Welcome to Haypp's 2025 Capital Markets Day. We're really pleased to see all of you here in the audience in person, and all of you who are joining us via the livestream. A couple of logistic things to get out of the way. We'll have two breaks during today's presentations. The first is slightly longer than the second. If you're here in person and haven't yet had a chance to see the demos, I'd really encourage you to take advantage of that as well. Perhaps more importantly, once the first break starts, coffee will be available, and will be available through the duration of the presentation. With that, I'd like to introduce Haypp's CEO, Gavin O'Dowd.
Thanks very much, Erik.
Thank you. Thank you all very much for taking the time to come and join us today. We greatly appreciate this. I recognize it's been 18 months, pretty much to the day, since we did our first Capital Markets Day, and I look forward to giving everybody an update on both the direction and where we're going and how we've been performing since then. If I start off, first of all, with a quick look at the agenda, we will start off taking a look at our achievements since that last Capital Markets Day, followed by Peter walking us through what the opportunities are within the markets as we look forward. Beyond that, Markus will give us a walkthrough of where the regulatory environment is before returning back to myself, where I will walk through the fundamental pillars within the strategy for our success.
That will be followed by Svante, taking us a walkthrough of how we are performing within each of the markets and what our outlook for those markets specifically is. We will wrap up at the end with a bit of a summary of bringing it all together for what our targets are and our capital allocation principles. This is the agenda, which Erik has alluded to earlier, and we will try and keep to that as much as possible. There will be opportunities for questions at various points during the day. Now, when it comes to today, there are four key points that I would like—sorry, just one moment. Is there any possibility of getting this screen working? Just while we're getting that screen working, there are four key takeaways which I would like to—which I'd like to focus on today.
First is that the potential for risk-reduced products, and nicotine pouches in particular, continues to grow exponentially within our markets, and there's a very long runway ahead of it. Secondly, there are significant benefits for buying these products online and from Haypp in particular, and those benefits are continuing to grow more as time progresses. Thirdly, regulation, because of the growth of the category, regulation is starting to emerge and manifest. Thank you. Regulation is starting to increase and manifest in a more robust manner across the markets, and what we have built in recent years gives us a substantial competitive advantage within this piece. Lastly, Haypp continues to grow market share in every one of its markets which it operates within, and this is a side effect of that operating model that we've been running so far.
Now, from here, I'd like to go back and touch on some of the very fundamentals around our business and our operating model. Let me start, first of all, with our business model. For those of you who may be relatively well aware of it, we are a marketplace. We buy products from a significant range of product manufacturers and brand owners, and we sell them directly to the consumers. That part of our business model, I think, is very well understood. However, what is not always as well understood is that we also collect a substantial amount of data from our consumers. We package that, and we are the largest insights provider back to the industry globally. In addition, our platform is a fantastic location for brand owners in order to generate brand awareness and brand trial around their products.
When it comes to the second piece here, which is the category that we operate within, here is perhaps one of the most robust nicotine and tobacco risk continuums available on the market, and it highlights the spectrum of all range of nicotine products relative to cigarettes. When it comes to this space, we operate solely with these four products in the right-hand corner. Snus, of course, was our origins for where this business began. Nicotine pouches is now by far the largest component within the business, but more recently, we've also extended across in some European markets into vaping and tobacco heating products. When it comes to the impact that this category is having, on the right-hand side here, you can see a chart of where the smoking rates are across the full range of European countries today.
What you can see is that, of course, Sweden has the lowest, continues to have the lowest smoking rates within the EU, and actually the lowest smoking rates within the OECD. It is about to achieve the World Health Organization target of smoke-free, which is when less than 5% of the adults smoke. In addition to that, we've added to this chart relative to prior years of what percentage of the population are ex-smokers within each market. You can see that it is not solely driven by heritage within Sweden. There is a substantial consumer base in this market which are ex-smokers. It's not only Sweden where we see the likes of Snus and nicotine pouches having this impact.
The market which has probably had the biggest impact when it comes to the reduction of smoking rates in the last decade is the U.K., where effectively half of the smokers which existed in the U.K. 10 years ago no longer smoke. The initial movement for that was started with vaping, and in more recent years, that has been accelerated with both heat not burn and nicotine pouch products. We can also see in other markets, such as in the U.S., where traditional cigarettes are declining double digits year on year for the last three years, driven by the onset of new products such as nicotine pouches themselves. When it comes to the global transformation, the three pillars which are driving this transformation remain constant, but if anything, they've actually been enhanced in recent years.
Firstly, one of the primary drivers for the growth in this category is the consumer demand to have a less dangerous product that they're consuming their nicotine by. This is becoming even more enhanced in the last couple of years as it's become more socially acceptable as the products are becoming less niche. Secondly, the principles around legislation, both in the U.S. and in Europe, hinge very much around the benefits of risk reduction. In recent years, we can see that becoming more solidified as actual legislation around the category is coming out that supports that. Lastly, because of that growth in the consumer base and the supportive regulatory environment, we continue to see many brand owners investing heavily into this space when it comes to developing better products for the consumer, which in turn is further accelerating that migration.
In addition to that, the brand owners are also expending substantial amounts of resources when it comes to generating the awareness around these products and explaining the benefits of them to the consumer. What this drives is that within our markets, what you can see is that the growth for nicotine pouches is continuing in a very robust manner, and this is effectively the only category within the oral space which matters anymore. Snus continues to operate within that line. If I move on for a moment and take a quick look at our achievements post the Capital Markets Day of 2023. If I start off, first of all, with our targets. We raised our targets slightly at that stage, and we said that we hope to be able to achieve SEK 5 billion in revenue by 2025.
We were tracking very well towards that during 2024. However, the shortage of ZYN within the US from the latter part of Q3 2024 means this target is now very difficult to achieve. When it comes to our profitability, we said we would achieve 5&-7% EBIT across our core and growth markets, and we would reinvest 1-2 percentage points of that back into establishing our emerging markets. We have come through the latter part of 2024 where we've already crossed the 5%, and that is up more than 1.5 percentage points relative to a year earlier. I think we're very happy with the performance on the bottom line. However, if I move along and take a look at a few other things which have perhaps changed since our Capital Markets the last time.
If I take a look, starting with the external factors of what has gone better than expected, what has perhaps gone worse than expected, and what has gone in line with expectation. If I start with the more optimistic aspect, first of all, of what's gone better than expected, the growth of nicotine pouches within the U.S. has been faster than we have expected. More recently, particularly in the last few months, the last six months in particular, I would say, the onset of second-generation products into the U.S. has really started to get traction with the U.S. consumer, which is very beneficial for our platforms because assortment, as you will see later, is a core element to our offering.
You can see the performance of these whereby, as .of today, more than 30% of the products we sell in the U.S. today are products that did not exist on the market one year ago. This is the beginning of a new era, what we often used to refer to as Day Zero for when this would start to manifest within the US. When it comes to what's in line with expectation, while it was very difficult to predict, we did assume that it would be at some stage in late 2024, early 2025, when the FDA would start to approve new products and effectively give a stamp of approval for the impact that these products, that nicotine pouches, are having on public health. We also envisaged that as the category got towards critical mass, there would be material investment across all of the brand owners within this space.
We also envisaged that as we got towards various discussions around this category within Europe, the benefits that risk-reduced products have used in Sweden would be a catalyst for the Swedish government to come and strengthen their voice and share that voice at an EU level in order to support sustainable legislation around the category as it goes forward. When it comes to what has gone perhaps a little bit worse than expected, I think the category, and we have into it some one effect side of we have been one of the side effects of this, the category has become a victim of its own success in the U.S., where the growth did not just beat our expectations but beat everybody else's and has created shortages within the U.S.
We have been a little bit disappointed with some of the countries in Western Europe, particularly the Benelux and France, which have taken a slightly negative view on this category and the benefits that it can create across society, and they have been refusing to focus very much on the science and the data behind it. When it comes to other aspects within our operational achievements, I think there are a few other features that we are quite happy with here along the way. First, we have grown nicotine pouch share across all of our markets. We have successfully entered vape and heat not burn over the past two years across the U.K., Germany, and Sweden, and we have increased our profit margins while also increasing the value that we provide to our consumers via our shared economies of scale philosophy.
We've further developed our media and our insights offering, which creates significant value for us, which again, we can share with our consumers. We've continued to expand the gap between ourselves and any other retailer across our landscape when it comes to compliance and hence further strengthen our reputation with regulators. In addition, we stood here 72 weeks ago, and I talked about in order to manage the level of scale that we're envisaging for the future, we needed to effectively build down, break down to the ground, and start again with all of the core elements of our systems. Over that 72 weeks, I'm very happy to say that all of those elements have worked out really well.
I will talk about these in a little bit more detail later, but we have rolled an ERP system and middleware across all of our markets and gone live everywhere, with the U.S. being the last market to go live on the 1st of March with zero consumer impact. We are getting great benefits out of that so far. Our e-commerce platforms, which are bespoke within Europe and had been with us for 10 years, we've been putting a lot of work into them over the time, but we realized there was a need to go back and take all of those learnings and codify it for the next generation of where we're getting to. We have more than half of those rolled out at this point in time, and we envisage we will have the rest of them rolled out over the next 28-29 weeks.
Our warehouses, we have now unified with full automation and a consistent warehouse management system across not just Oslo and Stockholm, but we also went live in late last year for our lead warehouse within the U.S. Now, when it comes to what targets I'm suggesting here for 2028, as you may recall from the previous ones, between our IPO and 2025 or 2024, we have effectively doubled our revenue and quadrupled our profit. What I'm indicating is that between 2024 and 2028, we will double our revenue again and quadruple our profit again. That equates roughly to a sales growth range of 18%-25% annually and an EBIT at the other end of that with 5.5%, give or take 1.5 percentage points.
The reasoning why we want to keep a little bit of oxygen in there is that while we continue to see great opportunities for investment, we will prioritize long-term shareholder value and make those decisions along the way. For today's presentation, I'd like to introduce our COO, Svante Andersson, our CFO, Peter Deli, and our Head of Legal and External Affairs, Markus Lindblad. They will walk us through various elements of the discussion. In addition to that, many more of the management team are here today, and there are some other key members of the organization around also. For those who are in the room, I please suggest you take the opportunity to speak to them around any questions or any topics you have along the way. With that, I will pass over to Peter for market developments. Thank you.
Thank you, Gavin. Good afternoon, everyone. When we started the preparation for our Capital Markets Day, one of the first things we did was that we looked at the different markets and expected evolution of the consumer base across those markets. To do so, we updated not only our forecast, but also the range of the market we are looking at. In our forecast, we have the markets where we operate today, but also we included several big European markets, including France, Poland, Romania, Italy, Spain, to capture a big base of consumers. When we looked at the total nicotine consumer number on this set of markets, what we see is that the nicotine consumption is very stable. Despite all the economical ups and downs during the last years, this category proved to be very stable. Within this category, online plays even a special role. It's rather countercyclical.
In bad times, consumers are turning more towards the online channel supporting our business. Looking ahead, we believe that there is no reason why the overall number of nicotine consumers would not stay stable. All the new products in the RRP space are going to provide incremental value and opportunity for the consumers. The key question is, I think, that what the composition of the nicotine consumption is going to be. Looking at the share of the four main categories we are looking at here, cigarettes, nicotine pouches, heat not burn products, and vapes. If we go back in time, you can see that in 2020, around 20% of the nicotine pouch users consumed any form of reduced-risk product. This is gently growing. In 2024, this ratio went just above 30%.
Again, looking at the current market dynamics, how they are developing on the various markets, all the effort by the brand owners putting into product development of the different products makes us believe that this development is not going to stop where it is today. We believe that in the years to come, more and more consumers are going to move from cigarette to the RRP space, and in 2028, around 40% of the consumers are going to use one form of reduced-risk products. Looking at this, I think the question is not if on this market there is an opportunity for Haypp Group to grow. The key question we have to answer, there are two key questions effectively we have to answer, are we at the right markets and are we at the right category? Let me unpack it.
Going to the markets, on the left side of the chart, you see the expected consumer number for our current footprint. On the right side, there are the other European markets included in our analysis. These markets, Spain, France, Poland, Romania, do have relatively lower RRP penetration than the markets where we operate. Also, the composition of the RRP products being used on these markets is completely different. If you see, in 2024, half of the consumers here used heat not burn products, and almost the other half used vapes with very low nicotine pouch penetration. On the other side, if I'm looking at the markets we operate, these markets cover around two-thirds of the total RRP population. 32 million people out of the 51 million included in this analysis in 2024 lived in countries where we have business at the moment. The composition of the products is also different here.
Vape is the leading category, however strongly followed by nicotine pouches. Heat not burn as a category has not been established so deeply on this market set than in other European markets. There was significant growth taking place between 2021 and 2024, and the underlying market dynamics suggest that we have still a long way to go. We expect an incremental 12 million people moving on our current geographies from cigarette into the risk-reduced products. Majority of them are going to join the nicotine pouch category. We do foresee an incremental 7 million consumers to step in and moving away from other products start consuming nicotine pouches. This will represent the biggest part of the growth. Looking at these numbers, we believe that we are not only at the right markets, but also participating in the right category.
Now, as a next step, let me unpack a little bit where do we expect the incremental consumers to join the category. I guess that this is not a surprise for any of you, but in our markets, the U.S. is by far the biggest one, not only from a population perspective, but also when you are looking at the total nicotine consumers in that market. It's standing out. The history of nicotine pouches in the U..S relative to Sweden or to Norway is relatively short. This category started to grow two, three years ago, depending on where you put the mark. It doesn't have a long history. Category awareness is in its infancy. However, the growth already started to manifest. As Gavin alluded, it's overshooted not only our expectations, but leading manufacturers' expectations as well, resulting in a tricky supply situation.
Leading industry players put out a statement believing that in 2030, 20%-30% of the U.S. nicotine consumer population can go into nicotine pouches. Our estimation of around 12 million people in the U.S. consuming nicotine in 2028 is closer to the low end of this prediction. Five million incremental users are expected to move into the category. In second place, we have the U.K. Nicotine pouches in the U.K. are also at their early stage of the journey. The products have been available for quite some time, but the rapid growth we see manifesting over the last 18 months indicates that the relatively low level of usage we have today is going to change.
More and more users are joining, and as the vape products are going through in the not-so-distant future a turbulent change period, we do expect that more and more people will realize the benefits of nicotine pouches and joining the franchise. Growth is expected all across the board, other markets as well. However, relative to the current size of the market, that growth rate is not going to be so big than what we foresee in the U.S. and U.K. I think that we can conclude so far that we are at the right market, at the right place. However, there is a third element what we have to consider, which is about the channel, because we operate only in online. The online channel penetration and the live stage of the online channel is completely different in different markets where we operate.
On one side, I would use Sweden and Norway as examples. Here, the nicotine pouch as a category is well established. There is a high level of consumer awareness that the product is out there. Also, the online channel is very well known by the consumers. I think we did a great job ourselves to make sure that people are understanding the benefits of shopping online. On the other side, I would like to highlight the U.S. and U.K. Penetration levels at the moment are extremely low. 3% in the U.S. indicates that people are not aware yet that the products are available online.
We, as Haypp Group, do have a high share of market in the U.S., so it's not that the competition is eating our lunch, but I think the key opportunity for us is to ensure that the remaining 97% of the U.S. consumers also learn that buying online has its benefits, as they get used to say these days that this is a good deal for them. U.K., 7% online penetration, also do have a way to go, and we believe that it's going to increase as well. Every part of the jigsaw in terms of the price, the convenience, and the assortment pointing to the direction that we will have opportunities. Looking at this landscape, the few things I would like to keep in mind are that the category, the RRP categories, are going to grow. We are positioned at the right markets in the right category.
Online as a channel does have different growth opportunities, but particularly the U.S. and U.K. are standing out. If I have to rank the opportunities, definitely the U.S. because of the high category growth and the opportunity in the online penetration is standing out, followed by the U.K. or other European markets, including the core markets as well, will remain on a growth path, but relative to the U.S. and U.K., that growth is going to be slower. Of course, I have not spoken much about vape in the U.K. or our emerging markets, but we realize and acknowledge that there is a huge opportunity in that segment as well. With this, I hand over the word to Markus to guide us through on the regulatory environment. Thank you.
