippers here, that we select partners who can provide identity verification and age verification on delivery. As you receive your parcel, you identify yourself to be of legal age. We do combine this when needed, so we can use multiple tools here to ensure that no one gets an order who is not of legal age. We strive to combine the least amount of friction for the consumer with the most robust age verification available in all markets and categories. 100% age-verified transactions, that's where the bar is for us. We accomplish this by working with the best partners and having a process in-house that ensures in every step that we stop any attempt of purchase of underage customers. To wrap this up, we've built the infrastructure on those fundamental principles.
So you see this as from everything into our e-com sites, to how we work with warehouse systems, to shipping providers, the same principles hold true here. And we apply this throughout our entire operating model, and it's a combination of the learnings we have over the years, sometimes by getting it right on the first try, and more often by a more long and winding road of finding out exactly how this works best. Armed with this, we've already come a long way in the step change to the next generation of this infrastructure that will allow us to keep doing this more smoothly, more efficiently, and at scale going forward. Thank you very much. I will now hand over to Gabriel.
Thank you, Janne. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for being here. I wanna drive you through the commercial part, and it's probably a story. I wanna tell you a story that probably you heard a lot of times in your life, right? At least how it starts, from a garage. I guess everybody hears this now and then, and, my story is called From a Garage to the SEK 3 billion revenue that we have right now. This is just the beginning. As Gavin mentioned before, this is not how it ends, so please bear with me how we're doing in our markets. You might all remember the chart that Gavin showed at the beginning of how many years we have saved, in terms of life, which is very nice, but how does all this translates to volume?
Here you can see how our nicotine pouch volume has been evolving market by market since the quarter they were launched. So important to see here how U.S. was the biggest one on the first quarter that it was launched in the U.S. That was Q1 2019, but then how the speed of the other markets start increasing as well. And of course, right now, Sweden, as you guys might expect, is our biggest market in nicotine pouches. However, you see how it accelerates towards the Q2 2022 and the Q3 2023 that we are here. And this is our current volumes by quarter by each of the markets. And I will go one by one for you guys to understand what have we been doing and why is this measure so successful. Let me start with our core market, Sweden. This is where everything happens.
Sweden means nicotine pouches. This is the cradle of the category. Everything of the knowledge of the category is here. The main brand owners are very much focused into Sweden, as well to nicotine pouches. And if we can be successful in Sweden, we can be successful everywhere. And as you will see, we have been very successful. Right now, we have a share of market, of the total market, around 30%, but when you take a look only at e-com share of market, we have 85%, so we own the channel in Sweden. This is our bread and butter of every single, of every single day. Almost half of all the nicotine pouches that we sell in the group are sold in Sweden. As you would expect, lots of options. The consumer is much more mature.
They know the category here, so they are very keen into trying new products, as you will see later, and has been showing a fantastic growth as well, 32% year-on-year, just on the biggest market that we have right now on our sales. Traffic has been growing, and orders has been following as well. What has been key on Sweden? As I mentioned before, and I would like to call it, this is the Silicon Valley of nicotine pouches, right? This is where the consumer, they know what they want. They are very demanding in trying new products. They are very demanding on the quality, on the checks that we do as well. This is where the suppliers focus their investment. This is where things are happening right now. It's also very competitive.
For you guys who live here, you cannot walk 100 meters without being able to find somebody selling nicotine pouches or those. Everywhere, you have more than 14,000 competitors just in Sweden, and to make it even worse, the margin is one of the lowest margins in the world. So it's a very tough environment to compete, but as you saw before, we are succeeding here. And why do I say that we are succeeding? Just look at the curve of nicotine pouches since the launch. Actually, last month, we crossed for the first time the 2 million cans sold in one single month in Sweden. So it keeps growing. We keep on switching consumers outside tobacco products to bring it to nicotine pouches, and the performance so far for Sweden has been fantastic.
Just in October, as you can see there, 43% of everything that we sold in Sweden was a nicotine pouch, so the category keeps on growing as together with the market as well. In just five years, we managed to bring this business from zero to 20 million cans, so it's a fantastic success story of just a single category. Something that has been key is the trial that we are able to generate. Right now, 28% of our monthly volume comes from products that were launched in the last 12 months. As Johan was mentioning, this is why brand owners, or one of the reasons why brand owners like to work with us. We can generate trial. We are a fantastic place to launch a product, and we are very good in bringing this product into the hands of consumers.
So this has been one of the key factors that we have right now, and we have the highest fragmentation. On every order, on average, is around 2.3 brands per order. So it's not only people that come and buy what they used to buy. No, they come, and they usually buy their normal product, but they also try, and we have the tools on site to make them trial and to facilitate these to consumers. Hence, we have a very good success story in Sweden. Let's move to Norway. I don't know how much of you guys have been in Norway in the retail industry, but I think Norway, we call it a showcase on how to thrive in very highly regulated markets. And I will show you in a second why, what I mean by regulated.
In Norway, we have 11% share of market, 80% on the e-com, on the channel, so we also own the channel in, in Norway. 41% growth year-on-year, even higher than Sweden. And why do I call it highly regulated? When you go to an offline retailer in Norway, this is what you see. If you go to buy nicotine pouch or tobacco snus, this is what you see. If you are lucky enough to ask the guy or the girl in the retailer to open, this is what you will see. It doesn't get much better. And this is what I mean by a very dark, heavy regulated market, and most likely, the retailer, they won't have the knowledge of the product, and they are not gonna be able to guide you through what you really want to buy.
As I mentioned before, it's closed door, it's plain packaging, everything. Every single can is the same color right here, so it's not that we paint it. This is how the cans look like in Norway. They're all green, no guidance, very limited trial, no brand building. Imagine you being a brand owner trying to launch a brand in the offline universe. It's almost impossible. On the other side, here we come, and this is our stores. It's not that we can do fantastic things on marketing because it's also very heavily regulated, but at least we can communicate, and we can explain to the consumers what they are buying. We can tell them facts about the product that they are buying, we can show the price, and we can generate some trial as well. We can give guidance. We can offer different pack sizes.
We can communicate the price as well. So it's a world of difference between what can be done in the offline universe versus what can be done in our own platforms in Norway. And what are the results of that? You can see it here. The spike that you see in the middle of the graph, it was the COVID growth trajectory that gave us a very good tailwind. The good thing is that if you see the blue line, the tobacco after COVID, it decreased. However, nicotine pouches, it didn't, and it keeps growing. And right now, we're about to sell more nicotine pouches in Norway than we are selling tobacco in Norway. So it's a trend that is replicated from Sweden. It keeps growing month on month. Our waiting sales is increasing and increasing. And again, why this?
Norwegians, they are, they were very used to being up front on the category, liking new innovations, liking new product features, and we are the only place where they can find that right now, at least some guidance to it. Let's move to the USA. It's by far the biggest market that we have in the group, and it's probably the biggest opportunity. I will show you a bit why on that. We're still very small. We have 2.5 share of market or the overall market, but this 2.5 is a huge amount of volume. When it comes to e-com, it's very fragmented, but almost we own as well, the channel. We need more online penetration on the market, but the one that is there, we have it.
25%, a quarter of every single nicotine pouch that we sell is sold in the, in the, in the USA. One of the best growth, almost 50% year-on-year, on a market that is growing and is increasingly growing. Traffic and order following. And probably you know it, USA, USA is not a country. USA is a continent. And, it's very difficult to be a one-size-fits-all for each of the states. So, we have very different performance by state. Here you see how the offline market is performing, sometimes different than us and sometimes the same. But this is the top 10 states. Just to give you a bit of an idea, nicotine pouches in the U.S. is five times the total market of Sweden and Norway.
Just for you to have an idea of the size of the opportunity in the U.S. is huge. It is, it has almost no limits here. We're doing very good. We're overperforming the market growth with 57% year-on-year, growing half percentage points share of market as well, and 45% growth in consumers. It's very complex, as I mentioned. Right now in the U.S., the products that are available, both offline and online, is what we call, let's say, first-generation products, because of the PMTA approval process that needs to happen before anything is launched. There is a line of maybe over a million requests of products to be launched in the U.S., and it's not moving fast, that we can tell.
Even with the first-generation products that we have in the U.S., even like that, the market is growing significantly, and we're performing quite good in here. Imagine when the products that we see available in Europe or in Sweden are able to go to the U.S., the new innovations, the new products, the new flavors, the new strengths. This category has a great potential, and Gavin will expand on that a bit in a second. Let me show you three share of markets that we have, and let me show you three states: Texas, New York, and Colorado. This is our share of market. This is high share of market in these states, 6%, 4%, and 3.4%. Why do I choose these three? Because the average on the rest of the U.S. is 1.5%. What has happened?
