Welcome. Thank you for listening in today. It's our great pleasure to introduce the Q3 report for this year. We are continuing to grow our sales from a low level last year, and our net sales this quarter was SEK 189 million. That is a 50% growth from all the low figures from last year. Our EBIT was SEK 58 million and our EBIT margin 30%. You could also see that our continuing growth is now up to SEK 688 million last 12 months. What are the highlights for this quarter? We can see that the societies and economies are continuing to open up, and this has an effect on all commercial type of photography. All professional photography we could see in basically all market is increasing.
Also this is obviously based on traveling and that people are getting married more often and so forth. In addition to this, that the continuing opening up or the all in all opening up of economies, we could also see that the e-commerce photography market is especially growing. We have seen a high increase on our products or the demand of our products within that sector. On the negative side, we also have faced the problems with component shortages and also freight, both costs and some sometimes delays over the quarter. This has impacted our sales and gross margin. The very important thing is that we continue to invest in new products and new product development and innovation. We made two major launches during the year.
Number one is the B10X and B10X Plus that we launched during the quarter. Early this year, we launched the Pro-11. Pro-11 is really our flagship product, which is used by all the large rental studios and hence all the major photographers around the world, but also in-house studios and both for e-commerce and for creative photography. The B10X are products that could be used both for video photography as well as still photography, aimed at those photographers that are shooting both types of content. We are continuing to invest around 10% of our sales back into product development. We have a large set of employees that are building new products as well as building new IP rights. We are continuing to develop our IP portfolio.
What is Profoto? Profoto at a glance. We are active in the growing image and content creation market where we have the premium position in the segment photography lighting solutions. We're selling lighting equipment, lighting systems, flashes that are used by the world's best photographers. We sell those products all around the world, where we have sales activities, sales people based in North America as well as in Asia and in Europe. We have a global distribution. Our focus is organic growth, developing new products, developing relationship with dealers and end users. We are selling our products with high margins. This means that we have to do large investments in innovation, so we do.
In addition to this, we focus on operational efficiency to really do what is necessary to produce great product for all our customers. One of the things that we do, we outsource all production, which means that we have a very asset-light balance sheet. This also means that our staff is not so much operational. That is that we are mostly managers hired by Profoto, which means that we need to have very high-quality personnel. I would like to actually thank all our staff that made a terrific result during the third quarter. Thanks to them and their competence that we're able to produce this kind of figures in the third quarter. Our history is very long.
We were founded in 1968 by Conny Dufgran and Eckhard Heine, and they already from the start said, "You know, we will build the best flash, and we will sell it to the best photographers." We were really trying to take the premium position already from the start. I started 25 years ago. I added more customer focus and more sales drive, more entrepreneurial spirit, so very high focus on growth. 2009, Petter, you will meet Petter very soon, he came in, and at that time, we doubled the profitability, and we continued to grow over the years. We are active in this lighting solutions market in the larger image and content creation market. Our part of the market is around $1 billion. That is SEK 8.2 billion.
That was the size pre-COVID. We can see the high growth currently in this market, and it is based on number of photographs, number of images that are used all around the world. Our main focus, as I said, is organic growth, and we are going to produce. Our plan is to produce high margins as well as high growth, meeting our financial targets, within the black area of this image that is professional still photography. We have produced these figures in this for the third quarter in this area of our, of what we do. In addition to this, we're looking into growth avenues within three general areas. Number one is the top one, which is video film, moving image production. We want to support even more a broader audience for, with our products.
We already do this today with the B10X, which can be used both for video and still photography. In this area, though, if we want to approach the largest size of this market, we need to invest heavier, either with operational development or with a platform acquisition. That is number one. Number two is the area of e-com photography, e-commerce photography. The need of great images is a must for all driving e-commerce companies. Today there are more and more companies, not only dedicated e-com companies, but also large brands that are focusing more and more on their e-com side. This means that great photography is a big need. Here you have the importance of actually handling the images during the process of producing those images.
