Morning everyone, and welcome to Lyko Group's earnings call for the third quarter. My name is Tom Thörnblom. I'm heading up Investor Relations and Communications here at Lyko. Today, we will have a short presentation from Rickard Lyko, our CEO, and Ylva Norlén, our CFO. After the presentation, we will have a short Q&A for everyone. So we will start with the analysts, and then open up later on if we have time. The call will be recorded and will be found on Quartr and in the Quartr app, and the presentation will be shared there as well. With that said, I leave the floor to Rickard Lyko.
Thank you, Tom, and welcome everyone. Let's jump into the presentation. As you have seen, we grow good in the quarter, but under expectation on the profitability. We see that it's a market-wide high promotion pressure on the market, but with that said, it's on certain part of the assortment, not everywhere. And that we see a huge difference, which also impact the mix of what we're selling, that is more, more online because that's growing faster, but that's also showing that we have higher margins in the retail segment, where we can choose which brands we are selling. We have invested in strengthening our position, both for the growth in inventory and marketing, and we see that we are on all-time high in the market share, or also from the consumer perspective as a brand awareness. We also had some cost on the...
Related to the ramp up of the warehouse, both that we came from the Q3, as we have mentioned, the things that happened in the Q3, but also going into the Q4, building up the inventory, because it takes a lot of people in the hand to get every product in the warehouse, and we were ramping up with about SEK 150 million more stock. Jump into the next. We're growing about 70%, and we see that's a lot above what the total market is growing and also a lot of our competitors in the market. So in that sense, from a consumer perspective and also from our suppliers' perspective, the numbers look really good, but what we see is that we need to take a look at going into the margins there.
The new automated warehouse were enabled to do a really good customer experience. We were delivering really fast under the whole quarter. With that said, we're going on this quarter in full speed with both the new automation and the old automation to be able to handle that. But it gave us also a possibility to keep on putting inventory in. That was the problem last year when we were setting every focus to just delivering out. We see that we can acquire 350,000 new customers in the Q3 quarter, which will help us a lot going forward. We know that when we are looking into the customer experience, we know that the customer will come to us, or they will stay with us when they have tried out and starting buying from us.
We also see that Norwegian passing NOK 1 billion in annual sales, so it's quite of a mark to passing that level in the Norwegian market, and we're starting to be one of the absolutely biggest player in the Norwegian market all, all in all, and that's also for Norwegian, Sweden, and Finland combined. We see going into 2026, that we should be able to taking that leader position in the whole market, both for retail and online combined.
We also see that, thanks to good sales and long-time relationship, we have a strong supplier relations, which help us a lot, because also when we're looking into the distribution of the products that we are selling, the products that are distributing very broadly, they are also the ones that are in, in, a lot of price pressure and campaign focus under this period, but also going forward. But we also see that where we have, suppliers handling the distribution in a better way, we also know that those are the ones we can get much better margins from. And that combined to our own brands, where we also knowing we have totally different margin levels.
Still, we are in the beauty ecosystem, and for us to play is a lot about being something in between the strong brands and customers, and we see that one of those, things that we are doing the best in, in between there is Lyko Community, and we also saw just on November, that we have more than 21 million views in the community, where we're also seeing that we are building a unique position that's really helping us driving back, but also driving different kind of traffic into the app. You're not just there to buy another product.
You're there for the experience, to find out and learn more about the products, and that's put us in a unique position where we can affect what you are buying, and that is a huge difference in between e-commerce and online, is that you are entering the stores a lot of time asking what you want. You want a shampoo, not a specific product, and we see a similar pattern, those coming into the community, they are there for exploring, which help us to affect what you're buying. When we look at the spontaneous awareness, we have invested that for a long time in Sweden, and that was because we know that we are selling products that you're running out of, and you will come back and buy them.
And now we are seeing that we are on a totally new level, and we are the absolute highest brand awareness, both in Sweden and also now in Norway. We see also that Finland is on a really good track, and we have started in Denmark, but we don't do that much of an investment there yet, but on a good level to keep on going into that more going forward. And if we're looking into this one, we see that there's quite a gap down to the second player in Sweden and Norway, and I think this has put us in a unique position, because if there is something that we know about those kind of numbers, those are the one that best project future sales.