Thank you, Peter. My name is Markus, and I'm heading the legal and external affairs function within Haypp Group. We know that we are operating in a quite regulated market. With that, it comes responsibility to both know about the regulation to come and also to guide the company where we should be for the future and also shape the regulation in the right ways so it fits us and fits our purposes for the future. That you can do in different ways. The most important part is to listen to the regulators, what they actually would like to achieve. That is to reduce the harm coming from tobacco. There is a different method for that to get that in place.
For us, it is important to showcase that we, as a company, are a part of the solution, so how we can contribute to reduce the harm. It is while showing that it is how we get the license as a company to operate in the markets where we are present. One example that we all know, some of us at least, is how PMI did with the IQOS, how they positioned that product, how they showed the health effects with that, how they acted in a responsible way when they launched it in different markets, and how they now have gained market share in the risk-reduced space, both in Europe and now also in Europe and also in Asia by taking that position.
In the same way, we in Haypp Group are setting an example, an example on setting the standards, the industry standards for nicotine pouches, and testing the products according to those standards and acting as the market leader as we are. By that, we are giving the license to act and get the respect from both regulators, our customers, and also our suppliers. If we look into the regulatory development and the forecast for different markets, and if we start with the U.S., we would like to say that the U.S. on the federal level is a stable market with a status quo situation. However, we see on the state level that some states prioritize regulation here. In those states, there is moving in some of those.
To define the status quo and the positive size, the positive development on the federal level, we have the FDA that just recently mentioned went out with the first MGO on nicotine pouches. This, of course, is important for the full industry as a whole, but especially for our category, the nicotine pouches. What is extra important for us is not only that this product got the ZYN, got the marketing grant order, it is also how they have defined the digital marketing for that product in the protocol. That definition on how the product shall be digitally marketed is totally in line with Haypp Group's operation model. The proposals that we have seen on menthol ban, nicotine restriction to decrease the nicotine level in tobacco products are parked for now during the current regime.
The uncertainty we see in some states on the regulatory situation, we are monitoring closely. This was also mentioned in our last Capital Market Day. There we highlighted the investments we have done in compliance in the US that we have done since then. That is also why we now will invest even more in compliance and also engagement on state level. First and most, to secure our major states where we have a good footprint today, but also to open up new states to increase our sales in other states where we are not as strong as we are in our main states. If we move over to the U.K., I am happy to say that the U.K., as a country with government and parliament and state agencies, everything remains committed to the harm reduction to reduce the risks in the consumption of nicotine.
There we have a new regulation coming in place. It's in the House of Lords, I guess, now, or if it passed yesterday or something, where they focus on getting a more sustainable market model for the full U.K., and especially focusing on getting youth not into the category and keeping them out of it. This will make it easier for us to operate. One way to secure our footprint in the U.K. is also how we are contributing to the standardization of nicotine products in the U.K., where the British standard is aligned with the Swedish standard that is aligned with our Haypp Group's marketing and product standards. Now we are working on lifting that up to the ISO, the ISO in the international standards. We have the same standard all over the world for nicotine products.
We will also get a benefit out of licensing as implemented in the U.K. to have a more sustainable retail sector, both in brick and mortar and online. We can also see that the digital advertising of vape that has been introduced will be moved over into the nicotine pouches with a more sustainable model and also more cost-effective for us, not participating in that game. We will also have an excise implemented in 2026 in the U.K. that is okay, good for us. Of course, there will be higher excises, but it is on a decent level. The most important part for us with that excise coming in place is that a part of that excise is going back to the licensing, making sure that the licensing works, and also with the private import that is flooding into the market today that we have to compete against.
If we move over to the EU, it's our assessment. It has been our assessment the last Capital Market Day, and today the same at that we will have a positive environment to operate not only in 2028. That is the goal for this Capital Market Day, also after 2030, when the third tobacco product directive will come in place, as we guess, our guesstimate is. What we will get out in that directive that is aligning the total European inner market and helps the countries to end up in the regulation in a decent way. We foresee that the nicotine pouches will be open to buy in Europe. Flavors will exist, and online will be open for buying the products.
During this period, we will also increase the consumers around Europe, where we will get a heavier and better and better weight in consumers purchasing products as political electors of the politicians. What we know, what we believe, I would say, because we are not participating in the votes, but what we believe is the online sales will be domestic. We will face a ban on cross-border distance sales, but that has been our assessment from the past. That is also why we are building that operations now in the European markets, where we will operate locally in each market. The most important country in Europe is Germany. We see during the new regime that we have got in Germany that they remain committed to the science-based approach on regulating products.
In the past, we have seen this from different state agencies coming out with positive reports and proposals on how to regulate nicotine pouches. We now see in the current government that the science-based approach still exists and probably is strengthening in Germany as the leading country in Europe. However, I would like to highlight, as Gavin talked about and Peter touched upon, if I remember correctly, that we will see different national regulations coming in place until 2030. We have seen it in the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Spain. Countries will regulate and tax nicotine pouches in different ways and in different directions. That is what we have to wait for. That is why we have to wait for the new directive coming in place in 2030 to have a more aligned approach all over Europe.
This is also the reason why we have for now paused our geographical expansion in Europe. For now, we will see. When we get more clarity, we can open up for the next steps in Europe. When we see where we should operate and how we should operate, the backside on reducing the harm from tobacco, it's the induction of youth into nicotine. This is the most important part for us in our work, where we have to end up in a good way. That's why we are creating the legal age access only also for the future now.
What we can see is that the legal age is moving in the purchasing timeline, where you from getting the product to the earlier you see the product or get to know the product, and that the legal access has to move as far on the other side as possible. For sure, age verification is essential for the purchase as such. We have to protect youth from seeing the product, getting the product, and knowing about the product and getting to see the marketing. Here, online will be increasingly important to make sure that this actually happens because we know who is visiting our sites and what they see and when they get in contact with the products. This will open up a new way of operating for us compared with our brick and mortar competitors.
This is also mentioned in or defined in the Marketing Granted Order that's been got in the U.S., where they have a special digital chapter on how online should be regulated and what the benefits from that are. That is not only to make sure that the youth doesn't see it, get in contact with it. It's also traceability that you can after showcase who has seen it, what have we done in a fantastic way compared with our brick and mortar competitors. Nowadays, we are also partnering with other industries that face the same situation. We see also on the G1 level that we are moving in this direction, both for pharmaceuticals and for alcohol. That is why we have and we will ongoing focus on new digital solutions to eliminate the potential human errors that could be done during this process.
Also, how you can show full traceability of what we have done and who have seen and got in contact with the products. In this work, we are totally agnostic who we cooperate with. We just would like to cooperate with the best and the best-in-class providers so we can build the triangular or the data collection on securing that only the right persons get in contact with the right products so we can secure the 100% legal age access only also for the future. All in all, this together, it's a lot to have on your plate to have control over everything. It takes a lot of development to get this in place, both from the compliance and to know the regulation and to set the right structure and infrastructure for the company. It comes with some costs.
Today, we have the right systems in place. They are fully tested, not only once on a regular basis that we test the systems that we have. We have a red flag system so we can see different consumer patterns that we have to track and that we have to control. We have an online retail reporting, what is happening and who is picking up the parcels in different places. This is a complex implementation that we have done. With our size as a company, it comes with a low transactional cost that gives us a fantastic benefit to be the most compliant, driving the industry, driving the category with low transition costs for the consumers. As a positive outcome of this, it's not only that we do the right thing for the consumers.
It also comes with recognition from regulators, from the industry, and our consumers, what we do. It is something that we benefit from. To have the sophisticated compliance in place also reduces the friction for us and for the consumers and also for the suppliers. Thank you so much.
Marcus, you do not get to run away yet. If you could stay on the stage. Peter and Gavin, if you could join us. We would now like to open the floor in the auditorium for any questions. If you could wait for a microphone and then state your name and firm, please, and then your question, that would be lovely. Thank you.
Hi, Niklas Ekman here from Carnegie. Can I ask about the regulatory environment in the U.S.? I am thinking about current events with tariffs in the U.S. Does that impact you at all?
Also, the DOGE process, has that at all impacted. the FDA and their authorization process?
Maybe I'll start with the tariffs one and perhaps hand over to you, Markus. No, regarding tariffs, no. Of course, our operations within the U.S. are solely domestic. We buy products within the U.S. We have our U.S. warehouses, and we ship to U.S. consumers. We are very much within the borders of the U.S. We are not impacted by that. Even further back in the value chain, I estimate that about 96% of the products that we sell within the US are manufactured within the U.S. at this point in time. For the remaining 4%, you have to bear in mind how low the product cost is when it comes to manufacturing here, that even the inbound tariffs and those are not likely to be significant.
No, I recognize we're probably one of the few businesses at this point in time which operates across Europe and the U.S., which is looking on at this more as an independent observer rather than one which is greatly concerned. However, I think, Niklas, there is a secondary aspect to this, which is not the potential spillover effects of this. What we do find is that this could be having a bit of an impact on consumer confidence. Now, as Peter kind of alluded to earlier, our category tends to be non-cyclical when it comes to consumer demand. Also, because of the pricing gaps that we provide relative to offline, we tend to be particularly countercyclical. No, there's no direct impact from us on the tariffs themselves.
We look on with anticipation to see what economic impact there is, recognizing that we tend to benefit in the countercyclical nature of this. Perhaps over to your views on DOGE, Markus.
My views on DOGE. I mean, it was just a day or one and a half days ago. We know what has happened, and we know that we do not have any or fewer staff in place in the FDA. How that will be handled, I have to get back to you with who is left and how they will operate for the future. I think it is a little bit early today to actually say who is there and how they will move ahead.
Have FDA been significantly impacted by DOGE, or is that unit kept more or less intact?
I think I do not know whether you are aware of this or not, Niklas, but over the last 36 hours, there was a significant impact with the head of the CDC, believed to be gone on administrative leave, and I believe potentially not returning from it. I think there may be a couple of hundred other senior staff within that department, which do not appear to be in that department anymore. It does appear as though we are dealing with a very fluid situation over the last 48 hours here. Sorry, I should have. Yeah.
While having the microphone, can I also ask about you talk about the U.S. potential here. Can you tell us a little bit about your negotiations with PMI? Because that has been a problem with the lack of ZYN. Can you say anything about your negotiations?
When do you think it's likely that you will see ZYN back on your online shelves, so to speak?
Absolutely. Of course, there was a ZYN shortage. For those who are not aware, there was a ZYN shortage through 2024, driven by the market demand accelerating significantly and supply not being able to come online quickly enough. As that came through the latter part of the year, as we got into the end of Q3, there was a restriction where online was deprioritized for ZYN because of the amount of capital that they had allocated towards brick and mortar stores, and they were prioritizing the volume to there. What we did notice as we came into the latter part of the year and the beginning of 2025 was that we started to access some product directly. We started to access some product into the market again.
As many of you may have seen, we started selling products up to that point in time. However, with the marketing granted order that came on in the third week of January, it brought us to a position where we needed to either adapt our sites to be able to fit with that marketing granted order or remove ZYN from it. In order to, we're ready to press the button to do that migration for the adaption. In order to do so, we need robust supply of ZYN coming through. We have an excellent relationship with PMI, both at a global level and also at the US level. We have very close dialogue with the U.S. team on a regular basis on how this is progressing. We feel we will be back in stock with ZYN in the not too distant future.
When it comes to coming back today and giving a specific date for it, we're not ready at this point. As soon as we can see that we have a guarantee of supply, we will make the adaptations, press the button, and be ready to extend the offer out on ZYN at that stage.
Excellent. Thank you.
Thank you, Niklas.
For those of you who are joining us online, please use the livestream facilities to publish any questions you'd like, and then we'll pass them on to the management team. Do we have more questions in the audience? Everyone's quite keen on coffee, right? We'll wrap it up here and take a break for coffee. We'll be back in about 20-25 minutes, please. Thank you.
Thank you. Okay, welcome back, everybody. I'm going to spend the next hour.
I'm going to be here on my own, and I'm going to touch on some of the key pillars around the strategy of our success. I'm going to talk about picking out each of those pillars. I'll touch on the fundamentals of them. I will touch on the progress we've made in the last couple of years, and I will touch on what the outlook for each of them is as it goes forward. However, before I get to the strategy of success, I'd like to approach looking at some aspects around our business from a first principles and very fundamental level. At various points over the last eight years since I joined this business, people have asked me what's likely to occur and what's going to change over the next few years.
I think the question that people don't ask often enough is, what is actually likely to remain consistent out into the future? I'd like to start with some of those at this point in time. First and foremost, when it comes to the consumer and regarding what their demands are, I consider this to be something we can predict with high degrees of certainty. I don't envisage in five years' time that the consumer is going to turn around and say they wish they'd paid more, nor are they going to turn around and say they wish they had a worse choice. For e-commerce, they're not going to turn around and say they wish their delivery had been slower when it got to them. This is a very consistent gig on it here.
When it comes to our other business partners, such as suppliers, the brand owners, they will always want efficient, accessible access to a prime consumer base within it. They will want to operate with a business partner which is trustworthy and which particularly focuses heavily on youth access prevention for this category. They will want a partner which can give them enough insights on what's happening in the market so that they can adapt and change to the market circumstances. When it comes to regulators, the first and foremost thing, as Markus alluded to earlier, that they will want is legal age restrictions on these products.
They will also want partners or players out there in the industry which will self-regulate when it comes to nicotine standards and when it comes to flavor descriptors in order to make sure that these products are never harmful and never attractive to underage usage. They will also vary from country to country, but they will demand that the business partner or that the retailer is compliant with all local regulation. When it comes to the fourth pillar here, I think this is a quite interesting one when it comes to technology. The one thing that I can probably say with a reasonable degree of conviction is that the worst technology is ever going to be is today. It is only going in one direction.
As that progresses, we see it will continue to generate an ever smoother buying experience for the consumer for online and particularly for complex products and highly regulated products. The technology will enable the consumer to have a much more personalized experience on where they're coming through on this. We have seen coming through very much in the past that the largest player tends to benefit from these magnificent shifts within technology, particularly if they're well equipped to do so. With that as a backdrop on what we think is going to be consistent over time, I'd like to walk you through what is the fundamentals and remains the fundamentals of our strategy. This is, for those of you who've been with us for many years, this will look somewhat familiar.
For us, if we break it down, it is about dominating organic search so that we get traffic to our site. Once traffic arrives to our site, offering those consumers the best assortment, the best price, and the best convenience so that they come back to us again. In order to be able to do this at scale, it needs to be embedded in the right infrastructure and technology so that each of those first four pillars can continue to improve over time. Now, when it comes to the underlying philosophy that we've been running this business on from the beginning, I'd like to remind everybody on where it is.
We run with what we refer to as the philosophy of the shared economies of scale, which effectively means the bigger we become, the more benefits that we can release, the more of those benefits we will give back to the consumer. This is a philosophy which I would love to say we were smart enough to have come up with ourselves, but it's a philosophy which perhaps some of you may recognize from Costco or from Amazon. This has been driving the ever-increasing share of the markets that we've been gaining across each of our markets so far. The model also generates significant benefits for our business partners, whereby the bigger we become, we get much more benefits for the suppliers. I will touch on many of those aspects as it goes through.
It also creates benefits for regulators, whereby as we've gotten to such critical mass, we can lead the universe when it comes to what compliance with youth access prevention and product standards can actually be here. If I start going through these four pillars, and if I start with the first one on search, probably no harm just to stand back and set the framework for where we are here on this category. Our category, while it is significantly safer than any other tobacco, than the traditional tobacco products which are out there, it does not come without a dependency risk. Because it has a dependency risk, it is not possible to buy advertising space with the likes of Google AdWords, Facebook, Instagram, et cetera, for our category.
In addition, many countries are starting to introduce legislation which bans digital marketing for this category, further enforcing those restrictions that those large global media companies have. You've seen this manifest already in Norway. It's already in for vaping in the U.K. We expect it will expand across nicotine pouches. As the FDA has brought in the first marketing granted order, that effectively bans Google AdWords for within the U.S. as well. Now, when it comes to what this generates, it means that you always want to be at the forefront, that when somebody picks up their device like their phone and types in some reference around this category, that you are always at the leading position to organically collect that traffic. It's the top positions within that, which we'll come to in a moment called the AAA positions.
Now, when it comes to how you get to be at the leading position on that, Google will always optimize for the consumer experience. While they will adjust their algorithm on a daily basis, there are four key fundamentals that they tend to look at within the space here. The first one is relevance. When they are sending traffic to your site, is your site relevant for that traffic? Having the widest and most curated assortment and having that assortment of new products coming on before anybody else is a real differentiator on this space. We will touch on our assortment later on and how that benefits us here. The second piece that they will look at is the user experience. How easy is the site to navigate? Is the consumer able to gently find everything they want as they go through?
