Hi, and a very warm welcome to all of you online and here at Riddarholmen in Stockholm. We are glad to host our Capital Markets Day here in this historical building for the first time. Here have been crafted histories and books since 1882, so this is a big moment. We live in a world full of stories, and we know all of us that we can't really change the world, but we can touch hearts, and we can brighten up lives for a lot of people, for our readers and listeners, with good stories. That is the magic of what we are doing here in Storytel Group, and that's why I love my work, to be a part also to be a part of this company. My name is Bodil Eriksson Torp, and I'm honored to serve as the CEO for Storytel Group since October last year.
Ever since Jonas Tellander, who is also here today in our room, very welcome, founded our company, Storytel, we have been a pioneer. Leading the future of storytelling, we were the first to bring audiobooks to life on a grand scale. We led, and others have actually followed. Today we want to show you how we will continue our journey going forward. We start with a position of strength. We have built a proven and robust business model, and we have a solid financial foundation. We are also the premier destination for authors and publishers, offering a unique ecosystem across all formats to build fantastic audiences. We all know that yesterday's success will not guarantee success tomorrow. The world is changing, and we need to do that as well.
That is why we are here today, to see and to share our strategy for Storytel Group for the next chapter. We will focus on strategy execution to expand our business into new markets, and we will lead the storytelling of tomorrow. We will create even more value for our customers, our readers, our listeners, our authors, our partners, and for you all, dear shareholders. That is what we are going to talk about more today. Let us take a closer look at where we are standing today. This year we are celebrating 20 years of streaming audiobooks. We have pioneered the way of how people discover and enjoy stories by our streaming services. Of course, 20 years is just a glimpse compared to 200 years of legacy with Norstedts and also Gummerus in Finland with over 150 years of history.
I think it's quite mind-blowing when thinking of the marriage between tradition, books, physical books combined with innovation of streaming. Here are some of our defining moments during the years. We have so many moments to be proud of during the past 20 years. All from the beginning with Jonas and John as entrepreneurs founded Bokilur, to ringing the bell at Nasdaq, becoming a listed company, and several successful acquisitions during the years. This is how our group has been steadily growing, both in publishing and streaming. Of course, the acquisition of Norstedts became a game changer not only for Storytel but in the whole industry. I think we all remember that. It was a brilliant step taken by our founder, Jonas, and you know the rest is history.
All of those defining moments have built the foundation of where we stand today with a proven business model that we will continue to scale further into Europe. The heart of Storytel is actually our marriage between publishing and streaming, and this is our proven business model. This is not about two different business units having successful business units. It is about the synergies between our business units and where we create value for both customers, publishers, and partners together. How does it work? Our publishing houses provide our streaming services with strong authorships and relevant content that resonates with our users. When users discover relevant stories that they really love, they stay engaged, and they become very, very loyal to us. Vice versa as well, authors benefit from the opportunity to create audiobooks for our streaming platform, supported by powerful marketing that drives discovery and consumption.
This helps our authors to grow their brands and earnings, which is why they choose Storytel Group. It is a dynamic interplay driven by customer data and insights. It is our proven Nordic playbook. In the end, it is the engine that really is behind our customer loyalty, content relevance, and this is our competitive edge. Now we are really ready to accelerate our model and expand it into further markets across Europe. As you can see, the marriage has been quite happy. Happy wife, happy marriage. I do not know who is the wife here, but overall we have a really healthy year-on-year net sales growth with a good trend. Over the period, our margin has increased with over 10 percentage points from 6.3% to 16.8%. The share of net sales from streaming is 75%, and 25% comes from publishing, which now has reached SEK 1 billion in revenues.
We have a clear ambition, and that is to offer the world's best stories regardless of formats and taste. Our data help us to know what our customers love, and we could therefore tailor our content in the just perfect way. We know that the consumption of audiobooks is highly local. In fact, 85% of the consumption is in local languages. We do have the best lineup where you can find something for every taste. Yes, we are definitely proud. We have many more successes coming up, of course. Here are two of them, inviting you to some exciting launches during this year. As a female leader, I'm super excited to see and read and listen to Sanna Marin. She will launch her book from Gummerus in Finland. She brought in new leadership into her role of Finland's Prime Minister at the age of only 34.
There is another legend in our house. He is here coming and going. This is, of course, the one and only tennis legend, Björn Borg. This summer, Norstedts will publish Björn Borg's biography, Heartbeats. We will maximize the value of these stories into several languages across all formats, from print to e-books to audiobooks, reaching audiences all over the place. That is our ecosystem in Storytel. These are stories that will be shared worldwide, that is for sure. Talking about worldwide, let's dig into our geographical footprint for a moment. We operate our streaming businesses in over 25 markets with a focus on 10 core markets: the five Nordic countries, the Netherlands, Turkey, Poland, Bulgaria, and U.S. through Audiobooks.com. In seven out of 10 core markets, we are a clear market leader in the audiobook streaming sector.
Market leadership is something that we value deeply, and we have a proven Nordic playbook. Going forward, we will expand into new markets, and our ambition is super clear. We are not entering new markets just to participate. We are entering to win and to become the market leader. We will bring our proven business model and the operational know-how to quickly establish ourselves. During the years, we have learned a lot from both successes and failures. Now we are fully confident of our Nordic playbook to enter and reopen new markets in an efficient way in Europe. We want to invite everyone and deliver a world-class experience in our storytelling world. Our dear customers, our book lovers, are in our hearts in everything we do. They are passionate, they are loyal, and they are deeply into audiobooks.
We are here to ensure that we continue to be their go-to destination, to serve their taste and their habits perfectly. We are opening up our arms to tomorrow's book lovers, new listeners, explorers, casual listeners, those who are curious about audiobooks and just beginning in their journey of our world. A whole new generation of book lovers. We are now in the pole position to attract and catch new subscribers. Our book lovers are more engaged than ever. Here are a few key metrics to qualify this. We have reached over 2.5 million paying subscribers in the beginning of this year. 70% of them listen to Storytel every week, and many of them are also listening every day. Some of them are listening over eight hours a day, daily, for example, while commuting or working night shifts.
Jointly, our subscribers have consumed nearly 800 million hours on our platform the last year, 2024. Also, the last year, we sold over 50 million books by our publishers. This is, of course, reflected in our sales growth, surpassing SEK 3.8 billion in 2024. That is an impressive CAGR of 29% regarding subscribers' base in 2015 and a CAGR of 33% in revenue over the same period. We are driven for financials, but we are also driven for, of course, our passion for people and the planet. We will also create a positive social impact, not just through stories that we tell, but also leading the way of how people choose to spend their time. Let me give some examples. We promote children's reading by making it a fun and daily activity through projects like the Reading Ladder.
It is designed to inspire a love for reading and also listening among Swedish preschoolers. Together with the Swedish School of Sport and Health Sciences, we are working to promote well-being and mental health by studying how physical activity combined with audiobooks can have a positive effect and improve academic performance. That will be launched, and we will see the results in the upcoming years. It is a long-term study. Passion for people, our world-class team here at Storytel, is the most important factor and the reason behind our success. As we all know, it is all about talents and the teams and the people here and the teamwork. My work is to bring on talents for the business of today, but also for the business of tomorrow, and also attract the talents that we will need for the future.
Our team has a deep knowledge and strong roots in the markets where we operate. We have a physical local presence in all our 10 core markets. 40% of them is based outside Sweden and reflecting a broad geographical footprint. In fact, we represent over 40 nationalities, a diversity that brings fresh perspectives and comes across everything that we are doing in our company. I really believe in the power of building a strong culture to unlock the full potential in every single team member and also in every team together. I am looking forward to onboarding a new Chief People Officer into our executive management team to execute a new people strategy as well. Of course, our skilled team is a competitive edge, as for many other companies.
We have the unique team, and that is also one thing that is building our resilience to serve all our markets, both central and locally in the different markets. Let me quickly walk through some of our competitive advantages. Of course, it is about local. Strong local presence. By having local teams, we have established networks and local know-how in each of our core markets. It is a key to local success. We are proud of our portfolio of strong brands within streaming and also publishing. Our strong Storytel brand is also reflecting in our strong awareness metrics, which is a result of years of consistent brand building, local relevance, and long-term media discipline. Like I mentioned before, our publishing houses are bringing fantastic stories to all our customers, and our streaming platforms are bringing these stories to an even broader audience by distribution. Industry-leader user experience is key to us.
We are deep into bringing out the best of our product going further by also using the toolbox of AI. When meeting the future, the future is quite bright, I would say. The overall global publishing market is forecasted to stand strong, and audio is booming. The global audio market is forecasted to nearly double to $13 billion by 2028, including a lot of unmature markets, of course. Global book publishing markets hit a massive $144 billion by 2028, mainly driven by audio. This morning, we announced our new financial target for this year, 2025. This is where you can expect revenue CAGR to exceed 10% in constant currency rates, EBITDA margin over 20%, and the leverage of net debt EBITDA below 1.5. We are fully committed to achieving these targets.
The rest of the day, we will present our roadmap and how we deliver our strategy and our targets for 2028. This is our strategic framework that we have been working with for the recent weeks or months here in Storytel, designed to drive profitable growth further on and set Storytel as Europe's leading storytelling company. We will achieve this through three strategic pillars. First, we will continue to enrich more lives with stories, this meaning driving revenue growth by offering locally relevant stories across all formats, print, e-books, and audiobooks to more people in more places. We will expand into new European markets and use selective M&A acquisitions agenda in both publishing and streaming as an accelerator to gain market shares. Second, we will pay to win as a team.
This is about attracting the best talents in the industry and creating a unified culture of collaboration and entrepreneurship across the entire Storytel Group. This is a group-wide strategy for the first time. Third, we will continue to reinvent how we work, amplified by AI. This pillar focuses on driving profitability through operational excellence. We will continue to turn our data and AI capabilities into strategic advantages for smarter solutions and greater efficiencies. Our first step is to unify our organization to act as one Storytel Group. From there, we accelerate our journey to becoming a European powerhouse. Today, we will dive into how we will enrich more lives with stories and walk you through our accelerators and also enablers to get there. Before I hand over to my colleagues and my team members, I would just make a quick reminder of our foundation.
