Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to this live video interview with Zinzino following the Q4 2025 report. My name is Niklas Elmhammer from Carlsquare Equity Research. We're very pleased to be joined once again by the CEO, Dag Bergheim Pettersen. As usual, we welcome questions from the audience. Don't hesitate to submit your questions on the chat function. We will try to address as many as possible. Let's turn to you, Dag. Welcome. Great to have you with us.
Thank you. Thank you so much.
You released your Q4 2025 report last week, so we'll discuss some of the main points. Firstly, growth. 45%, almost as strong as the previous quarter and well above your targets. Solid contributions from acquisitions and organic growth. Could you please comment on the organic growth in the quarter?
It's a good summary. Thank you for that. I would say that the organic growth is much stronger than you might anticipate. Over the last years, we have done a lot of acquisitions. I don't know if we have an exact number on how you're calculating the organic growth per se, but I am very pleased with a lot of markets, like Germany is crazy good, and that region has been, like, super strong. All of the Germany and Austria and Switzerland have done, like, extremely well over the last years. We have significant growth in U.S., although that is probably the market I've had the highest amount of acquisitions that have contributed to the growth in the U.S.
It's the second-largest market, while I would say that Germany is more or less only organic growth. If we move over to Europe in general, strong contribution. Same in Latin America. Asia is more or less on its own growth structure, although we've acquired two companies that contributes in Japan and Korea. Taiwan is the strongest market, and we acquired a company, I would say, seven years ago. How can you evaluate? Is that organic growth, or is it new growth? That would be the hard thing to say. I feel it's, like, organic growth.
Okay. Thank you. You mentioned Central Europe. It's one of your core markets, and at least from the outside, it seemed to be one of the best performing with, I believe 66% growth in the quarter. What are the success factors?
Oh, so maybe a step back could be smart to do. All of the listeners here or viewers who's watching this and knows Zinzino, for those of you, I apologize pre-handed on, in explaining. Zinzino is a global brand. We're established in the Scandinavian. We have our headquarter in Gothenburg, Sweden. You can find the reports from the last 10 years or maybe more than that, at our webpage. We are more or less selling test-based nutrition, preventative health, and very often you can see that what we have done in the core markets like the Scandinavian markets are duplicated into the other markets. There is a connection between the Scandinavians and the Europeans and what we're doing in the markets of U.S.
None, none of the markets are standing alone, as you can say. Of course, what we have done over the last years and the growth that we have done in Germany is not a surprise because it's a little bit about what is the market potential. Germany has 80 million people. If you combine with Switzerland and Austria, it's 5 x larger than the Scandinavian markets. We would probably be 10 x larger if we did the same revenue all across the world in all our markets, if you times that with the percentage of sales that we have here in Scandinavia.
Extraordinary happy with the results and the growth that we've had over the last years in Germany and the markets around Germany. It comes from our long-term ambition and the plans that we have created. I'm not sure if I answered your question other than saying that we're really happy to see that kind of growth, and we will push through to do good growth all across the world.
Okay. Thank you. We have a question from the audience about subscription. Your model relies on recurring subscription revenue to a large extent. How has the subscriber base developed in Q4? What are the retention rates?
That's an important question to say. We are measuring our customer base, so we have around 1 million customers who are buying frequently at this very moment. What do I mean by that? Parts of that are on subscribing or out to orders, buying one or two products. Part of that are customers who are buying, like, half a year or maybe even yearly. The point is that 80% of the revenue comes directly from customers that are buying within the last six to 12 months. What do I do with those numbers? I'm steering the activity, the inventory, forecasts, how to spend money and all that. When it comes to the second question of that question, that was the retention.
It differs a lot, depending if it's on, if it's on an old market or a new market. Zinzino is 20 years old. Of course in Scandinavia we have a very loyal customer base. In Europe in general, we have a good and loyal customer base. In, in the U.S., I would say since we've been there for 10 years, we have a pretty good and loyal customer base. In all new markets, it takes a little bit time for the subscription model to really breathe in into the culture of how people are buying.
Okay. We have one more question regarding numbers, so to speak. What is the total number of distributors globally? Yeah.
We define them in active and non-inactive. I think it's around 40,000 more or less active distributors or field members who are selling the product all across the world.
Okay. Thank you. Regarding M&A, you have been active in 2025 and 2026, and you acquired It Works! recently.
Yes.
With, what does the integration timeline look like, and what are the sort of, key synergies you expect?
I have a lot of internal questions in regards to this. I hope my staff is watching as well. They are sometimes tired of me and us acquiring a lot of companies. You said that we have been buying some. If you look at the last year, it has been a crazy development on that. I will repeat myself in general terms before I'm going into It Works!, and this is more like a reminder for everyone who's watching who understands Zinzino, but also the new ones. We have an ambition of being the number one direct sales company on this planet, which is crazy ambitious. We strongly believe that we're gonna grow and do extraordinary good over the next years. A part of our strategy is acquiring companies, and why do we do that?
Well, it is to have increased distribution base. It's also maybe turning into new markets. It could be because we wanna have new products or ingredients, or it could be all of those above. Of course, in many of the cases that we are going into, we find synergies in the, on the tech side, more or less, the Mexican companies now implemented totally into Zinzino. We established ourselves in Peru and are soon gonna go into Colombia as well, and we got new products. All of their customer base and their partner base are in our technical system, meaning that what they spent on money on IT is now not a part of our cost structure. Secondly, they had customer care. We are saving money on that.