When they're looking at any content, do images or videos render very fast? Milliseconds makes a massive difference here. Now, because of our category and what SEO has been the prime chromosome within our business, we actually build all of our platforms in-house bespoke, with the primary purpose of them being to optimize for SEO. The third aspect which they will look at is content. Is the content on your site unique to your site? And is it content which the consumer is prepared to engage with? If you do, well, then you're clearly a good site, so we should send more; Google will say they should send more traffic to that site. Because of our scale, we're about 13 times the size of the second biggest online retailer for nicotine pouches at this point in time.
We can generate a quality and a quantum of content that nobody else could even comprehend. We will touch on some aspects of that later on as well. In addition, because of our relationships with our business partners, we get a substantial amount of unique content generated by others for us, which further accelerates our position within the eyes of Google. Then reach. In recent years, they have been getting much better at identifying outside of your store how many references are there from credible sources talking about you as a site. We have been able to utilize not just our PR capabilities, but we have been able to utilize our data and our product standards to engage both with traditional media and also with leading universities, which often want our data to publish research around this category.
Now, people will often stand back and say, "What is our SEO strategy?" I think that's perhaps a different way to address the question. We don't have an SEO strategy. We have a business hinged on SEO. It touches on every aspect from the content on our site to our technology, to our external engagement, to the assortments we carry, and when we bring those assortments in. SEO is at the core of everything that we do. What you can see from this is that it does generate some very solid results for us here. If we take a look here across a range of our markets, you can see this is what I refer to as the AAA locations. When you get your device and you type in something around the category, is it our stores which take the vast majority of the traffic?
I think this is a good time to explain to people that across each of our markets, we run multiple brand fronts or multiple stores across each market. The reason for that is that the first brand in the search will take the vast majority of the traffic, but the second one will take the vast majority of the remaining traffic. The third one will take the vast majority of the remaining traffic again. By owning all of that AAA location means we get the vast majority of the traffic as it comes through, and it leaves no oxygen for anybody. Here you can see each of our sites across each of our markets as it comes through here. This creates a dynamic whereby on any given day, over 97% of the traffic that comes to our sites comes to us organically.
That has been increasing over time. There are two side effects to that. One is that our marketing spend is extremely low. It has actually been even reducing over time, and it is now about 0.5% of our revenue, not because we do not want to invest more in marketing, but because as Google continues to improve, it becomes harder and harder and harder to actually get platforms to be able to drive digital marketing via the search engines here. It also creates a material barrier to entry. Others, I think in the eight years that I have been here, I have certainly seen about 100 competitors come and go across our markets. Others who get themselves in order and can get permits to operate, get a license up and running to sell, that is great. What they cannot do is get traffic to their site.
This is quite fundamental. Needless to say, when you have this sort of location, it is coveted by many. There is always pressure on us in order to be able to manage this. I would like to talk about some of those pressures and what we are doing to address them. Of course, we have competitors coming in on one side, but we have also regulators coming in on the other, which are restricting more and more as regards to what we can say around the category. We recognize that many of our competitors do not comply with that. While it is never an issue over the long term, because those who do not comply do not remain, it is often a bit of an irritation over the shorter term.
We always take a position on how do we drive ourselves forward with this in such a way that the benefits are unique to us because of our scale, our position in the market, and our approach. We focus on three key factors within here. First, I talked a lot about the performance of the sites and the ease of navigation as one of those four elements earlier on. Our previous set of stores, we had been up and running for 10 years, and while we chopped and adjusted them at various points along the way, we have now gone through a material overhaul on it. That material overhaul has effectively codified all of that decade of experience of how to perfect this journey along the way.
We have now gone live with those sites across a range of our European countries, and we see a notable uptick in the traffic that we get and the share as those sites have been rolled out. Secondly, I talked about building broader credibility across the universe with more references coming back to us in order to further strengthen this. This is something I'll touch about later on as well, whereby it becomes an ever more important aspect to have broad, credible sources talking about us as a store to build the authority and the credibility here. Lastly, content. I talked about our quantum of content a moment ago, but also to make sure that we can produce content going forward at a level that nobody else can.
I'm going to take that specific topic on content and walk through the challenge that we've been facing on this over a number of years and the solution that we developed on it. When it comes to scaling content, we have a tool which we developed in-house, a proprietary large language model tool called HayppWriter. Just to create some context around this, we operate in seven markets in multiple languages, and we have 16 stores. That means we have over 10,000 web pages which need regular updating on where it gets to. We've just over two and a half million words. When it comes to why it needs regular updating, we have new products coming on every given day.
In addition, we have some of the existing products whereby they need to be repositioned within the markets and be explained subject to either brand repositions or how the consumer is interacting with the product repositions along the way. Google continues to adapt their algorithms as it evolves, so you have varying demands on this as it comes through. In addition, there's always evolving regulation regarding what you can and can't say within each individual market. It is impossible to manually keep this quantum of content to the quality that we would like with this number of moving factors to it. However, we do have the benefit of having very structured data, and we have had for a number of years.
With the onset in late 2022 of large language models, it gave us the ability to be able to utilize our engineering capabilities to develop solutions to this. Now, when it comes to some of the data that we utilize here, you have to bear in mind we have robust product data. We have the leading consumer data across the industry. We also have all of the search data which we have been collecting for 15 years regarding our sites and how Google is navigating through it. We have the deepest understanding on the regulation across each of our markets, which we have been able to convert into a codification of regulation in each market. In addition to that, we have the store themes for each of those 16 stores and where it gets to.
Where it now gets to is that for the vast majority of the content coming up on our sites now, whether it's product content or brand content, this is not generated by humans anymore. It is generated by the HayppWriter and is the engineers which are driving this. It means that effectively when we get a new product in real time, that content is perfect and up on our sites in multiple languages as it comes through. As the consumer adapts their buying behaviors and how they're interacting and talking about different products, that data automatically flows back into the HayppWriter and adjusts the nature of the content in order to fit in with future Google searches on this space.
Of course, we can guarantee then the quality of that content across our stores, and we can guarantee the themeology of that content as we vary one store versus another within the markets. Of course, most importantly, we can guarantee that all of this content is compliant with what's required within the markets because we have codified the requirements from a legal dynamic within those markets. That releases a significant amount of our team to be able to free them up to further drive on the innovation in this space. Because we have ever-increasing amount of data points on our products, we can extend our content much further in this space.
It creates a scenario whereby even where all of our competitors are generally focused on one category and one market, and in theory should be much more agile than us in those local markets, we are by far the most agile player in this space. This is why we continue to take channel share and market share across our markets. Now, when it comes to what the results are, which come true from this, here to the right, you can see what our share of Google traffic is across all of our markets relative to our closest competitor. I think it's fair to say we are head and shoulders above in every market.
When it comes to what this generates, it means that each year, not only do we keep all of our existing customers, which I'll come to later, but we see an ever-increasing share in new customers coming in via this. This is total customers here. If I was to extract Snus out of this and focus on nicotine pouches, the inflow of new customers is growing much faster than this. I recognize some of you have been to a few different investor days over the last three months to six months, and at various points in time, people have talked about various AI tools, and this is just one of ours. There's a reason why people standing up as CEOs don't show what the AI tools look like. It's because this is what an AI tool looks like.
It is not particularly sexy, and it doesn't necessarily drive very much more knowledge or information in it. What I can say is for those of you who are here physically, we have a booth rigged up out back, and please go over and feel free to play around with the tool, and the team can explain and let you generate content for a couple of new products which are coming into the market at this point in time. However, for us, the most fundamental change around search that's coming from AI is not coming from the ease of generating and refining processes within it. As you can imagine, for a company which is so dependent on search, we are always thinking about where could this evolve to in the future. We think the biggest impact on this is actually going to be from a consumer perspective.
Now, many have turned around, and I want to just turn back and start with the landscape on this. Many have turned around and talked about how search has been such a rapidly changing environment in recent years. For my adult lifetime, there has been one dominant search player on the market, and it's been Google. This has been an extremely stable environment despite what people may say around it. However, the onset of large language models, whether it started off with ChatGPT or then moved on more towards Perplexity or other tools recently, is the biggest challenge to the traditional search model that I have ever experienced.
While it's very difficult to tell which of these models will win, or even if Google will adapt itself to win in this new environment, what I think is fair to say is that this is going to change, and it is likely to change significantly in the next few years. I think across our markets, we also believe the country where we will see this change manifest first is within the U.S. However, I think we feel we can come up with a few clear expectations within this space. Firstly, whoever the new leader is in this space or the adaptations to the existing leader, we do expect that nicotine, because of the dependency that it drives, will always be kept outside of paid marketing spaces on this.
We also expect that in the same principles that Google got to dominate in the late 1990s by saying they would focus on the consumer first, and if you have the consumers, the retailers will adapt to you, that will be equally valid to this. Whoever will win this will focus on the consumer first. However, we do recognize there's a couple of other tweaks which are coming true on this. As many of you will often recognize, you go into Google and you put in a search term and you get 10,000 results. It has become very evident to most people you don't require 10,000 results coming true on it, and all of the new models are showing out two and perhaps maximum five results as regards to guiding you to a location to buy a product.
What this creates is an even greater consolidation where a winner takes all scenario within it. It is very difficult to tell exactly how this will manifest over time, but we feel the one thing which will be consistent here is that as these models are more powerful than the traditional search engines, they will have a greater opportunity to bring in broader reach when it comes to determining who is the authority that the consumer should listen to around a product.
This is part of the reason why we have been investing so much into building up our third-party authority by utilizing our data to share it with some of the leading universities across Europe and North America who publish leading academic papers referring to us in the headlines as the data sources within it, because it is a very different level of credibility if you can get Cambridge University to say you're doing a great job versus Joe Blogs to say you're doing a great job.
It is also part of the reason why we've been building out our touchpoints on sharing our data and our product standards with some of the leading traditional media houses across the space, because again, it is a very different scenario when The New York Times makes a reference to your site versus when an individual makes a reference to your sites on this space. We feel authority is going to be the sole precursor of who will win in this new universe. We also feel the authority won't just come from there. There will also be that these platforms are much better at capturing consumer-led feedback when it comes to authority as well. This is why we have started utilizing our million-plus consumers in order for them to be able to make references to us both on our sites and in other stores as well.
We recognize this is a bit of a moving part, and we're not entirely sure where it will pan out, but I think today is a good opportunity to set a tone on where we are preparing for on this space. The key takeaways from search, as I see it, is that organic will continue to be the ever-increasing share of digital search for this space, and that is only going to continue. In addition, technology is altering what's going on here at a rapid pace, and we will continue to invest to make sure that we are leaps and bounds ahead of anybody else in this space on it. With that being the first of the four pillars, I would like to take a moment and then move along to our second one, which is assortment.
Now, I stood in front of you all 72 weeks ago, and I explained why assortment was so important for the consumers. I shared a range of data across the Swedish consumers as regards to how fragmented they were and how many new products they were trying. At various points since, people have come to me and said, "It's only the Swedes that will behave like that. It won't be anybody else." Ironically, it was never the Swedes that said that. It was only other nationalities that told me that was only the Swedes that would behave like that. Today, I'd like to extend that data set, and I'd like to compare it to the U.K. and the U.S.
If I start here on the left, I'd like to highlight this is the share of sales in each of the three markets of products which did not exist in the market one year ago. This is altering radically across all of the markets. When it comes to the number of new products being launched, it is significant across all of the markets, and it is accelerating heavily in the U.K. and the U.S. Particularly now in the U.S., the products which are coming, because of the expense of bringing a new product to the market in the U.S., it's only the good ones which are coming in.
Even if people can turn around and say, "But there's been a significant drop from 2023 to 2024 on new product launches within Sweden," I'd like you to bear in mind during Sweden, we rejected 92% of the new products that were brought to us for launch. This chart would look fundamentally different if we chose not to, if we had chosen to include them. When it comes to the most important aspect here, which is the consumer, the consumers try between six and 10 new products with us on any given year at this stage, and that is only increasing. The consumer greatly values assortment. One of the things that they love about doing that on our sites is that they know any product they try on our site is a safe product because we have very clear product standards.
Before we will issue any product in any market, we send it off to the world's leading laboratory in this category, Eurofins, for independent testing, and we would publish the results of that before we will allow that product to be offered to our consumers. Of course, we are digital, so these consumers are going to be a little bit more demanding than that of the mainstream market, which creates an environment that you tend to see trends manifest with us well before you start to see them manifest offline. That is roughly 18-24 months irrespective of the market that you will see the trends manifest with us first. This is really useful for our business partners because we are a litmus test on where the world is going and what the future of that can be.
If you combine that with an ever-increasing consumer base, which is a significant grouping at this point in time, that makes us an incredibly healthy business partner to work with. There are two key features that these brand owners want to utilize from an assortment angle here. The first is that there is a deep desire to understand how this rapidly changing consumer is behaving. Secondly, there is the opportunity to be able to address those consumers with their new products or their products which are already on the market. If I start with the first of these two, which is the understanding. You may know from previous events that we have always described ourselves as being quite a significant insights provider. We are the largest provider of insights to the industry globally.
The reasoning we are that is because when we set this function up in the beginning of 2020, we built a multidisciplinary team with capabilities both within the maths and algorithms within it, but also within the qualitative research and in the visualization expertise through it. We have a significant number of data points in all of our consumers, and we have the ability to augment the data of how the consumers are actually behaving with input from the consumers when we reach out to them to ask them why they have behaved in that way. This data set is being utilized by all of the large manufacturers in all of our markets at this point in time.
Just to contextualize this, we sell for the data sets themselves, we sell a front-end license to each of the suppliers that they pay for in cash, and there are approximately 200 external people on our platforms on any given day on our data platforms from the brand owners utilizing this. They utilize this data for a range of concepts here, sorry, for a range of depths here. First, our data is used when it comes to looking at concept ideation to figure out where are the unmet needs in the consumer and where are the great opportunities that may manifest in the future across the market. What products should they launch and what communication should they put behind that as they bring it through? How do they generate awareness?
This can be around the feature of the product or the unique attributes of the brand of the product. From that, sorry, from that, how do they understand what parts of consideration are key or what parts of that message are key for the consumer to understand whether or not they should consider that product and move from that consideration down to trial? It is also great data, particularly when you get to the trial space of understanding what did the consumer really like about the product, what parts of their expectation did it meet, what parts did it surpass, what parts did it not meet.
That feeds on then to understanding with those consumers what are the repurchase patterns and how does that move from there into building up a sort of a loyal consumer base and how strong is that loyalty both on the emotional level and on the functional level and what opportunities do people have to utilize that loyalty to either extend the brand or even take additional pricing within the brand over time. We do offer quite a significant base on the insights here. When it comes to the demand for our insights here, very simply, we break our insights down. We have a broad portfolio of options here, but we break it down into three different groupings of the data, the pure qualitative, and the combination of when you merge the data with the qualitative research with the consumers at a consumer level.
We can see all of these are growing, but particularly this unique point that only we can do is rapidly growing across the markets. That has been driven by the continuous improvement in our products and us rolling it out across the new geographies. Of course, we offer this service to support and understanding the consumers, but we've also been seeing demands for our data from 2022 and onwards being utilized for effectively every M&A transaction that you have seen within this industry. More recently, you can see that our data is being used by the brand owners in order to support heavily with regulatory engagement and government engagement. I'm going to pick an example of something which we've been working on for the last few months on this space.
When you go to the U.S., the primary discussion, and Mark has kind of alluded to this earlier within the FDA, is anybody which is bringing a new product to market needs to be able to prove that their product benefits public health, and they need to continue to prove that in order to keep the product on the market.
As such, you need to submit an application in order to get the product on, and embedded in that application, you need to do what's referred to as a longitudinal study, which is where you follow a group of people for a 12-month period and understand what impact is this product having on their otherwise on the rest of their life as they're going through that period, particularly with a focus on is it getting people off cigarettes and what % of the users of the product at various stages have come from more harmful forms of nicotine. Now, because we can emulate a typical market in this space where we carry the full suite of products coming through, and because across 2024, we have roughly 10,000 new customers in the U.S. coming to our sites many months, we are perfectly equipped to do this.