We will remain and increase the go-to destination for our loyal and highly engaged book lovers, but also warmly welcome the next generation of readers and listeners of tomorrow, targeting new customer segments. We will bring innovative storytelling powered by 200 years of publishing expertise. This is paired with our streaming distribution platform built on a proven business model. Our ecosystem with publishing and streaming reinforces each other and creates a solid foundation for long-term profitable growth. We offer an extensive local catalog. This is supported by our team with deep knowledge, local knowledge, and strong roots in all our core markets with foot on the ground. Now we will dive deeper into how our strategy. I'm proud to present some of my team members in the executive team today that will guide you through different parts in our strategy.
There will be time for questions at the end of the presentations and Q&A, both from online and here in the room, of course. First out is our Danish colleague, our Chief Commercial Officer and Head of Streaming, Claus Wamsler-Nielsen . After Claus, we will meet Helena Gustafsson, our Chief Content and Publishing Officer, who will tell us more about our content and publishing strategy. We will also meet Johan Ståhle, Chief Product and Technology Officer, and Oleh Nesterenko, Chief Marketing Officer, and Jonas Olson, our Head of Finance. First up, welcome, Claus.
Thank you, Bodil.
Good.
Good afternoon. I'm Claus Wamsler-Nielsen , Chief Commercial Officer of Storytel. Today, I will walk you through where we stand commercially, what we achieved, and how we will continue to drive profitable growth over the next period of time across our footprint.
While I'm new to Storytel, new to the Chief Commercial Officer role, I'm not new to Storytel. I've been with the company for seven years, working with the markets as a CM for Denmark, Finland, and the last couple of years, I've been working with the growth markets. I visit our offices regularly, work with the local teams to drive the growth in our streaming markets. We call it the streaming markets, a commercial organization around deep local knowledge and central expertise. We've been active in the markets for several years, building strong relationships with publishers, authors, and business partners, which can be seen here in the picture we have on the slide.
If you look at the top here, the one with all the small pictures, you would see our consumer media in Turkey with some of the most famous actors and top journalists that are helping us enrich people's lives with stories. This can only be achieved by having local presence. Because of the local presence and the deep local knowledge, we are highly relevant, and we can differentiate our go-to-market strategy compared to our competitors. The local teams bring the commercial strategy to life on ground in the market and aligned with our broader company goals. We are now where we wanted to be. Let me take you back to the last capital markets day in 2023. We were in a very different position. Several markets were unprofitable, retention was unstable, and we were heavily investing to find the right formula.
Today, we are exactly where we set out to be. We achieved a remarkable transformation commercially, operationally, and structurally. We built a strong and resilient foundation for continued scalable growth, and the financial and operational results followed. We have a strong and consistent revenue growth in the markets despite a strong focus on profitability, broadly reducing costs over the same period of time. This growth reflects not only increased volume, it also reflects improved monetization, better retention, and stronger customer engagement. It's also a result of disciplined execution, focusing on our most valuable segments, improving pricing power and scaling efficiently. We are not chasing growth at any cost. We are building a healthier, more predictable revenue base that supports both profitability and long-term scale. From 2022 to 2024, we increased the streaming revenue with a CAGR of 11%. This model works. We reached a big new milestone.
Our subscriber base now stands for 2.5 million paying subscribers. In 2022, we took decisions that streamlined our footprint and our expansion investments and focused on monetization with substantial price increases, which slowed down the subscriber growth. We significantly restructured the business and reduced our marketing investment, all necessary steps to build a more focused, profitable, and resilient model. We also exited Russia. From 2023, we came back stronger, returning to growth, revamped our go-to-market strategy across all markets, increased marketing efficiencies, and fueled high-potential markets. What is important is that we are now growing again, but with a higher quality base, better monetization, and much stronger unit economics. One of the most important achievements on the journey is that almost all of our markets are now profitable. 23 out of 25 markets are profitable. Just three years ago, this was only seven. We completely turned that around.
The strategy has been focused on prioritization, operating discipline, and local execution powered by a centralized structure. This puts us in an ideal position to now scale further. An important factor leading to profitability is low churn. Our churn is lower than ever, despite higher prices, higher competition, and a broader subscriber mix, both geographical and product. Our users are more engaged, more satisfied, and more loyal than ever. The focus on high-value customers in our acquisition and customer experience paid off. We see that high-value segments have half the average churn compared to our full base. The development in churn is despite higher prices and also high subscriber growth, which normally drives churn up. One of the reasons for the low churn is our strong engagement.
Close to 1.2 million people listen for over 10 hours per month, and plus 40% of the base listen for at least five minutes per day. These are not casual users. They're passionate, highly engaged, which drives better retention, better monetization, and stronger lifetime. We have a strong monetization of the service. The RPO has grown significantly from 2022 to 2024, focusing on high-value segments and implementing several price increases across our footprint. The last year and a half, we've seen a decrease in RPO, which was expected and budgeted for. The decrease in RPO is driven by the strong momentum that we have in the growth markets where RPO is lower. Our strategy has been to first establish listening behavior, build loyalty and daily habits, and then gradually introduce pricing tiers and value-based monetization.
Over the last year, the RPO has increased by 5% in the growth markets as a result of price increases. This, together with our focus to further penetrate households in the Nordics, has an effect on the overall RPO. We now have a highly efficient operating model with a matrix organization that is highly centralized with a last-mile execution from our local teams. A data-driven marketing efficiency that brings high value to the markets and healthy margins. We operate the markets in an efficient and scalable structure. We run a centralized structure with key competence and last-mile executions from the local teams that gives us scale benefits of centralization without compromising local insights. The central teams are cross-functional and agile. We have a strong MarTech infrastructure that provides expert knowledge and efficiency, a product and tech organization that drives tech excellence and product innovation.
On the local side, we have the deep local expertise and insights that provide a differentiated go-to-market strategy and strong industry relations. The setup has improved revenue per employee by 70% over the last three years. One of the most important enablers when it comes to profitable growth is our fantastic marketing team, both centrally and locally. Over the past few years, we completely transformed on how we invest in customer acquisition. In Q1 2022, we spent around 26% of our revenue on marketing. In Q1 2025, that number is down to 16%, a 37% improvement. At the same time, we improved customer intake. We are bringing in more of the right users thanks to better targeting, channel mix, and data-driven decision-making. Our margins have improved 3.5 percentage points from Q1 2022 to Q4 2024. We have changed our promotion strategy to a higher degree of monetization from day one.
We optimized our tier structures, pushing the most profitable tiers, and we negotiated favorable terms on payment processing fees and optimized the payment mix between web payments and in-app payments that are more expensive. We increased our content margins by balancing external and internal content. As a result of this, we are highly resilient and competitive, which is a great starting point for our future journey. I'm proud to say that we are the market leader in 7 out of 10 of our core markets. In Finland and Poland, where we're the challenger, we're taking market shares. That is a powerful position, not just in terms of share, but also in brand strength, customer loyalty, and local influence. It's taking years of focused investments, local relevancy, and product excellence to build this leadership.
In each of these markets, we continue to innovate, expand the addressable audience, and reinforce our position. Leadership gives us pricing power, stronger partnership relationships, and a platform to launch new features with confidence. The competition in our markets has been growing over the past years. We see competition from both local players and international players. Nordics is dominated by Scandinavian and local services, while in the growth markets, we see more local services, maybe except for the Netherlands, where we have both international services and local services. Some have a focus on audiobooks, some on e-books. Some are only with English content, some mainly with local content. Some companies come from other formats like podcasts and music and cross into audiobooks. We have a strong momentum despite the increased competition. As you've just seen on the previous slides, our subscriber base is growing. Our SAC is decreasing.
Intake is strong, and we have all-time low churn and strong monetization. What is the road ahead? Our strategy going forward focuses on two clear objectives: deliver profitable growth and reach an annual growth rate of 10% CAGR. This is a snapshot on how we are structured across region and strategic priorities. The Nordic markets are most mature and profitable markets, and we are a clear market leader. Nordic plays a defensive role. The focus is here on protecting and developing RPO and continuing to increase retention and maintaining leadership. The growth ambition is to grow with minimum the fair share of the market development, and we expect to grow approximately 5% CAGR driven by product innovation and tiered monetization. In the U.S., the focus is profitability and generating cash flow. The revenue ambition is to grow by a 5% CAGR.
I know that many of you have asked for more information about our US business, so I'm going to talk a little bit about that later on in the presentation. For Netherlands, Poland, Bulgaria, and Turkey, that are high opportunity markets with high growth and strong potential, and where we are enjoying the strong momentum, we will either grow revenue share or expand the category depending on the market maturity. We will be growing with between 15%-20% CAGR. In the rest of the world, we will continue to focus on countries that deliver profitable growth. We will scale selectively here, guided by efficiency. In the rest of the world, we have valuable content that we capitalize on, and we will explore on further capitalization. There are no active plans to close any of these markets since they are now delivering profit.
We expect to grow between 5% and 10% CAGR in the rest of the world. We do have exciting news when it comes to our global footprint. We are actively looking into opening new markets again, where we can take a market leader position and harvest the synergies from our existing footprint. I will tell you more about this later. The commercial path towards 2028 will be a four-model approach. We will increase our footprint by launching new markets selectively. We will continue to win market share in the markets where we're not the market leader. We will drive category growth in our immature markets, and we will defend the strongholds in the Nordics. This is exciting news. We will expand our footprint selectively in Europe, and we will open markets to win. The shortlist of potential markets has a population of around 70 million people.
We will target new markets with leadership potential and low audiobook penetration, expand into adjacent markets to leverage regional strength and brand synergies. We will capitalize on low entry barriers and strong digital adoption for fast entry and leverage in-house expertise from existing offices and central functions, and drive growth through innovation, partnerships, and M&A. Storytel's competitive edge comes from a combination of platform strength, content depth, and market strategy. We have a strong publisher proposition that enables us to build a strong local catalog and a global catalog with impact. Our scalable platform and superior app experience outshine local competitors and offer a seamless journey tailored for audiobooks and e-books. With our central MarTech infrastructure, we execute marketing with precision, fast, data-driven, and adapted to each of the markets' maturity. We have succeeded in adjacent markets, which gives us a clear roadmap and enables an efficient go-to-market strategy.
