Hello everyone, and thank you for joining the Thule Group Investor Meeting. My name is Lucy, and I will be coordinating your call. During the presentation, you can register a question by pressing star followed by one on your telephone keypad. If you change your mind, please press star followed by two on your telephone keypad. I will now hand over to your host, Mattias Ankarberg, CEO and President, to begin. Please go ahead.
Thank you, Operator. Welcome everybody to this call. I'm joined here with Toby Lawton as well, our CFO, and we will give a brief intro and then hand over for a Q&A session. I thought as an intro, we will just recap our recent performance. We'll speak about the current market environment, and we will remind everybody of the priorities that we have for 2025. If we can start on the next page, I mean, in case there is anybody that is not that familiar with Thule, we are a premium outdoor product company, and we've been around for a very long time, for over 80 years, and we've been a public listed company since 2014, which is shown on this graph. We had a pretty busy 2024, and it was nice to see that 2024 also then resulted financially in back to profitable growth.
Sales was up by 5% to SEK 9.5 billion, and EBIT margin increased by half a percentage point to 17.0%. That was a nice outcome on the financial side. We were also really busy, and just as a backdrop to what we're doing in 2025, 2024 was the biggest product launch year in Thule's history by a margin. We launched three types of products, you could say, and we had several upgrades of our existing bestsellers, many products that got new generation product out. We brought some new innovations to the market in the categories we're already in, and then we entered three new product categories. We entered dog products in the beginning of the year with the dog crate, Thule Allax, start of the year 2024.
We entered car seats in May and then gradually rolled that out during 2024, and we entered what's called performance phone mounts through the acquisition of Quad Lock at the end of 2024. Very busy year, good start for the new categories. Dog products is the best first year sales for a category that we've ever had, and car seats is a bit earlier in its sales phase, but we won, of course, you are aware the most important consumer test we could win, the ADAC test in Germany, and have a good start also commercially for car seats. A lot of activity to broaden the portfolio. We opened five new DTC markets. We were recognized for our design effort in terms of product awards and the team awards, and at the end of the year, we also were recognized for our sustainability work.
Sustainalytics ranked Thule as one of the top 50 sustainable companies in the world out of over 15,000 in the scope. A very busy 2024, and it was not an easy market environment, but if it's one thing that we learned in 2024, it's that new Thule products can drive sales growth also in a tough market, and that has colored also how we look at 2025. As a reminder on what we're doing in 2025 and also to comment on the market situation, you can go to the next page. This is just to remind everybody, this page is exactly the same page that we presented at the Q4 quarterly call. There has been no change to our priorities. Obviously, the market is a dynamic place, but priorities are exactly the same.
Our focus is simply to continue to drive the long-term growth strategy we have in place. We, of course, do not have an easy market in 2025. It was challenging, as I said, in 2024, and as we look now in the start of the year, we see the same trend continuing with some, I guess, accelerations on some parts. It was not all gloomy last year. We had some pluses and some minuses in the marketplace. Two things stood out on the positive side. The bike market, at least the premium end of the bike market, was coming back nicely, which helped us.
The European consumer was increasingly healthy, I would say, in terms of willingness to spend and participating in, continuing to participate in sport and outdoor activities, but also more willing to spend, which is, for example, visible in an improved consumer confidence number in Europe last year. That was on the plus side. On the negative side, last year, we have an exposure to the RV industry with our RV business, and that's going through a tough time. That hurt sales in 2024. Also, our North American consumer was clearly not recovering as well as the European consumer during last year. If we look at the beginning of this year, I mean, we're in durables. Trends do not shift that quickly. I'm sure this audience is aware of some other market trends going on as well. We largely see the same patterns.
If anything, the U.S. market and the North American consumer is becoming more negative. Again, examples from, for example, public data on consumer sentiment is dropping significantly three months in a row, and particularly so now very recently with the uncertainties that are going on. This, of course, affects consumer purchase intent and also retailer behavior, particularly in the U.S. We are, given that, well positioned. Thule is the global market leader in our most important product categories. We sell to enthusiasts that are above-income consumers and are willing to spend on new innovative products. We produce most of what we sell in our own factories, and we have factories in both Europe and the U.S. We have a favorable position to be able to advance our competitiveness and continue to drive the business forward in 2025.
We have set four priorities to do so, and these are the same headings as last year, and then we tweak the content and update the priorities to adapt to where we are, of course, in our development and the marketplace. The first is continue the product development efforts that we do really well. We had a record launch year last year. We continue to put the foot on the gas also in 2025 and keep a similarly high launch calendar as we see that that is driving growth. We are doing, since we launched two new categories organically last year, we are now focusing more resources on launching products in our existing product categories. You will see rooftop boxes, bike carriers, running strollers, upgraded versions of existing bestsellers during 2025. We also have an earlier launch calendar in 2025 than 2024.