Marketing and branding, we are saving money on that. The scale of the business is also somewhere where we are saving a lot of, I would say, money, which is more or less in technical terms, financial terms, synergies. You can see the same thing for It Works!. In It Works!, we are now this week, next week, putting all the customers and the partners into our system, meaning that we will close down It Works!' system in the end of March, more or less, maybe April. Let's see. We have a lot of synergies on the financial part, customer care, marketing, branding, logistics. There is a lot of good synergies in that acquisition as well. In another point is scale of the business. Why do we have the profits in Q4 and Q3 as we had?
Well, it's because we are scaling the business, meaning that we get more revenue per use of cost. That is kind of the bottom line of why we are doing acquisitions and also how we look at this acquisition in itself. Although it's not easy to do these kind of acquisitions, but we've been pulling that through pretty well over the last years.
Okay, thank you. Regarding margins, as you mentioned, the gross margin was increased in a nice way in the quarter.
Mm.
From a weaker U.S. dollar and lower input costs, for example. How sustainable is that going forward, and how is that the growth margin being affected by the spree of acquisitions?
I'm not sure if we have calculated that, and it's a little bit. You need to do some definitions on where are you gonna say that this was an acquisition that. We have seen in many of the acquisition is that when they come into our system, they're able to grow business from where they, from where we acquired them. That has been a great synergy in itself. On the profit, on the growth side, you were asking could we sustain a 45% growth? Is that the question?
Actually, the question was about the growth margin, which has fluctuated.
Ah.
Over the years. Is this level sustainable now?
I think I'm gonna answer the same way I did a year ago, and that is that if we wanted to sustain that and just focusing on that, it wouldn't be too hard. Remember, we are investing in new technology and products, in new markets and in people and systems and technologies. We are having what we call sustainable growth as one of those, and profitable growth as one of those leaders. What we have, you can say lowballing goal is that we're gonna increase the margins a little bit. That's our promise, and we're saying that we're gonna have 20% growth over the next sequence of the next three years, and then we are promising that the EBITDA margin will be above 11%.
It wouldn't be a problem for us to have those profits if we wanted to. We are having a bigger goal, and over the next years we would like to grow the markets, invest, and building a much more bigger company than what we have today. That needs investments. We are gonna have profit. We're gonna have sustainable profitable growth, we are promising everyone what we're promising on page six, and that is above 20% and above 11% EBITDA.
Okay. Yeah, that's what was actually my question regarding the margin target, given that you already achieved it through your... 2025.
I do understand the question because it's much lower than what we accomplished 2025, so it's a little bit boring maybe and lowballing or you can call it whatever you like. We are investing, so my thinking is like this. This is what we promise. This is what we would like to really over-deliver on. That's where we are aim, have our aims.
Okay. The 20% growth target could also perhaps be a bit conservative given that you already have made acquisitions for example, including It Works!.
Yeah, you're right. It might be on the low end, you cannot take anything for granted. It's just like to see what is happening now in Iran, it impacts us shortly. You have a lot of outstanding things that could happen to us as a company, I am pretty sure that we will be above 20% with It Works!. It's a lot of work implementing a company like that, it's the largest acquisitions that we've done by far. My hope is that we will be on 25% or even 30% growth this year. Let's see. It's a little bit early to say.
Okay. Okay, do you have any comments on trading so far in 2026? I mean, you released your January sales report at 20%, I believe, growth.
I don't. It's one of those things that you shouldn't do too much of a comment on are the stock trading and all that. I think one of the things that we're hit by last year was short sellers. I'm thinking like this, that we will always get the right kind of price and the right kind of trading when we're performing well. My idea is to concentrate our work on doing our job perfectly, improvement constantly, and expanding, growing, showing positive return on that, all the investments that we're doing, scaling the business and be a very consistent growth player for every shareholder.
What I'm extremely happy about is that we've had 13 years of paying out dividend, and at the same time being able to build the business like we are doing. Despite that we are giving out a lot of the money and working capital, we've never had a better financial situation than what we are in at the moment. I am quite pleased with what things are. What's happening. I think that we will get the fair trading and fair amount of trading as well.
Okay. Another question regarding expansion acquisition. With acquisition largely funded through share issuance, can you commit that future M&A will be consistently EPS accretive?
What does that mean?
that you will be able to increase EPS even though you issue new shares to sellers.
Guarantees. Well, that's a difficult word maybe. It's quite brilliant. It's quite geniusly what we're doing because what we are buying the companies for, if you look at, if you look at how we're doing the acquisitions and you look at what growth you can see, it's brilliant for us to have a tool like that. We are buying the companies with our shares. Most of those companies have a much lower price per sales than Zinzino. If we are succeeding with It Works!, we bought them for $30 million, we're expecting $60 million in revenue. If you just take, like, a very easy math on that, is that's gonna be price per sales, you know, 0.5, while Zinzino is trading on 1.5.
If you look at those kind of ways of how we're building and doing the acquisitions, I'm almost surprised that people are not asking us for advice on how to acquire companies through issues of the shares. If I'm gonna give you a guarantee here, well, I'm guaranteeing you that I would say every one of the 13, 14 acquisitions that we've done, I would say that 90% of them have been really successful, and they have been really, really good for Zinzino business. If we're gonna have, like, that kind of hit rate moving forward, who knows? We put a lot of effort in evaluating and doing due diligence before we are acquiring companies.
Okay. Thank you. That's a good answer, I believe. Also.
It's a long answer.
Unfortunately, I think we have to wrap it up. We're running out of time. Thank you, Dag, for a terrific interview, as always.
Thank you. It's a pleasure being here, and thank you all for-