Hi, and welcome to Profoto's Q2 Presentation. My name is Amanda Åström, and I'm Head of Investor Relations. Today I have with me our CEO, Anders Hedebark, and our CFO, Petter Sylvan. I will now hand over to Anders, who will start off by sharing some highlights for the quarter.
Morning and hello to everyone. Nice to see you here. Thank you for joining the call. Our second quarter this year, our net sales increased with 9% in the quarter. Organic growth adjusted for currency effects, it was a decrease by 13%. We had both good and not so good effect. The growth was affected mainly by late deliveries of components, and we do not believe that this. We only believe that this is a short-term problem, and we believe that the full year will not be affected by this. We also had two great product launches in the end of the quarter, the 22nd and the 29th of June, of the A2 and of the Connect Pro.
We are very happy with the launches, and we foresee good sales of those products into the future, into this quarter, coming quarter. We see a profitable quarter with the net sales of +9% up to SEK 187 million. The EBIT was good, 48%, up 33% from last year, with an EBIT margin of 26%. As you can see, we continue to grow, which is good, up to SEK 791 million last 12 months, and that is a 27% growth. The EBIT is good, SEK 239 million, and with a good margin of, healthy margin of 30%. Let me talk a little bit of Profoto.
As you know, Profoto, we are the leader in a global niche with rather high barrier to entry in relation to the size of the market. We are selling our products mainly because of our brand and that we are used by the very best photographers all around the world. We have a long history. We were founded in 1960 by Conny Dufgran and Eckhard Heine, so we have a long experience of supporting professional photographers worldwide. We are focusing heavily on customers, and we bring quality products to the market, and that's what we do in order to grow.
We are entrepreneurial-focused company, so we try to do a lot for customers, and we outsource a lot of our activities of operational activities, which means that we need to have competent and dedicated management and staff with a long-proven track record. As I said, we are the world leader in lighting products for professional photographers, and we are active in what we call the growing image and content creation market. We enjoy a premium position in the segment of photography lighting solution. What we do, we do products that are used by the best photographers to shape light and create great images. As I said, we're used by the best. We sell all around the world. We focus mainly on organic growth and high margins.
This means that we need to invest, and so we do a lot of our efforts into innovation and bringing new products to the market. This also means that we're not focusing on ourselves, but we are outsourcing, for instance, our production. This also means that we need to have a lot of managers, and we need to have great staff, and so we do. We are part of the attractive and fast-changing image and content creation market. That this market is huge. We are the leaders in one of the niches called the lighting solution market. The size of this is relatively small. It is around $1 billion, which was the global market size pre-COVID.
This market, the growth in this market is driven by the number of images used and posted on the internet. The graph to the right is depicting exactly that, how the growth is more or less exponential in this respect. As I said, we focus a lot on innovation, a lot on product development, and we try to spend around 10% of our sales back into product development. This quarter, we launched the A2 and the Connect Pro. What you see on the image here is the A2, which is a small handheld or the world's smallest studio light, basically. We also launched the Connect Pro, which is the compatibility and the connectivity solution between the camera and the flash in order to support photographers when they're creating great images.
At the time of last year, at the time of IPO, we communicated our strategy, which is based on organic growth in the black area here, what we talked about that supporting still photographers when they are creating great images. We also pointed out three areas for possible growth, and number one was at that time the smartphone photographers, photography for professional photographers. That is number one. Today, Profoto has an extraordinary good solution for those who wants to use their smartphone when they are shooting and creating great images. Number two was light for moving images, which we also are looking into. Number three was more industrial or e-com workflow solutions. That's why we invested in StyleShoots, in this area, in the orange area here marked in this image.
Sorry, the 6th of April in last quarter. Let me talk about StyleShoots. StyleShoots is based in Haarlem, sales around EUR 9 million with a healthy EBIT margin and 40 dedicated great employees. We paid EUR 18 million in cash.
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for the shares in StyleShoots, which corresponds to an EBIT multiple of 12x EBIT 2021. CEO and CFO have undertaken to acquire Profoto shares in the stock market. StyleShoots, they provide a workflow software for large studios, especially in e-com, to actually ensure consistent high image qualities for selling basically apparel, footwear, and accessories on the internet. This shortens the time to the market for the e-com companies, which is crucial for their profitability, and it's based on high productivity. They do this in order to increase conversion of the traffic that actually arrives to their webpage and minimizing return by depicting the products in a good way so that you actually get what you see. In addition to this software, they also provide four types of hardware.
First is the Horizontal, the Vertical, the Live, and the Eclipse. All of them are dedicated studios for different kinds of photography or content needed in order to sell products online. That's basically it. We're very happy with the first quarter, and we have come a long way with the integration, but we will continue to do that and work together and bring these two product lines together. Thank you very much. I leave the word to you, Petter.