What have we done right in these three states? Very simple. Convenience. As Johan, as Johan mentioned before, surprise, surprise, consumers like cheap products. I mentioned the same, surprise, surprise, consumers want the products fast. So we invested in convenience in these three states by having either a local warehouse or having a 3PL, as Jenny was mentioning, and we were able to give consumers a much faster delivery than in the rest of the states. Very recently, we implemented a two-day nationwide option for delivery, and we start to see the growth in the rest of the states' surroundings. So convenience in the United States is key. Let's move. Let's go to U.K. And U.K., to summarize it, is the, is the epicenter of reduced risk products in Europe. If you... It's something that I've never seen.
I worked 15 years in tobacco industry, but I say I never seen this. You go to the U.K., and the amount of support that these categories, vape, nicotine pouches, and heat-not-burn, have, even from the authorities, is crazy. They are really committed into making it a smokeless country. So, we're doing quite good as well. In nicotine pouches, we have 4.5% of the share market, 65% of the e-com share market. It's still quite small scale. It's 2% of the whole volume that we sell in nicotine pouches in the group, but we have almost 100% growth year-on-year in the U.K. This is the moment to be in the U.K. This is the moment for nicotine pouches in the U.K. It's growing a lot, and Big Tobacco is investing heavily behind it.
If you go to the metro station, you can see Velo campaigns. If you go to all the nicotine fairs, you see a lot of stands from Big Tobacco . So it's something that is getting a lot of traction in the U.K. How are we doing? As I mentioned before, 94% growth year-on-year. Something that has been key is the convenience. We took a bit of a decreasing trend with Brexit. It was more difficult for us to import products into the U.K., of course. We decided to put our own 3PL, not our own, a 3PL warehouse, and then we started growing. This was all the start of it. And then very recently, we have our own warehouse, so no longer a 3PL, and look at the steepness of the curve. It's...
It's almost a vertical one. And as I mentioned before, something is happening in the U.K. on nicotine pouches. Is it time to invest there? Invest there. You can see the big vape competitors from us even launching nicotine pouches right now. The category is getting a lot of traction, a lot of awareness, and you can find it everywhere as well. As you guys heard, we also launched vape this year in the U.K., mainly to get some learnings and to prove ourselves in a new category, and learnings is what we got. So it's fierce competition. It's crazy competition in the U.K. regarding, regarding vape. If here you cannot walk 100 meters without finding nicotine pouch, in the U.K., you cannot walk 50 meters without finding vape. And I'm talking everybody sells it, from mobile stores, to the convenience, to the mom-and-pops, everybody.
So it's very fierce competition. It's very fragmented suppliers. I don't know how much you guys are aware of vape, but, disposable vapes is disrupting the totality of the market, and the bigger, bigger brands are not, right now, from the Big Tobacco. They are from other disrupting players as well. Innovation is key. Agility is key. Every week, there's a new product, there's a new device, there's a new feature coming out. You need to be very quick in getting it to your warehouse, in delivering it, in making very good progress on SEO as well. It has a very big relationship with nicotine pouches, especially now that every single vape store is creating awareness on that, and we were the first site with two different options of reduced risk products.
In summary, very good moment in the U.K., very good traction on nicotine pouches, very good learnings from vape, but, we do believe that the future is still to come, and the growth in these categories is gonna be much, much higher in the upcoming years. Let me talk a bit about DACH. DACH is where convenience will make the difference on the future. Right now, the product, it resonates for the consumer, even if, and you will see in a second, in Germany, the product is banned from offline stores. It's only online that you can buy it. Even there, the demand is still growing, so they do like the product. Switzerland and Austria are markets that are still growing, and where you can see innovation coming, and you can see the same trend that we see in the other markets.
Nicotine pouch is growing, tobacco, oral nicotine, decreasing. We have 15% share of market. Our e-com share is around 35%. Everything is e-com here. And 11% group weight on the sales, on the volume. Fantastic growth of 40% as well. And here you can see the growth, year-on-year, with Germany growing 40%. Austria, 93%, is one of our best success stories this year. It's still quite a small volume, let's be honest, but fantastic growth. The category is there, is present. And 28% on Switzerland. And what has happened? Let me put some indications here. First, the category, as I mentioned, was banned in Germany. Of course, if the category is banned from offline, it starts, everybody starts coming online, so it gave us a huge boost.
But after a bit of time, it starts to lose relevance, or this is what I, what we thought. But looking at this, it didn't. Then COVID came, and also it gave us a bit of a boost, and we started realizing the importance of the convenience in these markets, of getting things fast. We cannot ship from within Germany, so we're shipping from Sweden, but we are making small steps in order to make it more convenient. So this year we included the two express options to consumers, that they can get the products much faster than they did before, and the curve keeps growing. So there's a whole huge potential here, and we need to optimize the level of investments in order to be able to make it more convenient to consumers. In summary, 2023 has been another year of a strong performance for us.
This is our trajectory since 2018 in terms of quarterly nicotine pouch volume, growing quarter after quarter until we... until right now, close into the 12 million cans. And all of this, as you guys heard before, based strongly on our cycle of packs, in which we attract the consumers, we get the supplier support, we improve our assortment, then we're able to invest in pricing and SEO, which then will attract more consumers. Simple as that. No rocket science. This is our packs structure, and this is what we stick to. Now, if I was able to read your minds, probably you guys are thinking, "All good, great performance, but is there still any room to grow?" Let me give you a bit of perspective on where we are right now.
When you look here, this is the size of our sales in the markets that we are right now. So this is Austria, Switzerland, Germany, and U.K. This is how much we sell. This is the size of the market of nicotine pouches. Let's take a look at our core markets. Let's take a look at Norway, let's take a look at US, and let's take a look at Sweden. This is how much we sell. This is the size of Norway, this is the size of Sweden, and this is the size of US. I'm talking only nicotine pouches. When you wrap all this together, this is our total sales of nicotine pouches as a group, and this is the size of the opportunity in nicotine pouches. But we don't stay there. This is the size of vapers, and this is the size of smokers in the whole world....
So I hope this gives a bit of a framework on the size of the opportunity that we still have ahead of us. And with that, I finish my part. As you heard a lot, we've been talking about USA, so now Gabby will make a bit of highlights on our strategy there. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much, Gabby. Thank you. All right, guys, I'm conscious that we've been going on for a while, and I'm sure everybody's ready for coffee, so I'm gonna give you guys a two-minute summary of what I'm seeing within the U.S. When it comes to the U.S., I think there's four points that I wouldn't mind highlighting here. The first one is, this is by far the biggest nicotine market in the world. It is the most valuable cigarette market in the world. It is the most valuable vape market in the world, and as Gabby earlier alluded to, it is by far the most valuable nicotine pouch market in the world.
Just to put in perspective as regards to how big it is in nicotine pouches and how rapidly it has now gone into growth, particularly in the last six months, the growth of nicotine pouches in the U.S. in the last six months is more than the entire nicotine pouch market in Europe, including Scandinavia. So there is a lot of potential in this space. It also, where there's often many references to the regulatory environment within the U.S., the regulatory environment is extremely stable. So there's a lot of learnings came in from some of the mistakes that were made roughly 10 years ago when it came to the vaping market, and on the back of that, both brand owners and regulators are very clear on what not to do with this.
You can see that clearly with the PMTA's requirement for many products, for all products, having to be tested and approved to be released onto the market going forward. But you can also see it with the marketing standards and what people are actually saying about products, what kind of products, what types of flavors are getting there, and you can also see it in the consumer profile. The average age of a nicotine pouch consumer in the U.S. is in their mid-thirties, so this is a much healthier profile. This is not a contentious category, and for that reason, it gets a lot of support from regulators in the role that this category is playing from moving people away from cigarettes. And the vast majority of consumers in this category are either ex-smokers or ex-dippers, and some of them are even ex-vapers in the U.S.
We have an excellently established relationship with our suppliers. The infrastructure that Johan spoke of earlier, when it comes particularly on the inside space, is just as valid for the US. So we developed that infrastructure in one market, honed it, and then spread it across to other markets, including the US. And in the US, consumers, sorry, brand owners are very keen to understand, both for the existing universe, what is the path that consumers take to nicotine pouches? When they started with cigarettes, what was it that convinced somebody who was consuming a particular type of cigarette to move across to this category, and did they transition through a different category in between, such as vape? So that data which we have is even more valuable because it's a derivative of how valuable the underlying market is itself.