And also now that we're seeing, we're taking a huge step in Finland to take a big part of that beauty market as well. So I think this is something that we totally keep on believing in, and we also know that we can balancing the market investment on the short time, but in the long time, we really believe in this is the position we want to keep on building because this is the piece that we need to be able to go from just focusing on price. And the, the beauty community is the biggest in Nordic, and that's something we keep on investing in and building out, and we now have just launched that we are paying per view a lot of consumer that are in the platform and doing a lot of good content.
In the other end, we're balancing that with retail media , selling views to our suppliers. This is also something truly unique that we don't see any other players on the market have something similar, and this is something we really, truly believe that is a unique position that we want to keep on building. We will have some new launches here coming up, and we have just launched or we will launch next week the Pay-Per-View for consumer in the Finland as well. We open up a store in Täby, and we have communicate that we will open up in Bergvik and in Kalmar, and this is something also that works very well, and we see that they are profitable. We also see that the new concept is delivering.
We see that we are adding perfume, we are adding skincare and makeup in the stores, and we're seeing that those category is also taking part of the sales in the size that they're getting in the stores. So we're seeing that, this is a new position that we are taking with the other categories, and that is also something that really will help us in the long run to build the margins in those category in a better way. We know we came from haircare, where we have really good margins, because we have been working with that for a long time, and now we're starting building that up in the other categories. We are also changing, I will say it's not a heart transplantation, because it's not that, hard, hard to change heart.
It's not that hard to change it, but it's really make a huge difference. We are changing the search engine and the promotion engine at our platform, which will be AI-based, and this is truly something that makes a huge difference because we have so much of the consumer coming to us searching for products because they haven't decided yet, so they use the search a lot. And this will be live from the first of April, and that will help us a lot, I think, for the customer experience, but also in the sales going forward. So what have we learned? More selective promotion activity going forward. We know that we can do that better. Going into Q4 this year, we can set that in a better mix to make sure that we are keeping up the margins.
We see that going into January here as well, that when we are changing that, we also see the result of that. And also, when we're looking into the market spend, for sure, we can also do that mix even better, but it also affect for sure how the markets are developed, but we see that we are in a position where we can set higher ROIs to be able to keep that tighter. And then a tighter cost control framework is also key for the long-term profitability, and there also, I mean, there have been a lot of things happening in the last three to four years, technology-wise, which make it possible for us to make it more central and also find efficiency in the work we do on the white collar side.
Focusing on the balancing growth with profitability will be key, and, I mean, we have always been doing that. Now we will set a little bit more focusing on the profitability than the growth. With that said, we are all set up to keep on catching growth, and we're seeing that there is a possibility for that in the market, and that hasn't changed. We've seen the cost reduction program that we have communicate, that this is a new step for the company, and we are communicated that earlier. It's a tough decision because it affect a lot of our employees, but on the other side, looking into the total of the company, it will make us stronger going forward.
Also, when we're seeing it's not because of the sales and the consumer are not there, it's because of the margins that we have seen in the last quarter. We're also closing down the office in the Netherlands and Germany because we see a possibility to handle that from a central level, from now on, so that's why we're changing that. And totally, all in all, we think we will save about SEK 100 million on a rolling twelve basis, and it will affect about 70 people. Productivity gains enable us with previous investment that we have done in a lot of system; we are launching part of the system we have built for quite a long time now, with the order handling system and everything around how we're using a lot of the data platform that we have building out for many years.
And there, together with the AI development, we now see we can get a lot of efficiency out of what we are doing and operating in. So going forward, looking into, we see that the average order value are back on track in January. We have made some changes there, and we also seeing that the gross margins are back, and that's on the level that we were in January last year, which is much higher than we see in Q4. Q4 is a unique quarter in that sense that the campaign period is very long and affect the sales a lot. But with that said, it's just that the underlying margins on the product hasn't changed. It's about how we set those promotion. We see that we have a strong customer position.
We acquire a lot of new customers and the brand awareness on a record high level. We know also that a lot of customers were experienced super fast delivering also under the period, and we know that also we have our wide assortment with the stock levels, where we can sell a lot more products now. We also see the structural cost advantage in the new automation, which also will help us a lot going forward, because we are more efficient and we are touching the product much less than we did in the old system. With that said, we still need both the system on the peak period to be able to handle those kind of big volumes. But I think it's all about discipline, growth and profitability balance, and setting the focus for that in the whole organization.