Thank you, Anders. My name is Petter. I'm CFO of the company. Let me short summarize the investment case as we went to the market a year ago. We are leading brand in a niche market that is growing 3%-5% per year. We are the premium brand and is approximately twice as big as the nearest competitor. We have a huge dealer network acting globally that is significantly important to differentiate us from the competitors. We operate with a very asset-light business model and high profit margins, and done that for quite a long time. Next page, please. Profoto been in the business over 50 years. The last 20 years, we have grown 12% year-over-year.
The last five to six years, we have had an EBIT margin in range of 25%-30%, and that's also reflected in our financial targets going forward. Next page, please. Now looking at the quarter and the regional sales. The regional sales has been fairly stable on each region without any major changes. In Europe, the EMEA, it has increased significantly mainly because of the added sales from the StyleShoots, and StyleShoots is today mainly operating in Europe, although they have some minor sales in other markets. Next slide, please. We have had a number of high level of EBIT margin. In the margin now, we delivered within our margin range that is 25%-30%.
This was on the low side, 25%, and that was mainly driven due to the lower postponed sales that Anders talked about due to the delay of components and to a less degree of the lower margin added by StyleShoots as they operate on a lower operating margin. Next, slide, please. If we look at an overview of the financial targets, we are year to date and on the quarter within our EBIT margin range, but we are behind on the growth as a consequence of the postponed sales as described. Next page, please. That's all I had financially, and time for questions.
Thank you. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. If you wish to ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing any keys. If at any time your question has been addressed and you would like to withdraw your question, please press star and then two. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster of questioners. Your first question comes from Karri Rinta from Handelsbanken. Please go ahead.
Yes. Thank you, Karri, from Handelsbanken. Again, a few questions from me. First, these delayed components, can you confirm that this is related to lockdowns in China? Is this one specific supplier that was shut down during the quarter, or was this a more widespread problem?
Has it been fully resolved now?
Petter, would you like to take that? Answer that question, please.
We don't disclose which region it is related to, but it is a specific event around related to specific components for a specific group of products. As we consider it's a one-time occurrence. We don't see any similar patterns that had the material effect this quarter.
Can I ask a follow-up? Is there a reason why you don't give any specifics?
I don't know, actually. Maybe we can come back to that and discuss it. We haven't discussed. I mean, we planned not to necessarily disclose the details, but if you find it important, we may be able to inform more in detail.
No, it's just that I was just in another conference call, and they had the exact same problem, and they explained that it was one supplier in China, and then that supplier was shut down for most of Q2 because of the COVID lockdowns, and that was very helpful. I guess my question, maybe a follow-up, would be is this in any way related to your European EMS supplier and their factory in Russia? Is this Russia-related or China-related?
It's related to one of our major EMSs. We could be more specific which supplier, which regions, but we haven't talked about if we should disclose that or not. I don't know if it's. I believe that we need to talk about it before we inform about it. We can do that just after the meeting, but we just need to discuss together if there is any reason we should disclose them.
Fair enough. I don't know if you can sort of separate between what was supply-related and however, maybe, I mean, with many discretionary categories, we have heard from many companies that there has been some slowdown in end user demand. I'm not sure if you mentioned anything around that in the release or if you can discuss if you have seen anything maybe. Yeah, if you can discuss anything about the end user demand and any shifts and changes that you might have seen during the quarter.
What we do, we see some hesitance from the market from individual photographers. On the other hand, we see from big large brand studios an increased demand on investing in their capabilities of creating content for their brands in order to drive sales on the internet. We have a mixed demand situation among our different customer groups. It is not so that we see a sharp demand. We have seen some hiccups, but we think that we have a stable demand, but we had some issues of especially component deliveries in the quarter, and this is the reason why sales is like it is.
Okay. Finally, can you remind us of your sort of typical seasonality during a year? Because recent years, last year, you had the reopening that sort of skewed the typical seasonal patterns. The year before that, it was the pandemic, and then you have these product launches that can have an impact on. How do sales typically develop during a year between different quarters?
Underlying, Q3 is normally the weakest quarter, and there is a pattern that the Q4 used to be the strongest. This quarter, as we have described, however, even though Q3 underlying may be the weakest, we expect spillover now from sales that we couldn't deliver in Q2 due to the components and to some degree potential higher increase than normal in China, where it's a matter of week-by-week measurement how much sales increase when they open up, and it goes back and forth. If they do open up quickly, that may have an impact or will have an impact.
All right. That's helpful. Thank you. Those were my questions.
Yeah.
Thank you. Once again, if you do wish to ask a question, please register by pressing star then one on your telephone keypad. We will now pause briefly to allow any other questioners to join the queue. A reminder, you can register for a question by pressing star then one. Thank you. As we are showing no further questions, I will hand back for closing remarks. Thank you.
Great. Thank you for today and your questions. I just want to give you a gentle reminder about our third quarter report, which will be published on November eighth. Thank you for today.