So we have an excellent relationship with our, with our partners on that space. And lastly, we are an undisputed market leader in this space. So we reckon we're about 10 times larger than the second biggest player when it comes to volumes in this space. Our ... People talk about the finer nuances within the U.S. Let me kind of simplify this one. What a U.S. consumer wants is not that fundamentally different to what a European consumer wants. They want a good price, they want a great assortment, and they want good convenience. It's somewhat-- They're somewhat indifferent as regards to which country they're in. This seems to be sort of a universal truth regarding what consumers in general want. And we have gotten to some critical scale on this.
If our business, from a sales perspective, was a state in the U.S., we would be the eleventh biggest state. So we're at about just slightly ahead of Tennessee and slightly ahead of Arizona on this space. So we would be quite a large state on our own within this space. So we recognize the opportunity that comes with this market, and we recognize that 2.5% share in this market gives us a huge opportunity to go from here. And we have fine-tuned what our business model is in a multitude of other markets, and now we're starting to fine-tune it more extensively in the U.S. So with that, I'm gonna pause here for a moment, and I'm going to move along to questions and answers for 10 minutes.
At the same point in time, anybody who would like, feel free to grab a coffee, and then we will be breaking into the next section, which will be the regulatory environment from Markus. First question comes from over here. Niklas?
Yes. Thank you. Yes, a couple of questions. Firstly, can I ask about the bubbles you showed here before with the vaping versus nicotine pouch market?
Yes.
How much bigger is the vaping? Like, it was tough to see the exact relations.
Well, the bubbles which we showed here, Niklas, were a reflection on the markets which we're currently in. So that's a reflection of that. But just for example, if we start off, first of all, with a more holistic perspective on it, there's just over 100 million consumers at this point in time of harm-reduced products globally. Around about 60 million of those are vapers, and around about 2.7-2.8 million are nicotine pouches. So that gives you a context that you're dealing with more than 20x at a global level. And vape itself is a category which is highly skewed towards the U.S. and North America when it comes to consumption, so the vast majority of that is in there.
The bubble which we saw there is simply how large that category is in the seven geographies that we currently stand.
... Thank you. And a second question on U.S. regulation that you talked about, how many products have actually been approved-
So-
Since the regulation came in place in, I think, 2016?
Yes. So the PMTA, the FDA, just to give some context on this, the FDA created a framework of the learnings of the vaping environment in the early teens. And by the 30th of June, 2016, if your product was not already on the market, you have to wait until you got a, until you got clearance before you could introduce a new product. However, what they said was that old products which were on the market could remain there until they were processed. From that day forward, there has been an extensive number. I was at a conference with Brian King, who leads this section from the FDA, around about five weeks ago, and he was talking about they now have just over 1 million products which they're processing.
Now, the vast majority of those products are sitting within the vaping space, but in that mix, the nicotine pouch category is there also. So, to date, within the vaping space, I think there has been around about 10 products, roughly, which have been approved so far, and there's a whole new framework coming through, with some commitments from the FDA. to accelerate as this goes through. But I think what we feel really positive about here is that there's a general sentiment that within the U.S., nicotine pouches has a much healthier consumer profile because of that average age within the mid-thirties and extremely low youth access adoption around it. So there's generally an appetite to see how these products can get accelerated through at this stage.
I believe there will be slightly more radical approaches taken from the FDA in order to reduce that grouping that they're actually gonna be processing through.
Mm-hmm. Superb. Last question from me. When you showed here the difference between 3PL and an own warehouse and,
Yeah
... automated, what would you say is the type of scale required to move from 3PL to a warehouse to an automated warehouse?
Yeah. I think when it comes to this general dynamic within it, we bring multiple factors into the case. It's not, there's not so much a single KPI, which you can hold up against and bring it into it. So I think one factor comes in is undoubtedly scale, but there's an even more important factor when it comes to scale, as regards to the pace of change and anticipated growth. Because as you can see, such as we now see with the U.K., as that growth starts, the pace of change starts accelerating, well, then the necessity to get it up and get it running in advance comes in on that. Another factor, I think, coming in as well, is very much what your alternative is. So how, how much time are you carving off, and what are...
The third factor is, what is the convenience expectations from consumers? More developed markets, such as the U.S. and the U.K., the general assumption when it comes to e-commerce is that people want to get their products... They anticipate getting their products within 48 hours, so it, those factors come in together. But what we can generally see is that as the category is getting very well established in every market, it justifies, over the medium term, having a warehouse set up in every geography.
Superb. Thank you.
Thank you, Niklas.
Thank you, Andreas Lundberg, SEB. The online share in the U.S. for the overall market, NP market, it's rather low. How has that changed over the recent, let's say, two, three years, and why do you think it's so low?
Yeah, I think it's a great question. There's a couple of factors on this one, Andreas. The first factor is that when we established ourselves in the U.S. in, almost four years ago, it's actually four years ago last month, so when we got going, and at that point in time, we were selling roughly 20-25,000 cans of nicotine pouches a month going through. We've now crossed 1 million, so it's about 40 times larger at this stage. But we were also very much in the belief at that stage that we were happy to just keep pouring money into the U.S. in order to get it to scale, knowing that our model worked with scale, that it would become profitable in itself.
We have now lifted our gross margin in the U.S. from, at points in time, it was -20% EBITDA, to now being almost profitable. So we've managed to grow share, while at the same point in time, reducing the amount of investment and bringing the market towards break even at this stage. So our basis for how we scale and how we grow in the U.S. was, first, we would kind of view it going through three stages. First, get ourselves established enough to critical mass. Second, once we get towards critical mass, bring the market into profitability, and then once we get it into profitability, which is where we're going to now, we have the profitable long-term growth ahead of us. And let's be frank, since we are 85% of the online sales within the U.S., we effectively are the market.
Our decision for the last phase, to sharpen it up and bring it onto an economically sustainable model, was probably one of the key factors why we didn't accelerate market share faster in the past. But I think we are very well positioned to... Once we get it into profitability, we're very well positioned to scale in a profitable way from there.
But do you see a different behavior among consumers when it comes to offline versus online in the U.S. versus-
No, I don't think so.
... core markets?
I think the consumer behavior is still very much the same. I think they want a good assortment. Of course, the assortment in the U.S. is much narrower than that in Sweden, but you still have over 100 SKUs of nicotine pouches on our sites in the U.S., which is, you know, more than 10x of what you would get in your average convenience or petrol store within the U.S. The second factor is pricing, and you can certainly see for some of the states, as the retailers are taking more and more margin on this space, the consumer is becoming more aware of the pricing gap, and that you can get these products cheaper online, and hence moving to online. And the third factor, which I think we've been just gradually cracking over the last 15-17 months, has been convenience.
So I see no reason for our performance in the U.S. to not outperform the market substantially from here. Maybe I think there's one extra point which we noticed from our data coming through. We have two types of consumers which join us within the U.S. There are those who want to understand more about harm reduction and come and buy their first product with us, but they are the minority. The majority are people who first migrate across to nicotine pouches, and then when they become more familiar with the category, they start looking at alternative places where they can buy these with a slightly broader assortment and better pricing. So we see a delay factor between when the U.S. has taken off with overall performance and when our performance is taking off.
Perhaps just to create some context with this, if we look at the offline universe or the total universe within the U.S. at this point in time, roughly 1 year ago today, the domestic growth levels within the U.S. was around about 30 percentage points. Over the last 50 weeks, it has grown by almost 1 percentage point a week, and the latest reads coming out of the U.S. suggest that you're now dealing with a year-on-year growth of over 70%. The pace of change in the growth levels is accelerating quite rapidly, and of course, we anticipate that there will be the delay factor before ours will take off, but we are seeing that we are growing faster than that already at this point.
Lastly, if we have time, I don't know.
Please.
Speaking about brand owners, how would you say the attitude among your, let's say, top two, three, four producers or brand owners have changed during the last four or five years? Thank you.
I think everybody has started to recognize, and I think we have to take this ourselves as regards, we've invested heavily over the last 5-6 years, in particularly over the last 3-4, in our platforms of how we can help the brand owners. Partly in the form of insights, where I think we're now, as we said, the largest insights provider, partly in the form of new product introductions. I think what everybody has realized here, and I think it's been a little bit of a surprise to us as well, as regards to how rapidly the category is changing. And that as opposed to that of cigarettes or even with snus, whereby you could launch a product and have a brand life cycle, which would often last a century in this space. This is a very different space.
As people have realized that over the last 2-3 years and different ones have come to terms with it at different points in time, they recognize the need to introduce new products and always have their finger on the pulse of how the consumer is moving, and then they recognize the great value that we bring in on that space. So the relationship has gone from strength to strength in recent years on this space.
