Hello and welcome to today's broadcast with MEDS. Our CEO Björn Thorngren and CFO Nick Mendola will present a report for the third quarter of 2025. After the presentation, there will be a Q&A. If you're calling in and want to ask a question, please press star nine to raise your hand and then star six to unmute yourself and hand the word. You can also submit questions using the form to the right. With that said, I hand over the word to Björn.
Thank you. Good morning, everyone. I'm here with my CFO, Nick Mendola, today to present our third quarter. Our first quarter as a public company, so we're very excited and happy to continue this presentation today. Just to kick off, I wanted to reiterate our mission, and its three pillars. The first we have achieved now, we're a profitable SEK-b illion company. We achieved that through our very engaged employee base. We have 50 employees, so very high revenue per employee. The end game is, of course, to become the customer's favorite pharmacy and then have returning, happy, loyal customers that are profitable in each order. It's been a very strong and historic quarter for MEDS. We had a very successful IPO in September on Nasdaq First North Premier. We achieved a strong following by tier one investors in Scandinavia and actually also Europe.
We broadened the investor base to over 2,000 new shareholders. As a company, we exceeded some milestones: 1 million active customers, meaning returning customers, and close to SEK 1 billion in annualized revenue last 12 months. As you can see, the profitability path is very steady and has been ongoing for years. We will continue this into our financial goal next year and beyond, 3%-5% EBIT. Last 12 months and year to date, it has been 2%. I leave to Nick to summarize the financials, and then we will return at the end to recap.
Yeah, thank you, Björn. Continued strong sales growth in Q3. Continued to grow faster than market, which is a trend that we've seen consistently over time. Particularly strong sales in September. Leading to adjusted EBIT of 2% for the quarter. Operating cash flow at SEK 24 million. Go into that a little later, but driven in part from seasonal effects from working capital, where we get a strong inflow of cash during Q3, which offset some of the one-off costs related to the IPO. Strong balance sheet, SEK 97 million in cash, no debt. We're a capital-light business. Which allows us to grow and generate cash flow and not tie up a bunch of cash in working capital. Looking towards the future, we have almost SEK 500 million in tax loss carry forwards, which we'll be able to utilize in the future.
Those are currently off balance sheet, but we will take them on balance sheet as deferred tax asset in the future. From a top-line perspective, the 22% growth, which we've seen market estimates of around 17% for the market, so outperforming again from a market perspective. Strong growth in our prescription drug sales, so Rx, at 52%, which is a key factor for us that we have a high focus on as we see the shift from offline to online on Rx, having strong growth in the market. We still have a lot of opportunity in prescription drugs where it's just 15% of our revenue, and only 15% of prescription drug sales happen online today. Key milestone to get to 15% is that's generally an accelerant point in e-commerce. When you reach 15% penetration, you generally see a snowball effect where that growth accelerates.
Trade goods and OTC products are the largest driver of sales in terms of value, SEK value. That continues to grow above market as well. The scalability of our operating model is evident, and we have best-in-class EBIT incrementality. What gross profit growth. How much of your gross profit growth falls into EBIT profit growth. What you can see is 50% of our gross profit growth landed in our bottom-line EBIT growth. Both from a pharmacy segment perspective and e-comm retail in general, our numbers stack up very high. Order economics, the core focus in our business. How do we improve our profitability at an order level? There is no point in scaling an e-comm business if you do not have strong order economics. Contribution margin two, which is kind of our North Star metric.
Gross profit three is a lot in the e-comm industry, say. It grew with 37%, which is a really impressive number, considering our top-line growth was just 22%. The way we were able to achieve that is we grew top-line without having to grow our marketing spend. In an e-comm business, to be able to grow top-line without increasing your marketing spend is a really successful result. One important thing to note is contribution profit for us is the focus. It's not gross margin or gross profit or marketing in a silo. The interplay between product demand, pricing, and marketing is quite high. That's where I think our team excels is our understanding of that, of how does price elasticity affect marketing spend and vice versa. There's generally a negative correlation. If.
