Good morning, dear listeners. Welcome to Novaturas Investor Relations Conference. I'm Emilia from Nasdaq Vilnius, and I'll be moderating today's event. We'll start with the presentation from the management, which will be followed by the Q&A session. Please be informed that this webinar is being recorded and will be available on the Nasdaq Baltic YouTube channel. I encourage everyone to submit questions in the Q&A section at the bottom of the screen. With that said, I am pleased to introduce today's presenters: the CFO of the company, Darius Undzėnas, and the CEO of the company, Kristijonas Kaikaris. Please, the floor is yours.
Thank you very much, and very good morning, dear investors and dear guests. I'm CEO of Novaturas, Kristijonas Kaikaris, and today, together with my colleague, Novaturas CFO, Darius Undzėnas, we are happy to present Novaturas' financial and operational performance for the fourth quarter of 2024 and also of the full year of 2024, with a highlight of our key results, market developments, and, of course, the steps we took to strengthen our performance. I would like to begin today's presentation with the executive summary. Starting with the fourth quarter of 2024, which was marked by the strong revenue growth and a significant improvement in our profitability. Novaturas' revenue increased by 16.6% to EUR 48 million compared to the same period in 2023, while the net profit reached EUR 2.6 million, which was a major turnaround from the EUR 3 million net loss which we reported in Q4 of the previous year.
EBITDA followed the same positive trend, of course, improving from a negative EUR 1.5 million to EUR 3.3 million. Operationally, we maintained efficiency and improved our key metrics. We served 47,600 passengers, slightly below the 49,000 in Q4 2023, but with a higher load factor of 98.9% compared to 96.7% in the previous year. This reflects better capacity management and demand alignment. Our customer satisfaction remained stable with a Net Promoter Score of 51%, which demonstrates our consistent service quality. Now, looking at the full year results of 2024, the strong performance in the fourth quarter helped us improve what has begun a challenging year, especially what we saw after H1, after we entered into the summer season.
After difficult first two quarters, when the Baltic market saw an unprecedented oversupply of tour operator capacities due to new entrants, after the first half of 2024, we initially projected a net loss of EUR 5.1 million. However, following the profitable start to autumn, we revised our outlook, reducing the expected net loss to EUR 3.4 million. By the end of the year, we further improved our results and closed with EBITDA of negative EUR 863,000 and a net loss of EUR 2.5 million. What we projected again after H1, after the first half of the year, was EUR 5.1 million net loss, but we ended up with much more promising results, with a net loss of EUR 2.5 million. The total income of the year stood at EUR 201 million, a 3.6% decline compared to EUR 208.3 million in 2023, while the number of passengers served reached 239,000.
Again, a 7.6% decrease from the previous year. Despite these declines, the company successfully optimized operations, and we managed to significantly improve our profitability. Novaturas has demonstrated resilience and adaptability in a dynamic and very, very competitive market. The strong performance in the final quarter in Q4 2024 allowed us to significantly improve our financial position of the year, and we entered 2025 with much greater efficiency, a stronger market position, and a foundation for future profitability. That is about the executive summary. Darius, the floor is yours to present our key financials. After you finish your last slide and your presentation, I will take over.
Thank you, Kristijonas, and greetings to everyone. Today I will present the financial results for the fourth quarter of 2024, as well as for the full year. As we can see from the slide, the last three months of 2024 were highly successful for Novaturas, significantly reducing the annual loss. What were the key drivers behind this? The main reason is that sales grew by 16.6%, marking the best result in the past three years, despite a slight decline in the numbers of passengers, which decreased by 3% compared to the previous year's fourth quarter. Revenue growth per pax was driven by several factors. Q4 2023 sales were significantly impacted by unrest in Gaza. Overall prices increased due to inflation, a higher share of more expensive destinations in the portfolio, and nearly full capacity utilization, a load factor reaching 99%.