Those kind of creative images. That's why we have looked into the area of supporting the e-com companies more with workflow, digital workflow solutions, taking care of every part of making an end-to-end solution for e-com companies, e-commerce companies. Here it's also the same thing. We're looking into organic growth as well as selected acquisition activities. Third, but not least, is smartphone photography for professional photographers. This means that professional photographers that want to use their smartphone to create great images or and use light at the same time. The reason why we are in this area, we are alone. We are the only company in the world that are able to make actually your smartphone into professional camera by adding light or professional lighting system.
The reason is there are 1.5 billion smartphones sold in the world every year, whereas there are approximately 5-10 million professional cameras sold. We believe that this market will grow in the future. We are very early in this part of the market. We have invested in this market the last five years, and we will continue to make a better customer offering within this area. We went public first of July this year, and the highlights that we were communicating at that time is that we were a leading brand in a global market niche in an attractive segment called the growing content creation market.
We are, as I said, we have and we are continuing to focus on our core operation, but we want also to expand our addressable market, and organic growth is the focus. We have very competent and great staff, and we are looking for long-term organic growth with very good profitability. That was all for me. I will come back for questions, but I will leave the word to Petter. Please, Petter.
Hello, everybody. My name is Petter Sylvan, and I'm CFO for Profoto and been in the company since 2009, as Anders mentioned. Profoto has had a long history of organic, profitable growth. In the years 2010 to 2014, we've grown 10% year-on-year with a net EBIT of 15%. The last five years prior to COVID, we even increased the growth to 15%. More significantly, we increased the profits to the range of 25%-30%. This is also what we deliver by far this quarter, and this is what we aim to continue to do the coming quarters. We see now that sales improve quarter- by- quarter when societies are open up. America is leading this growth, and Europe region is slightly behind.
More travels, events, and weddings are occurring or are starting to be planned for. At the same time, the product photography, and some of it driven by exploding e-commerce, is continuing to flourish for us. Our newly launched B10X and the Pro-11 are perfect fits to these photographers' needs. In Asia, we have a more mixed experience as societies open up and close again. That's a fact. After the downturn in 2020, we started to grow again and deliver profitability in Q4. Since then, we have continued to increase sales. At the same time, the cost has been lower, and we have had a higher operational efficiency. This has led to that we have delivered high EBIT in the top of our EBIT margin range.
If we relate this to the financial targets we have, we have the target growth sales by 10% organically year-on-year, currency adjusted, and we are exceeding that by far this quarter, but we're coming from a very low level as comparison quarter. We feel, however, confident now that we are on the right track to reach our complementary target in 2023 to sell at least SEK 800 million. The EBIT margin continued to be in the high level of the range span we have set to 25%-30%, and we feel confident that it will continue to be within this range. That's all financially. Thank you. We're ready for questions.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, if you do wish to ask a question, please press zero one on your telephone keypad. If you wish to withdraw your question, you may do so by pressing zero two to cancel. Once again, that is zero one on your telephone keypad to register for a question. There'll be a brief pause while questions are being registered. Our first question comes from the line of Karri Rinta from Handelsbanken. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Thank you very much, and congrats on a strong quarter. First, I see you've I think you mentioned in the release that Q3 is typically seasonally a slower quarter, but this time it was offset by the sort of the reopening effect. Can you discuss a bit more detail about the monthly pattern of your sales? So did you see a sort of an building up and/or an acceleration throughout the quarter? And maybe a few words, how has that continued in October? That's my first question.
We don't comment the individual months, and we won't comment October. Generally speaking, we see that the whole quarter has been good in Q3. We don't see any significant differences in demand among demands. Clearly there is a greater demand when societies open up, as I mentioned. We think that correlation is strong. It's hard to say. Part of this is of course end user increased demand when more events and weddings are sort of planned and occurring. But some of it is also likely stock build-up as dealers and renters do this that now becomes more optimistic when there is more job to be done to photographers. It's hard or impossible to us to say how much is a stock build-up and how much is end user demand.