You reduce your prices, or sorry, a correlation that if you reduce prices, you need to spend less on marketing. If you increase prices, then you generally have to drive more marketing spend to bring in more customers. We never look at these individually as a silo, but we look at them together and have a very focused approach to driving contribution profit and not looking at the individual staples. Contribution to margin at 10% of sales during the quarter. I like to use this as a very simple math exercise. We are approximately SEK 1 billion in revenue. We have a contribution margin of 10%. With those metrics, and if you hold your fixed costs stable, which we have done historically, just doing simple math, adding SEK 100 million in sales contributes to SEK 10 million in EBIT growth, which is about 1 percentage point in.
EBIT margin expansion. OpEx, our OpEx costs, increased by about 6% during the quarter and relative to our sales growth of 22%. A very nice operating leverage and led to a 1 percentage point improvement in EBIT. We are a cost value-focused business, so we have a high focus on our cost and bringing in costs that bring value to the business. We've been able to scale this business without having to grow our fixed cost because we're getting a lot of output out of the cost that we have today. Cash flow perspective, as mentioned, strong operating cash flow during the quarter, driven largely from seasonality and working capital, but that is offsetting the effects from one-off costs that we took in operating income related to the IPO. Actually, if had it not been for those.
IPO-related costs, we would have had operating cash flow of around SEK 34 million instead. With the proceeds that we received from the IPO, we ended the quarter at SEK 97 million in cash, leaving us very well capitalized and in a well-positioned to support our growth going forward. Balance sheet, we have a capital-light business model. We have working capital that tends to be between basically at net zero for most of the year. We are not binding capital as we are growing. Very low CapEx and no debt. As previously mentioned, we have off balance sheet our historical tax losses, which we can carry forward to offset against future profits. We are expected to take some of those tax losses onto the balance sheet during Q4 as a deferred tax asset. It will depend on how profits are developing in Q4 and the extent.
The good news is we won't have to pay tax going forward. For quite some time. Hand it back to Björn, talk about logistics.
I wanted to touch upon our logistics. Really how we scale with our logistics. What we have seen in comparison to similar peers, not just in pharmacy, but other e-comm industries, when they invest more in automation. Currently, we are ahead of the curve. We invested several years ago in packing and sorting, which is around 50%. We have a semi-automatic logistics setup. We have announced that we will make limited investments in the coming years in also picking, but we will not do the huge investments necessary by companies that have several billion SEK turnover. That will be after this prognosis period in our financial targets. When we reach, hopefully, the tripling we foresee in the next five to six years, we might look at that type of investment. We also really foresee the current technology having improved a lot.
We still have 1990s or even 1980s technology used in warehouses today, but a lot of exciting development is coming up that will be much more efficient, much more actually automated, and less CapEx intensive. That will be in 5+ years as we see it currently. We have probably the most experienced logistics team in the industry, a very senior Head of Logistics and lots of experience with different types of automation. It is something we always evaluate, but currently we're very happy with our setup. We're able to grow with that setup. What we have announced is that we'll look for a larger warehouse second half of 2026. That is ongoing and will be announced as soon as we have something to announce. That is really to accommodate the growth for this next five- to- six-year period.
A lot of questions on the regulatory update on home delivery rules. We have said that this has very limited impact on our business. I wanted to touch upon why we say that. This is a very approximate view of our current alternatives, and not all are even included here, but around 70% are totally unaffected by the new rules. Of the 30% remaining, it is primarily the ones in gray and specifically the newspaper type delivery, which is impacted. MEDS, in difference to some competitors, have never used newspaper delivery services for prescribed medicine. We are not impacted by that. A lot of these alternatives will also remain. A very small part of it will go to a pickup point instead of being hanged on the door as the customer has requested. It is really.
In rural areas where there are no alternatives, where the impact will be felt most by the customer and typically those that do not have access to a car. Elderly and immobile, the most vulnerable in our society is being impacted. We feel that is unfortunate, but for our business, it has a very limited impact. After that, we will move into questions, and I will leave to our moderator.