If we have time, there's a couple of questions from those participating online. The first one is relatively straightforward. How does Haypp think about the possibility of private label, about bringing its own brands into the space?
We have a very clear principle on this. We are not moving into private label. We have a very close relationship with all of our partners. It would be a conflict, I think, bearing in mind how much we use, we share our insights with our partners on this space. We're very happy with the place we have in the value chain, and we will not be moving into private label.
Okay. Secondly, there's been a lot of discussion about online and about penetration. So, how does Haypp think about the competitor set? I mean, you're growing, it's attractive. Surely, other people will try to join in.
Yes.
And then, related to that, apparently in the prospectus, Haypp's market share in Sweden was stated as about 90%. The recent presentation said it was about 85%. So what explains that difference? If you could address-
Yeah
... kind of the online competitive environment.
Yeah. Absolutely. So firstly, when it comes to the competitive environment, our biggest competition by far is the offline stores. They make up about 97% of our competition in any market at this point in time. So it's very much, you know, whether we're dealing with the big grocery stores in Sweden, the U.K., the U.S., it's fairly comparable base here. When it comes to online, of course, given the success that the business has seen coming forward, there's always going to be a range of characters who will enter into this. Frankly, if I had a new shirt for every person who said they were gonna take half our business over the last six years, my wardrobe would look a lot better than it currently does. So we have a big opportunity. There is a big space in this, and there is always multiple characters coming.
What we find in this space is that people can go and establish a site, they can go and reduce their prices, they can even spend a lot of money on convenience, and potentially even get their assortment up and running and their permits. But there's a few things that they're not capable of doing. The first is they cannot get established and sustain the traffic through to their site because we dominate the SEO piece in lines with what Hasse talked about earlier. The second one is that our ancillary business around the insights on the media creates a substantial pricing gap of what we can offer the products out for and still be profitable versus that of others. So others can come in and be prepared to burn money for a year, two, three years.
But once that money is burned through, they still don't have an economically sustainable business, and they tend to exit, and we have quite a range of those going through. At different points in time, there will be more waves coming in. At different points in time, there will be more waves leaving. But we're very happy with our business model, and we consider that it is very difficult to compete against.
Okay. Do we have time for one more?
We can take one more.
Okay. So, Haypp is stated it's the most profitable partner with the brand owners. But does that also then mean that there are opportunities for gross margin expansion in that partnership that was discussed, sharing that 15%? And then could you more broadly talk about gross margin expansion opportunities in various end markets? It seemed that there were opportunities with various retailer margins being quite high in some markets. So broadly, what's the gross margin opportunity, and could you talk maybe specifically about some end markets?
Clear. I'm actually going to break that down into two questions. I won't touch on the second one yet, because Peter is gonna stand up in a few minutes and walk through gross margin expansion and where it is, and if there's still a question after that, we'll take it in the second round. But on the first one, regarding the 15%, we take a slightly different approach to this versus many of the other retailers. We're very proud of being the most profitable retailer when it comes to our business partners, and that's part of the reason why we have such a strong relationship with them. We feel as though this does not need to be a zero-sum game... when it comes to who makes money in this space.
We have built our entire operating model on the principle that we generate more value, and that value can then be shared evenly across both. We never need to get to a level whereby we are turning the screw on our business partners. That's not who we are, and it's not what we do. So we like the concept, and we would like to be sitting here in ten years' time with still the same philosophy of that we are the most profitable business partner for our suppliers, and that that value they're getting is often out of incremental benefits because of our operating model.
Super. Thank you.
Perfect. Thank you very much. We'll now take five minutes, grab a quick coffee, and then we'll kick off with Markus on regulatory outlook. Thank you.
So welcome back after the break. I would like to touch upon the regulatory environment and, more specifically, our way to navigate in the regulatory environment, and also the regulatory outlook for risk-reduced products beyond 2028. The reason why we have chosen 2028 is that the Third Tobacco Products Directive, we expect that to enter into force spring 2028. So our way to navigate in a highly regulatory environment comes out of that we are a credible player due to our history of responsible behavior. And we are representing our consumers, our suppliers, to drive a sustainable change. And the number one there comes from the Youth Access Prevention. That is always prioritized as the number one priority on all our e-com platforms.
We have a 100% compliance record, tested this year in Norway, with 800,000 age checks, age checks, and 3,000 declined purchases shown for the Norwegian Parliament. The importance of age verification will increase in the future and be even more important than ever. Our global leadership in setting the product standards for nicotine pouches is enhancing our credibility, both for the consumers to use our products, for the brand owners to sell through our platforms, and also for regulators. Here, the NicoLeaks.com is pioneering, highlighting Haypp Group's global independent testing regime via Eurofins. We also have scientific and regulatory corporations that further supports Haypp Group's efforts in access to data, showing age, use among our users, and flavor preferences.
And also the nicotine pouches role in sustaining consumer transition from cigarettes into safer alternatives. And all those together, the credibility and the trust that all these builds, is getting us a place, a seat at the table where regulatory decisions are made, and that we're always involved in those discussions before they appear. So if we look at the outlook for nicotine pouches and in our situation, also the online sales. To start with, regulation will continue to evolve in the reduced risk category. It will always come new regulation, and Haypp has in the past and will, in the future, benefit from regulatory changes. And we, on daily basis, really monitor the development, we forecast the regulatory development for the future.
We also have an ability to rapidly adopt to the new environment that materialize after new regulation. Nicotine pouches and the online channel for risk-reduced products will grow. We will face a stable environment for nicotine pouches beyond 2028, when the third tobacco product directive enter into force in national laws in Europe. Countries in EU may choose to regulate or ban nicotine pouches. We today can see that countries already today choose to regulate nicotine pouches compared with banning them. Cross-border online sales restrictions will materialize after 2028, and this reinforce our investments, as we have shown earlier in warehouses around Europe.
The U.S. market will improve with newer generation of nicotine pouches that will pass through the PMTA requirements and getting marketing granting orders from the FDA. Consumer demand in U.S. is robust and is increasing. And that what is benefiting us is also the age profile of our consumers that is well beyond 21 years old. If we look into a few regulatory changes that we have shaped and adopted to in a successful way that can provide us with a proven track record in managing regulation and also our ability to navigate in this regulatory environment.
We have the Norwegian Public Health Strategy that was published earlier this spring, where a majority of Norwegian parliament support the online sales for the future with a benefit for us. We also saw this being presented by the Swedish government, a new excise change, where all tobacco and nicotine products is taxed in a harm-reduced way, with increased excise on cigarettes and decreased excise on snus, and a very low excise on nicotine pouches. We also can see the California flavor regulation that enter into force this year end for offline retail with favoring online sales with a better possibility for youth access prevention than the offline sales has.
And we also saw the presentation before me, the German nicotine pouch sales restrictions enter into force for the physical trade, not impacting us selling nicotine pouches from Sweden into Germany. But how about the future? How can we foresee the future of nicotine pouches and the risk-reduced product category? We can see that via the harm reduction, if that is gaining momentum or if not. And in different ways all over the world, the harm reduction, harm-reduced perspective is gaining momentum, setting the regulation in a special, special way. Sweden, with parliament, voted against a stricter tobacco strategy comparable with the Norwegian ones. We had an excise change this spring, that where we adopt the nic, the excise structure for the redu-, harm reduction.
In Norway, we have an increased excise on cigarettes and a decreased excise on snus due to its harm to the health. In Denmark, we have allowing the all nicotine pouches as the only category where you allow flavors in nicotine pouches. U.K. is the harm reduction country of it all, with strong support from both the government and the state agencies. In Switzerland, we have a new law proposal entering to force, allowing nicotine pouches and online sales with more liberal regulation compared with offline, and also with a ruling government in place, promising to deliver a harm-reduced laws next time. It's time to update the law in Switzerland.
Germany, we have recommendations from the independent BfR, recommending the German government to regulate nicotine pouches in a more favorable way to get the harm reduction into place, converting smokers into safer alternatives. And in the USA, we have the FDA statement on harm reduction just recently by the new tobacco boss, Brian King, Gavin mentioned before. And we have the new nicotine pouches in the PMTA process waiting to be approved. And in Europe, we have the Beating Cancer Plan that was presented this spring, highlighting harm reduction as a good way to decrease the smoking-related illness. And we have the EU mandate that was negotiated to the FCTC, WHO, that will happen in Panama, with a global think tank over tobacco and nicotine regulation.