We have been asked by the brand owners to build up this facility to support them on their longitudinal studies. This is not just for getting the products approved. These requirements also need to continuously be updated and submitted back into regulators to prove that their products are still meeting those needs. This does not just generate a significant amount of cash for us, but it also strategically strengthens our relationship with another touchpoint with the brand owners. Back to the brand owners again and touching on the second piece here, which is their appetite to utilize our platforms to launch products into the markets. When it comes to our media ecosystem, we stood in front of everybody here two years ago, and we talked about how we are developing this. First and foremost, perhaps maybe to touch on the base principles within this.
Anybody which is bringing a new product to market, you want to generate two key dynamics within this. First, you need to generate awareness that your product exists, and then secondly, you need to generate trial of your product across the consumers. We have a broad range of touchpoints across all of our platforms, which are good for either brand awareness or brand creation, round to helping people to consider the product as part of the repertoire as they're going down through the purchasing journey, and then even to pieces at the end whereby we have the likes of the checkout upsell, which gets people to come in and having bought 10 cans of product A and 10 cans of product B, they get a material discount to try one can of product C as they're at the checkout.
This means that we have an excellent ecosystem, which we talked about here as Media 2.0, which we are proud to say we now have rolled out across all of our markets. What we are finding is that across our markets, the share of the trial we generate within the market is between 2-4 times our share of the actual market itself. If I was to contextualize that, in markets like Sweden, where we have just over 30% share of the total market, we believe we account for about 65% share of the total new products tried on any given day within Sweden. If I look at other markets like the U.K. or the U.S., where we have significantly lower shares, we believe that we account for about four times that share when it comes to the level of new trial.
This is why our media is so valuable within this ecosystem. What we've seen from our media and our insights is that the demand for this has been growing at roughly, so the revenue we get from this has been growing at roughly twice the pace of our overall group revenue. That has been driven by the improvements we've made into these services, but it has also been driven by the demand for this as the growth markets of continental Europe, the U.K., and the U.S. are starting to get much more traction and much more demand for this category. This now accounts for a very high single-digit share of our group revenue.
When it comes to the future of media, I'm going to touch on this a little bit further on in the technology piece as we go through, but for us, we now have such robust data coming through from what we've built up over insights over the years that we know exactly what message for which product needs to be given to which consumer at which stage in the buying journey. The next step here will be where we unify our media and our insights so that when the consumers come onto our platform, they get a personalized media experience, which further increases the value of that media over time. I'm now going to move to the third leg of the journey here, which is pricing.
Now, if I first of all create the framework of why we are able to provide the price gaps that we do within the market. First and foremost, it is widely accepted that for any brand owner who sells products to us on similar terms to a comparable size retailer, they make roughly 15% more margin. The reason for that is because there is no field force, there are no returns. There is one single point of delivery, there is no point of sale material, there is no need to come and check for contract compliance within the store. We have a full audit for this. When you bring all of this together, our business partners tell us it is generally at least 15% of extra margin that they make upon that.
That is money that they are very happy to reinvest into consumer offers on our platform. When you bring that and you combine it with the high single digits that we get of revenue for our Media & Insights business, combined with the economies of scale that we've been utilizing across both our warehousing and distribution and our overheads, we have a strong, and this is what I consider to be the most fundamental moat around our business, which means that we can offer very compelling prices to our consumer and still remain profitable within those markets. When it comes to what those price gaps are across our core markets, and in particular, I would say Sweden, Sweden is the most competitive market from a pricing perspective to operate in the face of the earth.
Svante will touch a little bit on it in a moment, but due to that legacy of the markets, there is historically low traditional retail margins here of circa 20%. In fact, if I was setting up a nicotine pouch online business today, of the 183 countries around the world, I think Sweden would be towards the bottom part of the list of where I would start. However, if you look at some of the other markets, such as the U.K. and the U.S., you can see retail margins which are often up towards 50%.
This combination of where we are with that, plus the support that we are getting with the ever-increasing demand for our Media & Insights business in our growth markets, means that we can remain profitable and still operate with a 20%-30% discount here in Sweden and Norway while operating with a 40%-50% discount versus offline across our growth markets, such as the U.K. and the U.S. Now, we know we do not need these price gaps in order to keep the consumer, but these price gaps are fantastic at this stage of the infancy of the industry in order to accelerate that migration from offline to online.
If I was to combine these two topics together of pricing and assortment, the consumer demands both, but these are also of great benefits on the other side of the coin to our business partners because we have a very attractive consumer base, we have excellent launch capabilities within our media, we can guarantee that we generate highly profitable partnerships, and we can provide consumer insights back in a rapidly changing environment. This is a scenario whereby our virtuous cycle actually works to the benefits of all involved. Now, the fourth and final pillar within this strategy is convenience, and this is a topic which is often greatly underestimated. Many can do convenience and logistics, however few can do it well.
When it comes to what we define within the scope of this topic when it comes to convenience, it is everything from being able to get products into our warehouse and launch new products rapidly for the consumer, true to ensuring that when the consumer presses buy on our sites, that they have the products both fast, reliably, and transparently as it comes through, and in the rare occasions where something goes wrong, that they get all of the support, or even if they have any questions before the buy, that they get all of the support from our customer care team. Now, in order to understand these, I think it's important to stand back and recognize some of the key characteristics around our category here. Firstly, we operate with products which have an extremely low weight-to-value ratio.
Also, most of our products tend to be quite harmonized when it comes to the physical dimensions around the products. There are extremely low degrees of return if you buy this product as a reason why you're buying it; you're not planning on sending it back. There is very limited seasonality throughout the year. There's a degree of seasonality within the month, but very limited seasonality throughout the year. While we consider ourselves to have an extreme assortment whereby we often carry 8-10 times more than you would find in a store, relative to other categories, the extent of our assortment is actually quite easy to manage. It's all of these factors which have been born in mind when it comes to the infrastructure that we run our convenience and logistics on.
If I take a look at one of the core elements within that, which is the warehousing itself, historically, we often operated with 3PLs, but more recently, we've been moving into our own warehouses, and then more recently again, we've been moving into highly automated warehouses. As we move over to those highly automated warehouses, we see benefits both in the terms of cost, and we see benefits when it comes to the lead times to the consumer. We also see on the cost aspect that while there's more fixed cost in getting full automation up and running in the warehouse, the variable costs contract significantly, and the benefits of scale really manifest on this piece.
Further, when it comes to time, particularly for peak times, and we would often see peak times tying in around salary dates, we can see a significant reduction in the amount of time that it takes for the order to be packed and ready to go. Unfortunately, we were not able to run our capital markets today at one of our warehouses, which I think would have been very exciting for everybody, but in the absence of that, I do have a brief video around our warehouse that I would like to take a moment to share with you now.
At Haypp Group, our vision is clear. We inspire nicotine consumers to use lower-risk alternatives. We are helping smokers switch to options like nicotine pouches, delivering a broad assortment, good prices, and top convenience to our customers. Take a look at our Stockholm warehouse, a cornerstone of this mission.
With smart automation and scalable solutions, we process 1,200 orders per hour with just a team of 11. That's efficiency in action with diminishing variable costs, and we have reduced fulfillment costs to just SEK 2.7% of revenue. At the same time, we have reduced lead time by 40% and improved pick quality for customers to 99.9%. We have the same automation setups in Norway and U.S. Speed meets precision. Orders are filled instantly with multiple daily pickups and near zero mistakes, thanks to integrated systems and real-time visibility across every step of the customer journey. We've optimized shipping too, tight packaging and pre-sorting cut costs while keeping consumers happy. As demand grows, our warehouse scales effortlessly by extending the automations to handle more SKUs and higher capacity. This is more than a warehouse. It's a platform for growth, delivering value to customers and investors alike. Learn more at hayppgroup.com.
Thank you. Now, when it comes to convenience, I'm talking about what we built yesterday that we're utilizing today. In order to be able to scale across all of the markets, we needed to roll out part of that new ERP system or that entire new ERP system I referred to earlier. That has been combined with the rollout of a product information management system, which enables us to capture all of the broad suite of data around any individual product, which gives us the ability to be able to populate both warehouses and shipping providers and all the other systems over time with this. This data set, by the way, is also the same data set, which is the input that I referred to earlier for generating the automated content as it comes through.
The ERP system is fundamental here for us to be able to fine-tune our stock levels within our systems, bearing in mind that we turn over the stock within our systems approximately 12-13 times per year at this stage. In addition, the warehouse, we talked about the automation, but underpinning that, we have a consistent warehouse management system across all of our warehouses at this point in time, which means that as we onboard any new product or as we tweak any process within any warehouse, it becomes a case of a just-once deploy everywhere. It works extremely well in that space. Regarding shipping, we introduced a new shipping administration system called Ingrid into the U.S. with great benefits around about a year ago. As such, we then introduced that platform itself in as an integral part of our new stores.
As we're rolling the stores out across Europe, that enables that transport administration to be within it. What that enables us to do is to offer personalized shipping options down to the postcode for the actual customer so that we can identify which is the best shipping option to be able to bring in or drop off for that consumer. It also effectively commoditizes shipping because it gives us the ease of just streamlining X number or any number of new shipping providers onto the system without having to manage the administration around them. For customer services, we have gotten to such a scale that we needed to overhaul our entire customer service system.
We are very happy with the Microsoft Dynamics tools that we have at the moment, which brings in not just the customer experience on that specific order, but all of their historical orders so we understand who is the customer and what has their behavior been in the past so we can personalize our response to them. However, we are far from happy with that. We were also talking about what we are building today for tomorrow, and this should not be that far away. Now, across some of these factors, firstly on the inbound piece, we have now, because we are running across so many markets and we are extending into other categories and there are so many SKUs, now with all of the data structure we have there, we are working with new tools to automatically utilize machine learning for the replenishment of these products as they come through.
In addition, because there's so many new products coming in across the markets and because we want ever-increasing amounts of data on it, we do not want to be bringing this data in and building it ourselves. We have built a supplier portal so that the suppliers can automatically put their own data in for our platforms. This combination of features makes it much more scalable as we go forward and even as we extend into other categories, more SKUs, and potentially even more markets. When it comes to warehousing, I think we're very comfortable with the warehousing we have across almost all of our footprint, with the exception of German-speaking Europe. We have made some great progress on the convenience in there in the last couple of years, but we have leaps and bounds to go here.
When it comes to the U.S., we believe that even though we've stripped a couple of days off the average shipping time in the U.S. of late, we would really like to get down to seeing if we could offer same-day delivery. Actually, yesterday we went live with our first same-day delivery service within Houston, which happens to be where our prime warehouse is, and we will test the results of that over the coming months. If it works, we will roll that out to other key urban areas within the U.S. We will continue to fine-tune the automation, further reducing both the lead time and the cost.
When it comes to shipping, we have a new shipping tracking tool, which will be rolled out later on this year, which tracks every parcel with every shipping provider for every step of the journey and feeds that information back in relative to where that parcel was expected to be at the time. With that tool, combined in with our customer care, we're able to give real-time updates to the consumer and proactively tell the consumer should anything not be going exactly in line with expectation.
Going down to that with customer care, combining that along with the robust data that we now have in the single platform on it, of course, in 2025, there are great opportunities in order for us to be able to use our AI tools to address some of the simpler customer queries, which often makes up the bulk of our queries, and be able to meet that customer at a 24/7 basis as it comes true. All of this together will further increase the customer satisfaction and further increase their retention rates. Now, when it comes to retention rates and customer satisfaction, while search is critical to getting the customers, it is those other three pillars of assortment, price, and convenience which are critical to keeping them and keeping that customer satisfied.
I wouldn't mind taking a moment and just talking about what our customer satisfaction rates are. On the right, you can see the Net Promoter Score. We are world-class. We are above Apple when it comes to Net Promoter Score among our consumers at this point in time. You can see that manifest across into our results. 40% of the new customers that come to us each day were told about us and guided towards us by either a friend or a family member. What this creates means that once customers come and buy from us, if they come a second time, 85% of those customers stay with us. Refining and fine-tuning all of the aspects of these pillars in the strategy are key to be able to hit these results.
When it comes to what that delivers, here you can see on the right-hand side, the dark blue section is the new customers we get each quarter, and we have been getting since 2018. The light blue section is the returning customers coming through. We get the customers, they stay. You can see a marginal shortage there, and you can see the impact of the Q4 out of ZYN within the US, but it still has a very healthy trajectory here as it comes through. In addition to that, we see that the longer a customer stays with us, the higher a share we get from them. As the customer gets into their second year in particular of buying with us, we tend to go from supplying a small portion of their volume to supplying the vast majority of their consumption in a year.
That is as they've started to recognize the benefits of buying with us and become more adept to that. We also see that the longer the customers stay with us, there is also an increase in the average order value as consumers spend more time on our sites and understand the benefits around more premium products and hence continue to uptrade to those products while they're on our stores. As I said at the beginning, these were the four pillars, but none of this works at scale across multiple markets and multiple categories unless you have the right technology and infrastructure in order to continue to refine it as it comes through. I would like to spend a moment now on that. The principles around how we build our technology have not varied for the time I've been here.
It has always been around ensuring it is efficient with low variable cost and agile to either changing consumer demands or often changing regulatory demands within the markets. It must be scalable because in many of the markets, with the exponential growth we see going through, it needs to be able to handle 10x, 50x, 100x volume going through those markets. It needs to be replicable. Our operating model is consistent across our markets. There has to be a model of build once and deploy everywhere. Also, as technology continues to evolve, it has to be expandable. You have to be able to plug new solutions from leading suppliers out there in if it will further enhance the business model and the consumer experience. What we do is we focus on bespoke aspects around core elements of our model, such as our platforms and our SEO.
Everything else, we go to the world's leading providers on it, of players who we believe will continue to remain ahead of the curve, and we partner with them and integrate them to our platforms. Now, when it comes to what the three pillars of what we have been most proud of delivering from an infrastructure perspective over the last three years, we're pleased to say that we rolled out the entire ERP system and the middleware, which is the key aspect to be able to integrate all leading new platforms that come through over time. That has been successfully rolled out across all of the group, and that gives us an entirely new base for scalability, and you can see that manifesting already.
From the front end, what we refer to as V3 or our e-commerce stores, we have rolled out originally within Norway and more recently we rolled out Haypp across the U.K., Sweden, Austria, and Germany. We have seen a substantial uptake, not just in our SEO, but also in our conversion rates. Also, because of the way those sites have taken all of the learnings over the years, we see the amount of time the consumer is happy to stay on our site and engage with more of our data, data which we can provide much richer in this space. It's been fantastic. Lastly, but by no means least, both the warehouse hardware and the warehouse management system. We are proud to say that this was all done.
At various points over the last six quarters, you would have seen in my quarterly report where I would make a reference to one or two of these things coming together, but perhaps this is a kind of a more graphical indication of where we are on this journey. We have all of the warehousing done for our existing locations. We have all of the ERPs done, and we're about 24 weeks away, maybe even 22 weeks away from having all of our front ends done across Europe. This gives us a whole new opportunity as we go forward from here. Firstly, we focus on the consumer impact. It gives us that opportunity to take another leap ahead on staying ahead on the search space, which is so critical for us, and extending our outreach capabilities across our platforms on this.
It also, we can see significant improvements in the customer experience as we can continue to refine and perfect this over time. It also gives us the ability, our previous platforms had been built for Snus in mind. We could extend them across to operating nicotine pouches, but they were almost impossible to be able to operate for vaping and heat not burn. These new platforms are designed with multi-category risk-reduced products in mind, which gives us a whole new base to be able to drive true from. Of course, as part of this, there is a material uptick in the convenience as we commoditize the shipping with the rollout of the transport administration within it. However, there are more importantly long-term benefits coming through on this.
While we've been leading with legal age with solutions for legal age access only to our products, now we have so many solutions around the world plugging in that this gives us the ability to be able to combine different solutions. I think Sweden here is a great example where we have Instabox for pickup points connected into BankID for collection going through that. We have a range of these across all of our markets. The concept of build once deploy everywhere is driving incredible efficiency already to our tech team where I'm seeing new products being tested in the most dynamic of markets and then rolled out across other markets rapidly. The ability to streamline and automate the underlying processes is creating a lot of efficiency within how we can drive our business as it goes forward.
While the conditions are not ripe for it today because of some uncertainty in regulation, you have to bear in mind one of the key reasons why we decided to make this step was that it would generate a significantly greater ease for launching and getting established at speed in any new geographies. Just to give an example of this, in our old platforms, we always ran Austria and Germany as a combined platform. As we went through February, the team thought maybe no harm, perhaps given that Austria is getting some good traction to split it out on its own. It took two days from the decision to split Austria out on its own until Austria was a standalone site on this space. This is a whole new base within this.