Thank you so much for the presentation here. As you mentioned, I will carry on with the Q&A. If you're calling in and want to ask a question, please press star nine to raise your hand and then star six to unmute yourself. The first caller here is the phone number that ends with 673. You're welcome.
That might be me. I think Benjamin at ABG here. Good morning. First of all, I was wondering if you could give us any flavor on the average order value or the order count growth in the quarter, please.
Sure. Thanks, Benjamin. Average order value was SEK 450 during the quarter, which is a stable level with what we had last year. Not seeing any significant changes from an AOV perspective. Q3 tends to be, just from a seasonal perspective, a lower AOV quarter than preceding quarters, just product mix perspective. There is not a drastic change or any significant changes than what we've been seeing.
Perfect. Thank you very much. You noticed well that September growth was strong. I understand the comment as being of stronger growth on the quarter overall. I was wondering what would you say is the reason for this observation? Underlying easier comps or something else entirely?
No, I think we were able to gain good traction in the market in September. It wasn't that September was an easy comp from last year. I think just strong execution, strong campaigns. Nothing in specific. As Björn said, it's a normal quarter for us. We find opportunity in the market. We see where we can acquire customers or drive sales, and we execute on that.
Perfect. Thank you very much. You note also that the gross margin decline was due to product mix effects. I was wondering if you could specify further. Are you referring to the higher Rx share here primarily, or is there something else?
Yeah, so it's a little bit of a combination of a few things. Our Rx increasing in share of sales had some effect in that, but it's also, we've been iterating when it comes to charging for freight on Rx, both in Rx and in app. We have a little bit lower sales from freight, which is, since it goes into sales with the cost falling below gross margin, it's a 100% margin sale. That all done with that iteration helped us also drive sales on the top line, and we saw the contribution margin that we wanted to achieve. We were okay. I mean, we constantly iterate. It's part of our business model. From that perspective, different mix. Then you get effects from last year. We had our advent calendar sales that hit September. This year it's going to hit October.
I mean, it's small incremental effects from different parts, but nothing that we're concerned with.
Perfect. That is actually a perfect segue to my final question today. I was wondering if you could give us some indication of the volume of Christmas calendars sold. You say they were all delivered in October this year, essentially. I am trying to gauge the impact on growth or the potential impact on growth.
Yeah, I mean, overall, you're talking maybe basis points of growth. Effect, because when we look at from a quarter in total, it's one of those things where you wish after the fact that, oh, I wish we would have bought 5x what we bought. With the advent calendar model, it's not really practical to do it because we're getting contributions from our suppliers. I wish we could just push a button and create more advent calendars because they sold out as quickly as they did. We're in a couple of years of this now. We have better data. We'll see what we can do for next year to have even bigger impact.
Perfect. Thank you very much. That is all I had today.
Thank you so much for the questions, dear. We will now carry on with the next caller who has the cell phone number ending with 639. You're welcome.
Yes. Good morning, Björn and Nick. This is Daniel from Danske . A couple of questions. I think you mentioned it, Nick, when it came to freight or delivery fees related to Rx. Could you specify a bit more what you've done there since it sounded like you've been lowering it or free of charge? Or what was the change that you made when it came to Rx and delivery fees?
Yeah, so we had free freight in Q3 on our prescription drugs. And in prior year, it would depend on value thresholds and which shipping method that you used.
Is this an ongoing? Is this a permanent change, you think? Is it at least ongoing in Q4 into 2026? Has it already been altered back?
No, we've kept with it. I think for us, given the traction that we're getting on prescription drug sales, we like the effect that it's had. You can't 100% attribute our growth. You can't attribute the growth just to that we've had free freight in prescription drugs. We see really good traction there. We're going to continue to see what can contribute to driving that growth further. I won't say it's permanent, but I don't think we're not doing a change back.
Yeah, and we didn't make the change in the quarter. It was made several quarters ago. It is a comparison to last year's Q3. It is really a result of.
Even earlier .
I can't recall exactly, but it's a result of us being so efficient in the Rx management that we realized we want to drive more Rx sales because we had good profit per order, which we didn't in previous years.
Okay. It will be a different comparison for Q4 as well. Then maybe it's going to be sort of annualized as we go into Q1. Is that a fair assumption?