That's how we enter efficiently, grow with confidence, and maintain a leadership position as competition evolves. In Poland and Finland, we are the challenger in the market. We are taking market shares, and we will accelerate the performance even more by having a differentiated go-to-market strategy with high local relevancy to take more than fair share of market development. As we are the challenger in the markets, our approach is going to be promotion-driven and more aggressive, but with a focus on high-value segments supporting our monetization strategy. We have the highest share of voice in the markets, and we will continue to invest heavily to build brand and preference. We invest where we see potential with high CLV to SAC. Our catalog is attractive and competitive, both in audio and e-books, ensured by strong publisher relations.
We will expand our distribution, reach new segments, and increase volume with strong strategic partnerships. In our immature markets, like Bulgaria, Turkey, and Netherlands, we have high potential and strong performance. Even though we are growing fast in these markets, penetration is still low. To increase penetration, we will develop the category, build behavior by showing all the benefits of audiobooks. Our brand awareness is growing rapidly, and we are committed to accelerate this momentum. With increased investment, we will further elevate brand awareness and drive consideration, helping to expand and lead the development of the category. We have achieved a strong product-market fit, and we will continue to build on this success to ensure we remain attractive to new users, casual users, and book lovers.
We are delivering an exceptional experience across all formats, and we are now doubling down on e-books that are highly preferred and, in this market, a powerful gateway into audiobooks. This focus is further reinforced by exciting new features that we are about to launch, which Johan is going to tell you more about shortly. With innovation and experimentation, we will continue to increase our marketing efficiency and support our growth. In the Nordics, we are a clear market leader. The strategy is to defend the commercial strongholds. Storytel is the home of high-value segments like the book lovers. We will also expand into new addressable segments and target the future book lovers. We have the best experience, the best content catalog, and the right product tiers in order to support this.
The Nordic region has an exceptionally high RPO that we will continue to develop and protect with product innovation. The more value we can bring to our users, the higher the willingness is to pay and upgrade to higher tiers. We will expand the fantastic catalog that we have today and launch relevant and exclusive content to attract new users and retain existing. As I mentioned, I will do a small deep dive on our US business, Audiobooks.com. Audiobooks.com was launched in 2011. They offer premium content, over 300,000 audiobooks with hundreds of major publishers, as well as millions of podcasts and other types of audio entertainment. Audiobooks.com is one of the leading services in the U.S. Storytel's acquisition of Audiobooks.com lays the foundations of our entry into the US and other English-speaking markets.
It was acquired by Storytel in 2021 and today has an annual revenue of almost SEK 500,000,000 and above the growth average when it comes to EBITDA margin. After the acquisition, the capital market climate changed significantly, and our focus changed to profitability and financial stability. Storytel started a transformation towards profitable growth during 2022, and we have delivered. We believe that there is further potential for synergies between our business in several areas, especially tech and product development, but also data and analytics. We're working closely, sharing our marketing best practices and learnings, and benefit from the scale effect, talking to partners such as digital advertising platforms and payments, etc. Our intention is to increase synergies, working with Audiobooks.com in a more structured way than before going forward. In the U.S., our strategic focus is strategic growth and strong profitability.
We will strengthen our market position and unique value proposition, enhance brand differentiation, refine messaging, and sharpen competitive advantages to capture high-value segments. We will elevate the customer experience, optimize engagement, personalization, and accessibility to deepen user satisfaction and loyalty. We will maximize operational efficiency and profitability by streamlining cost structures and optimize pricing strategies and refine the revenue model for financial growth. We will leverage data for smarter decision-making, enhance analytics expertise, improve data utilization, and strengthen predictive insights to drive growth. We delivered a commercial transformation, and we are now profitable, engaged, and operationally strong. We are in a great place to handle competition and continue winning. Our commercial path of 10% CAGR is clear and actionable with our four-model approach.
Expand our footprint by launching new markets, grow market value share in the markets where we are not the market leader, drive category penetration in our immature markets, and defend the strongholds in the Nordics. I hope that this walkthrough gave you a clear picture on how we will continue to drive profitable growth. I would now like to hand over to our Chief Content and Publishing Officer, Helena Gustafsson.
Thank you, Claus. Oh, no, I am on. Thank you, Claus. Once upon a time, a new thought is almost gone. Long ago, it started to use this movement happening ever after. Hi everyone. My name is Helena Gustafsson, and I am the Chief Content and Publishing Officer here at Storytel. I am proud to represent all the fantastic publishing houses that we have in our group.
Today, I'll demonstrate how Storytel's publishing segment is an engine in our group strategy, driving growth and profitability for the entire group. Our content is the bedrock of our streaming business, fueling user retention, attracting new subscribers, and also making us less reliant on—I'm losing my voice, sorry. I need to grab a glass of water. Can you fix it? Also making us less reliant on external content providers. By integrating our publishing strategy with our streaming strategy, we unlock synergies that—thank you—that optimize our financial performance, amplify our creative vision, deepen customer engagement, and cultivate solid and rewarding partnerships with our authors and publishers. This unified approach builds sustainable competitive advantages that fortify our market leadership, anchored by the legacy of our 200—oh, thank you—200-year-old Norstedts and propelled by the go-get attitude of our digital-first publishers like Storyside and Linden Co.
We seamlessly blend innovation with tradition, empowering creators to reach bigger audiences. Our goal is clear: to become the premier destination for authors and readers. Let's have a look at our publishing portfolio. As I said, our fantastic publishers are at the core of our group. They operate through a house-of-brands strategy, where the unique strength of each publisher is leveraged by individual business plans aligned with the common group strategy. This ensures both autonomy but also cohesive strategic direction. The portfolio is quite diverse. We have digital-focused publishers like Linden Co and Storyside, who both are present in almost all our core markets today. We have Norstedts and Gummerus, and in some sense, also People's that are legacy publishers and strong brands, synonymous with quality and prestige in their respective markets. Hence, they are attracting best-selling authors.
We have a bit more specialized publishers, like our children's publishers, Björn Wahlströms and Robin & Sjögren. Also, you could say our newest acquisition, Bokfabriken, who specializes in crime series in the Middle East section. All in all, we have an attractive ecosystem that ensures that valuable talent and intellectual property remains with us. In Sweden, since we own multiple publishers, that actually then becomes an advantage. If a publisher, sorry, if an author wants to move between publishing houses, it's a bigger chance that they actually remain within our group. An example of that is Anna Bågstam and also the popular YouTubers, I Just Want to Be Cool, who actually started as original authors with Storyside and then moved to Norstedts and Robin & Sjögren to broaden their audience with also having paper books.
Together, all of these publishers hold a vast catalog of commercially appealing genres, some prestigious authors, and also a very big audiobook catalog. Let's look into that. Together, we have 72,000 audiobooks. That is actually 384,000 hours of audio, which takes about 44 years of listening if somebody wants to spend time on that. As you can see, the Swedish language part is the biggest, followed by Arabic, Spanish, and Turkish. While Arabic and Spanish, together with some of the other languages, are not part of our core markets, they tap into vast language groups. In that way, our catalog supports Storytel, yes, but it also constitutes a revenue opportunity that increases as the audiobook penetration grows around the world. In our mature markets, 85% of the hours consumed are on local authors in local languages.
This hyper-local preference in content makes it harder for global competitors to roll out a market-by-market service. Hence, our ownership of high-performing local content is a valuable competitive edge. Our Storytel Originals, tailor-made for Storytel streaming, have since 2016 served as a differentiator for us. They are exclusive to Storytel, and they are used as both retention but also intake boosters. For example, our Danish original, My Brother in 75 Parts, the one up in the middle, proved to be a powerful acquisition tool, with 50% of all the new Danish customers choosing it as their very first book when they came into our platform. In general, our originals outperform most of our other content with a relative performance of almost 900%. That means that they are consumed nine times more than the average audiobook on Storytel.
New customers choose an original as their first book five times more than another book. We are committed to continue to identify and capitalize on local market trends. This includes, of course, strategic acquisitions of top-list authors in all markets to ensure that we sustain relevance and customer engagement. Our publisher revenue serves as a crucial profitability booster, providing cost-efficient, high-quality content that drives significant margin optimizations within our streaming business. Storytel Publishing contributed with over SEK 350 million in gross profit in 2024. A large but growing part of that can be attributed to our share of streamed hours at Storytel, but it also includes print and digital sales through other sales channels.
Where Storyside, as an example, being a full-fledged digital publisher with a strategy to support the streaming business, has a 100% digital share, Norstedts Publishing Group, being a legacy publisher with a broad list of literature, has a larger portion of print book sales. Driven by the strong sales that we have had and the efficiency we have made, we see a strong tailwind on the profitability in the publishing segment, with more than 11 percentage points at the last 12 quarters, which demonstrates its value also as a standalone business. As Bodil pointed out earlier, the industry is dynamic and evolving. Traditional publishing models are challenged. We see a decline in print, the growth of self-publishing, and rapid technological advancements, especially with AI, which, of course, opens up for exciting possibilities, but it also creates uncertainty.
Combined, these three trends, together with the rise of subscription and the popularity of audiobooks, are causing the publishing industry to become a new and more global business. It enables publishers to cheaper and faster translate and release books beyond their home markets, increasing both the volume of books in local markets and increasing the competition around authors and digital rights. What I just mentioned are all trends that we are well-positioned to leverage on. Our strategic advantage lies in the relationship between our own publishers and the leading streaming platform. As Bodil said, the marriage between streaming and publishing. In a new world of publishing, publishers with a digital mindset and who embrace an international, sorry, publishers who embrace an international digital-first publishing mindset will be the winners. This is a space we, with Storyside, have been pioneering the last decade.
Our ambition is to grow and optimize our publishing business through organic expansion and targeted acquisitions, which will make us a very attractive home for authors, all powerfully supported by AI. Let me elaborate on these critical areas that will serve us as the foundation for our journey to 2028. While the global publishing industry sees a modest growth to 2028, with about 4% CAGR from 2024 to 2028, our ambition is to grow faster than the market expectations. Within the Nordics, our strategy involves aggressively growing our market share by attracting key authorships. The increasing digital share of revenue across our publishing houses, reaching 65% of our total publisher sales in 2024, aligns with prevailing market trends and is expected to grow even further.
In Sweden, as an example, audio sales now account for roughly 30% of the total publishing sales in the publishing sector, corresponding to a growth of 7% since 2023. Even though print sales are not explosive, we aim to take a large share of the print book revenues with strong authorships. Looking beyond the Nordics, we believe there is great revenue growth potential in our growth markets for both Linden Co and Storyside. Besides that, we will strategically pursue publisher acquisition to extend our publishing footprint. Publishing M&A is a crucial element in our ambition to become a European powerhouse in the publishing section, offering authors exciting growth potentials within the broader Storytel Group and beyond borders. When adding publishers to our portfolio, we can also leverage our group's scalability across central functions like finance, marketing, and operations.