All right. Fair enough. Anything that you can say about early demand for B10X and whether it made a significant impact on your Q3 sales?
When we launch, we always have an expected sell-in to dealers. They typically stock up for a couple of months sales or so. We have seen that positive effect in this launch. It is a good contribution, and it contributes clearly that Q3 this year is a bit better than Q3 or significantly better than last year. Part of that contribution is due to the launch, but it's not the major part of explanation. It's just a piece.
Then finally about the supply chain disruptions. Did your EMS partners have any any real issues during the quarter? Are you comfortable with your inventory levels and with your sort of delivery capability ahead of Q4?
We have mentioned in the report that the stocks, generally, we have our ready-made stocks are lower than we would like it to be. We don't have these margins for deliveries. On the other hand, most of the products we are able to fulfill at a reasonable time at the customer demand. There are from time to time few exceptions, but as we say, it has still a marginal effect. It's not a substantial effect, and we continue to be confident that it won't be worse than it has been in the Q3. That's how we feel right now.
All right. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of [Per Jørgensen] from ING. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Yes. Thank you, gentlemen, and congratulations with the impressive results. Anders, if I may go back to the slide nine, and look a bit more on the longer term, that's what I find interesting. If we take the business now, and it's a professional still for photographers and a little bit in the video photo, and also a little bit of e-commerce. Could you comment a bit about how you see the structure in the company? Let's say in the coming years, you'll still grow your basic business.
Yeah.
How much will the growth come from the other areas? That's my first question.
Yes. Now, first of all, we're trying to reach, and I think that we have program over the year, not only this last quarter, that we're able to grow within this black area, professional still photography. We intend to continue and fulfill our growth target within that area. That is number one.
Yeah.
In these areas, it could look like that this is totally new, but it is not. What we are actually doing, we are following the part of the customers or customer groups that are moving more into e-com, more into moving images as well as still on the same shoots. We try to cater for those needs and follow those customers. The same thing with smartphone photography. It's basically just a new camera. What we're doing, we are follow this. We see more not dividing these into business areas, more than with slightly step-by-step growing into smartphone photography, light for video, as well as e-com, and growing then the black part. It is hard to say, and I cannot give you a number obviously.
Mm.
Because it would only be guesswork.
No, no, no.
But.
Yeah.
We believe that the most important thing in running our type of business is to follow the customers. Also in that, when we're following, we will also attract new customers. We're doing this in a very diligent way and selecting our investments very carefully so that we're sure to ensure ourselves that everything we do is profitable, because that is the key for our long-term growth. Is the key. The key for that is profitability today.
It's also a way to say that you can actually expand your addressable market by following your customers in the new areas.
Yes.
Like e-com or like video and so on.
This will. We think that we, as we have communicated earlier,
Mm-hmm.
Obviously we are looking at long list and short list. We have some discussions, but we are very picky in the way we do. We're also looking into could we do this by organic growth?
Mm-hmm.
How much, what is the balance around this? This is normal business development. Rest assured that we have full focus on our actually delivering our targets within this black part or professional still photography, as well as focusing.
Yeah.
On new areas. We have, in our organization, divided up and we have. We are very careful. Petter and I are working very closely with understanding how much should we invest in each project in order to do that. We're not doing something, you know, foolish, and we are very diligent in what we do here.
Good. That sounds good. My last question is a bit more on, you know, you have been in this industry for many, many years.
Yeah.
As also Petter showed on page 11, that you have grown quite nicely before the.
Yeah.
Pre-pandemic, and then we got the pandemic. Everybody knows. How do you see the dynamic in the industry if you compare to 2018-2019, where you grew a lot, and now you will probably come back to the growth? Do you see any change in dynamics in the industry?
Not really. It is very much focused on, as always in all industry, we need to focus on the customer needs, and that's what we do.
Mm-hmm.
By launching new products and working very with our partners, with our dealers all around the world to create a lot of activities. Bear in mind, those activities has just started. Not even the full quarter.