And I think everyone are on board on that now, and we are really looking into how to do that going forward now. So I think we have a clear roadmap for 2026, and the simplification is also very important in this case. And, it's a new operating model where we also see if we not need to go into the next big project, which is, I will say, almost the first time in the company history, we don't have that big project in front of us. Now, we can really set the focusing to operate more efficient in the things we are doing. So I think that that is also something that make it much clearer and much easier to prioritize internally in the organization as well.
Thank you, Rickard, and now we leave the floor to Ylva, our CFO.
Hello, everyone, and I will take you through the results and more details on the financials for the quarter. So starting with the group sales, the net sales amounted to SEK 1,278 million in the quarter. That was an increase by 16.6% against last year's quarter. We had a negative FX effect on sales, so in local currencies, that growth was 18.8%. We had a prolonged Black Friday period with really strong stock levels and availability, thanks to the new automation, and we know that we gained market shares in this period, despite intense campaign pressure in the market. Looking at the year, all in all, 2025 concludes at SEK 3.96 billion, and that corresponds to a growth of 11.3% against the previous year.
In local currencies, we would have taken that fantastic SEK 4 billion barrier, and it would have been a 13% growth. And then to the gross margin. The gross margin decreased to 39.6% in the quarter. Last year, we had an exceptionally high level, 45.2%, and just to break that sort of decline down a little bit, the main reason for the decline was in the product margin, and here it was the mix of the pricing strategy, but also combined with an intense campaign pressure. We had a more disadvantageous assortment mix, channel mix, and we also saw lower contributions from our suppliers. So all in all, the product margin accounted for 4.5 percentage points of the margin drop.
Then we had a 0.5 percentage point effect from change in inventories between the two years, and we also had a 0.6 percentage point lower other revenue stream affecting that gross margin downwards. So that was the breakdown of the gross margin. Then when we look at the OpEx and personnel side of things, in the operational costs, we saw an increase in share of sales during the quarter, and this was caused by quite a few different events. Firstly, we had SEK 3.9 million in one-off costs related to the new automation and the ramp-up. This was mainly freight and packaging, but also increased personnel, which I'll get back to.
We also had a lower average order value as a result from the campaign pressure, so we had more orders to ship, and this drove up the freight, packaging, and transaction costs in the quarter. We also spent more on marketing during the quarter, around SEK 20 million, compared to the quarter the year before. And this was both brand and performance marketing. Then on the personnel side of things, we also had a negative one-off from the closure of the offices in Germany and the Netherlands, and this accounted to SEK 2.7 million. And then, as I mentioned previously, we had SEK 300,000 related to the warehouse ramp-up in personnel cost.
When it comes to the group functions, those are the functions that support the group-wide, we have remained fairly steady since early 2024. We have a cost during this quarter of SEK 51 million. Looking at the profitability on group level, we see a decline from the sort of record quarter last year. This is a result of primarily the lower gross margin, but also higher variable costs that sort of came as a consequence, but also one-off costs related to the warehouse ramp-up primarily, but also the closure of the German and Netherlands offices. For this quarter, the one-off costs totaled at SEK 6.9 million, but for the entire year, we had almost SEK 20 million in one-off costs.
Without the one-off costs, we conclude the year at SEK 78 million in EBIT, corresponding to a 2% EBIT margin. Looking at our segments, we had a strong growth in the Nordic segment during the quarter, 18.2%. We had a negative effect sales here, so in local currencies, that was 21%. And then if we conclude the year, this segment corresponds to SEK 3.7 billion for the year, and that's a 12% growth. And as we mentioned previously as well, we are very excited that the Norwegian market accounted for more than 1 billion NOK. The EBIT in the quarter was down as a consequence of all the reasons I went through for the group, so we will move to the European segment.
In Europe, we have been more or less steady on a rolling basis over the last couple of years. We decreased in the quarter 13.7%, and if we look at the 2025 outcome, we decreased by only 1.3% and arrived at 131 million SEK. And then if we look at the profitability for the Europe segment here, of course, we have that one-off effect from the 2.7 million SEK of closing down the Netherlands and Germany office. So, but we arrive at -8 million SEK for the quarter, fairly in line with the last six quarters. And all in all, the year 2025 concludes at 26.7 million SEK, a loss, and that's against a 33 million SEK loss last year.
We have been talking quite a lot about the one-off costs for the year. So just to summarize this, both by quarter and by cost type, it was SEK 6.9 million this quarter, mainly attributable to the automation ramp-up, and in total for the year, SEK 19.9 million. In total, during Q3 and Q4, the automation one-offs was totaled at SEK 18.5 million. Then I believe this is probably the last time we will show this slide as the logistics investment in the new automation are almost done, and the ramp-up is almost finalized. But just to recap the standings, this automation hands us +150% capacity. Going forward, we have been paying rent for the extended warehouse since the beginning of 2024.
