Good morning. Welcome to the presentation of MEDS First Quarter, 2026. I'm here with our CFO, Nick Mendola, and we'll go through the operational and financial figures for the quarter and also talk a bit about our move to the new logistics center. You may at any time ask questions in the chat, and we'll cover those at the end. I'll remind you, but you can start already. To begin and summarize our targets for the company, our mission, and it remains to be the customer's favorite pharmacy. This is crucial in order to keep growing profitably and taking market share as we have done for a long time now. To enable that, we need super engaged employees.
We have a very small team, a very low cost base, stable, very engaged employees, highly qualified, that's why we are outperforming the market. The end game is, of course, to continue to grow, we reached 1 billion and now billions SEK profitably. We have the financial target to triple revenues in five to six years with an EBIT range of 3%-5% during that projection period. First quarter, we had above-market growth, good profitability, we are back at almost 2% EBIT after the lower Q4. We had very strong sales, particularly at the end, all-time high in March. We did see continued price pressure.
We have four out of five competitors that are, as we know, not making a profit. That is something we have to contend with, and we want to keep growing profitably. We rather lower growth and continue with profit than fight for the last percentage point. Good cash flow, and we normalized the stock levels after Black Week, as we talked about in Q4. We have a very strong balance sheet, almost SEK 72 million in cash, no debt. That enables us also to continue to grow fast and be strong for the future. We signed the lease for the new logistics center during the quarter and will move after summer. I will get back to that later on.
Sales development, we have very strong growth from prescribed medicine, as we have had for more than one year now. 35% is really contributing to our growth, and it's a strong shift in the market that clearly is going to continue with high profit profitability. We do have also contribution from other goods, so it's broad and no particular category sticks out. We have strong contribution from all sectors and categories. Rx, that is prescribed medicine, is now almost 18% of sales, so it keeps growing in line with what we have guided and it's likely to continue to grow over the coming years. As you can see, we're now almost double just one year ago.
Rx customers are really good for the company because they return to a higher degree, almost twice other customers. They're loyal, and they also buy other products. It is a important pillar of the business, and we will increasingly also start to add own products to balance the prescribed medicine and the other products and have a good, solid margin mix across the business. It's not impacted by economic shifts, and as you can see, our growth is very linear and steady. I'll leave to Nick for margin profile.
In Q1, we saw a gross margin normalize again to where we had been previously. As we mentioned in previous call, we already had seen that rebound in January and that continued throughout the quarter. You know, very important for us that we get the gross margin levels to where we're at today or continue to increase them because that's a big element of the profitability. As you can see in the contribution to, you know, really being over the 10%, contribution to margin is key for us because then we scale quite well on our fixed costs which we have good cost control over.
When we look versus Q4, you know, with gross profit increasing by SEK 6.3 million, SEK 4.9 of that fell all the way down into EBITDA. Strong growth on gross profit versus Q4, and that leading to the increase in profitability. For economics perspective, having really good cost control around marketing, good ROI, 6.6% marketing cost to sale is very strong number from e-com perspective and we're stable in our fulfillment costs as a percentage of sales. OPEX perspective, getting operating leverage on our fixed costs, decreasing those costs from 8.5% to 8.3%, that's the scale effect that we're gonna have.
When we can continue to trade with over 10% contribution to margin and also are able to, you know, reduce our fixed costs as a percentage of sales, it's gonna lead to EBIT margin expansion going forward. Cash flow, as Björn mentioned, saw a return in cash from releasing working capital, so our inventory levels normalized after Black Week, which we had previously spoken about and that leading to the growth we had in cash and to a level that we had expected at the end of the quarter. Strong balance sheet, as Björn mentioned, no debt. Really just inventory that's up a little bit still, so there's some work we can continue to do to get inventory levels down.
Really our approach on inventory is to make sure we have products in stock and take advantage of the opportunity to sell the products to customers rather than fully optimizing for the lowest working capital levels that are needed. Since we can get our products in generally within one week, at most two weeks, you know, we know we're carrying more than two weeks of inventory but that's a strategic decision to optimize for sales rather than optimize for the lowest working capital possible. I'll leave it back to Björn to talk about logistics update.
Thanks, Nick. We will move into three times as large facility after summer or second half of Q3. We'll also, as we announced this morning, make some investments into further automation. It is similar to the automation we already have but more capacity. It's well proven and we don't expect a major issue. We'll also test everything before we actually move, so to minimize any interruptions. We forecast SEK 16 million in CapEx for that purpose. Also we promised to give some guidance on impact on sales and other costs. This is our best estimate right now. We will lower marketing in order to fulfill customer promise and have continued satisfied customers during that period.