Mm-hmm.
Was open in all markets. As you know, America is due to open their borders now in November. It's not open yet. People are not. Photographers are used to travel all around the world and do photography. They can't today. This opening up should continue. You know, it's winter now, so we'll see. We do not make any forecast about
No.
Opening up of economies and societies. We're following and we're doing everything we can to focus on high activity for the dealers and launching new products.
Generally speaking.
Yeah. That's great.
We don't see any different behaviors.
No.
Or needs among
No.
The consumers and customer.
Yeah, slightly. We obviously the e-com side has slightly increased. It was a great demand before also. We could see more people are using smartphones slightly. Obviously video as part of the marketing mix for all brand building companies is slightly higher. You know, photography is growing.
Yeah. Great. Thanks for that. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Viktor Lindeberg from Carnegie Investment Bank. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Morning, thank you. Starting on a higher level, you mentioned in the quarter that you've had some headwinds in APAC, not least in Japan with closures. Can you sort of indicate how the landscape looks now from a global level? Is it more open in general? Do you have any, you know, incremental lockdowns elsewhere? How do you view your geographical presence now in terms of the opening up?
From a very, very high level, we believe U.S., generally speaking, is most open.
Many Western countries it's relatively open thereafter, and it's more restricted in the important countries for us like China and Japan. This is nothing specific for our industry, the restrictions we talk about. You can read much of it yourself in any publicly available data. We don't even have forecast about that. It's no meaning of having any detailed opinion about it. We just see that the correlation between open society, open stores, people getting back in stores, events are planned, weddings and so forth. It's a positive correlation for sales.
Bear in mind also in addition to that.
Yep.
We have boots on the ground, you know, both in Japan and China that are more locked down at the moment. We have our organization both in Europe and in the U.S., and we have fantastic partners with a large dealer network, and they're working as much as they can. We do everything we can in order to sell more and work with them. They're both physical visits within the countries, but also meetings on telephone and on Teams, etc . We think that we have a good, very good push, and we have the market. The activities are going up. The photographers are more active, and we're looking for a good future.
Yep. Speaking of that, obviously you need to have products available to sell, and I think you touched upon that. But just to maybe clarify a bit on inventories. You are now at a fairly low level of inventories closing the balances for Q3. Is this, I mean, deliberate, or would you be happy to have significantly more inventories going into Q4 and the new year? Or how should we think about that going also into Q4 when it comes to building up inventories? If there's any seasonality in that we can learn about.
We would like to have slightly more inventories. They are on the low side. It's not deliberately low. It is as low as it gets when you have difficulties with and chasing deliveries. I would expect at least that inventories will grow with sales, and perhaps slightly more with that once we start to get stable deliveries. Will that happen in Q4? I don't know. It depends about the whole delivery situation in the world, and I don't think we are that much more different than any other company that has electronic manufacturing of products.
Maybe also relating to that then, the gross margin and the impact maybe to sales, I guess, is of course hampered by supply chain and component shortage, shipping cost, etc . Can you maybe share a bit more details on what specific components that you are sort of lacking, if anything, and also how, if anything, if it's possible to quantify how this impacted you in the quarter? Your gross margin came a bit short of my expectations. Just to see what where you are underlying, if possible.
We don't disclose the details of how much effect the cost of components, you know, the extra cost of components. There isn't any specific product or specific component that makes a difference. There are a range of things that happen every day and we spend tremendous resources chasing and buying on the spot markets and so on. That has a great effect. That's securing that we sell most of what we want to sell and at a decent margin, even though it would have been better. We clearly would have had a gross margin likely in line with our normal internal targets if it wouldn't have been for this component situation. That's what's eroding the margin currently. That's what we can say.
Finally from my side, you have a dividend policy of distributing at least 50% of earnings, but also looking at your current balance sheet, it's strong with a net cash position and likely will accumulate cash in the coming quarter as well. Just curious to see how you view your capital allocation priorities now. You also mentioned that predominantly it's organic growth that you intend to pursue here. Anything on cash and balance sheet composition that you can share with us as of now?