Our term loan is currently at 486 million SEK, and we will start the depreciation from March 2026. Amortization starts from Q2, 13.75 million SEK in quarterly installments. And then when we look at inventory, the automation gave us the opportunity for the first time to replenish the stock levels already during the campaign, during Black Friday campaign, but also throughout the month of December. So all in all, we secured selling with improved stock levels, ended the year with 120 million SEK more in stock, and that's a 16% stock to sales ratio versus 14.4% the year before.
Thank you, Ylva. We will open up for questions. Please, I will let the analyst come first. I see the hands. Please, Magnus Råman from Kepler Cheuvreux.
Thank you very much. I have three initial questions, and first on your net debt. Excluding leases, it declined 12% year-on-year. It declined a full 36% sequentially from Q3. And I believe that payables is a clear driver here behind improving operating cash flow. And I would say that your sort of IFRS 16 adjusted gearing of 2.2 times doesn't look super worrying. But in the backdrop of these numbers, I'd try to be reassured here that it's not just a timing effect of the year-end as it relates to payables and thereby balance back in Q1 again, but rather structural. So I'd phrase my question like this, that did you make any sort of long-term negotiations with your suppliers here?
Also, do you see that you have a more rapid flow through in the new inventory or fulfillment center? So that you'll see a more sustained working capital improvement, essentially. That's my first question.
Yeah, I would say, with the new automation, it gives us a completely new opportunity of how we fill up for for campaigns and also how we manage the sort of stock levels and working capital throughout the campaigns. We here see that we have an opportunity of delivering in later and filling up throughout campaigns to a completely different level than before. If we go back one year and the old automation, we could either deliver in or deliver out, meaning that all of December was only spent on delivering out. So we have completely new sort of you can call it a playground now in terms of how we buy, how we sell, and also how when we pay.
So it's a mix of that composition, but primarily the sort of calendar effect that is the biggest change at the moment is that we were able to replenish and buy a lot during December. So we go into the new year and the new quarter with higher stock levels than before, which is an asset for us. We have already sort of paid the hours it takes to deliver in these stock levels. And then we have a big campaign starting next week, so we are in a really good position there when it comes to stock levels. So yeah, the answer to the question is we are hoping to see that this becomes more structural going forward, but it really also depends on the market.
This new automation gives us a completely new starting point when it comes to inventory planning.
That was also a change in this campaign this year, that we had extended the Black Week with the Cyber Week, which went into December, but with good delivering out, we can also starting refilling at the same time in a new level in December. Last year, we were really handling orders until the last of before Christmas Eve to be able to get everything out in time, and this year was in a totally different position.
Great. The second question is, these closed offices in Germany and Netherlands, if you could help us with what is the saving, and from when will we see that saving?
So we have offices in Amsterdam and in Berlin, and we had seven employees that were affected in this decision. This decision was taken during Q4, and the savings are fully sort of accounted for going into 2026.
Yeah, but could you elaborate also? So is it both rent and staff cost for seven employees that are being saved and will be rolled, sort of that saving will then, of course, have an effect year on a year, on a year-on-year comparison throughout 2026. Is that correct?
Yes, exactly.
Right. And you wouldn't care to give us any ballpark figure of the total cost there saved?
Well, yeah, not other than the SEK 2.7 million that we took as a one-off cost during the quarter.
Right. But that's a salary-related, I guess. But how about the rental cost for these premises? Is there any meaningful number there?
No, it's not. They were both smaller offices with flexible sort of rental terms, so.
All right. Great. Then, the third one for me is, that you clearly flag here, of course, that you're done with new, larger investments for now. Feels reassuring, from a cash and debt position. But you also mentioned here AI-driven efficiency improvements, apart from the sort of cost savings measures, that you take. Can you elaborate a little bit on, which cost could be reduced by AI and how?
I think most of the reduction when we're talking about those system, that's obviously affected white collars that we're seeing now, but also going forward, that we can handle more volume on less people. But then when you're looking into the relevance and the search engine, it's harder to say, it's not a cost reduction, that's an improvement in turnover, I would say. So hard to say exactly, but we will come back when we have clear numbers on those.