We foresee a SEK 25 million impact on sales for that quarter. On EBIT, it's evenly split, SEK 6 million impact, but a small part of that is from actually the sales. It's also a write-down on some material that we will not bring with us and also direct cost with the move. Everything is looking good so far, and we're really excited for this move that will enable us to fulfill our financial target of tripling revenues in the next five to six years. On the automation, we had this slide in last update but just to reiterate, we're currently at around 50% automation.
We'll expand and further boost that capacity to enable tens of thousands of orders to be delivered every day. It's not possible to automate 100%. There are no fully automated warehouses in the world today, even though some companies claim that. It is possible to further invest into 75% automation. During that period, when we'll triple our revenues, we don't foresee such a need. It's for larger companies to take that risk. The technology that's available today is really from the 1990s, so it's not very high tech but very expensive and hard to see an ROI on.
Our investments, which is within our guidance of tens of millions of CapEx during this period, will be able to support super well our growth and do that in a cost-efficient and scalable manner. We look forward to continuing our partnership with Ranpak that we worked with since 2021, and also begin a new partnership with E-motion, which has a very high reputation, Swedish company, for sorting capabilities. With that, we conclude and move over to Q&A. I can kick off with one question we get a lot, if there's any impact from the Strait of Hormuz on our industry. So far we have not seen that, and also that's what we hear from authorities.
We also have a lot of experience from the pandemic where we see that our industry is able to cope well with logistics interruptions. A lot of capacity is in our region and others, such as Rx is possible to move even under difficult circumstances. So if you have any questions, please add that into the chat. I'll start with one here from Benjamin at ABG, talking about asking about the competitive environment. It's stable, I would say, because we don't have any new competitors since we launched in 2018.
We do see the two major chains taking market share, and that continues. That has been the case in the last five years, where the two retail chains have their online side which they have communicated at least one of them is not profitable, but they are continued presence and taking market share there. We do believe every company wants to be profitable, so it's not permanent. Next question, talk about automation solutions. I just covered that briefly, but it's worth noting that it's proven systems that we worked with before. Really a lot of the challenge is on the software side where we also have our own system that we'll continue to work with.
We really will spend a lot of time in testing and making sure everything works before we move, so it's not done at the same time. If we need, we can delay the move. We have our current lease until year-end. On the impact of the move, there's also a question here about the SEK 25 million in sales and EBIT impact. I did cover that, and the EBIT impact is not solely from sales. It's also that we'll leave some equipment and also some direct costs in the move. Roughly equally divided, the SEK 6 million, between these three components. When we lower sales, we'll make sure to lower the least profitable sales and keep the most profitable. That's why EBIT impact is actually not that high.
Can add a little-
Yeah
Color to that. Prior to the move, you don't want to have a backlog going into the move, so you wanna have as low order stock when you're moving as you possibly can. During the actual physical move, you don't want the build up of a large order backlog either. That's the period when, you know, ramp down marketing and campaign activity, so that's contributing. T he more of the unknown is how long does it take you to get back and ramped up so that you can start to build out campaigns and put your marketing flow back on. That's where we've tried to take in a conservative approach in this guidance because that's our unknown part.
We have ambition to be back and fully ramped up as quick, quicker than what we've estimated. We wanted to be conservative on the guidance.
That pretty much covered the next question also on time period. Yeah, we have left some room for a ramp-up period after the move to get everything trimmed in. We have done this before. We did move six years ago. The company was smaller, but it was a similar type of move. We do expect to recover fairly quickly. On the question on how will customers be impacted, yes, we'll likely not deliver same day during some period, and in order not to overpromise. As soon as we see that is possible, we'll bring that option back up. I think that's the two parameters we'll work with.
The not overpromise on delivery times and lower marketing spend in order to lower sales and give us room to really fulfill customer expectations in a good manner. Final questions on AOV. You wanna take that?
Yeah, I mean, AOV a little bit higher than what we had prior year but no substantial shift. One further question regarding the Q3 marketing. What we would expect is that we'll see Q3 marketing decrease as a percentage of sales because we don't have any real fixed marketing costs, so we shouldn't lose on efficiency. It's that's what we would expect. Again, that's during the month of September, it's not gonna impact the whole quarter. Even if we're lower in marketing spend as a percentage of sales during September, it's not going to entirely shift the whole trend versus what we've had previously.
We expect we'll stay you know, leading up to the move, so July, August, have marketing spend in line with where we've had it historically, and then a little bit lower in September around the move.
To wrap up, we think it's a solid quarter. It's also very strong comparable from last year. We do continue to deliver on our promise to really keep fixed cost in check and scale on our cost base. Good profitability, almost 2% EBIT, and above market growth. We're looking forward to moving into our new logistics center and further grow in the second half of the year. With that, thank you very much, and this recording will be available on our IR website in a short time. Have a nice day.