We had a pushback on the proposed excise in from European level on the TED, Tobacco Excise Directive, where countries all over Europe pushed back the European Commission proposal, proposing a better weighted excise levels for risk-reduced products. And on top of that, in Europe, you also have the NCD, the NCD report, Non-Communicable Diseases initiative. That is the strongest ever presented support for harm reduction from the European Parliament as a good direction for where the European Commission have to be with a proposal, where they're coming up with new proposals for the TPD3. So, to summarize, nicotine pouches and the nicotine pouch category and online sales will remain beyond 2028.
The FDA statement from Brian King, an increased number of countries in Europe supporting nicotine pouches, goes in the direction of harm reduction. However, youth access prevention will remain a key priority for us for the future and will be even more important. Our today's solid age checks will, thanks to technical solutions, develop even further. Today we already have a robust system, but compare with offline, but it will be even better. We will see common approaches across industries with age-restricted products, not only tobacco, sold online, that could help preserve consumer choice while enhancing youth access prevention, both for online and offline in a good way. So all in all, low risk from favorable regulation to materialize. However, compliance is the key and will be an even more important part for us.
And strong capabilities within our operations and our organization, Haypp Group, to manage and navigate through the risks that will appear and use them as a competitive advantage for our best. And now over to Svante.
Thank you, Markus. All right. My plan is to talk you through some of the adjacent opportunities that we see. I think it's been somewhat evident from what we've seen so far today that there are, yes, there is substantial opportunity in our current footprint with nicotine pouches in our existing geographies, but we do also see quite substantial opportunities outside of that footprint. I thought it could be helpful to start here a little bit bigger picture. As we mentioned earlier, I guess you mentioned it in the beginning, Gavin, there is about 1 billion smokers, globally, which are looking for healthier alternatives. About 100 million, people, industry estimates, have already moved to risk-reduced products. When we say risk-reduced products, we mean modern alternatives to cigarettes, which carry substantially lower risk.
This is everything from heat-not-burn products, vapor products, snus, and nicotine pouches. We do believe that this transition from smoking to risk-reduced products is really only beginning. You have all of the large five big tobacco manufacturing companies kind of recognizing that cigarettes is becoming a thing in the past and placing their sole focus towards driving the risk-reduced product portfolios. And we expect to see quite accelerated innovation for many years to come within the risk-reduced space, and this is going to be driven by a couple of factors, but I guess firstly, strong consumer demand for risk-reduced products. Also, regulatory support, which we just saw here from Markus' section, and investments going in from both the established large five tobacco manufacturers, but also new emerging ones popping up.
So why are we looking at this now, given the opportunities that we have in the current footprint? I think the first thing here is that, yes, nicotine pouches is the fastest growing product within the RRP universe, but it still only accounts for about 19% of all RRP products sold in our existing markets. And there's other RRP categories out there, such as vape and heat-not-burn products, which are experiencing quite strong traction as well, and in some cases, also from quite substantially higher basis. And we see as well that the nicotine journeys for different consumers may involve a couple of different risk-reduced products, and in many cases, consumers are kind of dual using products as they mature in their nicotine journey.
As I touched upon, we do believe that the level of innovation here will only accelerate, given the investments that are coming in, and we believe that Haypp can play a very relevant role in this landscape, explaining these products to consumers and guiding them through what's about to come here. Supplier landscape is largely overlapping. I will come back to this point, and we do believe that the regulatory frameworks are quite similar across the RRP universe. So there's a couple of good reasons here to look at a little bit outside the footprint that we currently have. If we take a little bit of a look at the landscape per geography here, and start off with our core markets of Sweden and Norway.
I mean, I think it's, it's probably common knowledge in this room that, that it's quite dominated by traditional oral products, with, with snus being the dominant one still, but NP, obviously, the clear contender here. But I think it's interesting a little bit further down this, this table as well, where you see vape actually growing by 75%. These are 2023 growth rates, already. So there is, I think there's, there's things going on in, in the, in our core markets here, which, which kind of tells us that these, you know, it may not look like this, forever. And I think the same is true if you go across to other markets as well.
I think the U.S., the U.S. is a slightly special example here with vaping, since if we look at what's kinda classified as legal vaping products, there's a huge illicit market in the U.S. at the moment. But within the legal space, the vaping category is actually declining. But NP here is the clear contender, growing by 55% year to date, 2023, and from a quite substantial base now. If we look at the U.K., which has traditionally been a very vape-dominated market, we're still seeing quite reasonable growth rates for the vaping category in the U.K., about 20% for 2023. But I think it's also interesting here, a little bit further down, where you see heat-not-burn products are starting to grow, and even more so, nicotine pouches, like Gabby has mentioned here before.
Lastly, if you look at the DACH markets, they were always a little bit more fragmented, but and here you also have vape as the, as the number one, but you have two quite strong contenders, I would say, in heat-not-burn and NP, coming afterwards. So I think the takeaway here is that the landscape is somewhat different across the markets. We do believe that this won't stay constant, and it's quite evident if you just look at the growth rates here for each of the categories. We do believe that there will be space for more than one category to take significant share of each market here. It's unlikely that all the consumers in the different geographies will only will relate more to sort of one product than the other.
We do believe that there will be kind of a relationship between here and space for more than, more than just one. Looking a little bit at what the product landscape and what innovation has meant in the past, I think we're all quite familiar here with how NP evolved from what was traditional and quite brown snus, which is now the white cleaner products that we see, and we have a lot of samples over here today.
If you look at the vape category, 3-5 years ago, this was predominantly quite inconvenient tank devices, as you see on the picture here, and that has completely now moved on to a disposable device, which is very convenient and easy to use, that has kind of taken a dominant position in the vaping market in many geographies. I think also lastly, here in the heat-not-burn space, it's quite interesting. A couple of years ago, the majority of the heat-not-burn products, so I guess all of them, were tobacco-based heat sticks that you plugged in the device. What we're seeing now coming is actually tobacco-free heat-not-burn products that are based on, in some cases, a tea base and other ways to extract the nicotine out of them.
So it's kinda moving from a very tobacco-esque type of product to non-tobacco or zero-tobacco variants that are coming out now. And as I mentioned earlier here, all the large tobacco manufacturers are active in all of these three categories. But much like we've seen in the NP space, with emerging suppliers being launched and taking meaningful share, I think we have seen the same thing in the vape category. And this, all in all, you have the big, large tobacco manufacturers and you have emerging manufacturers coming in, fighting for share. It kind of creates a landscape which leads us to believe that there will be a lot of innovation and investment going through here, and consumers are going to need the guidance and help to navigate this.
That's where we can play a very relevant role. Briefly on regulation here, Markus just walked us through how we see this, but many of the imperatives for regulation are quite similar, irrespective of if it's NP or if it's vapor, heat-not-burn we're looking at. But it starts kind of with credible product and marketing standards. We need to ensure the quality and the credibility of the products that we're selling. And as Markus explained, we've taken a. We were in the forefront of that for the nicotine pouch space, and that's going to be equally as valid as we expand into other adjacent categories. These are all kind of. They all fit under a regulatory harm reduction regime, which many governments are now adopting. And obviously, youth access prevention is going to be key here.
These products should not end up in the hands of underage people. We have many years of experience and ways to work with this, like Janne explained a little bit earlier here today. We're quite well positioned here for entering into adjacent categories, and the consumer needs are roughly the same. Search, given the level of innovation and disruption that we expect to see, online will be a key channel here to explain the trade-offs between different products and categories in a way that you can't do offline. Price will be important. Aside from, you know, the obvious health benefits, social acceptability, and so on, price is actually a key factor for why consumers move from cigarettes in the first place. And assortment, navigating the assortment that's about to come.
I mean, we have done this in the nicotine pouch space for many years, and our, our ways of working is quite easily replicable to any other category. Same goes for convenience. I think it almost goes without saying, but the convenience infrastructure we built is quite well-suited for any kind of harm-reduced or risk-reduced nicotine product out there. And as I mentioned, our infrastructure is generally built for hand and multi-category. We have the experience in the SEO field for dealing with nicotine pouches now for many years, and that experience we can leverage across any category. We have the partnerships that Johan walked us through here with the large five tobacco manufacturers and many of the others.
And more categories will, in general, just increase our relevance in terms of media and the insights that we can give them. We have the back-end tech systems to deal with larger assortments, and the infrastructure we built for convenience, as I mentioned here, are quite purpose-built for this. And if we look at the online landscape, I won't stay here too long, but the online landscape is. I think we mentioned it here before, it's quite fragmented from what we see out there. It's quite fragmented, but many of the players remain quite profitable. And I think there was a question here earlier as well, where Gavin elaborated a little bit on competition, but it's the online landscape for other risk-reduced products is, in general, there's no really sort of clear global leader in it.