Great. Thank you very much for me.
Well, then we leave the floor for Johan Fred, SEB.
Yes, good morning. Thank you for taking my questions. A couple follow-ups from me as well. Firstly, on the cost reduction program, you stated that this will affect roughly 70 FTEs. But does the SEK 100 million in annual savings also include the closure of Germany and the Netherlands? And also, could you, in general, give some more color on what is included in the cost-saving program, please?
Yes, so the majority of the SEK 100 million will be from the organizational changes and the affected FTEs. We are also doing OpEx savings, and that will come out throughout the year. And we are also just to lift out the marketing component of the OpEx, looking into how to be more efficient, especially there as well. And then, of course, lastly, as well, we are reducing the CapEx agenda slightly as well, that we had planned for the year.
So, the SEK 100 million, is that including the closure of the local offices in Germany and the Netherlands?
Yes, it will be including that.
Any chance that you could sort of elaborate on the timeline for realizing these savings? How much is in H2 versus H1 in 2026?
Yes. We are in the midst of looking into this at the moment. We don't have any clearer sort of guidance than what we have given before. But we will come back in a much clearer way on that in Q1.
Okay, but, but these SEK 100 million in annual savings, one should expect that to take effect in 2026?
Absolutely. The SEK 100 million is on a rolling basis, and from the first of February. So, so absolutely.
Cool. Thank you so much. And then, in the presentation, you stated that you're gonna be more focused on profitability, going forward. Does this mean that you reconsidered sort of the aggressive customer acquisition strategy? And is this also why you're seeing gross margins returning in or tracking in line with prior years here in January? And sort of in a general basis, how does this translates into sales growth in 2026? How should one think about margins versus growth?
I mean, it's a thousand different things that we are doing a balancing act. One of those are prices, campaigns, and the mix of what we are selling. So, I mean, what we are saying is that we will prioritize up a little bit, the profitability versus the top line, but in exactly how that will turn out this year, it's also, I mean, it's affecting what we have seen in Q4, where we are meeting a tougher market, that the consumer are not there exactly. That could change, and then the growth can come instead. But, I mean, we are also now setting us in a position that we are not needed the growth to be able to get out the profitability with reducing cost instead.
So it's more, I would say, a signal about how we look at that than we are now. I mean, with the new automation in place, we can really handle much more volumes. So we have everything in place if we're seeing that those possibilities are coming.
Okay. And also an interesting thing that you mentioned, you mentioned lower contributions from supplier as one of the reasons why the lower, for the lower gross margin in Q4. Several other online retailers have also mentioned this as an explanation to lower profitability in Q4. What is your analysis of this driver, of the lower supplier contributions? Is this something that could be a structural shift in the industry, or do you see it as something that was specific to Q4, in general here?
It's hard to say. I don't see a general shift there. It's also about the mix of what you're selling and how you're setting up the campaigns and so on. I mean, what we are seeing, the position is that we are getting more support looking into the long run, then it can shift in between quarter, depending on what we are selling. But the position from our point in, when we look into other suppliers, is much stronger than it has been before. But also here we see the mix in between physical store and online and so on. So it's really a mix. I don't see any structure shift there or changes that should do a huge different going forward.
That was very clear. Thank you for taking my questions.
Thank you. Then we go over to Benjamin Wahlstedt from ABG.
Thank you very much. First of all, I was wondering if you could explain in a bit more detail, perhaps how pricing during campaign season works for you. I mean, historically, you've experienced gross margin declines of upwards of two percentage points Q on Q. You are well aware that Q4 is very campaign-heavy, so sort of any qualitative comments on what happened and what went wrong would be much appreciated here. Thank you.
I mean, we have 72,000 products that we are setting different pricing levels on, and then depending on what all the other players in the market are doing, we adjust that. We are in a position where we see we don't need to be the lowest on price, but we need to be relevant on price. So we need to adapt depending on what we are seeing. We're changing going forward is that setting more focusing on the products we are making the best profit from, where we came from, where we are maybe setting more focusing on what's selling the best. So I think it's more of the mix in what we can affect that we are changing than we don't know exactly what will happen in the market. But we are very comfortable that we can affect the margins going forward.
And also there, when we are setting profitability versus top line, we will go more for the profitability and setting, I mean, more request on the suppliers that we are going up with.
All right. I suspect you had quite a few SKUs last year as well. So is there any specific sort of competitor that's forced you to act in this way? Or, I mean, the complexity was there a year ago.