However, the real long-term opportunities that come with this is something we haven't managed to touch on yet along the way. That is data. Now, I've heard at various points in time over the last five years people talking about how much data they have and the quantum of data. How much data you have doesn't matter. How much structured data you have is what matters. We've been in a privileged position because we've been selling access to our data for five years to people who've been paying good money for it with now 200 people a day using that data. Our data is structured leaps and bounds ahead of any other organization of our size.
We also recognize the long-term angles of this, and we've been collecting additional data points which have not been included yet, but because of our structure, that raw data is very easily processable as we go forward from here. What we couldn't do was utilize that data when it comes to consumer experience on our old platforms, but now with the new platforms that have been rolled out, we can. We're perfectly well equipped to be able to integrate that as it comes through. Some of this you can already see as it comes through, such as the algorithms for what consumers see when they come to our platform and how real-time that has been updated, not just on consumer preference, but taking in the other aspects, particularly assortment and price embedded into that algorithm.
For example, if a supplier gives us a product long before they give it to anybody else, that algorithm will reflect that and boost it when it comes to customer placing. Or if you can see that the prices are even more competitive than normal on our sites relative to others, that would also give it a boost. In addition to that, for a number of years, we've been running machine learning for propensity modeling around our CRM because it was outside of our stores. So that when people got an email from us, what they got was unique to them of products that we felt were just suitable for them.
Or with frequency modeling, not just looking at what somebody's consumption patterns was and when they had bought last as regards to when did you send them the message, but recognizing that this person often does their buying when they put the kids to bed at 8:00 P.M. on a Sunday evening, the right time to land on the message is at 7:30 P.M. We've been really successful with both of these for a number of years, but now what we're able to do is bring some of that up into the stores so that the consumers who are not coming in via email can get that experience at the outset.
For those of you who are here today, if there are any more questions around this space, some of the team which have built this are sitting here and we'd be happy to walk through with you as well on it. Sorry, when it comes to the future potential within this, the real future potential comes from refining the buying experience for the consumer, not by people going in and adapting the sites, but we can now integrate the data into the sites so that it becomes self-learning for every part of the consumer journey. That will continue to evolve as the technology continues to improve within this space.
Of course, last but by no means least, with this technology suite, the appetite for our consumer data from third parties is also more enhanced when it comes to how we can provide that data to senior levels within the business partnership. I am now going to stop here on the key pillars of our strategy. As you can spot, all of these pillars to date have been quite functional. I am going to do something that I generally do not do, which is talk about something we are planning on doing that we have not quite started on yet. We have a very close relationship with our consumers, but our relationship is very much hinged on the functional attributes and the functional benefits which we provide.
We believe there's an opportunity to strengthen that relationship by developing a softer, more emotional relationship with our consumers and strengthening our brand within that space. Perhaps just to provide a little bit of context around this. When it comes to the category itself, there are a few things which need to be borne in mind. One, risk-reduced products in recent years have moved from niche to mainstream across all of the markets. Within that, we see the consumers having a strong emotional connection to the category that they're using. It often creates a sense of identity and co-identity across people who are using these products. However, the products themselves have not been carrying huge degrees of personal loyalty across the markets, and hence there's actually a vacuum which is manifesting here.
In addition, it is a very complex regulatory category whereby the brand owners are not equipped to be able to explain all of the benefits of this category. There is a hunger for understanding within that. There are a lot of false narratives out there around the category which users really want to go to a trusted source to understand what is the reality and where this hangs together. The best place under the current regulation to be able to explain some of these benefits en masse to the consumer is within the retail environment. However, offline, the retailers are not committed to the long term of the category and do not have a mechanism to be able to engage the consumer around some of these broader aspects.
Needless to say, I recognize we might be slightly biased on this one, but I believe we are by far the best-positioned company in the world to drive this forward. The reasoning why I believe we are the best-positioned company for it is not, firstly, of course, we are the largest retailer of nicotine pouches online or offline in the world, but we also have the deepest understanding of the consumer. It is our understanding of the consumer that drives the entire industry and where it gets to. We have a deep passion for the category, and we have already established some of the core fundamentals when it comes to respect with the consumer.
The consumers love our knowledge within the category and that we are the ones who are able to establish where is the right place for product standards, not just for nicotine levels, but for pH levels so that it does not damage the lip, so that if it is too high or does not damage the enamel of the tooth if it is too low. We also see that our consumers greatly love the responsibility we take on youth access prevention. Actually, the more we move of highlighting the need for the consumer to jump through an extra hurdle on processes for youth access prevention, the higher we see the retention rates because of the respect that that generates among the adult consumers. They love the fact that we are independent, we carry all products, and we are not going to promote a product to the consumer that we do not believe is right for them.
At various points across the markets, we've often fought on behalf of the consumer to protect their rights to risk-reduced products, whether they be flavors or the ability to express the product or talk about the product along the way. We believe that we can harness this category's community power to further enhance our position and amplify our voice and the voice of the category among consumers. In doing so, we consider there to be some significant benefits for this. I think it will, first and foremost, be accelerating loyalty and increase even further our share of the consumer's wallet. It will also, as I talked about on the search space, have spillover benefits to further strengthen our position when it comes to the future of organic search as it comes through.
It also, the more the emotional connection we have with the consumer here, the more we can add to that amplifying word of mouth, which is such a material driver for our existing growth today. It will not be only us which will benefit from this. The stronger our brand as a store and the more credibility we carry, the more we can transfer some of that equity and add more to our business partners when we are supporting them with their brands as well. If I was to wrap up this piece and summarize our strategy, we will continue to prioritize perpetually improving the consumer offer and reinvesting all of our benefits of scale into that. We will continue, as you can see, to prioritize also long-term investments for the long-term impact we can have because there is a sustainable opportunity that comes with this.
We will continue to utilize the technology to release those benefits over time, and we will see if we can further enhance our emotional connection with our consumers over time. With that, I'm going to pause there for a moment. Thank you, Erik.
We will now start our second Q&A session, taking questions from those in the room first. We have a question here from Niklas, please.
Yes, Niklas Ekman here from Carnegie again. Can I ask about the Media & Insights business? What type of revenue does that generate for you today? Rough share of sales, how has that evolved, and what do you see? Where do you see that in a couple of years?
It is roughly, it is a very high single-digit share of our group sales at this point in time, the combination of Media & Insights, and it has been growing at twice the pace of our group revenue over the last few years.
Okay, excellent. Thank you.
When it comes to how I see it changing over time, we'll touch a little bit more on that and some of Peter's material later, but we see continued potential for that to outpace sales performance, both in our core markets, but particularly in our growth markets.
Excellent. Thank you.
Hi, Johan Fred here from SEB. A few questions from my side, if I may. You talked a little bit about competition, mainly from other retailers, but what about competition from brand owners and them potentially opening up own stores? Or how should we think about brand competition?
Actually, it's a great point, and I didn't touch on that within this because I've kind of, let me give some context around this. Direct-to-consumer stores have been operating for about eight years, some leading ones. Here in Sweden, Swedish Match had their store up and running actually before I joined this business. They haven't gotten any traction, and I think there's two fundamental reasons for that. The biggest one here is that the consumer wants a broad range of assortment coming through. The consumers we often see utilizing different products and different brands, not only at different times throughout the year, but actually at different times throughout the day. You will often see the consumer starting off with lower nicotine, slower release products early on in the day, moving into medium nicotine products or more medium-term release later on in the afternoons.
If they're going out in the evenings to catch up with some friends and have a few drinks, they will often go for the higher nicotine products as it goes through to there. Hence why you will often see people putting so many different products into their basket when they're buying with us. The challenge that a direct-to-consumer brand has here is that it is limited in most cases to one brand. For that reason, it does not meet the needs of the consumers. We have been facing D2C platforms as competitors across all of our markets for as long as I've been here. Yet there is no market where it has reached anything close to critical mass. We believe that that dynamic within it will remain.
Even in markets where we have seen those platforms become extremely competitive over a short period of time from a pricing angle as a view towards even antagonizing their other business partners along it, we still have not seen those platforms get to mass because they do not provide the consumer what they want, which is a broad range of assortment.
Thank you. Just touching on different subjects from the strategy update here, but your updated search engine strategy, have you seen any impact from or traffic impact from you optimizing content for large language modules?
No. No. At this point in time, I think if I break it down, what we have done is we've migrated everything over onto the, or in the process of migrating everything over onto new platforms, more than half of them are done. As we've done that and we've utilized AI and large language models to generate our own content, we have seen a material uptick in the share. We already had, of course, the lion's share of the traffic in those markets, but we started to see another uptick in the share of that as it came true. What we don't see is much inflow of large language model data coming through, particularly in Europe.
If you take a look at the US on this, what you're seeing over the last five to six months is often 40%-50% month-on-month growth within the traffic, which is going through to large language models at this point in time. While it's still a relatively small, low to mid-single-digit percentage of the overall traffic relative to the traditional search engines, that form of exponential growth is something that requires time to wake up and be ready for. We're not suggesting that this is going to have a material impact over 2025 or maybe even 2026, but I think now is the time to plant the seeds for what this universe could look like in three to five years.
A final one, if I may. What are your investment needs to, or on your transformation journey? You talked a lot about the future and where you're heading and what's needed to require there, but how much would you have to invest in, say, the coming three years to reach your 2028 targets?
When it comes to investment into capital expenditure and areas like that, I want to hold back a little bit here. I do not want to steal all of Peter's thunder when he comes along in a few minutes. What I have said historically is that we envisaged that we would be investing 1.5%-2% of our revenue in CapEx. We gave some guidance in the latter part of 2023 that there would be a material uptick in that in the second half of 2024 and the first quarter or two of 2025, both with the influx of the ERP systems, the web stores, and the automation of the warehouses in Texas. We are past the bulk of that now.
I think there might be a little bit more going through Q1 and Q2 for this year, but at that point in time, we feel as though we're able to manage all the rest from there. We believe that that ever-increasing pool and that 1.5-2% of an ever-increasing revenue pool gives us a lot more money in dollar terms to be able to spend each year as it goes through. We believe we can continue to manage within that from a CapEx perspective.
Andreas Lundberg, also SEB. Get it back to the questions about Media & Insights. You said a high single-digit number of your revenues, right?
Yes.
Do brand owners also compensate you through lower purchasing prices?
Yes, that's in addition. This is separate. The Media & Insights business is paid for in cash as it comes through. Of course, what we see is that when people are looking for, particularly when they're looking for prime media and have prime locations within the site, it's always good to accompany that with a very compelling offer to encourage the consumer to actually trial the product as it comes through as well. When I was talking earlier about how on comparable terms the suppliers would make roughly 15% more gross margin on our products, that was what I meant as regards to they are very comfortable to then utilize that proceeds to invest into competitive pricing on our platforms as well. All of the promotions which you will see on our stores are generally funded by the brand owners themselves.
On the cost side, on the same topic, I guess you have taken a lot already. Are there a lot of ongoing costs for the Media & Insights business, and where do you book that? Thank you.
No, so the vast majority of the development costs within Media & Insights. We started this over, it was quite intense back in 2020. We dedicated a substantial amount of money to it at that stage to get it up and running. It became quite self-fueling from there. As you can imagine, there is not a huge amount of fixed cost going into this. There is a very insignificant amount that gets captured within the CapEx, but it is a very insignificant amount on it. The rest of the cost is more on the qualitative research space where we have a team of now 17 people across both the quantitative and qualitative insights combined with the visualization expertise. That is consumed through the overhead space.
It is an OpEx cost.
That's an OpEx cost, yes.
Thank you so much.
Yeah.
Hi, Gavin, Jason Hirschman, Hudson 215 Capital. You showed us a lot of, I think in this section here, a lot of all the new technology that you're putting in to sort of upgrade the various sites. I was wondering, you had one slide that sort of showed how the progression of, say, customers or customers like tipping over from what share they would have to say of their nicotine pouches, whether from you or from somebody else, and it sort of goes up over time. Is there a sense of these investments that you're making, how much quicker you can get to say to a tipping point to getting like 50% or 75%?
Maybe you can also just give a little bit more information if possible about, let's say, in the core markets or the growth markets, do you have like 80% of someone's, let's say, nicotine pouch spending or close to 50%? Some little bit more color would be great.
Yeah, absolutely. Maybe to give some context around that one, Jason. What we find, first of all, is that the longer a customer stays with us, the higher the percentages will be. If we look at our core markets, we believe we're operating with between 80% and 85% of the full consumption of those consumers. There will be times when they will simply run out and say they don't have a product, they're walking, they're going past a gas station or a grocery store and they pick up a product and they go from there. We can generally see that is where they get to over a couple of years. The new technology suites coming in, particularly the logistics piece and the stores piece, is accelerating, is expected to materially accelerate that journey to get them to that destination quicker.
Now, if we were to compare that to our growth markets, we actually have a much lower share of wallet of our growth market consumers coming in. This is not unusual for a couple of factors. One, across our growth markets, many of the users and much of the market is still dual using. Hence the amount of pouches which they get through is significantly lower per day. Hence the reason for them to come online and buy is that little bit lower as well. Over time, we see them gradually make the migration away from nicotine pouches being a relatively small share of their nicotine consumption to being a much greater share.
As we can combine that with also meeting those customers with greater convenience, particularly in the delivery, but also on site, we've seen already in the likes of the U.K. where we can get a much higher share of those consumers much quicker and start to have that impact again from the latter parts of the first year into the early stages of the second year.
Okay, thank you very much.
Okay, we have a couple online. Firstly, it's a detailed question regarding the media again and wondering about the difference between display advertising and placement advertising with the idea that the placement advertising is more recession resistant. Trying to gauge the degree to which our media business will survive in case there's an economic downturn.
Sorry, display versus position.
Yeah, placement.
Placement. Okay. I guess subject, there is a mix of both. It's not just display and placement. There's also the checkout upsell pieces which come true on this. There's the CRM pieces. I'm not entirely sure exactly when you come to the likes of CRM or some of those aspects, where do you draw the lines between display and placement? Placement is a significant piece of our overall revenue stream coming in on that. When it comes to it being recession proof, I think this is not a category which focuses very much when it comes to a recession proof perspective here. This is a category which is continuing to grow extremely fast. It's non-cyclical, as Peter said earlier, and the demand for both placement and display is increasing.
Even where we've seen economic corrections going through some of the markets in the past, there has been no corrections going through in the demand for either the display or the placement media here.
Terrific. We have another question, and this is more about the site and brand strategy. The questioner is wondering if, because Snus is an often searched term, why Haypp does not use the Snus.com site across more of Europe. That is one specific question, but maybe you can talk more broadly about Haypp's strategy around the brands of the different countries and different markets.
Yeah. I guess if we were sitting here seven or eight years ago, that would have been a much more fundamental aspect. The importance at that point in time regarding the word that you had within your domain name relative to the search was actually a key driver for Google. It's not anymore. It's not such a big driver within it. It's down to what is the quality and the quantum of your content going through it. I think that doesn't have a material impact on us. Of course, it would have always been very easy for us to have rolled snooze.com out. We're indifferent as regards to what names we would have been putting on the sites as we're putting them out in the past, but this was something we felt didn't have a material impact.
When it comes to the overall brand strategy, I think this does give us an opportunity as we move into a new universe. We do have lead brands in every market. Here in Sweden, it's Snus bolaget. Our lead brand within the U.S. is Nicok ick. Of course, our lead brands within the U.K. and across continental Europe is Haypp. We will be coming back with a little bit more communication on how we're refining our brands and which brands will stand for which positions within the markets over time.
Super. Thank you. That concludes the Q&A session now. It's just coming on four o'clock here. If you could rejoin us in 15 minutes, I'll excuse you for another coffee break. Thank you.
All right.
All right. Welcome back, everybody, from the break. My plan is to walk you through how we've been performing in our markets and some words around the outlook for them as well. I'm going to start off here today with a bit of a historical backward-looking introduction. Many of you were around at the time of our IPO in 2021. We did talk a lot back then about our desire to grow the nicotine pouch segment due to the potential we saw in it. I think it's fair to say that we succeeded quite well on that. Back then, the nicotine pouch segment accounted for roughly a third of our volume. It is today two-thirds of our volume, and it's been growing by 40% on average each year since. On top of this, we also increased market share in all of our geographies.