We can also utilize our expertise to accelerate digital transformation. If we take Gummerus as an example, who after acquisition made a clear goal to substantially increase production of audiobooks and overperformed digital sales already in year one. To conclude, including sales within Storytel, we aim to grow organically above the market, but with M&A, our growth will be significantly higher and double-digit. To become the first option for any author might seem like a bold ambition, but our commitment to authors is a fundamental part of our growth strategy. Authors and their incredible stories are, as I said in the beginning, the bedrock of our business. Hence, it is paramount to continuously enhance our value proposition to them.
With product and tech and marketing as enablers, this includes targeted promotional campaigns directed to both new and existing customers and innovative marketing initiatives designed to amplify their works and their readership. This approach means that we will utilize the collective power of our various business units, our publishing houses with a strong legacy of know-how and talented publishers, which is the foundation for every long-lasting author relationship, our tech platform, our data insights gathered from 25 markets, and our marketing expertise. We have already taken the first steps in harnessing this potential, welcoming several renowned authors to the group during the last 12 months. Most recently, Norstedts acquired Mari Ljungstedt in the picture here, one of Sweden's most acclaimed crime authors with 7.5 million books sold in Sweden and translation into over 20 languages.
Another good example is the acquisition of Sune last year, where we have several exciting initiatives that I hope that we can reveal in the near future. Our firm goal again is to become the premier destination for authors, a place where their creativity is valued, their work reaches our global audience, and our success is closely linked to theirs. A key focus for achieving operational excellence within the publishing segment is the strategic integration of AI. AI presents substantial opportunities to enhance operational scalability, driving us into the next phase of growth and achieving significant cost reductions. Within our publishing segment, the commitment is clear. A large portion of our productions will be AI supported or even AI generated by 2028, both as a means to expand our content offering for Storytel and to effectively build catalogs for new and emerging markets. This is not just the future.
It's about tangible results. Besides the cost savings, it also speeds up our ability to go to market with new content, with up to one-third of the usual time for an audiobook to be translated and produced. This is especially important when it comes to our most popular segment, series, where translation and production of a full series could take years and launch cadence of each new title would be once or, in the best cases, twice a year. With the support of AI, we can now roll out a complete series in a few months. That clearly demonstrates the transformative impact of AI on our operational efficiency. To foster the necessary shift within our industry and to tap into exciting new frontiers in storytelling, we have launched forward-leaning initiatives such as Voice Switcher that Johan will talk about a bit more in the next section, and New Horizon.
New Horizon is an audiobook written by an AI author, Rosy Lett . This all began with a bold ambition. We wanted to dive deep into the world of generative AI by using it throughout the entire publishing process of an audiobook, from creation to launch. We wanted to understand how AI can and will impact content creation, not just for Storytel Publishing's own production, but also for the vast library of stories that we offer from our publishing partners. Our main takeaways are that AI at the moment is a tool that is best used as a creative support and not to replace human creativity. AI can assist while human creators provide the vision, the emotional intelligence, and the critical judgment. Given the rapid pace of AI, it's difficult to predict its future impact on the audiobook industry or on Storytel.
Going forward, we will use what we have learned to improve our publishing processes and to support our authors if they would like to test different AI tools. The future of storytelling is being written here and now, and Storytel is excited to be at the forefront of this transformative chapter. To summarize, we are at the beginning of a new journey to grow and expand our publishing segment. As I have showcased here today, our combined strength of streaming and publishing and the strategic direction creates tangible results for all stakeholders. For authors and publishers, enhanced visibility, expanded potential for growth and revenue creation. For Storytel streaming, increased user engagement, new customer acquisition, and a stronger market position. For our customers, a richer and more engaging experience and unique content that they cannot find anywhere else.
By leveraging on our combined strengths, attracting key authorships, gaining market share, and growing across both existing publishers and new, and working strategically with AI as a tool to accelerate, we are not just building a foundation. We are powering the ascent to our ambitious 2028 vision to lead the future of European publishing as the undisputed premier destination for authors. Thank you for listening. Now we are going to have a short break, and I am told to say that you get 15 minutes, not more.
Let's see, are we—I see someone on? No. Maybe the production team, green light us. Now it's on. Someone wanted me to talk. Welcome back from the break. I hope you had a chance to take one of those cute small cupcakes or whatever they're called.
Anyhow, my name is Johan Ståhle, and I'm proud to stand here representing our product design, curation, and tech teams. I've been with Storytel for now close to four years and recently expanded my responsibilities to also lead the tech organization. Today, I want to walk you through how we have evolved our product and tech capabilities the last years and our view of the future. I will also dig a bit deeper in some of the underlying metrics that are powering this engagement that both Bodil and Claus have been referring to, so you understand the drivers a bit more as well. Of course, show you a glimpse of the road ahead. The transformation of product and tech has been really intense over the last few years. We've gone from running tech with 220 FTs to around 80 today.
During the transformation, we have actually increased both output and quality. We managed to achieve this thanks to the great commitments from the teams and that we have reinvented how we work and organize. We have cleared significant technical debt, modernized our architecture, and rebuilt core systems. As a result, our in-house tech is now more resilient, scalable, and reliable, giving us a strong foundation to move faster, innovate experience more, and better support our strategy and financial targets. To succeed with our mission to move the world through stories, we need to ensure more people discover our fantastic universe. Together with Oleh and our friends at the marketing departments, we have completely rebuilt our acquisition and activation engine, giving our marketing experts the data and tools they need to perform their job, and at the same time, our customers a fantastic welcome experience.
Oleh will shortly deep dive into this area, so I'll leave it for now, but it's a testament of how we come together as a group and working on joint efforts. Third, we've sharpened the user experience. Storytel is today more personal and better than ever, recommending you the right next book. Once a user presses play, they immerse themselves in a fantastic listening or reading experience. As a result, engagement levels have risen materially in our product, and our leading product KPIs support this. Sharpen your eyes. I will show some graphs, not just shiny UX, and go through some of the key product KPIs that give us confidence on the road ahead. In product and tech, we have a North Star KPI: number of people consuming 10 hours or more of content per month.
Ten hours is a bit more than the average audiobook, and it also resonates with our commitment of getting more people to read and consume stories. Personally, I'm very proud at working at a company that enables close to 1.2 million people consistently, month after month, reading at least one or more books per month. Our North Star also correlates with value delivery and building loyalty. Everyone in this room knows the secret to loyalty is high consistent engagement. As you can see, I'm very happy to see the health of our base has increased year over year to record high levels. This is driven by a combination of high quality intake and deepening the engagement with the existing base. It is not just about consuming stories. It is about immersing yourself into a great story, a story you love, and not jumping in between books.
That's when you get the full value out of Storytel. That's why I'm happy to see our book completion rates consistently improving as a direct result of our improvements in personalization, curation, and a more immersive discovery experience. Innovations like industry-first Book Trailers that we launched a few years ago clearly resonate with our base. One of our product strategies is always in a story. Why? The moment a customer in our service is in between books, the likelihood of churn drastically increases. 50% of our churners churn straight after completing a book or just starting a new one, but have not reached more than 10% in that book. This is the consistent engagement I was referring to earlier. As you can see, steady trend here as well, but close to 85%, and this is across core markets, not just Nordics, are consistently engaged in stories in our platform.
More people are consuming more stories, and they stay longer with us, which leads us to the strength of our content offering. Storytel Group's efforts to offer the most attractive content in an easily accessible product experience is reflected in the content performance. Seven out of eight NPS drivers, you need water as well. Seven out of eight NPS drivers are related to customers exploring, finding, and of course consuming content that is relevant to them. Here Storytel stands out, where our content experience is one of the main reasons for customers selecting us over the competition. The appetite for fantastic content is evident among our customers with increased consumption and engagement across all markets. What really stands out, if you look at the orange bars instead, is how attractive our content from our publishing houses are, clearly outperforming the broader catalog.
In the last four years, Storytel publishing consumption has risen more than 50% in our service. It is a powerful testament of our integrated model, where we do not just distribute great stories, we also create them. When it comes to new releases, Storytel is a powerful platform for launching new titles. We work closely with our publishing houses to develop platform-specific promotion strategies. This collaboration allows us to maximize catalog impact and also create top-list momentum for promising titles. In our core markets, the share of top-performing titles from our publishers is steadily growing. This is driven by a combination of the right content promotions, deep insights among our publishers, what our streaming customers love, and a very, very strong release pipeline in the last few quarters.
If we just do a snapshot of Sweden the last 90 days, we actually see an astonishing 80% of all titles on our top 50 list is coming from titles from our group. This is not just driven by new releases. This is also a result of our ability to reactivate strong backlist titles coming from the group. With this foundation, they support our ambition for 2028 and what we want to scale. Now let's turn and see a glimpse of where we are going. I will share the direction, but without revealing the details of our product roadmap, as I also know several of our competitors are listening in to this day. I am keen on giving you a clear view of what we invest in going forward.
Many of us have said this, but today we already offer the industry's best discovery and listening experience with the richest library in strong audiobook categories like crime, romance, and feel good. This is an experience we have refined since maybe the first Bokilur released 20 years ago, and we've become really, really good at serving our core audience, the book lovers. Now we intend to scale that leadership to new audiences through adjacent content categories, formats, and languages. As a result, we are increasing our focus on non-fiction, our English catalog, and e-books. Our increased focus on non-fiction categories like biographies, business, and shorter serialized content all requires thoughtful product innovation. These formats often contain rich visuals like graphs, tables, or images that are not fully supported in the pure audio format. AI and unique Storytel metadata—oh, one back, Anna, you're too quick.
I have a pointer. AI and Storytel metadata enable us to uniquely innovate this product experience, and we are increasing more investments in enhancing these formats, creating a unique experience only available at Storytel. We continuously see strong trends in our English consumption. The trend is going in our platform and across Europe. We see that in book sales and on our service, and it's fueled by especially younger audiences and non-fiction, with phenomenons like BookTok that Helena was into. That is why we are very happy to bring back several of the strongest English publishers back to the platform under slightly new remuneration models as well. Lastly, e-books, where we see opportunities to better opt into existing reading behaviors, bridging the gap between audio and reading. Oleh will jump on the stage after me and deep dive in this area a bit more.