I think, I think it is more the underlying growth in the market, if there is an underlying growth. I think what's happening in this quarter is that there are a lot of players, and when a lot of players don't see that they're having the top line that they needed to be able to handle their cost, they are going more competition into that. And, what we're seeing now, there is some of the players seems like they're going out of the market, and that could also be the case, that we have players that needed to go even harder and don't get the total in line with what they need. So, so I think it's more about the competition in together where we're seeing the growth underlying in the market.
Do you think, Bangerhead's sort of demise might have been, might have been part of it? Do they run sort of inventory clearance sales, or?
Yeah, I think all of those players are affected, and exactly how, how much and, and where, it's hard to say. But, I mean, we know that we have a lot of players that needed to go for that, so we will see. Yeah.
Yeah. On a similar topic, are you using Google Automated Discounts, and do you see any reason to believe that it was part of the problem?
We are using GAD in some sense, but also doing that. It has been changing. I mean, we used that a year ago, and then the price rules are changing, so you cannot use it as much as we has done in before. But yeah, we are using it, but that was not part of the problem. But for sure, it can affect it on some SKUs when we see players only going for that, so hard to say.
All right, so, to summarize then, is it fair to say that you're changing focus from driving, like algorithmic marketing towards sales, and instead focusing on sort of like a contribution margin or contribution profit?
I would say it's a balancing act, where we are balancing it a little bit different. It's not a total shift. It's, it's more how we are prioritizing the things where we know we can affect the sales, and we see that we can do a better job going into this Q4 on that sense.
Perfect, thank you. Turning to top line, Oh, actually, no, sorry, there's gross margin again. To help us understand the comment on mix a bit better, could you share the growth for the physical part of the business versus online, please?
Yeah, we usually don't share that split since we changed the segments. We had stronger, much stronger growth in the online channel during this quarter, since the pricing strategy sort of has a bigger impact on that channel. So the channel mix also weighed down the gross margin, as I mentioned.
Could you give us an estimate of the impact in basis points terms?
Uh-
We don't comment on that, but as you know, a lot of the sales are online, so even if they would be growing in the same level, which they did not do, it still affect the mix of it, but no, we don't comment exactly on the numbers.
All right, thank you. I have a few more, but I'll let Daniel step in before me.
Welcome, Daniel Schmidt, Danske Bank.
Morning, guys. Just coming back to the cash flow, and I heard your answer when it comes to the automation, and that's sort of in place now, which changes the buying pattern. But you also wrote that you are extending payment terms or payment days to suppliers. Could you shed some light on how far that's been extended? And it's like it's swinging SEK 450 million in cash flow in the quarter. I assume that they want to get paid soon.
Sorry, we have some issues hearing, but you were talking about extending payment terms.
Exactly. Exactly.
Yes, I mean-
I assume that they want to get paid, so I assume they get paid in Q1 instead.
Yeah, I mean, it's a big mix when it comes to our buying strategy, sort of when we buy, when we sell, and when we pay, both if we split up our assortment in the own brands part, in the external part, in the parts that we buy specifically for campaign periods. So it's a big mix, basically. And, I mean, the main calendar shift here versus the year before was the fact that we were able to build up a really big stock before the Black Friday period, but also replenish throughout that period and also all the way during December.
Yeah, but they still wanna get paid, I assume. Are they gonna get paid in Q1 instead?
I mean, the supplier has got paid for 18 years now, so yeah, they will get paid and has always got their payments, and nothing has changed there.
But you say that you are extending it, so I assume that it will be a swing back in Q1 instead.
I mean, what we have talked with suppliers, and that's something we're doing ongoing. We want longer payment term, but with that said, a lot of our assortment, that's our own assortment, we pay before it get produced and so on. So it is a mix of that. But as long as I am driving business, I've never been in a case where I cannot pay the suppliers. So yeah, they will get paid.
... Yes, and it's been a big focus within the company for more than a year now, with a new agreement as well, where we are negotiating improved terms, not only on things like payment terms, but also on terms that are linked to compliance, to pricing, to support. So it's been a sort of long-term effort there.
But I still don't get it. The swing is so big. Are you saying that you won't see that swing fully coming back into one, and this is more structural?
I mean, we're going up and down in the stock levels as well, and this is one of our biggest period where we are selling a lot, and we need to restock that in December to be able to go into January with a good stock level. So yeah, it will swing, and it do swing, and now we're going into big periods of big campaigns, so it will swing back again. So yeah, it is big swings in the stock levels for sure.