Last year, we served more than 1.1 million consumers. Last but not least here, as we have seen, as I hope has been evident so far throughout the day, we feel that we have built an extremely robust business model that will be able to drive further results for us in the longer run. With that, I will start to look into each of the markets a bit. I am going to start with Sweden. I am starting with Sweden for a very particular reason, and that is not because it is our home market, but it is actually one of the most competitive markets in the RRP category, as Gavin, I believe, alluded to earlier. It is very competitive, predominantly for two reasons. The first one is that it has an extremely low level of offline retail margins. We are estimating on average about 20% offline retail margins.
This is very much driven by the fact that the Swedish market was for a long time in the producing part of the value chain and run by a monopoly. The retailers always were weaker in their bargaining power. It is also a market with extremely high offline distribution. In a relatively small geographical country like Sweden, there are about 14,000 stores which are selling RRP products. It is not just convenience stores. These products are everywhere in Sweden. They are in grocery stores. They are in mom-and-pop stores around corners. In every decent-sized city you are, you will be able to find these products offline. In this environment, we are very proud that we have succeeded extremely well. We have been mastering all of the key elements of the consumer experience. We have been dominating search for a long period of time.
In terms of assortment, we are carrying the most wide and credible assortment of nicotine pouches. I believe I dare to say that very, very, very few products get launched in Sweden without us being involved. In terms of price, you saw in Gavin's charts earlier that we have a very healthy price gap towards offline, of course, driven by the great revenue that we're receiving from our Media & Insights business. Thank you. Thank you. Lastly, in terms of convenience, we've done amazing progress on convenience. You saw the warehouse movie from our Stockholm warehouse. This warehouse is providing same-day delivery for, in most cases, in the Stockholm region. For the rest of the country, it's oftentimes next-day delivery.
I think above all else here, since this is our home market, we also have a team with a very deep market understanding on the consumer dynamics and are working diligently every day to optimize for it. Getting to the results, I think they speak for themselves. We have a market share in Sweden for nicotine pouches of about 30%. We are dominating the online channel with 85% share, and we are continuing to grow and take market share. Last year, we grew by over 30% in the NP segment in Sweden. This is a great example of how we have succeeded in a highly competitive market already. This gives us great confidence as we are now accelerating our progress in markets outside our home markets.
When it comes to markets with potential here, we believe the U.S., as Peter also alluded to earlier, is the greatest growth potential that we have as a group. It has great growth potential, but it is also a quite complex environment from a regulatory perspective. I am going to touch here firstly on some of the dynamics around the US as we see it before I get into how we are thinking about it. In the US, we are dealing with a nicotine market of roughly 50 million consumers today. Out of these 50 million, about 6 million are already using NP. This has been increasing by three times in the last couple of years. Many of these 6 million consumers of NP are quite new to the category.
What we're seeing is that they are oftentimes dual-using for an extended period of time before they've become fully committed NP users. This means that without even further consumer growth, we should be expecting volume growth in this category. Obviously, we're not assuming that the consumer growth is going to be zero here. We're expecting it, in fact, to double over the next five years. There is a vast amount of growth opportunity in the US. If we look at the supplier landscape, I think we should bear in mind that this was a market which was dominated by one leading player for many, many years. What we have seen, particularly in the last, I would say, maybe 12 to 18 months, is that we now have six very large, credible brand owners, many of which are accelerating the launches of second-generation products.
This is going to further drive the fragmentation in the market, which is exactly suitable for our model. In terms of regulation, we mentioned a couple of times today already that the nicotine pouch category was recognized by FDA as low continuum of risk with the MGO that was issued. I think what this means is that FDA is recognizing that the benefits to society with NP far outweigh any potential risks. I think it's also worth reflecting on the significance of this. Gavin talked about the PMTA process, as it's called, where applications for new products are submitted to the FDA. FDA has received over 25 million different applications for different products. Out of these 25 million, about 60% have received marketing grant orders. 20% of that 60% is for nicotine pouch products. This is significant for the category.
Now, on the more complex side, Markus mentioned earlier here, at the state level, we are seeing various types of regulation coming in. Already today, there is quite an array of different local restrictions in different states, but also localities within states, both for flavor and delivery requirements. That is obviously a complexity that has been managed. We view this as something net positive. We, as the largest player with scale, generally benefit from regulation. I will touch more on that in a moment. Where we are, we are not starting from ground zero here in the US. We already have a great position in terms of search, assortment, price, and convenience. We do believe, however, with how the market dynamics now are shifting, that even further advancing these aspects of the consumer experience can accelerate our growth and allow us to take even more market share.
When it comes to the regulatory environment, as I said, and I'm reiterating that, this is an advantage that will play to our strength as the biggest player with the scale to invest in the compliance to make this work. Every other player that is far behind us will struggle with this. You can see in our results here, we're already controlling about 2.5% of the overall NP market. This is 2024 data. In the online channel, we're completely dominant. We have 85% share. We're growing really well. This is our total volume increased by 41%. Now, that's, of course, affected by the shortages of ZYN that we saw in the latter part of the year. If you strip that out and look at the assortment we're actually carrying now and the states that have remained open, we grew by more than 100% last year.
I'm going to go from here into digging a little bit deeper into some of the aspects around the consumer experience where we see that we have further work to do to be able to accelerate this market even further. I want to start here with search. First point I think that is worth to mention is, as Markus mentioned earlier, we have invested in all of the compliance, the systems, and the infrastructure when it comes to age verification, when it comes to what content we produce, and when it comes to what target groups we're going after. With that in mind, I think in search, there's basically two dynamics that we're working through. One of them is how search will impact consumer, sorry, how AI will impact consumer search behaviors in the future, as Gavin explained here earlier.
We believe that this will happen in the U.S. first, given that the US is the epicenter where these tools are developed. Our teams are working with leading experts in California to map out how we believe these changes will happen and what the best position is for us to take to benefit from that. There is another aspect of the search that is interesting in the U.S., and that is the awareness. As I mentioned earlier, we have an extremely strong share of the online channel. As you may remember from Peter's slide in the beginning, the U.S. online penetration is extremely low, low single digits, which means, and this is also reinforced by some of the feedback that we are hearing from our new consumers that come to us.
When we start to query them on how they got to here, they actually realize that they did not know about online before they got to us. That was accentuated during the ZYN shortages of last year. Consumers in the U.S. are generally not aware of the online channel. This is something we want to accelerate. We want to accelerate this by clarifying the brand identity so that consumers know what our storefronts, what the values our storefronts represent, and establish an emotional connection with them. We also want to work more with out-of-store advertising in the U.S. We are going to do this in a measured and cautious way so that we are testing different types of messages, activities before we scale them up nationally. We are also going to do this in partnerships with suppliers. This is why I have included a car in this picture.
We are currently sponsoring the Talladega 500 race for NASCAR, which is going to be an excellent event where we're going to promote our Nico kick brand and drive further awareness. This is just one example. There are multiple other activities that we're running in partnerships with suppliers. One of these is also shared rewards within loyalty programs to further educate the consumers that they can come to Nicok ick to fulfill their purchase needs. To summarize search, we have a job to do in ensuring and safeguarding the future of search that AI is expected to bring. We also have a job to do in driving people to the online channel where we're already dominant. If I look at assortment, as I mentioned earlier, we're seeing an increased level of fragmentation in the US market driven by very great new launches from credible brand owners.
This will only increase the need for consumer guidance where we will work using our own data to personalize recommendations and offers to get the consumer exactly what they need. This fits very well in with what Gavin described earlier that we are already planning to do with our infrastructure. We also are testing all of the products, obviously, for quality. The U.S. will see more and more launches coming on. The credibility aspect of the assortment will remain key. This will also drive an increased demand from our Media & Insights business from brand owners. In a market where fragmentation increases and consumers desire guidance, we can provide brand owners with the opportunity to give the consumers that.
I am bringing up this chart as well again to remind everybody that already today, above 30% of our sales is coming from products which were not on the market 12 months ago. Two excellent examples of that you see here on the right-hand side are Velo Plus and SONE. If I move on from there to price, in the US, contrary to Sweden, we have extremely high offline retail margins. We are estimating about 50% offline retail margins on average in the US. Already there, we have a strong opportunity to retain a price gap to offline.
If you also augment that with the fact that we're expecting an increased Media & Insights demand, which gives us ancillary revenue, and overlay that with the fact that we're expecting economies of scale, both from inbound pricing, but also in our logistics with the automated warehouse and scaling on overheads, we have an extremely healthy base to further provide value back to our consumers. We're going to do this in a very focused approach. One way we already do it today is with brand owners when they come to us and say that they want to do a pricing investment. It could be to boost a campaign or boost some kind of trial. That's already happening. That's something we want to do even further.
What we're looking at ourselves as well is taking a more local, state-based approach to pricing, providing the exactly right price point depending on where in the country the consumer is located, in which state. Last, but I think by no means least here, is our loyalty program that was just launched about two months ago, where we are going to invest in rewarding some of our most loyal consumers. We already today have over 5,000 members of this loyalty program, so we're off to a really strong start. If I move on from there to convenience, from a consumer point of view, it's actually very simple. The consumer wants a fast, reliable, and transparent convenience experience. I think what's special in the U.S. is obviously that this is a very mature market in terms of e-commerce.
That sets a high bar for us in terms of the consumer expectations. We have already, since we caught up the last time in the CMD in 2023, reduced the lead times by two days. We are expecting to further reduce that. I think Gavin already mentioned that yesterday we went live with a same-day delivery pilot out of our Houston warehouse. The way we are going to scale this going forward is that we are going to explore local warehouse hubs in high population density regions to be able to provide the same-day delivery to a large cluster of consumers. If I look at reliable, we already today have a platform in place to be able to provide exactly the right shipping provider based on location of the consumers' compliance so that they always get the most optimal last-mile provider based on their needs.
In terms of transparency, we're also about to implement a tool to be able to track the parcel in every point of the journey, providing full transparency to the consumer and reducing the risk of failed deliveries. Lastly here, around the U.S. team, we recognize that we've done an amazing job with the current team we have in the U.S. It's quite small. We recognize that there is so much more opportunity here that we're going to have to build this out and dedicate the local team to the U.S. to further improve on the consumer experience and help us navigate the external environment. We're going to be focusing on capabilities to advance the consumer experience, including the tech infrastructure to underpin it. We're also going to invest in externally focused roles on engagement, partnerships, and compliance to ensure long-term competitive advantage for us.
Some key infrastructure and knowledge is still shared from the U.S., from Europe with the U.S. We're expecting a material ramp-up here already by mid-2025 to really ensure that we get out early here and capture the opportunity that we currently see. If I summarize this U.S. deep dive, again, it is the fastest, it's the largest MP market, and it's the fastest growing. The environment is changing in a way that it's becoming optimal for our model. These are very favorable conditions for long-term value creations, we feel. We're now expanding the key local capabilities to capture all of these opportunities, and we're targeting to materially increase our market share in the U.S. by 2028. Peter will come back and share a little bit more color on what we mean by that.
We should also recognize that this will require investment over the short to medium term to realize the opportunity. I think there is more color on that as well in the financial section here next. That was it on the U.S. I am going to move on to the U.K. now, which is the second largest opportunity for us. In 2028, we are expecting three times the current number of MP consumers, which means that MP at that stage would account for 9% of total nicotine. I think we should bear in mind that the U.K. today is in its infancy. We expect that 2028 will definitely not be the end of the road. There is going to be a lot of growth even after this.
It's a market that is generally supportive of reduced risk regulation and is probably the most advanced market for RRP products in general outside Scandinavia, where vaping has an extremely healthy share already. Online penetration remains relatively low, but it is growing fast. It is growing here also because in the U.K., you're also dealing with high offline retail margins, similar to the U.S., of around 50%. It is a quite limited assortment that you will find in any offline store. You're generally dealing with the top two to three products, certainly in key accounts. You have a quite mature logistics infrastructure in the U.S. Given the geographical size and the concentration of population around the larger cities, this is an excellent basis for providing great convenience. We have already made great progress here.
We have about 4% share of the total market, and we've been growing by roughly 86% on average in the last years. This even accelerated a bit in 2024. In terms of share of the channel, we already have a very healthy share of 65%. Looking out a little bit on how we see the future here and what we need to do. First of all, it's about the fundamentals. We do expect that the paid marketing will be shut down for NPs, as it already is for vaping. We already have a very strong position in organic search, so we only welcome that. We will continue to broaden the assortment in the U.K., utilizing many of the partnerships we already have in Europe. Many suppliers are coming to us wanting to test their products in Sweden firstly, given the competitive nature of Sweden.
Very, very close second on that list is that they also want to bring them to the U.K. to test it there. We are helping a lot of brand owners with that, which kind of creates an exclusive part of our assortment that we can provide to the U.S. consumers of great products. In terms of price and convenience, we're going to continue investing in our price gaps to further drive the online migration that's needed in the U.K. and invest in our convenience to further reduce the lead times. When I look at a slightly more medium-term horizon here, we see a fantastic opportunity to work even more with our Media & Insights offering in the U.K.
Since the U.K. is the only market where we're carrying the full RRP or assortment with vapes, heat not burn, and nicotine pouches, there is a very good opportunity to further develop the Media & Insights offering to tailor offers to consumers based on where they are in the journey away from cigarettes, but also opportunities for brand owners to understand the interaction between all these three categories through our insights. In terms of regulation, Markus already mentioned that we have the product standards in place. We want to engage further on the enforcement of those product standards. Since the U.K. is a market which has a degree of problem with some illicit products and ultra-strong products, which we do not believe should be part of this category.
We see opportunity here as well to work on our store brand, particularly with an angle on trust, given some of the slightly dodgy dynamics around the assortment in the U.K., also with a view towards driving more online migration. We realize that the U.K. is a 70 million population, as I mentioned earlier. We do not believe that 2028 will be the end goal here for the U.K. We are going to gradually have to increase our local team and local capabilities in the U.K. to reflect that commercial opportunity. That was U.K. I am going to move on to Norway here for a moment, which I think is a very interesting example of a market where we have benefited from regulation.
I talked about the fact that we welcome the regulation and the complexity around the U.S., and I want to show you how it looks like in Norway, where there already is a very highly regulated environment. In Norway, we're dealing with a very restricted landscape for both marketing, retail display, and product packaging. I've actually included a picture here of a Norwegian can, as you can see. They all look the same in Norway. They're green in the same font. However, the consumer, while this is a very difficult landscape for the consumer to navigate, they still want the exploration. Sorry, before this regulation came in, Norway was actually known to be a market where the consumers were early to pick up on new trends. They want the exploration. In this very dark market environment, we have been taking market share and simultaneously improved our profitability.
We have today already 18% of the total market for NP, and we're effectively dominating the online channel and still growing at healthy rates. For those of you who haven't been in a Norwegian retail store, I just want to show you what it looks like here. On the left picture here, you see closed doors of the fridge behind the counter. Once the fridge is opened by the man behind the counter, all of the products are in plain packaging. There's a very low chance that anybody behind the counter can give you any guidance or guide you to something new. There is a very poor opportunity to do any type of brand building. If you compare that to what it looks like with us, this is our largest store in Norway, Snuslagret. We are actually able to provide brand visibility. Consumers can explore products.
We can give them guidance, price awareness, all of these things. It is a fundamentally different game online versus offline in this highly regulated environment. Turning to German-speaking Europe for a moment. This is a very interesting region. It has a bit of a heritage on oral products. Before the onset of nicotine pouches, there was a variety of Snus present here that was very appreciated. It is more dominated by NPs now, and we see a strong consumer demand. However, there are regulatory constraints predominantly around Germany, which is kind of restricting the overall category growth here in Germany. Germany is closed to domestic sales of MP. We do expect that regulation to clarify at latest with TPD3. We believe that if offline sales were to open, that is quite natural to provide a short-term headwind for us, but we do believe it will be great for the category.
It will mean that more supplier investment would be coming in. There would be broader assortment and broader awareness of the category, which will further enhance our long-term position as that is exactly what we need for our model to work. Turning to Switzerland for a brief moment here. This is a market which is quite limited in size. What is interesting with Switzerland is that it has a very meaningful profit pool due to the high disposable incomes. I will come back on what we are planning to, what kind of actions we are planning to take to capture that even more. Austria is a market in its infancy. It is rapidly growing. We have just recently launched our dedicated platform for Austria, and it is very early days, but it is also an interesting growth region for us, growth country for us.