We want to keep to try to catch more of the high season, which is spring and early summer for us, and therefore launch more products earlier in the year. We will continue as number two to build up the new categories that we recently entered to scale up dog transportation. Excuse me, we have a new product coming, a crash-tested harness soon. We continue to expand distribution as well. Similarly, on child car seats, we expanded all throughout 2024 with 20 new countries in Q4. That is now in place and continuing to activate that consumer, educate that retail staff, etc., and also bringing more products to that portfolio with a high back booster seat coming in 2025. The Quad Lock business, the acquired performance phone mount business, also has an ambitious development agenda for 2025.
As a second priority, we'll continue to drive those new categories and develop those. We will also continue the work of being closer to the consumer, being more visible. We know there are lots of fans of Thule out there that are not yet aware of our full offer, and one example of that is our DTC effort. We recently opened, two weeks ago I believe, Norway for thule.com DTC sales, and we will continue to add markets also this year. Lastly, we will continue to trim our supply chain efficiency. We have taken particularly inventory levels down a lot, SEK 1.2 billion last two years, and we have an ambition to reduce another SEK 200 million in 2025. That's the priorities for 2025.
They have not changed since we spoke last at the fourth quarter, and we look forward to executing them with high pace as the season starts. As we have an ambitious launch calendar, I also wanted to just quickly update you of some of the products that are coming now already in Q1 to the market. Just very briefly, we are bringing a new version of Thule Force to the market, which is our most selling mid-price rooftop box. New design, better aerodynamics, new lock system, new accessories. Really excited to launch that here, actually just about the end of March, which is around now. Look forward to see that in trade now. We are bringing innovation in rear of car this year called Thule Santo.
It's a combination of a bike carrier and a cargo box, a flexible modular system that we know has been positively received with particularly, excuse me, electric vehicle drivers, and we look forward to seeing more of that during 2025. Lastly, we have a big focus on some of our most important product categories, including bike carriers, and we have just released Thule Verte, which is an upgraded version of our most sold bike carrier in North America. Again, better functionality, higher loads, more accessories, including a lock, etc. Although the North American market is pretty tough, we have already received very positive reviews and included a few just PR clip highlights here, which I think continue to underline that we are bringing good products to the market, and we are proud of what our R&D team keeps feeding our consumers.
That is a little bit of an update of the market situation, our priorities, and also how those priorities are playing out now in the start of 2025. Before we move to Q&A, maybe Toby, is there anything you'd like to add specifically for this update?
Yeah, maybe. Thanks, Mattias. Yeah, hi everybody. Maybe I can just, I mean, add a couple of things to bear in mind, particularly maybe in relation to quarter one, and quarter one is going to be reported on 29th of April. Firstly, as Mattias says, it's a challenging market out there, and we feel that as well. North America, as Mattias mentioned, in particular, is tough, and RV is in a tough place. We certainly feel those trends. That is important to bear in mind.
On top of that, when it comes to the kind of P&L, I think it's also something we've talked about before, so it's nothing new, but we have a phasing of our particularly development costs, which is in relation to the product launches, which Mattias also mentioned, which are coming earlier this year. We take quite a lot of our development cost at the time of product launch. We expect our cost base, our SG&A cost base to be higher in quarter one as a result of that than it was last year. You can expect an impact of a few percentage points versus last year when it comes to SG&A, when you look at it as a proportion of sales. That's one thing to bear in mind. Again, nothing we haven't talked about before, but maybe not been, yeah, fully picked up.
The other thing to bear in mind is we obviously now have Quad Lock in the company. We had one month of Quad Lock in quarter four. We will have three months of Quad Lock in quarter one. Make sure you are aware of the seasonality of Quad Lock as well. Quad Lock has a seasonality, which we actually had some numbers in the Q4 report. If you dig into the back of the Q4 report, you can find some more data. Basically, if you take Quad Lock's annual revenue, around 18% of their annual revenue was in Q1 last year. That is the, yeah, we expect the same kind of pattern. Around 15% of their EBITDA came in quarter one. It is their smallest quarter of the year.
Just to mention, kind of below EBITDA, you also have to bear in mind there's depreciation in Quad Lock, which is approximately SEK 10 million per quarter. We will also have the amortization of intangibles, which you can also find in the back of the Q4 report, but it's about SEK 9 million per quarter as well. Make sure you're keeping that in mind. Just a few more detailed points, but just to make sure everyone's on the same page. Maybe with that, I could hand back to you, Mattias, and over to Q&A.
Thank you, Toby. Thank you for those clarifications. Let's look forward to some questions and interesting discussions. We will turn to operator to manage the Q&A session. Thank you.