As we focus on extending our product leadership, our ambition is to become the most inclusive and immersive platform for Storytel consumption across any format. To further innovate the listening experience, we've partnered up with Dolby, enabling us to bring immersive spatial Dolby Atmos productions to our platform, both through upcoming Storytel Originals, but also some really exciting partnerships with publishers on some really strong titles that you will see during the fall. To support our e-book push, we are investing in our reading experience. This spring, we launched a new in-app reader that drastically improved the reading experience, and we already see an uplift in a 20% increase in monthly e-book readers in our apps since we launched this. This is just one of many releases.
We're finally, and I have to say finally because we've been trying to get simultaneous listening and reading out the door for quite some time. This is a highly requested feature by our users that we've built, powered by quite advanced text-to-speech mapping, that we will start rolling out by the end of the summer across selective markets. We're also working hard to reintroduce the very popular e-ink reader that we had a few years ago to support the premium reading experience for our most dedicated readers, especially for markets like Poland and the Netherlands. By making format switching seamless and intuitive, we are not only meeting diverse preferences, but we also aim to address new target audiences. Right, Anna. AI. AI is central to all our strategies, of course, but it's with content discovery, improving that.
That's where AI really makes a difference today, enabling us to fully personalize the experience. Going forward, we will enhance both recommendations and search with AI-powered topic-first discovery journeys, making it easier for users to find content, not only searching for a book title or an author, but rather through a theme or an interest. We actually see quite particular or specific search behaviors in our platforms, in customers trying to find inspiring content in many different ways. We are working hard to improve this experience for our users. As our library constantly grows, it becomes even more important over time. In parallel, we are developing an AI metadata agent that automates content metadata enrichment to further improve recommendations and curation, generates dynamic summaries and alternative book descriptions, and aggregates customer reviews, just to mention a few things.
I think we all have struggled with searching for something for a book in our platform, but finding the right format in the right language. Sometimes we can be overwhelmed by the sheer breadth of content in the platform. To better tie all formats together, we are introducing a bespoke Storytel USBN, a universal standard book number, which makes different editions and languages seamlessly link, helping our customers find the right book that they were searching for. If you search for Dostoyevsky in our platform, you will get 130 different search results due to spelling variation, languages, and different ISBNs in the background. The result of this is smarter recommendations, better search, and discovery journeys that empower our users to find content across formats and languages. Finally, we are evolving how our customers can access the service.
Through new subscription tiers and strategic distribution partnerships, we are making Storytel more accessible than ever, while also giving clouds and our country managers more tools and levers to work with ARPU in their respective markets. To meet specific customer demands, we are adding paperback as an option to complement, and I want to stress, complement our core streaming model, unlocking access to some gated content while attracting casuals with some distinctive listening habits. It is all about offering more go-to-market flexibility and relevance to a broader audience while supporting our local marketing teams on the ground, launching the right product to their respective local preferences. When I was standing here on our last Capital Markets Day, we introduced the Voice Switcher, an innovative feature enabling customers to seamlessly switch between narrators, powered by groundbreaking AI voices narrating these books.
The Voice Switcher has been an ideal test build for developing and scaling market-specific AI narration. It has allowed us to experiment, iterate, and learn. Today, we are live in more than five markets with 45 best-in-class proprietary AI voices cast to different books. Alongside our in-house capabilities, we continue to run highly localized models through our partnership with ElevenLabs, enabling us to tailor voices to local preferences and cultural nuances better. Still today, these models are best in class, and no one in our local markets is even near in terms of quality. Until now, our focus has been on quality over quantity, building trust in the technology. We have onboarded fantastic voice ambassadors like Stefan Sauk here in Sweden and Sanna Marin in Finland, whose involvement has played a key role in driving adoption among our base.
Up until today, 150,000 customers have listened to AI-narrated books in our platform, with an average listening time exceeding seven hours. Our AI voices, they do not only pass the Turing test when you hear a little snippet. You know, even Stefan Sauk cannot mention who is the real Sauk or not, or Helena does not recognize them. What is interesting is that our customers plow through and read full books now through AI narration. This gives us the confidence that the timing is right to scale, as both the technology and market readiness is aligning. Our long-term vision is that we should offer all the world's stories, and that customers should be able to seamlessly decide whether they want to listen, read, or listen and read to a story at the same time. All books should be available as audio in our service. Today, that is not the case.
Just the last 30 days, we had 100,000 unique e-books that were read in our platform that do not have an audio equivalent. That, for me, presents a major opportunity and a gap we want to close. It is not just good for our customers; it is also good for our authors, as audio consistently drives higher engagement than pure reading. By unlocking more content through AI narration, we expand the catalog, increase listening occasions, and deliver greater value across the ecosystem. Therefore, we are now automating the production flows, enabling all e-books to become an audiobook with a high-quality voice, not only for Storytel Publishing, but for all our publishing partners as long as they possess the audio rights.
To wrap up, we are building a platform where every story lives across formats, where content and tech work hand in hand, and where users can choose if they want to read, listen, or do both at the same time. This is what positions us not just to lead in audio, but to lead and drive the future of storytelling. We can do this because of the transformation we have been driving over the past few years, offering a strong and healthy product performance and a solid tech foundation.
Looking ahead, we aim to scale our product and content leadership through four key priorities: increased focus on non-fiction, English, and e-books, all of which require thoughtful product innovation to further differentiate us on the market. Delivering an immersive and format-agnostic user experience spanning audio and reading, and delivering next-level content discovery, all personalized through AI, and lastly, flexible product offering to support growth and protect our ARPU levels across markets. This is what makes my work really exciting and why we want to continue to lead the future of storytelling. With that, I will now hand over to Oleh, our Ukrainian marketing genius, to talk more about our marketing machine that was referred to in the beginning. Thank you.
Thanks, Johan. What an incredible product development line ahead of us.
As Bodil shared earlier, our purpose as a group is to lead the future of storytelling, and this is what exactly drives our marketing. It is about making sure that more people in more places discover the best stories every day. When they do so, we want the experience to be fresh, relevant, and inspiring across every touchpoint, from the first advertisement they see to the very moment they finish their next favorite book. We do this by blending tradition and innovation, staying true to the roots of storytelling while using data, creativity, and technology to reach new audiences in a new, smart way. In that way, marketing plays a vital role in helping Storytel become a premier destination, not just for customers, but also for authors, publishers, and creative talents around the world. Hello. Yes, right. My name is Oleh Nesterenko.
I joined Storytel two years ago, just before the previous Capital Markets Day, where I was on the stage. I am here proud to present both global and the local marketing teams. We had a fantastic, incredible journey as a group since then. We made remarkable progress. I want to share this progress with you for the past few years and also give you a quick overview about our next chapter. As a marketing, I wish to promise you nice pictures, but it will be a little bit nerdy stuff also in numbers. Embrace yourself for the almost last. Let's go. It is exciting to stay here and say we did it. Two years ago, by staying here, we committed to a profitable growth strategy. We have delivered by increasing marketing efficiency while driving high-quality subscriber growth.
We've proven that strong, sustainable growth is possible with discipline and focus. This success was not accidental. It is a result of the clear and disciplined choices. We followed three main principles that make it possible: invest in the markets and channels with the highest returns, focus on acquiring and retaining high-value customers, and constantly elevate our marketing sophistication through better data, tools, and talents. This balance is best captured in one key metric: our blended CLV to SAC ratio, where SAC stands for how much we pay to acquire a subscriber, and CLV is a net return over the time from this subscriber. Over the last three years, we steadily improved this ratio, and now we are consistently above three.
In fact, we can improve this ratio even further. Instead, we made a conscious decision to scale up our investments and accelerate where we see strong returns in order to accelerate this growth even further. To put it simply, for every SEK we invest, we are expecting to get at least three SEK in return. This is what sustainable, high-quality growth looks like. We learned how to achieve more with less, improving efficiency without sacrificing impact. Because we built a strong confidence in our marketing returns, we are accelerating investments in European countries already this year. Our focus on acquiring high-value customers is clearly paying off. More new subscribers are staying longer with us after the sign-up moment. You can see on this chart that our six-month retention rate shows a strong positive trajectory.
There are several drivers behind this, but the biggest comes from the focus on the intake quality, engagement, and retention, all through smarter pricing and product tiers that deliver better market fit, much more advanced customer lifecycle tools, management practice, data, and campaign automation, ongoing improvements on the product and user experience that Johan mentioned, and optimized spend across towards the markets and the channels we have the highest chance to get loyal customers, the most loyal customers. All these efforts are not just improving short-term metrics like the six-month retention. They are helping us build lasting relationships. As you can see on the right chart, today in the Nordics, more than a third of our subscriber base has been with Storytel for more than five years. This level of loyalty is a clear indicator of the strength of our product, brand, and customer experience.
It's a competitive advantage that compounds over time. None of this would be possible without our team's restless focus on continuous improvements, what we call our incredible marketing machine. This slide is a busy one, and I don't expect you to read the whole thing, but I will highlight a main idea behind it. We see marketing funnel as a complete subscriber journey from the first moment of awareness to ongoing renewals. What drives our operational excellence? It's simple, but yet very powerful: clear roles and responsibilities of each team, sharp focus on each stage of the funnel, and aligned goals and measurable outcomes. By optimizing each step systematically, we are not just lifting individual metrics; we are enabling the sustainable and profitable growth at scale. Another busy slide.
What you can see here is our own approach that we—something we built here in Storytel over time based on what works the best for us. It is grounded in three main things: analytics, frameworks, and operation rituals. In the center, it is data. It is what we collect, how we measure, and how we analyze it. This shows how we analyze the performance and identify opportunities ahead of us. We apply frameworks that help us to prioritize and optimize across markets in close collaboration between the global and the local teams. Finally, we build rituals that help us—that we do daily, weekly, and monthly—that help us and teams to transform insights into actions. Yeah, daily, monthly, but with one exception I had to adopt here. Even famous Nordic summer break is here. We are a little bit slowing down there.