We recognize that we weren't first to the party in DACH, which is somehow reflected in our market shares. We do, however, feel that we're making very good progress and taking market share, particularly channel share in the online space. We had a year-over-year growth last year of 40%. When I look at what we're seeing, the outlook for the region, we feel that the key elements of the consumer experience around search, assortment, and price are already in place. We launched the Austrian site in February to be able to tailor specific offers to our Austrian consumers. Where we have a little bit more work to do is around the convenience, particularly around a dedicated warehouse for the region. We talked about convenience before here.
We've taken a lot of steps to reduce the lead times on convenience, and the next step is to establish a regional warehouse. We're doing this because we want to accelerate our channel share ahead of an anticipated opening of the German market, even though it's unclear when. We're doing it also to capture a greater portion of the Swiss value pool. This is possible due to the way how taxes are managed for the product in Switzerland. I think, however, we should all bear in mind here that a potential Germany opening, that will be day zero. From there, I'm going to move over to our emerging segment, which was something we opened in the last CMD. We define this as new categories in existing markets, number one here, and new, sorry, existing categories, but in new European markets.
We also gave you all some guidance that we would invest 1%-2% of our sales in the emerging segment. When I look at what progress we've made so far, we have been launching new categories in our existing markets. We, however, put new markets on hold due to the previously mentioned regulatory uncertainty and the fact that we also felt that we had so much opportunity in our existing market. The investments we made is kind of a reflection of that, where we invested half of the indicated percentage here. 1% under the new categories in existing markets. Just to maybe remind everybody what the significance of new categories here are, obviously, there is an extremely high pool of consumers already present. We're dealing with roughly 10 million consumers in our existing markets for vape and heat not burn products.
Many of the constants are similar to what we see in our nP business. Search is obviously key for acquired consumers, given the restrictions around these categories. Every consumer appreciates a great price, a wide assortment, and fast convenience. There is also, interestingly, for an extended period of time, very high retail margins for these categories, which provides for an excellent opportunity to further drive online here. We believe that further regulation and innovation will also be opportunities for us. We're seeing already with the upcoming ban of disposable vapes in the U.K. that product development is happening rapidly, and that only reinforces the need for consumer information and guidance in this quite shoppy environment. There is also, in the heat not burn category, interesting developments.
There have been taxes imposed and flavor bans imposed on heat not burn, which has kind of generated a new subsegment of the THP category of tobacco-free THP products. Both in vape and heat not burn, we see great opportunity and where we need to be able to support the consumer in guidance and information. Just also as a reminder, our progress here, we launched in the U.K. with a pilot in late 2022. That was followed by a mid-2023 launch in Sweden and a late-2023 launch in Germany. Since we started to report on this segment, we've been making very, very good progress. We do, however, recognize that this is early days, so our market share remains very, very low. As we see it for the future, having a full range of RRP products can help us accelerate consumers' transition away from smoking.
We recognize that not all consumers will be inclined to go to the one product immediately. We see generally in our data there are various points around the journey where they're testing different risk-reduced products. If we carry that full assortment, we can help them with that. I think our model is very well positioned to benefit from regulation, where we can again provide information and guidance to consumers. As I also alluded to a little bit earlier, we see a great opportunity to utilize our Media & Insights capabilities to help consumers with their choices, but also to help the brand owners to understand how the different categories interlink with each other. We are going to continue to invest in this part of the emerging segment as we see a massive long-term potential that can further extend our growth runway as a business.
When I look at new European markets here briefly, I think we touched upon this already a few times today. We are ready to go. The reason why we have not is that we see regulatory uncertainty. We do expect that to be clarified at latest with TPD3. In the meantime, we are focusing on the opportunity that we have in our current geographies, which is already massive. We are also developing category knowledge and partnerships, which we will be able to use across markets once the time is right for this. We also have, as we have explained today, developed a new infrastructure for multi-categories. Everything is in place. When the time is right, we will go for it. Just to summarize my section here, we have a remarkable growth opportunity ahead of us, and we have a well-proven business model to pull it off.
The U.S. opportunity, we believe, is expected to deliver exceptional long-term shareholder value if we get this right. On top of this, we're also seeing many, many European markets showing great potential, and we're particularly excited about the U.K. New RRP categories we already planted the seeds for, which will further extend our growth runway. Above all, we have the business model already proven in place that will enhance our probability of success. That was it for me, everybody. Thank you so much. I'll hand over to Peter.
That one as well, please.
Sure.
All right. Can you hear me? Good afternoon again. Gavin promised thunder. Let me stick to the original plan and talk about the targets, if you don't mind.
Before we go into any numbers, I know that you are all keen seeing them, but I would like to bring back four key elements of the last two hours, which we have to bear in mind before we go into financials. The first thing that when we are looking to the future, we believe that we are going to benefit from two tailwinds. First, there is going to be an overall consumption growth, and more consumers are joining into the RRP category. Second, the online penetration, particularly in the U.S. and U.K., does have a long runway to grow. Capturing the growth is not easy. You need the right tools, the right infrastructure to be able to do so. More consumers, more orders put pressure on the entire ecosystem. We are very proud. We feel that we are ready to capture that.
We went through the implementation, as Gavin mentioned, of a new ERP system, a new middleware, and many small parts of the ecosystem have been replaced, which is ready for the future. This is going to allow us to be agile, move fast, but also to scale efficiently. In the landscape of opportunities, the U.S. is standing out. That is by far the biggest opportunity ahead of us, and we are committed to invest into it to capture and take that opportunity. Last but not least, regulation. There are always going to be questions. There are always going to be markets, politicians who are trying to take a stand in this category. We believe that the shift in the electoral sentiment lately is pointing towards the positive side. With this backdrop, let me define how are we going to measure success. There is no secret, no surprise on this.
We are going to stick to net sales as we did it in the past, and we are going to use the adjusted EBIT as the measure of success for the profit. When it comes to net sales, as Gavin already mentioned, we are targeting an 18%-25% growth in average between now and 2028. The development is not going to be linear. In 2025, we expect to have a slower year. We need the full U.S. portfolio completion in order to get back to the track we have been till Q3 2024. Going on board, we expect to deliver these targets. In terms of the adjusted EBIT, we are targeting 5.5% plus minus 150 basis points. I recognize that this is a wide range.
The reason why we are defining our targets like this is that we do not think that 2028 is going to be the end of the road for us. We are a growth company. We work the best if we can grow because that means that the value of our Media & Insights business is getting bigger. That means that our fulfillment can scale. That means that the overhead can scale, which is allowing us to invest more to get back new customers and grow this franchise. Growth will remain pivotal, and we will keep investing into the growth opportunities as long as we believe that on a long term, we are getting strong returns for the investment. With this, let me move to the sales. Our sales depend on three key factors. First, what is the total consumption? We touched upon this earlier today.
We foresee strong growth, however different level across the market we operate. Second, this is the online penetration. Again, we cannot assume that 100% of the buyers are going to move online. Where is that ceiling? How far is realistic online penetration to grow? We have major differences in our markets and also the channel share. How big part of the online channel can we capture? You can say that online penetration and channel share, it's our market share. However, depending on what are we working towards, increasing penetration or capturing channel share, there are different actions, different types of investment needed. In order to unpack a little bit the different segment dynamics, now I'm cutting our company into five pieces. Typically, in our quarterly reports, we talk about core, growth, and the emerging segment.
However, I feel that in order to properly explain and lay down our journey towards 2028, having five pieces helps us a lot. Starting with the core nicotine pouch segment, here we believe that the consumption can grow around 15% in average between now and 2028. As Svante already guided you through, we have a very high market share on these markets. In a combination, we estimate it to be around 27%. Potentially, there is some opportunity to grow here, but as I mentioned, we believe that there will be at some point a cap how far online penetration can grow. Considering our high channel share, that will also mean that the further growth opportunities are going to become limited for us. In the Snus segment in Sweden and Norway, we foresee different dynamics. This segment faces consumption decline.
This was the case in the past, and we foresee this to be the case for the future. We have relatively low market share. We will work towards maintaining this market share, but this segment is not the focus of our strategy. The U.S. is a slightly different ballgame. The nicotine pouch segment over the last 52 weeks grew by 40%, above 40%. We are trying not to be bullish. We foresee roughly 20% growth between now and 2028. We operated in 2024 around 2.5% share of market, which was a combination of high channel share and low online penetration. We are aiming to move our share of market between the 4%-5% range for 2028. Growth Europe, which is the U.K. and the German-speaking part of Europe, will foresee a higher level of consumption growth.
The U.K., which is a fast-growing nicotine pouch market, is going to be the driver for this. We have a relatively low share of market, and we will put our focus to increase this share. Last but not least, the emerging segment, so the vape and THP products. We do not believe that rapid growth is going to go through on these categories. As we touched upon, particularly in the U.K., there will be regulatory changes impacting both the available products, but also bringing excise in. This means that we are counting only on a high single-digit category growth on this segment, and our market share today is very small. We will work towards increasing it, but we would like to be careful in terms of the forecast we are putting on the table. Translating this into numbers, what is it going to mean for us by 2028?
Before we go there and look for the future, I would like to take the time to take just a glance back. What did we achieve throughout the last four years? Because in 2021, when Haypp Group IPO'ed, this was predominantly a Snus company. Most of our sales were seated in a category that we already foresaw at that time going to go into a decline. Transforming the business was essential. Moving the business from a Snus business to a nicotine pouch business was critical for our survival. Just imagine today if I would stand here with 70% of our business being in Snus, declining. Wouldn't be a nice discussion. 62% of our sales last year was connected to nicotine pouches, which is giving us a very good basis going forward.
Nicotine pouches, which is a growing category, do have much higher interest from the suppliers to invest media and insights, but also carrying a higher unit profitability for us. When I'm looking to 2028, we are talking here about a range of 18%-25%, which means a 7-9 billion range for that period. Later on, I'm going to show you some scenarios of what is really why we are talking such a wide range. Within this, we do expect that the Snus segment, which is in decline, is going to remain in decline. Nicotine pouches are going to remain in a growth mode, and the combination of the market and channel dynamics will result in around 25%-30% CAGR for the nicotine pouches. Adding this up can result in the SEK 7 billion-SEK 9 billion top line for us.
The breakdown of the growth, what you can see on the right side. The biggest contributor to the growth is expected to be the U.S., around 65% of the incremental revenue coming from that market. Core markets, around 20% total contribution, but again, that will be a combination of growth coming from nicotine pouches, partly offset by the expected decline in Snus. Growth Europe is important. It will contribute to our growth around 10%, and the emerging segment is counted in with a 5% contribution to this growth journey. As I mentioned, this is a wide range, and I would like to show you why this is such a wide range. Let me take here a middle scenario, even on the low end, SEK 7.5 billion, which assumes a 20% CAGR.
If on the US market, we see a 20% category growth, 21%, and our market share increasing a bit around 4%, so not a major uplift, that would mean a 20% CAGR for the group sales terms. A more pessimistic scenario, if the U.S. market growth is lower and we are maintaining our 2024 market share, then the group sales can grow around 18%. On the other end of the scale, if the US market grows faster, around 26%, and Haypp market share reaches 5%, then this translates into the 25%. Now, there are two numbers which I would like to bring in to give some perspective on it. The market growth in the U.S. for the last 52 weeks was above 40%. I don't think that I would feel comfortable saying that that will remain for the following four years, but it's an interesting data to reflect on.
The second thing is that let's assume that we will be successful maintaining our high share of channel in the US. That means that 5% Haypp market share translates around 6%-7% online penetration. Online penetration in Norway is about 20% and about 35% in Sweden. Again, I'm not indicating that U.S. for 2028 will be about 20% online penetration, but I think it's an interesting thought to play around with some of these numbers, how big things can be. With this, let me move to the next part of the story, profitability. Again, I would like to start with a little bit of looking back at what we achieved for the last years. Our core segment is very stable. It delivered 8%-9% adjusted EBITDA over the last years. This segment already operates with high scale. We have the volume, we have the top line.
However, as you can see, year over year, we managed to fine-tune this business unit and increase the profitability. The big turnaround, however, happened in our growth segment. To get to where we are today on these markets was not for free. We had to heavily invest in 2022 and 2023, and with the continuous volume growth, development of new media services, and continued improvement of the insights, we managed to go above break-even in 2024. In total, on a group level, this meant that in 2024, we reached a 6% adjusted EBITDA, which also included 0.9% investment into the emerging segment. We got close to what we promised in our last capital markets day in terms of profitability of 7%-9% adjusted EBITDA. Now, looking for the future, and let me start with core markets. Here, we do expect a more stable environment, more stable sailing ahead.
There will be many things which I do expect to remain constant versus where we are today. Let me start with the product margin. We do have good prices for our consumers to ensure that they have the reason to buy online. We will maintain this. We have no intention of closing the price gap and taking the pricing benefit what we have out there. Fulfillment cost, today we operate with high scale. I know that we will be able to find small things, but I do not count on any significant benefit coming out of incremental volume coming in. Marketing investment is also an area where at the moment we invest very little. There is a high level of category and channel awareness on these markets, and we do not foresee any reason why we should invest more into marketing.
The overhead will be the first part, taking it from the bottom up, where some scaling will happen, but again, since we have already relatively high volumes and high top line, this is not going to be the key driver. I see two key opportunities for us going ahead. First, as I alluded to earlier when we talked about sales, the unit profitability of nicotine pouches is better than the one of Snus. So the mix change which is going through is going to help the profitability 1%-2% between now and 2028. Media & Insights, what we talked about a lot today, also going to gradually improve and add 1%-2% each point to the profitability of this segment.
This means that between now and 2028, once we reach that steady state level, then this category will show that we are in this business capable to deliver low double-digit adjusted EBITDA. Moving from here to the growth markets, and this will be a little bit more complex, our journey between now and 2028. More complex because we have more problems or we have more opportunities which represent more challenges what we have to solve. Let me start first with where do we feel we will have to invest. The first thing is going into the funnel awareness. As Svante mentioned, we have to create awareness for the online channel. We believe that this will require money and investment. Also important to note that here I'm talking about 2028, and 2028 on one side is not the end of the road.
If we believe that by 2028 we still have the opportunity to grow the online channel and the awareness, then this investment level will be still in place. The investment relative to the top line is not going to be linear. We believe that potentially in the first part of our journey in 2026 and the first part of 2027, relative to the top line, we will have to invest more than in 2028. Pricing is another thing where we believe once the consumer is aware that the online channel exists, price is a very good way to motivate the trial. Try out our service, see that you can get your parcel very, very easy and in a convenient way in your hand, and to open up the price gap in a very precise way and invest into the margin we feel will be required.
Product mix is expected to be neutral because we are focusing on nicotine pouches already at the moment, so we cross that road. The positives come next. Media & Insights improved a lot over the years, but as you could see also in the case of the core markets, with the improvement in the consumer base and also all the new insights and media products which are being rolled out across the board, not unit specifically, we will have the bottom line to grow. Counting a lot on fulfillment. In our baseline in 2024, we have very inefficient ways of working. In the U.S., throughout the big part of the year, we operated with two 3PL warehouses and one own warehouse with manual handling. In the U.K., still today, we have an own warehouse, but it has manual picking.
Now, the fact that in the U.S. we have only one warehouse now fully automated will allow us, as the volume comes, to increase the efficiency. In the U.K., the warehouse itself, the building itself, is capable to take the automatization. We have a proven track record that our systems are capable to integrate such a development very easily. When the volume will reach that point, I think it will be a very easy decision to decide that we are automatizing that warehouse. Last but not least, overheads. In absolute terms, we will have to invest a lot to create a team in the U.S. which is capable to take this opportunity. However, as the top line grows relative to the sales, the overheads are expected to go down in 2028. Same like marketing investment, this is not going to be a linear journey.
In general, we will have to invest first before we see the benefit on the top line. That being said, for 2028, we are targeting a 5.5% adjusted EBIT. This will be a combination of core markets improving 2%-4%, growth markets improving to 4%-6%. There is one important element which I would like to highlight. Growth markets are operating at a relatively low adjusted EBITDA versus the core markets, so the faster they grow, the higher negative mix impact they create within the group, which is factored into the 5.5% that I'm talking about. Now, there is no financial presentation about talking about how are we going to pay for all of this and how is our balance sheet doing.
