Hello, and welcome to the RugVista Group Audiocast with Teleconference Q3 2021. Throughout the call, all participants will be in a listen-only mode, and afterwards, there will be a question answer session. Just to remind you, this conference call is being recorded. Today, I'm pleased to present Michael Lindskog, CEO. Please go ahead with your meeting.
Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and appreciate the attention. We will, during this audio conference, me and Henrik present our Q3 2021 financials. If we start over on page 2 with a quick summary. The quarter can really be summarized with a period where we continue to achieve strong, profitable growth, especially pleased with the fact that we managed to accelerate our organic growth rate to 30% compared to about 22% in Q2. This was really driven across the core segments of B2C and B2B.
The one thing to note is that we did observe quite relatively significant differences in the growth rate between or within the markets, and not only for us, but also for the market in total. The second element I'd like to highlight is our EBIT. Our EBIT margin did drop about five percentage points. Almost half of that is actually driven by a period-on-period or year-on-year comparison, where last year we had an unusually large impact from a positive currency effect. So we had an unusually high positive contribution from that line item last year. The other element is driven by the continued investment in growth.
We also continue to improve and make progress in our restocking in terms of making sure that we are ready for the Q4 and Q1 peak season. The inventory value in total increased about SEK 15 million, and that is despite the fact that we continue to see some challenges in getting inventory into our warehouses according to plans. We are also very happy to see that we continue to receive outstanding feedback from all of our customers. Our NPS score remained at a stable level of 66, and that is despite some minor challenges in our logistics or carrier network with delays with some of the carriers actually.
Finally, of course, we continue to see that our efforts to drive growth in the bigger European regions is paying off and DACH, the DACH region, continues to be the growth engine for us. With that being said, let's move over to page 4. Where we keep track of some of the key KPIs. That's our vision. As I mentioned, we continue to have a strong NPS level. We had 66 this quarter. We also show a comparison versus last quarter of 67. That's the first time we are showing the NPS comparison.
As you may remember, we only started tracking the NPS during Q2 last year. Q3 was the first time we have a comparison number. We continue to penetrate the markets at a good level or a good rate. That is really evident by our increase in order count of about 29%. We continue to attract new customers. We had about 40,000 new customers join the franchise during the quarter. As we move over to the next page, a little bit of a deep dive again on our progress in terms of building up the inventory.
As you can see on the chart there, we increased the inventory count, so the quantity we have on hand, by an additional five or seven, sorry, at 7% versus Q2. It's almost 60% more items available to purchase compared to where we were last year. That's a great achievement. The challenges that we have experienced are primarily related to the sourcing we do out of India, where production is not 100% fully up and running, so there's still some production delays. Other than that, it's also related to the freight challenges we're experiencing on a global level.
Getting deliveries on time is especially challenging. If we move over to the next page with number six or on page six, I wanted to give everybody a bit of a flavor in terms of this comment about country-specific differences. What the slide shows is a couple of our key markets or a good set of our sort of nine important markets for us and how our traffic in those markets have developed year-over-year per Q2 this year and also Q3 this year.
The point we wanna make here is that there are overall good, healthy underlying growth in the markets, but there are differences between the markets. These graphs show our internal numbers, but they're also good indicators how the total market has been moving. The point being in terms of the total market also have showing different growth rates and not only our internal numbers. With that being said, I'd like to hand it over to Henrik, who will take you through the detailed numbers.
Thank you, Michael. If we move over to page 8, we'll start by looking at our top-line developments. If we start on the left-hand side, we can see our year-to-date developments, where we have shown strong growth across all our segments. We reached reported net revenue growth of 38.4%. If we exclude effects from currency and divested operations, then our organic growth rate was at 50.2% year to date.
If we move to the middle of the slide, we have a look at the Q3, where we saw solid growth also across our segments, and we reached the organic growth of 29.6%, which is a pickup in pace compared to Q2, as Mike mentioned, was around 22%, though it should be mentioned that comps were somewhat tougher in Q2 compared to Q3. If we zoom in on the B2C segment on a regional level, on the right-hand side, you can see the development by region. As Mike mentioned, DACH continues to be our main growth engine with growth of 41.5%.
Nordics grew by 15.3% and Rest of World by 31.1%, where in particular, Great Britain and France continues to show strong traction. If we move on to the next page, we'll have a look at our margin development. Starting on the left-hand side in the top corner is the year-to-date development, where we continue to improve margins up from 62.1% last year to 64.5% this year. This development continued in Q3, where we are up roughly 100 basis points to 64.4% this year.
It should be mentioned, though, that Q3, the effect we see there is to a large extent driven by the fact that we divested our subsidiary, ArtGlass, in December last year, and this segment had lower gross margins compared to our other ongoing segments. This is what we see if we move to the middle of the slide, where we have the gross margin development by segment. Starting from the bottom, you can see that our B2C segment had a stable development, so we continue to have a gross margin around 64% there. B2B improved from 66.6% to 67.5%, driven by category mix effects and lower discount rates.
Finally, our MPO, Marketplaces & Other segment, saw a slight deterioration, which was driven by a temporary carrier mix effect, for deliveries of Amazon orders out of our own warehouses. Finally, on the right-hand side, you can see the development in our operating margin on an adjusted basis, excluding our IPO-related costs. There you can see year to date, we landed at 20% flat EBIT margin compared to 18.5% last year. However, as Mike mentioned, for Q3, which you can see in the lower right-hand corner, we are down from 21% last year to 16.2% this year. However, still above our mid to long-term ambition of having a margin of at least 15%.