So we do believe that there can be space here for a player like ourselves, with experience in the risk-reduced field and knowledge and ways of working here to consolidate this market a little bit, either organically or inorganically. I guess Peter will come back to the inorganic part in a moment here. And so how does that fit to our sort of expansion plans here? I think where we're coming from now is that we have an existing business, our core and growth markets, which are delivering very solid growth and profitability, and this is kind of what creates the oxygen for us to even consider kind of next phase opportunities. And we do have the infrastructure and the templates that we can copy across to other categories as well, as I've been touching upon here.
By this, we're sort of positioning ourselves and planting the seeds for what's gonna be the growth in the decades to come here. I also want to just present with you to an example of what it could look like. This is an example from the U.K. vape pilot that we started in the beginning of the year. Here, keep in mind, we used same storefronts, same warehouses, same team, and we launched an adjacent category in one of our sites. Over the first nine months, we kind of almost achieved 5x the volume we did when we launched the NPs in the U.K. in the beginning. So there is a power in leveraging that existing platform that we have for adjacent categories.
A few words on here, how we see the priorities going forward. I think, first of all, we are looking at new risk-reduced product categories in our existing markets, and I'm saying more specifically European markets here. We do not believe that we, in the foreseeable future, will be entering the U.S. vape market, given the regulatory turmoil over there. Secondly, we're looking at nicotine pouches in new European markets. If we were to enter new European markets, we would probably start with nicotine pouches, which is the category that we obviously knows the best. And lastly, once we've kind of exhausted the possibilities in one and two here, we would probably start looking at new risk-reduced product categories in new European markets.
But again, I think it's over the foreseeable future here, is probably mostly going to be around point number one and two here that we're considering. That was it from my side. I'll now hand the word over to Peter, our CFO.
Thank you, Svante. Good afternoon, everyone. At this point, hopefully you get a very good overview on our operations or business model, but also about the opportunities we see ahead of us. Now I'm going to guide you through on how does this translate into the financial position of the group at the moment, and how do we see it evolving going forward. Let me start with a bit of a background, and let me start with the most important asset, what this company has, our consumers. We set an ambition ourselves to provide healthier enjoyment for millions. Unfortunately, as of today, we are not there yet. When we look at the last 12 months, we had a bit more than 900,000 consumers.
What makes us very happy, that out of this 900,000 a bit more than 200,000 is located outside of our core markets. So this shows that the growth markets do have a potential in these categories. The growth in our consumer base also translated into top-line growth. We managed to achieve a 39% average sales growth over the last four years. This growth was fueled by 2 key factors. One, the category growth. So roughly than six years ago, the company made the strategic choice to focus on nicotine pouches. That focus very well paid off, but also the investment, what we made into our growth markets also supported this growth big times. This strong top-line growth also translates to financials. Throughout this period, we managed to improve our gross margin.
From a 9.7%, what we had in 2019, we increased it by three percentage point up to 12.8% throughout the last 12 months. The bottom line, our adjusted EBIT grew as well. Obviously, you can see that not all the gross margin improvement translated to EBIT, because throughout this period, we invested heavily into the infrastructure and into people capabilities within our group. I think as we stand here, it's fair to say that we created a structure which is capable to manage further growth. We have the right people, we have the right processes in the group. However, we see that we will have a opportunity to improve on many of the efficiencies, which is going to be based particularly on many of the improvements, what Janne described to you.
Focusing a little bit on our core markets here. In the core markets, we had a very good sales growth throughout this period. As you can see, 2020 and 2021 was heavily supported by the COVID. But even since that time, as we alluded upon in our, Q2 report this year, we managed to come back in a reasonable sales growth. The profitability on these markets, I would say, it's relatively stable. We improved since 2019, but throughout the last period, the Adjusted EBIT is around 8% on these markets, which provides a very good and stable inflow of, revenue and, profit, what we partly decided to reinvest into our growth markets. Growth markets, let me go there, as the name implies, is important for us in term of, sales growth.
We are aiming to achieve dominant market position on this set of markets. The 57% growth, what we achieved throughout the last, period, is impressive. This didn't come for free. As you see in the middle, we invested heavily into these markets, but the good news is that we are reaching now the scale, which enables us to improve the profitability on these markets. Last 12 months, we achieved -9%. However, over the last two quarters, this was already improved to -6%, and we are confident that from next year, we will be able to move these markets into a break-even and in profitable, territory. This profit improvement is coming from the growth. With growth, we are able to unlock scale of economics.
The infrastructure improvement, what Janne alluded to, enables us to operate with lower and lower cost per order, and also our entire ecosystem, which is hinging on insights and value created for our suppliers through the consumer base what we have, is improving and growing rapidly on this group of markets. But before we go and look at the opportunities, what Gabi alluded on, on these markets, I also believe that on the current consumer base, what we have, we have an opportunity here. When we look at the orders per consumers on the core markets versus the growth markets, you can see that we have a much higher order frequency, and we believe that as we are engaging more with this consumer base, we are going to capitalize on this opportunity as well.
So that's about the past, but what does it mean for us in the future? Looking at the sales and shortening a little bit the time frame, what we are looking at, over the last 12 months, we achieved on a group level, a 21% net sales growth. Core markets grow relatively slower, but we saw a phenomenal improvement in the growth markets. If you remember back on the previous slide, this growth rate on the growth markets is rather accelerating than declining. Looking at the opportunities, what Gabriel highlighted to you guys, we truly believe that we still have a long runway on the growth markets, but also the category dynamics in nicotine pouches in our core markets are also very favorable.
Maintaining the growth rate, what we achieved throughout this last 12 months, makes us believe that the SEK 5 billion target, what we set ourself for 2025, is a realistic target. This is also going to improve this, this also going to translate into improvement of our profitability. First, let's take a look on what we do expect from the two reporting segments of our current business, what we have. In our core markets, we believe that further growth not going to require significant further investment from our side, but going to improve the value of our media offering and also enable us to unlock even further values in our insights capabilities, which then can translate into an improved profitability. Growth markets, at this point, are in the infancy in term of profit generation.
Early next year, we expect to move them into a profitable situation, but this is not the end of the journey. With further growth, moving more into an in-house warehouse operations, also considering potentially as we go on automatization. The level of investment, what we have to make, the cost per order going to reduce, but we also believe that all the media and insights offering going to improve their value. Adding it all together, this can translate into an improved profitability for the total business as well. If I give a different cut on this, our P&L composition coming from the top, the contribution, and I'm not calling it here gross margin, because in the external reporting, we use slightly different language here. But the contribution, what we achieve from product sales, media, and insights, we do expect to improve in the coming period.
Fulfillment expense, which includes two categories: the warehouse expenses and the shipping, the last mile delivery space, we expect to have slightly different dynamics. In the warehouse operation, we are confident that with the scale, with the improvements, with higher efficiency, we will be able to reduce that cost, but convenience is key. We are committed to provide better and better options for our consumers, which in term of the last mile delivery, expected to translate potentially into a higher cost. And this is what's reflected into increase in the fulfillment expense. The marketing expense is not significant in our P&L. As Hasse alluded, we are heavily reliant on search optimization, which cost is not reported as marketing expense, so we do not expect any headwind to come from this line.
Our overheads, or as G&A expenses, with scaling relative to sales, going to reduce in the period ahead of us. This makes us believe that from profitability perspective, on an adjusted EBITDA level, we will be able to make the required uplift in our current business footprint to reach roughly 7%-9% adjusted EBITDA ratio in the coming period. Now, here I would like to stop for a second because, no, this is the current footprint. Svante alluded in the previous section about all the opportunities we see ahead of us. We believe that taking those opportunities is not an option, it's a must. The SEK 5 billion target, what we are talking here in terms of sales, is not our end goal.
This company will be here beyond 2025, and we are going to have much more ambitious targets, and to reach those, we have to extend and expand our business footprint. In order to do so, we believe that we will have to invest part of the profitability, what we are making. So in our current business, we believe that we can get to a 5%-7% Adjusted EBIT in the coming years, but we are committed to invest into new opportunities in order to support our growth beyond 2025 as well, approximately 1%-2% out of the total profit, what we are making. Why is it important? Going into new territories, going into the new categories, it comes with an investment.
But we believe that over a medium term, those markets go, and those categories going to contribute into the group profitability. Here, I would like to take an illustration. Combining offline market prices with some insights, what we have on the product cost, can help us to estimate what's the profitability out there on the different categories. As Gabriel said, Sweden is one of the toughest market to operate in the RRP categories. This is where we see the lowest retail margin, front margin, what's out there. If you compare it with the U.K. nicotine pouches or vape, hopefully gives you an idea why we are so keen to put our focus on these new opportunities and ensure that we are establishing a strong footprint on new segments as well.