Not really.
No, we can't. Of course, the only thing we can share is that if there aren't any other priorities, we will maximize dividends, and that will be at least 50%. As you understand, clearly, as it looks now, that won't be a problem. Other priorities, we don't have anything to say right now.
All right. Thanks for that. I'll get back in line.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Okay. There's one question here from [Rodrigo Johansson], and he's asking that our average employees are going down now 26% from last year's same quarter.
Yes.
The personnel cost is only down 11%. Will we see more cost decreases into the next quarters, or have we had full effects?
The correlation there between compensation and percentage employees, I don't have an explanation. I need to look into detail and the cost pressure. I would love that question to be posted.
Yeah.
To look into, so I shouldn't answer that. The other second question, will it be further cost increases or decreases?
Cost decreases.
No. We are at a sustainable cost level. We won't increase that for just running the business. On the other hand, it may be increased in line with sales and meeting our financial targets because we are investing. But only for that. There is no underlying pent-up demand for increase in cost. That is the level we operate right now.
Good. Thank you. Are there any more questions from you?
We have one more follow-up question on the phone lines from Karri Rinta from Handelsbanken. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Yeah. I just wanted to quickly touch upon your own direct-to-consumer e-commerce efforts and compared to where you are today compared to where you were before the pandemic. If I'm not mistaken, these efforts are relatively new. In a situation with supply constraints and not having the inventories that you would like to have. How do you choose between your own direct-to-consumer e-commerce channel versus your more traditional partners? Who do you prioritize at the moment?
The prioritization question, we are just to start to emphasize, our own direct channel sales stands for 3%-4% or so of the total sales. It has a very marginal effect on the total. It also emphasized that our most important customers commercially are our dealers. This is an additional channel for us to directly sell to the customers, but we are not selling direct to the end customers at the expense of the dealers. Generally speaking, we always prioritize the delivery to dealers first. We prioritize that we are not selling at a lower price than they do and those kind of measures.
The way we think about our own direct sales channel is that we don't intend, as we have said before, to maximize the growth of the sales. Then we could do a lot of things, for instance, to compete with our own dealers. It's much more about step-by-step incrementally giving a better or another experience than a typical customer can get from their dealers. You would probably see that more and more going forward, which leads to that we get a direct relation to the end customer and data from them so that we can give better offers. It's much more about that, the direct relation that could benefit from better product development, better customer experience than maximizing increase of sales in that channel.
All right. Maybe finally a philosophical question about this, following your core customers into new areas.
Yes.
You have that sort of, I don't know, a middleman. That's probably the wrong word, but the dealer in between you and your end customer. How confident are you that you are sort of quick enough with your new product so that you can be the one that they choose when they go into these new segments? I don't know if.
Yeah.
If that's a question that can be answered, but maybe some thoughts.
We have a clear answer in that. Profoto is the most well-known brand within professional photography for lights. We are really the top brand and the leader in that industry. We intend to under our brand launch fantastic products in different ways. In that respect, the dealers they are our partners, and they will definitely sell our products. Obviously, there is always competition, but that is about the end user, and the end user is actually the one that is taking the decision what to invest in and what to not invest in. We think that the brand is our foremost most important asset in order to reach the end users. We are very confident that existing dealer network are able to sell products in this area.
It might be so that when we're expanding in one area or another, that we need to adapt, but it's more about small adaptations than large changes. As I earlier communicated, this is a step-by-step, and we do this very carefully, but we are also very forceful in what we do and really investing, but we're doing this in a careful way.
Perfect. Thank you very much.
Thank you. More questions, maybe.
Once again, as a reminder, it's zero one to register for a question on the telephone, and we currently have no more questions on the phone lines.
Okay. I would like to, when I have the word, I have the chance to thank you everyone that are interested. Thank you to all of you listening in, especially to those of you that have invested in Profoto. We are really honored to have you as partners with Profoto. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much.