Okay. Okay. But it's, it's more the sort of, it's a changing pattern basically, compared to what you're used to doing before. But on the, on-
I mean, the numbers are just that day. We don't see that the stock level is one day where we're seeing the numbers, and that can change from year to year.
Just, moving on then to the investment program. You guided for SEK 110 million in cash out in terms of CapEx. It came out at SEK 40-something or 30. Are you scrapping the rest of the investment program when it comes to Vansbro, or is that gonna happen in Q1?
No, we have almost taken up the full term loan for the investment, and we are in line with that investment frame when it comes to sort of paying the supplier Vanderlande. So the full 498 will be taken up as per Q1 2026.
But does that mean that the SEK 110 that became SEK 40 in Q4 is gonna be another SEK 80 in Q1 instead, in cash out?
No.
No. Okay, but then you gave the wrong guidance in Q3 then.
Okay, uh-
'Cause you said SEK 110, and then you said SEK 12 million for Q1.
I apologize. I don't have the Q3 at hand at the moment, but if that was a mistake, then that was a mistake.
Okay. Okay, cool. And then when it comes to the savings program, how's the cash out gonna look there? What's the cost of taking out these people?
Yeah, so we have estimated a one-off cost that we will take now during Q1 of SEK 24 million.
Okay, and that's for the people, and then the rest is gonna be more efficient ways of working, basically. You mentioned marketing, right?
Yes, it's gonna be both sort of indirect costs, but also operational costs, where we will try to scale where we can and really hold down the expenditures.
Okay. And you also mentioned normalization of the gross margin and average order value in Q1 so far. You don't mention top-line growth. Could you say something about top-line growth?
I would say it's in the level that we expect it to be. We don't see anything strange there.
Is that still double-digit, then?
I don't comment on that. I mean, we're going into campaigns period and so on, so we will see exactly where it's landing, but-
Okay. Okay, thank you, guys. That's all for me.
We're starting running out of time, but we will have one question each from Magnus Råman and then Benjamin Wahlstedt.
Right. I just wanted to tie into the discussion. I think maybe it was a bit of a misunderstanding on the previous questions of the payables. I think what Daniel was referring to was not whether you would be paying at all or not. That's no question that you would be paying your suppliers. The question I think was more related to whether we will see a structural shift push forward in the payment terms, or if it's just a shift over the year-end effect on the payables.
If I understood your replies previously to this question, you have seen a more structural extension of your payment terms, and since you pay COGS every material amounts of COGS, sort of every quarter, this, if this is holds true, that you have more permanently renegotiated payment terms, then we will see a positive working capital effect throughout, well, until Q3 2026 at least, and until we roll over this effect. Is that a sort of the right way to interpret it?
I would say both yes and no. As I referred to, we have a long-term effort in sort of improving supplier agreements on many different aspects, and that will definitely play through. Then it differs quite a lot how we buy for campaigns and the agreements made for campaigns. Also, when it comes to supplier contributions and marketing support versus sort of the non-campaign periods. There will be a mix, but for sure, our new automation gives us a lot of advantages when it comes to working in a better way with our working capital going forward, in combination with this.
... Right, and just very quickly on the marketing expenditures, I mean, you said before, Rickard, historically, that you want to spend the 10% of sales more or less. You don't want this figure to decline. Is there a new communication here? I mean, the discipline and higher ROI demands, I guess this is relating to performance marketing, i.e., AdWords, AdSense spending. Yeah, do you have a new target if you put the marketing expenditure in relation to sales now?
I think that's something we will look into for sure, and depending on what we're seeing in the top line development, which affects that in some sense, but for sure, I mean, we see an overspend in the marketing part as well in Q4 this year, that we will not do coming up to the next Q4. So yeah, we taking all that in consideration and see where is the new level that we want, but we still believe in investing in the marketing part to make sure that the growth will come going forward as well. But yeah, we don't have a new guidance around that, but we're looking into it.
Thank you, Magnus. Then we go out to Benjamin for the last question.
Thank you, and this is a quick one. What is your private label share of sales in Q4, please? Your own brand share.
Oh, I don't have that readily available, but it has been around 8.5%.
All right, we can take that offline. Thank you.
Yes.
Thank you everyone for listening in this morning. We will meet again the twenty-eighth of April when we release the quarter one report. Have a great day!