With this, I would like to move a little bit to the balance sheet and our business model, how it translates into the capital needs. In our quarterly report, we get used to allude on how we stand in term of inventory, in term of working capital. In general, I would like to highlight again that our business, the way it's structured, is very effective. We don't have high working capital needs. The inventory, what we are carrying, is the one what we have to finance, but apart from it, the scaling, the growing, is not requires significant investment from our side. Inventory turnover, what is at 15 times at this point of time, is what we see going forward. No material improvement expected at that stage, but also we don't see that we will have to put significant amount of the capital to grow our business.
At this point, as Gavin mentioned it already, I think in the first Q&A, our balance sheet is fairly healthy. When we look at what is the debt, what we are carrying, it's roughly 1 times of the Adjusted EBITDA, what we generated over the last year. So this gives us a very strong footprint to go into the next phase of growth and march towards the opportunity, to march towards grabbing the opportunities, what we see out there. In term of the investments, what Janne mentioned about in term of capital investments, we see that the 1%-2% range, what we set at the IPO, is going to remain valid for the period to come.
There might be quarters where we exceed this 1%-2% range, but over a 2-3 quarters period, we believe that is going to be sufficient to finance our business. M&A is an important part of our company. Let me go and recap a little bit the key steps, the key M&As, what we completed through the last couple years. In 2018, it was Snuslageret what the company purchased in Norway. At this stage, Snuslageret was already an established platform on the Norwegian market, and it perfectly fitted into our portfolio to enhance our footprint and secure a very strong position in the Norwegian market. In 2019, we managed to open up the U.S. and several European markets for us by acquiring Northerner.
This was an important step, providing us access to all the required permits and propositions into the US market. Last but not least, it was the Snusnetto and Nettot obak acquisition in 2021 in Sweden, which enabled us to consolidate the online market in Sweden and secure the first, second, and third place in the sale ranking, which, as Hasse alluded on, extremely important in our business model to acquire consumers. And we are open for further M&As. However, those M&As has to fulfill a strong and good purpose for us to go for them. We are going to act as good custodians of the shareholders' money, and we are going to go for an M&A only if it gives us something what we do not have and what we cannot recreate organically.
It either has to be a new market or give us a head start on a new category on a market where we operate, or it has to bring some new capabilities, what we don't have, and we believe we cannot recreate organically into the group. From a capital allocation perspective, we will remain disciplined. The first priority is to invest into our own infrastructure and build the current business what we have. We believe that we have more opportunities to do so, to improve efficiency, and this is the first priority what we are going to take. Emerging opportunities, as you could see, there are plenty of them. We will take them. This will be our second priority, and third, some strategic initiatives.
So if we see any M&A opportunity, which we evaluate being a good fit for the group, fulfilling the previously mentioned criteria, those are not out of question. And as Gavin, at the very beginning, clearly stated, shall we have free cash left after all the first three priorities, we are going to redistribute this to the investors. With this, I give the word back to Gavin to conclude and also open up the second Q&A session.
Perfect. Thank you, Peter. Right, so I'm going to just drop in a couple of concluding remarks here, and then we can revert back to any remaining Q&A. So as Peter said, we're on track to deliver our 2025 targets, revenue SEK 5 billion in 2025. High single digit adjusted EBIT margin for the core and growth divisions, and investment of approximately 1-2 percentage points of that EBITDA back into our emerging opportunities as it goes through. However, we recognize 2025 is by no means an end goal. In fact, it's very much a beginning. It's a sort of a milestone that we go through as we move into the next phase. And beyond 2025, we see no reason why there won't continue to be substantial growth in this category and the opportunities which have already been alluded to today.
We also see no reason why margin expansion, which we've experienced in recent years, is not going to continue also, and we will remain prudent custodians of cash. Any surplus cash which we have as we go forward, we will either utilize with similar returns to what we've generated on our capital employed so far, or we shall return it. Now, when it comes to our success and what's been underpinning it, so you've seen from Gabby what our performance has been. It's been quite robust in all of our markets. You've seen from some of the rest of the team what our operating model is, which has been quite fundamental to it as well. Underpinning a lot of our operating model is coming in for our technology and our processes, which makes everything scalable, both for existing categories and existing geographies, and new categories and new geographies.
But perhaps what's most important for driving this business forward, and perhaps that's, perhaps there's no perhaps, is the people and the culture. One of the things which has stood really well to this business in the last five or six years, is the recognition of the opportunity which sits out there, and our ability to be able to attract and retain top-class talent, so that we can scale this business across multiple markets and multiple categories. And that's part of the reason why we feel so confident with the journey that we're starting on now for the new opportunities going through it. Our ability to have attracted and retained that talent doesn't come easily. There's been a huge investment into the culture and into the capabilities that we have for making sure everybody is happy within it.
But the one thing that underpins everybody in this organization, and that everybody gets out of bed every morning and, and can stand behind, is the purpose.... The, the inspiring healthier enjoyment to millions is a prerequisite to being able to sustain the quality of talent that we have, and how we have scaled and always been able to keep that level up within that talent. And while many things will alter within this business as the years go forward, as we will continue to evolve and take new opportunities, the one thing which will remain constant is inspiring healthier enjoyment to millions. Thank you very much. I'd now take this opportunity for any additional questions.
Thank you, yes. Niklas here from Carnegie. Can I ask a little bit about what kind of pace you see in terms of rollout into new categories? And are we talking about just vaping or vaping first, or are you talking heat- not- burn as well? And are you looking at kind of going at one market at a time or going through to multiple markets at the same time?
Yeah, I think this is a key question, and Svante, feel free to jump in here on a few comments on it. So I think first of all, we, in the beginning of this year, we expanded initially into vaping within the U.K., and then in the middle of this year, we expanded into vaping in Sweden. Hopefully, before we come out with our next quarterly results, we might be in a position to talk about our next market. We will be expanding into vaping as well within Europe. Our primary focus at this point in time is moving towards vape, because it is such a well-established category and quite a stable category with a clear trajectory on where it's getting to here.
I think, as Svante kind of alluded to, there is some emerging opportunities with the changes which is occurring within the tobacco heating products. And I think there's also been a huge amount of science over the last 2-3 years moving on in that space as well. So I don't think we have as clear a position on that as we do on the vape space at this stage, where we see a very robust opportunity. Svante, is there anything you'd like to add on this?
No, I don't think so. I think I like, like Gavin said, we're, you know, we're working on one large European market at the moment, which we'll be back on, and I think it's, there's a range of opportunities out there, and we'll take them in the order we can absorb them and make them work.
Okay. Excellent, thank you. Also, Norway, you seem very confident that the parliament there is going to oppose an online ban. What makes you so confident in that matter?
I think in the spirit of enterprise here, I will pass this one over to Mr. Lindblad. Perhaps you could give a little bit of detail on this.
So, we all could follow the discussion that was in the Norwegian parliament this spring. That was what has happened publicly. And there it was clear that the government doesn't have a majority for the ban. And on top of that, we don't have any indications from anyone anywhere that that situation has changed. So we don't see any, and we don't hear any chances for a national online ban in Norway.
And when will this be known? Is there an imminent decision?
No, and I mean, when it comes to regulation, you will never know, because there can always be new initiatives and then new ideas and new party. But I mean, the current government, the current parliament is as it is today. And it's not much that talks for that. We will have the same government in place next period. It seems like there will be a change in minority in Norway. So if they don't have support this term, it won't be easier next term to propose a proposal like this. So for two terms then. Then it's past 2028.
Super, super, thank you. Also, can I just ask on insights that you're talking about? You mentioned this several times here today. How big part of your sales is this, and how does it differ in core markets versus growth markets?
Absolutely. Absolutely. The insights dynamic, I guess it generates value on multiple factors to us. I think on a clear quantifiable basis, it's the invoices that we send to the brand owners in order for them to understand either the consumer insights or the new opportunities insights, or the brand tracking spaces, or even, as was alluded to earlier, some of the dynamics around the M&A space. We don't generate a substantial amount of money on the insights that we provide to regulators or to leading universities, which will often publish much of our, much of our data, which is quite supportive from the regulatory angle. But there's a secondary piece, which is even more important here on insights when it comes to the value that it creates for us, and that's the pre-launch capabilities and the closeness in the relationship.
Where the manufacturers will often, there's many examples of this, and there's actually some examples of this here on the table, which you can check out afterwards, where many of the manufacturers will pre-launch products with us and with us alone, and extending our assortment gap versus that of other players in order to consume the insights together. For that reason, I think it's quite hard to stand back and say the value of insights is simply X. For that reason, we feel that it's probably best not to put a public number on it. We can say it is quite a fundamental driver to our business.