This structure gives us focus, speed, accountability. This played a big role in our marketing results we have delivered. We have done this without losing focus on building a strong brand, both in the Nordics and in growth markets. In fact, the Storytel brand has never been stronger. Our awareness metrics that you can see here reflect the impact of consistent brand building, local relevance of our go-to-market approach, and long-term media discipline. Storytel is not just strong; it has never been that differentiated before. A big driver of this is our exclusive content library, which now includes more than 21,000 titles available on Storytel. These titles are not just Storytel Originals, but also content from the strategic partnerships with publishers across different markets. Customer awareness around the fact that we have those exclusive titles is quite high.
It's nearly 80%, improved 10 percentage points actually over the last year. Across those customers, 50% of them consciously decided to listen to those exclusive books. Storytel Originals in particular, actually, Helena mentioned this, five times better drives intake than the average title in our library. All this reinforces the perception of Storytel offer to be the most relevant and accessible catalog as a clear market differentiator. Those were just a few highlights. There are many more examples of what we have improved and how we come in more mature in our marketing sophistication and digital maturity. It's a lot of data on this slide. I will just highlight a few. For example, a few years ago, we were present on six digital marketing platforms. Now we're covering 16. That gives us flexibility and precision to reach very different audiences across the market.
We doubled our intake from the organic search thanks to our SEO improvements we made and the content strategy. You can see this list going and going. All this reflects the strength of our cross-functional execution that Johan also mentioned, particularly with the product and tech team, and maturity of our digital capabilities now. Together, from intake quality to lifecycle and pricing, these improvements are driving real business impact. As we look ahead, our focus remains clear. We aim to keep growing fast in both subscribers and revenue, while constantly strengthening our profitability. Our ambition is to reach 3 million subscribers by 2028. That is a bold target, but we believe it is absolutely achievable given the strong momentum and foundation we have right now. We are not aiming for growth at any cost.
We want to stay same discipline and apply the same efficient approach that has delivered results so far. Always optimize for returns and sustainability. For this, we will keep a great control over our marketing investments. Because we've been able consistently to achieve more with less, we gain a high level of confidence on how and where we invest. That confidence has allowed us to accelerate the investment in select European countries. In some cases, we even doubled our spend this year, where we see exceptional return of investment. To reach our subscriber goals for 2028, we continue with what works: our high-quality growth formula and adding a few strategic accelerators. First, we keep our strong focus on high-value customers, the book lovers, how we call them internally, especially Nordics, where we hold the leading market value share.
At the same time, we are looking ahead by exploring new user segments, like casual listeners or those who just started their journey with audiobooks. This helps us future-proof our growth and build in for the next wave of loyal users. Second, we see more opportunities in our core European countries outside of Nordics. Third, as Claus mentioned, we are planning to enter more European countries, bringing Storytel's unique value proposition and product experience to more people and accelerating our subscriber base growth. When it comes to our European countries, where we are already present and have a strong foundation, we see a significant opportunity. In these countries, audiobook penetration is relatively low, especially if you compare to Nordics. This alone signals that we have a big opportunity to scale our growth there. What's even more interesting, look at the e-books.
This penetration is even higher than audiobooks, much higher. In total, it is coming close to the Nordic level. This tells us two things. First, there is a large audience already comfortable with digital reading, which makes transition to audio smoother. We can use this as a door opener. Second, there is an opportunity to increase engagement by offering multiple formats, even read and listen simultaneously, like Johan said, catering to different moments, preferences, and consumer habits. By offering both audiobooks and e-books under a unified experience, we can boost usage, improve retention, and expand our appeal, ultimately driving faster and more sustainable growth in these markets. Our third growth lever is geographical expansion. We see strong potential to enter more European countries. Claus already walked us through how we select those countries, the criteria on his slide.
I want to focus on what makes our offer unique. We are not just another audiobook app. We are bringing a streaming-first model, offering unlimited access to a rich local and multi-format catalog. Our platform combines audiobooks and e-books in one seamless experience, making it easier for users to engage how and when they want it. Crucially, we're deeply committed to localization, delivering high-quality, locally relevant content that resonates with readers in each market. Everything we do is grounded in our focus on the book lover segment. We are building the best-in-class experience for them. They are the most demanding audiences, readers and listeners. This is a clear and differentiating positioning, giving us a strong edge at scale when we enter new countries.
As I have mentioned already, we are not looking for growth at any cost while we are targeting our next big milestone as 3 million subscribers. Let me walk you through the key two directions: how we are going to further improve our marketing efficiency. It is not only about the cost-saving efforts. It is about how we can use this as the growth enabler. First, we are building an even more unified global brand system powered by automation, scalable workflows, and advanced tooling, all of which will allow us to operate faster, smarter, and more efficiently at scale. Second, we are embedding AI across full marketing practices, from planning and media buying to creative CRM and content generation. This slide shows how we built a scalable marketing setup, one that lets us launch a new country in only nine weeks.
This all became possible because we standardized and automated core parts of the funnel. Brand templates and central media strategy drive awareness. Automation and content feeds streamline acquisitions, trigger CRM, power retention, and win-back. Today, the bulk of rollout time goes into translation and localization, not to build the whole thing from scratch. AI is becoming a key enabler of our marketing efficiencies, of course, AI. Many use cases are already part of our digital practice. Right now, today, AI will help us to create production, media buying, and budget allocation with hyper-segmentation and personalized CRM, sentiment analysis, metadata enrichment, and predictive modeling, tools like chatbots for onboarding and synthetic research for faster planning. AI is not just a separate track. It is becoming an integrated layer across all our marketing, helping us move faster and personalize and scale and make smarter decisions.
We are already leveraging generative AI in many of our campaigns, particularly when it comes to creative production. AI is helping us create creative output, localize assets faster, and test variations more effectively without compromising brand consistency, from dynamic enterprise out to generated visuals and copy variations. It is now a key part of how we work, especially in high-volume, multi-market campaigns. Here on this slide, you can see a few examples where we use the AI-powered creative tools that help us to move faster and smarter. Key takeaway: we know we achieved, we know how to deliver profitable growth. It is delivered. Our next goal is clear and ambitious. It is 3 million subscribers by 2028. Yet it is grounded on the very strong foundation and the playbook that has proven that it works.
We will keep dedicated as the ultimate destination for book lovers in the Nordics, while keeping growing the category in Nordics for the newcomers, the ones who have not built a strong habit yet. We will be focused on growth in Europe, both in countries where we are already present and also entering new countries. We are doing this in a highly effective manner that will allow us to launch a new country just in nine weeks with a velocity never seen before. Thanks for listening. Now I want to invite Bodil.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Thank you. This is an amazing team. I hope you agree because I am very proud of the team. I just love to work together with my team. I am happy that we are actually having one group, the executive management team now, that has been working quite a long time in the company.
That's a strength. That's also good because we need to actually accelerate our speed, both in the company but also on the market. There are some small summaries. You have had a lot of information this afternoon. It has been different topics, of course. This is the way we also show that we are having a strong foundation. We have a lot of opportunities that are exciting ahead. We are quite confident. We are really in the mood of taking off now because we have been working with the strategy. We have set the new executive management team. Everyone is like, "Okay, just do the capital market day. And then we just run." That's where we are in the moment. We really want to go out there and just do business. We will.
This is a really, really exciting day for us. We have so many opportunities. I would say that if you just take—yeah. If we look into the two—because I will go through now to the next slide, the summary everyone can read. Guidance this year, 2025, is that our subscriber base was up 11% in Q1, as you know. We will keep the momentum and expect reaching approximately 10% growth of our subscriber base year on year. Where do we foresee the biggest growth going further? It is outside the Nordics. This will impact our geographical mix and is expected to reduce a little bit slightly on ARPU somewhat over time. Our revenue growth was reported up 7% in Q1, adjusted for currency. We have been investing more in marketing since the beginning of the year.
We expect stronger growth this year, reaching high single digits for the full year. This will also give us momentum into 2026. A stronger krona in Sweden might also affect our reported numbers a few percentage points if today's exchange rate remains stable. If we look at profitability, we are clearly moving in the direction of becoming even more profitable. We improve our adjusted EBITDA margin year on year in the first quarter to 15.7%. We are convinced that we will continue this positive trend. We aim to achieve a full-year margin of over 17.5%. That was also communicated in today's press release. We will, of course, invest wisely. Operational CapEx will stay low, below 5% of revenue. Our Head of Finance will elaborate a little bit more on that quite soon. What about our financial targets for 2028?
We have a really positive momentum now. We have a strong strategy. We have a strong team in place. We are confident that we will continue to grow and have good profitability going further on. Our ambition is to generate an average of annual total revenue growth of over 10% in constant currencies. This will be achieved through a robust, high single-digit organic growth and complemented by selective and value-added acquisitions. I know that someone was also asking about that in the pause. We are confident in delivering an EBITDA margin of over 20%. We also see the potential of a higher steady-state margin in the long run, which underscores our scalability of our proven business model. Our growth and margin expansion will be managed within a framework of healthy risk management. We are not going back to a very high-risk profile.
We are focused on maintaining a leverage below 1.5 times to ensure a strong and resilient financial position going further. We can take a look at the revenue bridge. We have focused on four key areas to achieve our midterm growth target. First, it is important to remember the strong foundation where we are coming from. We have a proven business model and have, over the years, built a leading position in a number of markets, which has created a very strong footprint. Our main focus is to continue building on our strengths, of course, as we have been talking about today. We aim to exceed the market growth by leveraging our unique and locally relevant content offering. We have a highly efficient MarTech function, as you were listening to Oleh just before. He is our really strong MarTech guy.
We will use that function and have a really efficient go-to-market strategy to support this. Looking ahead, expanding into new markets organically or through partnerships will be an important growth driver for us. Another key driver is our offering itself that also Johan talked about. By expanding it and focusing on user experience, we expect to attract new audiences and build new customer segments and grow the subscriber base both in our core markets but also in new markets. Lastly, but not least, acquisitions will be substantial growth by adding content to our current catalog, by also bringing in new subscribers. Acquisitions will go in both directions for publishing and the streaming business. In terms of profitability, we see multiple levers that will contribute. We are confident to increase our EBITDA margin gradually and exceeding 20%.
We will do this based upon four pillars: drive content productiveness by increasing own content through European publishers' acquisitions, furthermore improve marketing efficiency, and we will continue to deliver the best user experience to continue to keep our customers engaged and build loyalty. We will scale our platform by adding subscribers and new markets with a stable cost base. That is also important. Continuously, we will also work for prudent cost discipline. In other words, as revenue grows faster than operational costs, this will support our EBITDA margin development. EBITDA should be. We have already started our M&A journey. I mean, we have a history of many acquisitions that are successfully delivered in the company. There are also some failures, I think, but we have learned a lot. We are ready to actually accelerate our acquisitions agenda. It is already started.