If we move to the next slide, we will have a look at what drove the decline in our operating margin in Q3. Here you can see our cost line items as a share of net revenue. There, as Mike mentioned, two main drivers for the decline. The first one is an increase of 3.6 percentage points in our other external expenses, which was driven by the higher marketing costs. Then the second effect, as Mike also alluded to, is on other operating expenses, where we last year saw a short transitory spike in the euro to SEK FX rate at the end of the quarter, which resulted in a positive accounting effect on our euro-denominated cash positions. Those two elements were the key factors for the decline in our margin.
Just very shortly on personnel expenses, up by 0.5% versus last year, but that is according to planned recruitments. When we look at personnel expenses on a quarter-by-quarter level in absolute terms, then they are down compared to Q2. If we move on to the next page, a deep dive on our inventory levels. As Mike mentioned, we managed to add a net SEK 15 million worth of goods, so that we are now at SEK 130.9 million, and that's despite of strong underlying growth of roughly 30% for the quarter as well as the supply chain challenges that Mike also alluded to.
That means that, when we look at our targeted range of having inventory as a share of last twelve months net revenue of between 17.5% and 22.5%, we were at 18.8% by the end of the quarter, which makes us well-positioned to service demand in the ongoing peak season. Finally, on the next slide, a quick view on cash flow and net cash position. Obviously, the continued buildup in inventory did have an adverse effect on our cash flow generation, which is down compared to last year, both on a quarterly and a year-to-date basis.
Nonetheless, we are still generating positive cash, and we have a continued very healthy balance sheet, exemplified by our net cash position of SEK 120.4 million at the end of the quarter, up by more than 100 million SEK versus last year. With that, I would like to hand it back to Michael.
If we move to page 13, just to summarize. We continue to see strong profitable growth during the quarter. The 30% organic growth rate is very pleasing, and it's also exciting that we did accelerate the growth compared to Q2. The gross margin is continuing to improve, albeit on a somewhat lower level. The EBIT decline of about 5 percentage points. Almost half of that is really accounting effects. The restocking is progressing quite nicely.
We feel well-prepared and well-positioned ahead of the peak season. Like we mentioned, the underlying market growth is continuing. We do see country-specific differences. Keep in mind now moving into Q4 that we are facing tough comparables from last year, and especially during the holiday season, we did see an unusual demand pattern, where typically during the holidays or Christmas and New Year's, we typically see a strong demand decline. Last year that didn't happen, so we had solid sales throughout December last year, and we see that was really driven by COVID and the reduced travel availabilities of last year.
We don't know what will happen on that regard this year, since the restrictions as of now are not in place. Based on the latest COVID numbers, you know, the governments across Europe might do something. That's a bit of an uncertainty. Regardless of that, we are as mentioned well-prepared, both from an inventory perspective and as well as having a very strong commercial plan in place and everybody across the organization ready to really deliver on towards the end of the year and really finishing the year strongly. With that being said, we would like to hand it up or open up for questions.
We have a question from the line of Niklas Ekman from Carnegie. Please go ahead.
Hi, thank you. Can I first ask you about you talk about differences in different markets here. Can you tell us which markets are struggling the most at the moment? You showed a graph here before with some markets that were in decline. Which are the markets that are the most challenging for you at the moment?
Henrik mentioned which ones we're doing and a couple of markets doing really well. Of course, as you've seen, the DACH region as a whole is doing quite well. One market which is doing overall less strongly that I could highlight is actually Holland, where we saw last year an extreme increase and that is not, the total market is not at that level this year.
Okay, thank you. Curious about your comment here about December last year as well. Can you give any kind of quantification on the growth rates? How much they differed for October, November, December last year? Was there a tangible difference in growth in December last year?
We of course don't show monthlies, but like I mentioned typically what happens during the holiday period is that demand essentially almost dies during you know Christmas Eve and to a certain degree during the period between Christmas and New Year's is also quite weak. Last year we did not see that effect. That essentially means we have about 10 days from 2020 with very unusual demand pattern. We'll see what happens this year.
Okay. Thank you. Thirdly, just, Brexit, has that had any tangible impact? You mentioned the U.K. being a strong market for you. Have you seen any major disruptions there on supply or return rates or anything like that?
No. Just after New Year's of course, the carriers and of course ourselves had to adjust to the new import regulations, and that did in the beginning of the year cause some delays in the deliveries. Did not necessarily affect our customer satisfaction levels at all as the U.K. population kinda had to deal with the Brexit across everything in their entire lives, so to speak. So it seemed that they were quite accepting of challenges. Throughout the year, what we have seen is you know the operational processes stabilizing.
We have been able to maintain our marketing activities and also been able to, you know, grow our U.K. business, while our sense is that some others have not been able to operate as efficiently in the Brexit world as we have.
Okay. Very good. Thank you so much for taking my question.
Thank you.
As there are no further audio questions, I'll hand it back to the speakers.
Okay. No other questions then. We appreciate the attention and leave it at that. Hopefully we'll meet back when we present our Q4 numbers in February. Thank you, and have a great day.
This concludes our conference call. Thank you all for attending. You may now disconnect your lines.