Yeah, that's fair.
Yeah.
Okay. Would you say that that is the main factor that sort of contributed to the slight decrease in gross margin, or is it evenly distributed between sort of the fact that you have more Rx as a mix factor and then on top of that, the free deliveries?
Yeah, I would say that the freight part was around half, contributed about three, and then the Rx, the other part. Basically, our margins were stable across kind of our major categories. It was really mixed effect on what we sold.
Good, good. Maybe jumping on to the seasonal swing in working capital. You were fairly clear saying that it is usually a swing in Q3. We could look back, of course, but since I have you on the phone, what should we expect for Q4? Looking at history or what you know now?
I think in Q4, we tend to be around 1%-1.5% of last 12 months sales in working capital. In Q3, we ended up in negative working capital. There will be some effect, but the positive is we'll buy in stock now with our suppliers. That's going to lead to campaigns in January as well. Or stock that comes in November, December that we'll use in campaigns in January. Because we want to make sure that we have stock in January. We have suppliers that go on vacation. It's harder to get in goods, particularly at the beginning of the year. It is a strategic choice when we have the cash to do it. Let's have product available and drive sales and don't lose a sales opportunity because you don't have product in stock.
Okay. On that topic, when it comes to suppliers, do you normally book a large part of reimbursements from suppliers in Q4? Is there any reason to believe that that's going to deviate a lot compared to what you maybe booked Q4 last year?
Can you just clarify what you mean on reimbursements? Is that kind of marketing contribution?
Basically support from suppliers, campaign support. Is that Q4 heavy or is that evenly distributed through the year? Or how does that work?
Yeah, we tend to, because historically, November has been a campaign month from an e-comm perspective, we tend to get more, we have more activity going on, so we tend to get more campaign support. Also a bit higher in terms of retail media sales because it's a great exposure month. There's a lot of traffic to the site. It is a very interesting quarter for our suppliers to get visibility that we can offer.
Do you see retail media as a revenue stream growing more than the group average? Or is that taking off or is that following basically the total growth?
It's in general. Following. It's a balance there. We like to look at the whole package, right? We can sell retail media, we can get campaign support, or we can get even better just initial purchasing pricing. We're trying to look at the totality of the relationship with our suppliers and really build a partnership and meet their needs while also meeting ours. If we get more retail media, but it's going to come at the cost of a lower gross margin, is that really worth it? We're trying to look from a totality perspective.
Yeah. Good. You said that you had a strong ending to Q3. Is there any reason to believe that sort of the trend that you're seeing so far in Q4 is deviating from the total trend that you saw in Q3?
I mean. Thus far, I mean, we still see continued strong trends. Obviously, November, while we're not a clothing company, so we don't have the, or toy, we don't have the big spikes that some of the other retailers have. November is generally our strongest sales month of the year. There is still a lot to be determined, but so far, so good.
Okay. Maybe I'm also asking a little bit because on the back of the fact that Apotea yesterday mentioned that they're now shifting focus. They've been quite focused on ramping up Varberg, and they alluded to the fact that they seem to be happy with that. Now focus is shifting for them again a bit back to growing the company. I'm not saying they're not growing the company, but they've been in a period where they've been quite focused on getting that facility up and running. That seems to be changing now. Is that anything that you've seen in the market when it comes to their aggressiveness?
I think what we've seen the last four or five years is actually the state-run pharmacy and Apoteket taking market shares online. And Apotea are losing market shares. We don't foresee any change. We continue to be the only pharmacy really taking market share and also doing it profitably.
Okay. So no sort of detection of any sort of price aggressiveness as of late from Apotea that is sticking out compared to the normal behavior?
No, we have several competitors, and I don't think anyone sticks out in particular. We also never compete on price alone, so it's not really affecting us.
Okay. Good. Maybe a simple circumstance. Will there be any more one-offs recorded in Q4?
Not as anticipated now. There might be a very minimal just cleanup of provision now that we've gotten all the costs related to the IPO in and actual invoices, but it's going to be marginal at best.