It will be aligned both in the publishing segment and in the streaming segment to accelerate growth going on. Regarding publishers, this could mean that we strengthen our customer offering by filling content gaps in different markets. We will strengthen our content efficiency as well or reduce dependency on third-party content and thereby increase also our resilience on the market. With regards to the streaming service, this could mean that we increase our revenue in existing core markets, gain momentum through quicker entries, accelerate penetration, and reduce expansion risks. We are really committed to deliver on our new financial targets and our strategy. There is not a doubt about that. You can expect that Storytel Group will continue to deliver significant cash flow in the upcoming years. Furthermore, we are ready to have a very strong position with a leverage of 0.2.
Overall, this gives us great financial flexibility and room for further investments. In terms of capital allocation, we have clear priorities, as we also stated in the press release today. We will prioritize further organic growth in our core markets and strengthen our local positions. That is also important. Secondly, acquisitions in core markets where both streaming platform and publishers are in play. Third, new markets, both greenfields and acquisitions. Fourth, the board has also decided a dividend policy that will return excess liquidity to shareholders in the future. Now we will take a look at some more financial figures. Since our CFO, Peter Messner, is not here today due to his sick leave, we have instead our Head of Finance, Jonas Olsson. Welcome, Jonas.
Thank you, Bodil. I am the Head of Finance here at Storytel. My name is Jonas Olsson.
I've been with the company for two years. If we look towards 2028, Bodil just presented and talked about our financial targets. I just want to take a quick look and look at the recent development for total revenue and EBITDA and how they have developed recently. If we look at the rolling last 12-month development, we can see that the progress is stable and positive. The adjusted EBITDA since Q4 2023 has doubled. Just to clarify, each bar here contains four quarters or 12 months. It is excluding seasonality effect. This is, as we said during our Q1 presentation that we had a couple of weeks ago, that we have seasonal variations within our business, mainly in the publishing industry, but also to some extent within streaming.
Looking at this last 12-month development, you can see that we have a continuous positive trend both for revenue as well as for the adjusted EBITDA. Beyond digital revenue growth and an EBITDA margin above 20%, you can expect attractive development in further financial KPIs as well. Our building blocks, as you can also call them, are crucial to be in place to reach our goals. Our operational CapEx, consisting of investments in content and our tech platform, is expected to decrease further down to a level of 3-3.5% of sales. This does, however, not mean that we will stop investing in content and our technical platform. As we become more efficient on the content production side, costs will go down.
On the platform side, we do not activate as much cost as we have done historically to avoid a situation where we boost profitability by loading up the balance sheet with uncertain assets. If we look at the next graph, with marketing, we will continue to invest in marketing to grow both in existing and new markets. This spend is even likely to increase as a percentage of sales in the short term as we reignite growth initiatives. In the mid to long term, we expect this cost to decrease somewhat from current levels. Looking at the networking capital profile, the group has an attractive negative networking capital profile in the streaming segment due to our setup that we are receiving subscription payments in advance and paying publishers afterwards based on the consumption in the service that we have had.
The publishing segment does not have the same working capital profile, but as the streaming segment is the largest and is something that we expect also in the future to be the largest, we release cash from working capital as we continue to grow. Finally, looking at the cash flow from operations, our positive development in EBITDA the last couple of years has also translated into a healthy development in cash flow from operations. This is a confirmation that our actions on the P&L side are genuine, and we have the ability to translate these P&L improvements into cash. We expect this positive cash flow generation to continue as our EBITDA margins increase. With that, I hand back to Bodil.
Thank you, Jonas. Good, great.
With that, I hope that you have had a good afternoon and that you have a little bit more information about our journey going forward. We have a really strong position, we have a really strong business model, and we have the best talents in the house. I would say we're looking forward to take off now for actually executing our strategy, going for growth, but also increasing our profitability. We are very confident in the moment, and we are happy to actually increase our investments and also become the leading Storytel even in the future of tomorrow. I think that we will open up for questions in the room, but also for those of you who have been with us online.
Joachim Gunell from DNB Carnegie. A question with regards to the six to eight new European market entries you talk about.
There are obviously some markets that have been put to sleep over the past years. The six to eight markets that you talk about now, are they entirely new, or are you awakening some of these markets, essentially?
I would say it's a mix because we see some new markets that are in a good potential for us to take a lead in and that are not sleeping. It's not in our portfolio. On the other hand, we have also sleeping markets, or if we should call them sleeping, I don't know. Maybe it's more passive outside our core markets. Of course, it's a big, big asset for us to have all those markets and the catalogs in those markets that we can start again and reopen.
We are in that stage now that we're looking in our expansion markets and also in some new markets in Europe combining. Lovely. Just one follow-up from me with regards to your preference when it comes to pursue acquisition-driven growth. You have established this very strong track record on the content side and leveraging that to build a catalog. When we think about your emphasis on being the number one in a market, entering these new markets, would you prefer to acquire your way through a platform, or should these six to eight new market entries be more of an organic endeavor? I will prefer speed. That's the way it is. If there are good targets for acquisitions, I will prefer speed because we all know that it's about speed.
I mean, we can go greenfielding and taking the time, but it's also good to actually accelerate by finding the right targets in the markets. We know there are some markets that are maybe up for grab for consolidation, and then we can actually be one player there.
Thank you, Bodil.
Without saying any, which kind of countries. Yeah. We have also Stefan and yeah.
Okay, thank you.
Then Stefan.
Yeah, this is Derek from ABG. It seems like Spotify is about to offer audiobooks in the Nordics after the summer here. What do you think this will mean for the competitive and publishing relations in the market, and what kind of worst-case scenario do you foresee in relation to this?
I foresee opportunities, not worst-case.
I mean, we are used to having high competitive markets, both with global players and local players in all our markets. Of course, I mean, this gives also some light on audiobooks, and that can also contribute to actually increase the total markets. That is an opportunity for us. There are a lot of scenarios you can have, and we have definitely, but we have a really strong foundation in our book lovers that have their bookshelves in our streaming service. They are extremely loyal and with a high engagement, as you have seen today. We talk a lot together with them also what they prefer. We are confident in also our local presence and the local know-how because this market, when it comes to audiobook markets, is highly local. It is not like Netflix or the other streaming services.
You need to have the local competencies and be extremely strong on that. We are that. We are that. Yeah.
Okay, great. You sound convinced for sure. Just one more, if I may. I mean, looking at your demographical composition in your user base, has that changed anything in recent years? I know we used to talk about mainly women in between 35 and 65 years of age. What are you doing to attract sort of the next generations, not thinking about the kids' books, but I mean, people that are in their 20s now, for example?
Yeah, maybe if we go back, Oleh, to talk about the segments, you have the history. I think it is extremely important that we actually attract the book lovers of tomorrow because, I mean, this is really, really good that we have all our book lovers.
I think we can extend a little bit, expand our marketing investments in the targets that are the book lovers of tomorrow. This is a little bit younger, of course, and it's a little bit about cash shells. We have to open up that scene. That is also about the marketing machine, but we are also into accelerating marketing into social media, for example, when it comes to TikTok and Snapchat. As far as I know, we had that discussion when I entered the company. I think that we were not so much, we were not so good at those channels. Maybe you do not agree now, Oleh, but we can really increase our presence in the channels where we see that the future book lovers are.
It is still a skill you need when you do that to actually not just pull in a lot of new customers that will churn. This is a balance, and we need to be prudent in our investments here. We also need to have the content, of course, that will attract the young people a little bit more. I think Helena mentioned about, I just wanted to be cool. That is so interesting because they have built their audience on YouTube. If you have kids or teenagers, you know that everyone is looking at them. We actually took them into our storytelling universe of publishing. They have become really strong ambassadors for us. I did not know actually when I entered here that they are so strong. That was my son, who is above 20.
He was kind of yelling at me and saying, "Oh, mama, you have to look at YouTube and you just want to be cool." They were standing there just talking about Storytel for like 10 minutes. I was like, and they had an audience of 1.3 million subscribers. This is just amazing, and this is just the beginning to attract the new book lovers of tomorrow.
Thank you, Bodil.
Yeah, we have a question from Stefan.
Thank you, Stefan Wård from Pareto. I have a few questions on the growth targets. We got market growth for streaming. If I understood it correctly, it should be 14% roughly. Then we have a subscriber growth of 8% to a fixed number. Was it 3 million subs? Yeah.
There was information about the price level, which seems to be that you become more flexible on pricing so that the ARPU levels are coming down. Then we got from Helena's presentation that the growth for publishing should be plus 10%. When I look at, and also the waterfall staple diagram where M&A should add, it looked like it should add about half of the growth. The organic growth then in streaming, is that 5% or how should we interpret that? Organic growth target in streaming is 10%.
Yeah, and for the whole group, the organic growth is high single digit.
If organic growth in streaming is 10%, and then on top of that, it's M&A. What did Helena say for publishing? I heard 10% from that.
No, not really. I don't think, no.
Not 10% for publishing?
For publishing, it's not 10%.
What I said was the organic. You can, yeah. What I said was the organic work. Yeah, it does. The organic growth for the publishing segment will be above market expectations. If we do M&A, depending on which kind of M&As we do, it will be higher than that, significantly higher and maybe double digit, yes.
Okay, perfect. The organic growth for the streaming unit is 10%.
Oh, sorry. Not on the Nordics.
No, no.
There is a little bit of M&A in the 10%, but the majority comes not from the streaming part of the business.
Okay. Thanks for that. Also, a few questions on the margin expansion. It looks like marketing would be lower, more efficient marketing. You had 12.5% for 2028. Is that like the sustainable level, would you say?
Yeah, it's sustainable.
Especially when you come to the new market, you need to do a little bit of push. That is why we are keeping the same level, right, while we increase the efficiency. Then in three years, naturally, right, after the big heavy lifting, right, with the building awareness, entering the new market, you can a little bit stabilize more to the always-on approach. If you want really to kind of get into the market loud, you need to a little bit spend.
Can you give any color on what you have like in a mature market like Sweden where you have perhaps half of the market in terms of market share? How much do you need to spend here? Is it something you want?
I do not think we disclose that.