Would you say that, in your core markets, you are definitely profitable?
Yes
... excluding the what you generate from the insights?
Yes. But that's also one of the factors behind it. While our insights might be of much higher quality than what can be got from other sources, or where we may be the largest player in it and much faster within it. We don't get abusive when it comes to how we charge for it, because we view this as part of an all-encompassing relationship which we have here. So yes, it's a meaningful part, but yes, the business itself is definitely profitable in isolation. Absolutely.
Very good. Thank you very much.
Hello. Hasan Fransson from Raqs. You're talking about a lot of markets, and you're working in seven markets now, but you haven't mentioned big parts of the world like Asia, Africa, Australia. Are you considering those markets as well, or are you focusing on these seven markets?
Yeah, I think it's a valid question, and one we get asked often. If we stand back and think about our purpose here of inspiring healthier enjoyment to millions, of course, we've got to recognize that only 37 million smokers exist in North America, and 49 million smokers exist within the broader definition of the E.U., including Switzerland and the U.K., into that mix. So less than 100 million, less than 10% of the smokers are in our current geographies. However, we still feel as though, given the opportunities we have ahead of us, focus is the most important factor we can have. And for the next couple of years, we believe the best opportunity we can have for scaling this business is within that, circa 80 million nicotine consumers that we currently experience within North America and the U.S. So we will...
Sorry, North America and Europe. So we will maintain a focus on this space until we have broadened our position quite extensively here. And at that point in time, I think we will open that question once more. But at this point in time, we don't anticipate we will be going outside those boundaries for the foreseeable future.
Thank you.
Thank you, Andreas, here, SEB. You talk about high single digit margins. You mean EBITDA or EBIT or without a D, or?
Adjusted EBITDA. So we're talking here about the reporting numbers, which we release at this point in time. So it'll be feeding in on that space, and that's where we're offering the range of, based on Peter's material, of 5%-7% on that space.
Okay, I would call it mid-single digits, but maybe, maybe just me. Cool. And can you, again, maybe define what you mean with excess cash or excess capital? Thank you.
So what we can see is that the business is not particularly capital intense. And while we have been reinvesting back into CapEx in that sort of 1.5%-2% range, we don't envisage that's going to increase over the medium to long term. So hence, what we can see is that the business is starting to generate substantial amounts of free cash. Now, part of that, we will reinvest into our emerging opportunities, but we believe as we get out towards 2025, there will be capital which won't necessarily be adjusted for, cannot be efficiently consumed organically, unless the opportunities surprise us once more as regards to the scale of where they're getting to.
Hence, if we do have any surplus cash, we remain committed to being the custodians of capital that we were in the past, and that if we have surplus cash that we're not getting similar returns for, we will return it to the shareholders.
1-2 percentage points is the investments in the P&L, right?
Sorry, Andreas, say that once more.
Yeah. I think you answered that right.
P&L investment, what we are talking about.
Yeah. And what about CapEx investments for new categories and so forth?
Basically, sorry, let me get here. So when it comes to the new opportunities, when it comes to the capital investment, we do not foresee any significant investment because those will be able to share the existing infrastructure, what we have, or very limited new capital investment required for those. So that investment, what I portrayed, is more P&L investment, but the capital investment is limited on those markets.
Typically, when it comes to the requirements or thresholds, when you look at the new investment, what do you look at? In the return requirements or what's the process?
Well, generally, we've been operating on quite a high, very robust double-digit return on capital employed over the last decade of this business, with a particular focus on that in the last 5-7 years. So you have to bear in mind, if you look back at the history of this business, it has taken very, very small amounts of net capital in over the lifetime of the business, with the exception of when we took in small amounts, reasonable amounts of capital for strategic bolt-on M&A. So hence, we've historically been operating with a return on capital, which was well in excess of any normal WACC for our business.
But we will stand back and see where we are at that point in time, and we'll give a little bit more guidance as we get into 2025, and we're starting to look at the potentials of how we utilize capital at that stage.
Do you have any less positive historical experiences from investments, and what have you learned, potentially?
In capital allocation?
Mm-hmm.
Absolutely. Absolutely. Oh, I have a graveyard full of those. So I think what we definitely find in this space is that one of the key principles we learned perhaps 4 or 5 years ago in this space is being sufficiently focused and saying what markets we will take and what spaces, and making sure we have the infrastructure right before we attract capital in towards allocating capital towards those markets. And now that's why we have invested so much over the last 12-18 months on building our infrastructure up, and hence why we also revert back to Svante's points, we will take a very measured and controlled approach to our expansion, both into new categories and existing geographies, and new opportunities outside of existing geographies as well.
We feel the biggest risk to the business is not so much starvation, but more indigestion, and hence we will keep that as a base principle when it comes to capital allocation as well.
Okay, we have a few online questions as well.
Okay.
One segues nicely into the previous question, which is: What are the key lessons for Haypp from the successful strong growth of Haypp's pilot U.K. nicotine vaping business? In other words, how do you—what lessons did you take, and how do you apply those into the new opportunities?
Absolutely. So one of the reasons why we decided to go for a pilot in this space, and the particular reason why we chose the U.K., as Gabby referred to earlier, the U.K. is potentially the most competitive harm-reduced market in the world, both online and offline, and we wanted to test our edges there, so we could take the learnings from it. This wasn't picked randomly, either as a market nor as timing. We were conscious that we were building our entire infrastructure in order to be able to roll out multiple categories as we get into 2024 and 2025. So one of the key aspects here was to determine, was there any holes in our infrastructure when it came to managing either multi-categories on the same site or categories which had slightly different dynamics, and that the slight nuances within that.
We discovered a fair few of those with our existing infrastructure when it turned up within vape in the U.K. We were able to take those learnings, bring them back and recognize them while we're still at the architecture levels, early on in 2023, of our new systems, and incorporate those learnings into the architecture so that those will be part of the operating model which gets rolled out during 2024.
Okay. Another question was with respect to the regulatory environment. And the questioner noted the hostile attitude in Netherlands and Belgium toward nicotine products and was hoping Haypp could address in more detail the outlook for nicotine pouch, excuse me, legislation in Europe, including things like TPD3 and the coming Tobacco Excise Directive.
Yeah. So Markus, you can perhaps step in on this one a little bit, but just as Markus is coming up, I think what we can see is that there is a range of different perspectives across Europe around regulation in this space, with many countries already having brought in positive regulation around nicotine pouches or taxes, such as Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Austria, Slovakia, and a range of other countries, and many other EU countries where the category is not yet established, pointing out a clear support for the category and for risk-reduced categories in general. And then I think at the opposite end of the spectrum, there are those two outliers of Belgium and the Netherlands. But Markus, perhaps you could open up on this a little bit more?
Yeah. Yeah, but what we can foresee past TPD3, the third Tobacco Products Directive, is that there will be an opportunity for countries to either regulate or ban nicotine pouches. And now we can see more and more countries choose to regulate it, where Belgium and the Netherlands is two exceptions. And we also foresee that the online sales will be restricted with a cross-border distance sales ban. So, you will be... You will have to be present on each market you like to have online sales on. And different countries choose a different way to regulate, and they try to do it before TPD3.
Because you will see both from the end markets a strong position on how the European Commission has treated the Tobacco Excise Directive, where in the first leaked proposal, the nicotine pouches ended up in a too high, at a too high level compared with vaping. And yeah, I think that it's. So it's the European Commission has one way of seeing it, and we have known the European Commission's position since 2020, when they presented their tobacco product. The second Tobacco Products Directive mid-term evaluation. But I mean, it has to be merged together with the countries. They have to be supporting of it, and they have to pass the parliament, and there is someone, somewhere in between, they will meet.
Okay, thank you. And the last question then we have, I suppose for the day, is: When the board is considering how Haypp will return excess cash to shareholders, could you please discuss how you evaluate the attractiveness of share buybacks relative to dividends? And would anything need to happen for Haypp to buy back shares?
I think at this point in time, we're still in 2023, and we're not going to be returning any capital to shareholders for the next two years. I believe between now and then, we have lots of opportunity to engage with shareholders and consider what the various alternatives are within this space. I think this is a space that the first priority for us is to keep the business marching in the direction that it's currently going. The second one is generate the surplus capital, and then I think from there, we can discuss how we distribute it.
Okay.
Perfect. Thank you very much for taking the day. It was greatly appreciated. If you have any questions, please don't feel, don't pause for a moment to reach out for any questions on it. For those of you who are here in the room, there's an opportunity to grab a drink and catch up with some of the people who you were speaking to today, and take it from there. Thank you very much. Thank you.