All the IPO costs are in the Q3 numbers basically?
Yep.
Yeah.
Okay. Good. That was all for me.
Thanks, Daniel.
Thank you so much for the questions there. We will now finish up with some questions that have been sent to us. The first one is. Top line growth of 24% is quite high. How long is that rate sustainable?
Yeah, we sustain it for a long time. In the last couple of years, we had 39% CAGR. Our financial target is 20%-25%. That means tripling in five to six years. Of course, there might be quarters where we're not in that range, but over time, that's where we plan to stay. We always balance, of course, also with our EBIT target of 3%-5%, where we communicated we'll enter that range during 2026. The market continues to grow. The estimate we've seen for Q3 is 17%, and we continue to grow a little bit faster than the market. We do see a lot of room to grow left in the market, not the least on prescribed medicine, which is 77% of the market for the stores.
As that now is moving online, and it's a huge market, SEK 65 billion per year, which also keeps growing. There's a lot of room to grow overall in the market, and then the shift online. For us as an individual company, we're very small still. We continue to take market share.
Thank you. Do you see the trend that customers buying their meds via online instead of traditional stores continuing?
Definitely. As we communicated, 52% growth for prescribed medicine in the quarter. What we heard from other players in the market, they see similar trends. As Nick mentioned, there's an inflection point around 15% of the market. Penetration online that prescribed medicine has passed. We do think we're seeing that snowball effect that it's becoming the norm, not just for early adopters, but also for more mainstream and elderly, for example, to pick up their medicine online because it's simply much more convenient. They also discovered that everything else is 40% cheaper there. They have a huge benefit in terms of larger assortment, lower prices, and convenience.
Thank you. What was AOV in the quarter?
Nick mentioned it's SEK 450, and that's stable. So we're happy with that figure.
Thank you. How do you see cash flow evolving? If the strong development continues and you generate a lot of cash, how much cash do you anticipate that you need before you start paying out dividend?
I can start with the dividend question. That is obviously something decided by the board. Our financial target right now is to reinvest and build. We will have to return if that changes. As for the cash flow development, I will leave for Nick to respond.
I mean, we still expect to be profitable going forward, which will generate operating cash flows. As I mentioned earlier, our working capital requirements are low in the business. As we continue to improve our profitability, we'll see increased cash flow.
Thank you. How do you view your competitors and how will you fight them?
Yeah, we've been doing that for seven years now, very successfully. We have four major retail chains. Two of four are not making a profit. None of them are making a profit online. They are and have been aggressive online for a long time. We have some pure players as well, which we also successfully compete on. We're the only player actually gaining market share and also doing it profitably. We aim to continue to do that. Really being the customer's favorite is the number one weapon we have because then we get more customers that also return and shop for more. That's a big leverage in our model. We now have 1 million active customers in our country with around 8 million adults. That's really good.
Can we get that customer base to return even more and also keep increasing it? We're in a very good place.
Thank you. Moving on to the last question here. Do you see any major investments in the coming years?
Yeah, it's a question we get a lot, and we have communicated we will invest a few tens of million SEK, primarily in picking automation, but we do not foresee any major CapEx. That's a very qualified assessment we made and continue to make, based on what a company is doing around SEK 1 billion and in time SEK 2 billion of sales needs. I think there's some confusion with larger companies. What they need is very different to what we need. We have a very efficient warehouse. It's very scalable. We deliver 100% every day of the orders in time. As long as we can keep doing that and doing that efficiently, we'll continue to grow towards our financial targets of tripling the company without major CapEx.
Thank you. That was all the questions we had. I now leave the word to you, Björn, for some final remarks.
Thank you very much. It's a very strong first public quarter, but it's one of many that we've been doing for a long time now. We continue to deliver on our promise of growing faster than market, doing it profitably. We also have a very scalable model where we have the market leading conversion from gross profit to EBIT of 50%, not just in our industry, in all of e-comm resellers in Sweden, actually, what we can see. Our model continues to deliver and we'll continue to keep our costs in check and continue to grow and deliver on our promise to become the favorite pharmacy online in Sweden.