But I would say also, I mean, the absolute numbers is increasing, but compared to the share of revenues, it will decrease. Yeah. Understood. But it's a little bit with the longer-term margin there. So it looks like most of the savings will be on general admin type of costs of this. Definitely.
Yeah.
Y eah.
Okay, so there's more.
We don't like admin costs. Overhead costs, we don't like.
Okay. Yeah. No, otherwise very helpful information and good presentation. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Stefan. Thank you. Okay, I think we have, yeah, here's one more in the room. Gunnel.
Gunnel from DNB Carnegie again. Just one final one.
When it comes to the engagement figures that Johan showed and what Oleh talked about in how you're increasingly focused on this higher value segment of the market, do you foresee a potential risk to the whole unit economics as you now go on this, call it, reignite the growth ambitions in less mature markets where it's perhaps not as clear to you right now who are the high-value subscribers in those markets? Do you think that the current, say, three times CLV to SAC is, I mean, that is something that you can maintain also as you go outside of your current footprint?
Yeah. I can take this. About three, it's our, of course, blended, right? When you kind of step in and you learn, right?
Of course, the value is not like we need to step into and define what will be the value. I think we already see the big penetration of the e-books in all of those markets, for example. It builds a strong foundation. Also, part of this literature adoption, we have multiple formats that ensure us, and we build kind of similarities to the markets where we succeeded, right? We build the model that identified the opportunity. I think, of course, there are book lovers, but not audiobook lovers yet in most of those countries. This is the big unknown, right? If you look into, let's say, in media entertainment, share of consumption across the old type of media, we are actually playing naturally in all of our as a group in the highly premium segment.
Both printed books, e-books, and audiobooks are double as the volume share to the share of the media entertainment landscape. As a group, as we enter in all three kind of areas, it is by default people who are paying more. It is the fact, regardless of the format they use right now in all markets. Literature is quite premium if you look into kind of media entertainment landscape.
Another question, Stefan Wård again from Pareto. To Johan, you described that you could sell audiobooks per title. I think it is similar to Audible's credit function. How is that going to work? If you buy that title, then you have the sort of forever ownership of that download?
Yeah, you can buy books in two ways, generally, if you look at the industry. One is just paper book in general.
You buy one book at one time and then you keep it forever. Yes, in our platforms, you do not download like an EPUB file. The other, the coin model that you are referring to is a slightly different take. That is more the Audible model. Yes, short term, we are looking into paper book and also as a way to onboard some of the English publishers that are a bit reluctant to the streaming model today. Together with Claus and the local teams, yes, we are also looking into ways of adjusting our local go-to-market model in the portfolio without saying too much. What we are looking at short term is paper book where you buy one single unit.
It is mostly to get the publishers on board rather than or how should we--
Both publishers, but some of these publishers also come with a content offering that we currently do not have in the platform that is attractive and appealing to segments outside the core. When I was referring to core audiobook segments like crime, romance, fiction in mature audiobook markets like the Nordics, they stand for above 60% of total consumption in the platform. That behavior differs slightly also to allude to Derek's questions on targeting new users where we see new users coming in with a slightly different behavior than the old-school loyal audiobook users. Will those, a person who buys one title, will that be one customer? Have you thought about that in terms of how you recognize? I will refer this question to Arvid, but no, we are separating them, but I will let him go into the details of how we report our subscriber base financially.
All right, got it. Yeah. Thanks.
Derek.
Thanks. Just wondering where we're at in terms of the timeline for this stock exchange listing change to the Nasdaq main market. That's actually more a question for the board, I would say. Okay. Hopefully it will happen at some point soon. I wanted to ask also on the U.S.
And we have a chairwoman here as well.
If you want me to make a comment, I don't think we have a timeline, but we are getting that question. Yeah, we've heard some of your input on that, but there's no timeline for such a decision.
Oh, that's a good answer. Thanks. Thinking about the U.S. market there and audiobooks.com, you talked about the unique value proposition there. What type of unique value proposition is that and how will you differentiate yourself further in that market?
The value proposition in the U.S. is the credit model as we just talked about. It is a little bit differentiated from the other competitors in the market having one credit per month, but also looking into VIP titles and also special offerings that it is giving to the subscriber base.
Great. Thanks. Finally, I mean, looking at the pricing here, I think you mentioned some about flexible pricing models, but at the same time, you have this very loyal subscriber base, especially in Sweden and the Nordics. Why are you not increasing prices further and what is the outlook, please?
Can I have it again?
Why are you not increasing prices in the Nordics given your loyal user base and that your last price increase roughly two years ago, I think, was highly successful?
Exactly. When it comes to pricing, it needs to be value-based.
Our approach in the Nordic is to increase price with product innovation. We want to offer more value to the customers in order to increase the willingness to pay. That goes hand in hand. When we develop our product, we will be able to increase the prices further. Also, just to add on that, the other thing is to the existing base as well. Now we have this tier structure starting from the Flex to Premium to Unlimited. We want to make it more attractable for people to upgrade. By product differentiation in the tiers as well and work with the base that we already have.
All right. I'm happy to hear that the e-books are back on the table, so to speak, and AI as well. It should probably help you differentiate and drive prices. Thanks.
Thank you, Derek.
Two more questions from my side, please. Regarding ABC, can you comment on since the acquisition, has that unit grown positively on the top line for each year? So it's larger today than when you acquired it.
Yes.
That's confirmed. And then it's above group margins.
Slightly above group margins on EBITDA, yeah.
Because we have the financials when you did the acquisition, so that indicates that you should have an EBITDA there of around at least SEK 100 million. Is that something that you can confirm or you don't want to comment on that?
No.
No? Okay. Okay. But we talked a little bit about the strategies for ABC. Can you give a what should we expect? Will you start to invest or grow in the US, or is it just because it's still one of the core markets?
Can you comment on anything on what to expect there for the next?
I think we gave the picture through the presentation that the focus in the U.S. is profitability and cash flow. We expect to grow with a 5% kicker and keep above group profitability, basically, with limited investments. Exactly.
All right. Good. Thanks a lot. Just to help us think about the next three years, if you're going to do M&A, what's the landscape out there for publishers? We have what you have paid for Norstedts, but that's some time ago. I don't think you would be able to do that deal again. It's been a very rewarding deal. What's the price levels for publishers?
I think it's depending on which country you are in. I mean, in general, it's like 6-8 on the EBITDA.
6-8 times EBITDA.
Yeah.
That is something that we can have as a benchmark for publishers.
Somewhat, I would say. Of course, it is difference in difference.
Of course. That is helpful. Thanks a lot.
We have some questions from our online audience. The first one is for you, Jonas. This comes from Thomas Andersson. Would love to understand a more concrete financial impact on the P&L compared to Q1 2025 or full year 2024 from your U.S. focus that was presented.
Yes. Maybe a little bit boring answer, but we do not want to give details regarding specific countries. As Claus already said, it is $500,000,000 in revenue and slightly above on the group margin.
Okay. Thank you. We have a question for you, Helena. This one comes from Joakim Båge.
Please tell us more about your plans for non-fiction within Storytel Originals going forward, Storytel's view regarding more books about personal development and finance?
As Johan talked about today, we are working within the app to cater for other types of customer segments. One is non-fiction. I would say that we actually do have a lot of non-fiction books in our catalog already. In some countries, it actually is the bigger part of our catalog. We have, during all these years, become really, really good to cater towards our core customer base, the crime and the romance love book lovers. We also need to support and build a good funnel for the other customers when they come in so they actually find the books that they are looking for. That is kind of the answer to that question.
We have two more questions for you, Helena, and two more from [Christopher Kahler Käppler]. The first one, AI and content creation on balance, is this an opportunity or threat in your business?
It's a very good question, actually. The future will tell. No, as I was talking about today, when it comes to content creation, it is a potential for cost savings and also to boost our catalog. In that respect, I would say it's a super good opportunity. Of course, if we look at it from the other perspective, it also enables a lot of content to be published. The quality of that content might decrease. We always say that we embrace AI, but we also think it's super important to, at least for the content we ourselves produce, keep a high quality bar.
Another one for you, Helena, also from [Christopher at Kepler]. Could you please tell us how much unique content you offer in your non-Nordics core markets and how you leverage it?
I do not have an exact number, but as I said in my presentation, we have jointly 72,000 audiobooks, which is 4% of our total catalog. The number of books that are exclusive is much less. As Johan has showed today, they also have a strong user consumption. Yes, thank you. What was the question? Sorry. How we use them in our non-Nordics market. How you leverage it. Yes. For all our core markets, we are producing Originals. They are, as in the Nordics, super strong intake drivers and retention boosters. We have two different types of Originals, you could say.
We do intake drivers, which is mainly based on influencers or popular topics that then create attention. We also have a long series that we produce that are super successful and that we now are translating to each and every market. A series that could have started up in Denmark or in Sweden or in Finland is now translated to Dutch, Polish, Bulgarian, etc.
Thank you, Helena. Now a question for you, Claus. This is also from [Christopher Kahler at Kepler]. Also a question about Spotify. Related to the earlier question about Spotify's probable launch in the Nordic, is not Spotify targeting low-frequency listeners, which you have previously described as a solid growth pocket, thereby constituting a significant risk to your growth ambitions?
Yes.
When it comes to Spotify, I think we saw on the presentation right now that they already launched in the Netherlands. We have not seen any impact on our subscriber base in the Netherlands. We see still that our intake is growing. We have low SAC, low churn, and strong monetization. When we look at Spotify, the value proposition is very low hours. Our value proposition is differentiated. We have a tier structure that caters for both casual listeners and book lovers. We are also offering multiple formats, both e-books and audiobooks. We offer the best experience. I mean, we have 20 years of experience within offering audiobooks and e-books. There is a lot of insights and learnings here. Last but not least, we have a superior content catalog, both in the broadness of the catalog and also on exclusive content.
All right. Thank you. Thank you. That was the last online question. Are there any more questions from the room? No? I think I will hand over to Bodil.
Yeah. Thank you so much for being here today online and also here at Riddaholmen. We are super happy that you have taken your time to listen to us and to follow us. I hope and I am really glad that we can meet soon again to continue to talk about our success. I think we open up the bar. There will be some appetizers and the bar, yeah. Yeah, it is just drinks and of course we have non-alcoholic drinks as well. We can just meet and talk and chat a little bit. Please stay and feel comfortable. Thank you so much from us to you.