I think for those who are following our quarterly announcement, this is not a surprise, but I think it's important to highlight that we are carrying a very healthy balance sheet. Our net debt to adjusted EBITDA ratio is below 1% for 2024. There is no risk, no need to refinance this business, as is the case, I think, with many other companies. We believe that we will maintain this healthy balance sheet on our journey. The working capital, what we carry, is also not linear because we are opportunistic. This working capital is not optimized to have as less as possible, but we technically take the opportunity to optimize it to support the P&L. The peaks, what you see up there, refer to the year-end when, before the anticipated inbound pricing crisis, we are always increasing our stock levels.
Last but not least, in terms of CapEx, our range of investment is 1.5%-2%. However, there are periods when we go above. 2024 is one of these special periods when the overhaul of the ERP and middleware, the work on the front-end development, and the automatization of the Houston warehouse all fall into the same period. We foresee that beyond 2025, we go back to the previous normal levels because that will be the time when the front-end development is going to be completed. That being said, I would like to lay it down clear how we are planning to allocate the capital, what we have available. The first priority will remain to continue the organic investment into the strategic segments. Second, this company has a very good track record with M&As.
A big part of today's business, part of the Norwegian or the U.S., joined our franchise through an M&A deal. We will look for opportunities to accelerate our expansion. Just to make it clear, the sales target that I talked about is the organic sales target. After point one and point two, to be transparent, we do not expect to have excess capital left. Of course, this is heavily dependent on the opportunities and how the investment into the organic business is going to deliver. With this, let me summarize our financial targets for 2028. We foresee a sales growth between 18%-25% annually, not a linear development, slower in 2025 because of the ZYN situation in the U.S., profitability 5.5% plus minus 150 basis points.
In terms of the dividend policy, as I mentioned, our intention is to ensure that the available cash is invested into the future growth, either organically or inorganically. With this, I hand back the word to Gavin to talk about the people aspects of our business.
Thank you very much, Peter. Thank you. Okay, guys, I'm not going to spend much longer. You guys have been showing some fantastic resilience to stick with us for this period of time. Just the last couple of slides here to march through, and then we will wrap up with the final Q&A as it comes through. I think the one piece which I'm most proud of within this organization, and which I think will be most key for driving us forward and has been for all of the history of this company, is the people and the underlying culture within it.
I'd like to touch a little bit on some of the key aspects within that. First of all, when it comes to the team, we have a deep expertise across nicotine and risk-reduced nicotine in particular, and a deep expertise across e-commerce and digital. In addition to that, the operating model is embedded into the organization, and everybody understands what component of the model they need to deliver on. There is clear ownership from the individuals in order to pull on those levers to deliver towards that vision. I think we have a diverse range of skills, which has what's enabled us to get so far ahead of the curve on this.
Also, as we transcend so many markets with our business, it's worth recognizing that within the team, we have 36 nationalities, which gives us a very healthy range of perspectives on how to address various challenges here. Within that team, what underpins it and really glues it together, and what I enjoy most about working here, is the culture within the space. There is, and I know it's very easy for a CEO to say this, but there is no hierarchy within this business and where it gets to. It's very much down to a meritocracy of who comes up with the best solution will be the one which is backed on where it gets to.
The concept of teaming up across, and we have a lot of history of this, of teaming up from different sets of expertise to go and approach a single problem and come up with a solution that either fits from a regulatory perspective or a technology perspective to combine all together is something which is just ingrained into the culture at this point in time. There has been a massive drive over the years within the chromosomes, within the team and the culture for innovation, that innovation is often the solution for finding solutions to what often appear to be insurmountable challenges as it comes through. All of this, the reason we've gotten the results we have, is because underpinning all of that culture is the drive from everybody to go for that extra mile.
If I was to paraphrase our business and where we are at this point in time, I think we often talk about the performance, which I think is going quite well. In the last three and a half years, we've doubled the revenue and quadrupled the profit. In the next four years, we say we will double the revenue and quadruple the profit again. That's only possible because of the robust operating model which we have, which is hinged to manage to the longer term within this category and where it is. To be able to manage that operating model at scale, we require a very strong technology and infrastructure and processes to drive it through. Underpinning, to be able to drive that technology and processes, requires a fantastic team and an incredible culture to keep innovating as it goes through.
What unifies that entire team and culture and all of us through this space is our higher purpose of inspiring a smoke-free future. With that, I am going to go back to the opening slide that I started with this morning, which was the four key takeaways that I wanted from today. Firstly, risk-reduced products and nicotine pouches in particular have a seriously strong roadway ahead of it. Two, there are many benefits for the consumers from switching from offline to online and particularly towards that of moving to Haypp. Three, evolving regulation and continuously increasing regulation is something which is ingrained into our operating model. Because of our scale and what we have done in the past, this is a benefit for us for dominating an even ever greater share of the channel as it comes through.
The structural advantages will continue to be part of our philosophy to share those advantages with the consumer to continue to increase under the shared economies of scale model, the value, and the reasons for the consumers to migrate across to us. With that, I'd like to thank you all very much for the time and the concentration that you've put in here, and I'd like to open up for any questions and answers. Absolutely. Just while we're waiting for the first question to come through, I'd like to get the management team to step up so that when everybody gets a chance later on, if you're outside, you know who you can speak to on different topics.
Firstly here is Johan, who leads up on the partnership space, Jonas to lead on the after-sales and convenience piece, Janne who focuses on the technology and infrastructure, and Hasse who focuses on the marketing, including the SEO piece. They will be all there. Also Gabrielle, who's our Chief Commercial Officer, who manages the entire breadth of our markets and keeps the machine running.
Yes, Niklas Ekman here from Carnegie again. Can I start just to ask about what you're saying actually about 2025? When you're talking about firstly slower growth, is that mainly referring to the ZYN problems that you're currently seeing? Secondly, when you say slower 2025 and not seeing a linear progression towards the 5.5% margin target, does that also mean that you might not see the same kind of margin improvement in 2025 as you saw in 2024?
Thank you, Niklas.
First of all, if I take a look at revenue, yes. We kind of highlighted this within our Q4 results coming through as well. Our like-for-like growth continues to accelerate, and you could see that growing as nicotine pouches became an ever bigger share of our business, continuing to grow through the quarters from late 2023 into 2024 up until we hit the shortage. We envisage we will resolve this shortage in the coming quarters and then get back to it from there. In between, we do envisage that the growth rates will be below that 18%-25%. However, over the longer run, we believe that the cargo between 2024, which is behind us, and 2028 will accumulate to that 18%-25% space as it comes through.
If I flip to the second part of your question here when it comes to profitability, the opportunity which we are seeing in the U.S. is immense. The return that we see that we can generate on long-term shareholder capital here is like something we've never seen before. We will, as Peter kind of alluded to, dig deep at the beginning to make sure we can really accelerate the position we have and strengthen that flywheel within the U.S. in the belief and the knowledge that as we understand so many components within this market, that it will generate the long-term EBIT margins that we're talking about. Yes, over time, we will give you more updates as we're going along, but where we see good potential for investing our own money in that market, we will definitely do that.
Excellent. Thank you.
The margin range, as you said, is very wide. What's the main risk to you getting to 4%? Am I understanding it correct that it depends on timing, that if in 2028 you find yourself going through an extensive investment phase, that will push you lower? Or do you think in general that we should not expect very much margin expansion over the next few years because of this investment phase?
The way I'm viewing this one is different. Peter put up the assumptions that we had behind the numbers there. Within that assumption, there was a 4.5% share of the U.S. market.
Now, needless to say, we're not going to be particularly happy to be sitting here in 2028 with a 4.5% share in the U.S. market, but we wanted to be able to share the basis of our assumptions so that then people are equipped to figure this out themselves as it goes through. When it comes to what this means from a margin perspective, if we are there with 4.5%, but getting really good traction within that market, we will continue to maintain the principle of generating long-term shareholder value and being good custodians of the capital. We will continue to invest if we can see that we're accelerating the market space within it.
Yes, if we see, it's not so much that we see external factors which could consume a huge amount of that money, but if we continue to see opportunity, we want to maintain the flexibility to be able to grab that opportunity with both hands and go for it. Because we recognize that 2028, it's a milestone along the way. It is far from a destination.
Excellent. Lastly, from my end, when you talk about M&A opportunity, where do you see the greatest opportunities? Where are you most anxious to make acquisitions?
We're always keen to look at a range of options out there when it comes to M&A. What we want is something which bolts into our business and generates significant value from the outset. It can fall under two different types of spaces here.
One, the more orthodox aspect within it is something which is a business that does something similar to what we do ourselves, but in a space that we're not in, that we recognize that when we would bolt it into our infrastructure, it would be worth significantly more the day afterwards. Those assets, unfortunately, are few and far between and hard to find. We've looked at various ones over the years, but when you actually open them up, you realize perhaps it's just more efficient to do it ourselves.
The second part is perhaps a little bit less orthodox when it comes to the space here of, is there any parts within the value curve whereby if we owned particular assets to be able to support on either on the convenience or on the youth access prevention, which could really drive us forward and create extra barriers to entry to support the industry as it goes through. There are various occasions on that as well, but again, it's about finding the right one which would really add long-term sustainable value to us. We are always open towards solutions on this, but the one thing we're not going to do is spend money on it if we don't believe we can generate the long-term return on it.
Sorry, just in terms of markets, do you think this would be more towards the DACH region or U.S., U.K.?
It will depend on where the opportunity comes up.
Okay, fair enough. Thank you.
Hi, Johan Fred here from SEB again. Thank you for taking my questions. On sort of your loyalty program, which you touched upon in the U.S., is this something that is specifically focusing on the U.S. or is this across markets? Just thinking about sort of the, is there any regulatory concerns that we might get into here from rewarding nicotine consumption?
Yeah, absolutely. I think that is, and Markus has kind of alluded to this one earlier on, that you're dealing with two fundamentally different regulatory philosophies, subject to which side of the Atlantic you are. Within the U.S., there's much more restrictions on what the product is.
Within Europe, there's much more restrictions as regards to how you can display and interact with the consumer around the product when it comes to the likes of loyalty. In general, loyalty programs are difficult to enhance when it comes to Europe on this space. Hence why the U.S. is the place where we're focusing most on it. We've been very impressed with the results we've seen in the opening couple of months on that loyalty program.
Very clear. Thank you. Could you just remind us how much, as a percent of sales, you spent on marketing last year and how your strategy to increase sort of online awareness in combination with all your initiatives will impact your marketing spend going forward?
Yeah.
When it comes to marketing spend outside of the marketing team within the business itself, our digital marketing spend last year was about 0..5%. When it comes to what spectrum that we plan to invest going forward, we're actually testing some concepts at the moment within the U.S. with a particular focus on the geographic area around Texas because we believe we have some great advantages there and it's a great environment to test concepts before we scale it from there. Part of the reason why we're not giving any specific guidance on where that will be is we're not so much holding it up against the threshold of X amount of money that we will invest. We're looking at it as regards to what kind of return can we generate on the capital that we're putting in.
We will test concepts, and when we see that we're generating a very healthy return on them, we will continue to fuel them so long as we're getting that return to it. We will give you guys regular updates as we're going through as regards to how it's progressing. I recognize we're starting into a new era here when it comes to the opportunity to really take a run at the U.S. and get it going. We want to remain flexible on how we adapt to there.
Much appreciated. A final one from me then on media insights again. Generating high sort of single digit as a % of your group sales last year, but as you mentioned, growing significantly faster than the group. How much of your sort of annual growth until 2028 did you project is going to be driven by media insights?
No, the vast majority of our revenue growth, the vast, vast majority of our revenue growth will be coming from product sales. The continued growth in media and insights is going to have a much more significant impact on the bottom line than on the top line. The growth rate that we've seen historically is going to slow down significantly. Yeah, but even looking at that as a base, because it is still only a high single-digit share of the base, you run the maths out on it for a few years, it still doesn't alter the share of the total revenue radically, even as it outpaces the rest of the total revenue over time.
Of course. Thank you.
Perfect. Thank you, Johan.
Okay. We have quite a few online, so prepare yourself. Firstly, sorry, let me use this.
There's a question on the marketing, and particularly around increasing awareness in the United States. The person is wondering what kinds of efforts has Haypp undertaken so far, and what kinds of events can the U.S. consumers expect to see Haypp's online store brands at?
Yeah. We have significantly more flexibility regarding what we can do in the U.S., as I'd said earlier. We're now starting some out-of-stores, whereby we will be doing some billboard advertising and some digital advertising for podcasts, etc., as it goes through. There's a range of different touchpoints where we're going to be testing seven or eight different concepts with a sort of a test-and-learn principle running through on it. Before we kind of lock down on which of these we see to be most successful, we'd like to see what the initial results are as they're coming back through.
Yeah, but we have a lot of flexibility within the U.S. in order to be able to do this.
Next, we have a couple of questions on regulation. I don't know if you want to drag Markus up or not. Svante addressed this a little bit when talking about the emerging segment and the U.K. environment. Could you expand on why the new regulations in the U.K. support more sustainable market conditions, and why isn't the disposable vapor ban more of a negative for the group rat her than making it a net positive?
Maybe since there's a commercial aspect to that one, I can probably touch a little bit on the outside of it. Sorry. I think on this one, when it comes to the vaping regulations within the U.S., sorry, if I take the second question first as regards to the disposable ban.
The nature of how disposable is being used is that people pick it up, they buy one for the day, they use it for the day, they discard it, and they move along again. It doesn't necessarily lean itself heavily into bulk purchases as it comes through. A disposable ban starts to move people more towards being committed towards a product for a number of days and a number of refill capsules within it. That suits extremely well for online and is another additional reason for people to migrate across to online. When it comes to the implications of the marketing conditions around the U.K., we're very much hinged on getting digital search further restrained within the U.K.
There are already significant amounts of restraints around the likes of Google AdWords within the U.K. coming from Google itself, but extending the legislation across from Vape to there, I think, would further enhance that. Sorry, Markus, maybe you have some extra points you'd like to add?
I think you covered it pretty good.
The next regulatory question, Markus. Can you talk about whether there's, yeah, sorry, pardon me again. Can you talk about whether there's value in communicating more to Haypp's consumers about Haypp's advocacy efforts on their behalf as reduced-risk products consumers and maybe give a little bit of color about how Haypp is doing that already and what the constraints are in trying to advocate for them?
I think we are free to advocate for our consumers. I mean, we are today using our consumers, and they really like to be engaged.
They believe that they are quite smart, that they have found this fantastic product like nicotine pouches, and they are ready to stand up for nicotine pouches and tell their surviving how smart they have been and how good it is. Usually we communicate with them via our blogs that we have on our sites and also use our customer service to engage with the consumers. We propose to them what they can do and in what way. They do their engagement. They contact members of parliament, governments in the European Union, in the US, on all levels, engaging, standing up for the products that they like. We guide them in the right direction, and they make their voice heard.
Super. Excuse me.
Next, we have a question on the reduced-risk markets and in terms of the overlap of product affinity, so whether between vaping and nicotine pouches. I think the focus of the question is really on the United States. It is asking, is there an overlap between people who consume nicotine pouches and vaping, and what does that then mean for development of the U.S. market?
Yes. There is. This is consistent actually across all of the markets. We see a significant inflow to the nicotine pouch category coming from ex-vapers. In some cases, they are dual-using as they are coming through. You see, and we take a look at something which we have often published before, which we call the path to nicotine pouches as regards to what journey have consumers come to get to there.
What you're going to actually see is that more than 60% of the people who have gotten to nicotine pouches have actually come through multiple categories before they've gotten to nicotine pouches. They've often started off with cigarettes, come through either dip or Snus-type products within the U.S. or MST, moved over to vaping, and then moved to nicotine pouches. There is a conduit here where people continue to move down the risk continuum, with the majority of the consumers having come through at least two products before they get to nicotine pouches itself. We see that same behavior across the European markets, particularly outside of Scandinavia.
Super. Our last question is a bit of a blue sky one. It's asking, when do you think the Asian markets will be ready for a service like Haypp?
I think the Asian markets are ready for a service like Hype today. I think the more fundamental question is, when is Hype ready for the Asian markets? The way we stand back and look at it is that there are over 100 million users between Europe and North America at this point in time. We have 1 million. We have enough to do and succeed here. When we get to critical mass here, we will consider other options. At this point in time, we will focus on the two continents that we are currently in.
With that, Hype's capital markets day 2025 concludes. Thank you very much to everyone who came in person. We really appreciate it. Thank you very much to everyone who joined us via the live stream. For those here, I think we have some alcoholic beverages out in the hallway.
Thank you.
Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.