To ask a question, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad now. If you change your mind, please press star followed by two. When preparing to ask your question, please ensure that your device is unmuted locally. Our first question is from Mats Liss of Kepler Cheuvreux. Mats, your line is now open. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Hi, thank you. A couple of questions. First, I mean, you mentioned that things are sort of slowing down, especially in the U.S. And I guess currently we are sort of moving into peak season for you to some extent. The year-over-year situation seems to be, well, somewhat eased by your new product launches. How should we see that balance? I mean, product launches are interesting for you. I mean, you can sort of drive sales as you indicate. Is it enough to sort of balance a softer market situation?
I mean, on top line, then again, you have cost for the product launches, etc. Yeah. Maybe it's a bit, yeah.
Hi, Mattias. I can start, and then Toby can add maybe. Of course, first of all, we try not to optimize for the quarterly level. It's more the product launches that we do and put in place now is, as I said, to capture as much of the high season as we can. Q2 is the biggest quarter. We do take the costs to Toby's point when we launch, to cost continuously, but a lot of the costs, some of the costs are taken at launch. There's a dynamic there. I think typically Easter time is a good indication of where the market is heading, and we have that a couple of weeks out.
I think that should give us a good read. Of course, when there is uncertainty in the business, and consumers react, you can see in the U.S. consumer sentiment numbers that basically across age groups and income brackets, people are expecting higher inflation. That's the takeaway, which leads to reduced spend. Retailers also, some are eager to load in volumes, but most are cautious also to build up inventory as they do not know where the demand will go. There are a couple of things in place. I think it's hard to put a specific number down for a single month or quarter, but we clearly saw last year that without having this ambitious launch calendar that we identified, we would not have been able to drive that growth.
For the full year, we feel that we have lots of good products coming out and being able to capture the high season, and that should be able to give a nice boost to the top line for 2025.
Also, the bike segment is certainly a high-margin segment for you. What's the year-over-year comparison there? I mean, we saw a good trend during 2024, and could it be expected to continue in 2025 now, or are there other things that move in another direction? Yeah, I think, again, Toby, feel free to add, but I think generally the bike market has recovered nicely in 2024 and actually starting even late in 2023 or second half of 2023.
The big reason has been, as you probably are aware, the inventory levels at bike retail that is now largely sort of is in a healthy spot in Europe since quite a few quarters and is getting there in the US. I think that we still see the same long-term growth drivers of bike commuting is becoming more popular. E-bikes are growing. People are buying more expensive bikes, so they want to have more premium bike carriers, which benefits Thule. That is a good long-term thing. We do have a lot of new things coming out in bike during the last two quarters and the coming quarters.
But then again, of course, short-term uncertainty is a little too early to say, I would say, but when the consumer is shaken like this and the retailers become cautious, yeah, that of course is a negative effect in the very short term. We'll see how it plays out then as we come to high season.
Maybe I just add, sorry, Matt, just add, but I mean, in quarter one, bike is a smaller part of revenue because, yeah, it really, the bike season comes alive, as Mattias said, yeah, in quarter two and quarter three. It is a bit too early to read.
Another topic is, of course, the tariffs there. I guess you mentioned that you have production in Europe and within the borders there. Have you made any preparation?
I mean, some tariffs will affect you, I guess, components and so on. Could you make something to balance that through price increases also?
Maybe I can start here. Yeah, we have a lot of our manufacturing in the U.S., firstly. It is obviously, yeah, the tariff situation is affecting the U.S. market primarily. A lot of U.S. producers, we manufacture most of our revenue in the U.S. is manufactured in the U.S. We are less affected than most of our competitors who are importing either from Asia or from Mexico in nearly every case. We are not, we are somewhat impacted. We do have some imports. We also manufacture with raw materials that are either imported or are subject to kind of quite volatile pricing right now because of the tariff situation. We have announced some price increases.
It's different by product, but on average, the price increase is about 5% from 1st of June in the North American market. That's to offset the impact of tariffs on us as we estimate the impact to be. Of course, it's quite a changeable picture, as everyone knows. We are monitoring very closely, but that's the action we are taking. The price increase will come from 1st of June. We might get some impact. We don't see impact really in quarter one, but in quarter two, it depends on the timing of the tariffs really versus that price increase. There might be some tariff impact a bit before that price increase, depending whether it's on which kind of product category, if it's kind of aluminum or steel or some imports from China, which are the two kind of main tariff impacts on us.
Okay. Great. Thank you.
As a reminder, to ask a question, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad now. We currently have no further questions, so I'll hand back to Mattias Ankarberg for closing remarks.
Thank you, everybody, for joining the call, and look forward to speaking to you, if not before, at the Q1 call at the end of April. Wish you all a great weekend.
This concludes today's call. Thank you for joining. You may now disconnect your lines.