This allowed us to sell trips with lower discounts and avoid significant last-minute sales. These factors also contributed to a strong gross profit margin of 17% compared to a 7.2% margin in Q4 2023, and an EBITDA margin of 4.7%, or EUR 2.3 million without one-offs compared to a negative 0.5% in Q3 2023. The profitability of the fourth quarter of 2024 was positively impacted by one-time allocation of EUR 1 million in expenses to equity recorded in December. This adjustment was made after reviewing the full year 2024 expenses, following the previously disclosed audit qualification and recommendations. To ensure transparency and clarity, the company reports both actual EBITDA figures and the EBITDA figure excluding this one-time adjustment. According to Novaturas, it has also revised the comparative figures for 2023 and 2022, which will be reflected in the financial statements.
Looking at 2023-2024 as a whole, the optimized travel program and increased load factor contributed to a strong end to the third quarter and a successful fourth quarter, reducing losses to EUR 2.5 million instead of the previously forecasted EUR 5.1 million. However, sales declined by 3.6% in the full year compared to 2023 due to a highly competitive market. Let's now review our performance across different markets. As shown in the slide, there were no major market shifts by the end of 2024. The Lithuanian market accounted for more than half of total revenue and achieved the highest gross profit margin of 12.3%. This was influenced by varying economic conditions across different countries, particularly in Estonia, where declining domestic consumption negatively impacted revenue and profitability. However, GDP growth forecasts for Latvia and Estonia in 2025 suggest that these trends may change.
As a result, we anticipate a more profitable year ahead, but the market distribution is expected to remain largely unchanged. Okay, let's look at operating expenses. Comparing Q4 2024 with the same period last year, operational efficiency improved with operating expenses decreasing from 6.27% to 5.22% to sales. This was driven by higher sales, while maintaining operating costs at the same level. A slight increase in administrative expenses was offset by lower marketing costs. Comparing full year 2024 with the previous year, there were no significant changes in the structure of operating expenses. Marketing expenses remained stable at 40%, while the remaining portion consisted of other general and administrative costs. I think that's it about financial figures.
Thank you, Darius. I am again taking over and going to review the other performance KPIs. In this slide, let's start with our passengers served. In the fourth quarter of 2024, passenger trends reflected the mixed dynamics across our key markets. Lithuania here experienced an increase, serving 28,000 passengers, while Latvia and Estonia saw slight declines with 9,500 and 10,100 passengers, respectively. Over the full year, we served a total of 239,400 passengers, which is a 7.6% decrease compared to the recorded number in 2023. This decline was primarily driven by the optimization of our capacity in Lithuania, which we did in a couple of attempts seeking for profitability. It fell to 136,400 in Estonia and totaled here 52,400. Nevertheless, Latvia showed a slight increase, reaching 50,700 passengers.
Despite the overall decrease in passenger numbers, the financial impact was mitigated by the steady rise of the average selling price of our trips. From 2022 to 2024, we observed the consistent growth in pricing, reflecting stronger revenue per customer and also improving our financial performance. Going to the next slide, showing that another key factor in strengthening our financial performance, especially in H2 2024, has been our ongoing diversification strategy. Over the past two years, we have actively reduced our reliance on the most competitive top travel destinations like Turkey, Greece, and of course, Egypt. In 2022, these destinations accounted for 68% of our total travel share. By the end of 2024, this figure has dropped to 58%, from 68 to 58. The shift demonstrates our ability to guide customers toward alternative destinations, which contributes to a more resilient business model.
Specifically, our dependence on Turkey, one of the largest and key markets, especially during the summer season or autumn, decreased from 39% to 34%. Greece, from 15% to 13%, and Egypt, also from 15%, but by one point lower, to 12%. At the same time, we have successfully expanded our offerings to new markets, including long-haul destinations. The number of long-haul destinations has grown from seven in 2022 to 12 in 2023 and further to 13 in 2024. Gambia was a notable addition. Our strategic focus of diversification is evident in the winter travel patterns as well. Passenger share for destinations outside our top autumn and winter locations, Turkey, Egypt, and the Canary Islands, increased from 27% in Q4 2022 to 33% at the same period of last year.
This shift, again, demonstrates a growing interest in alternative destinations and strengthens our market positioning by reducing reliance on a few highly competitive regions. To conclude on this slide, despite challenges in 2024, our ability to adjust to market conditions, expand our destination portfolio, and optimize pricing has helped us navigate the year more successfully than we have forecasted after the first half of 2024. We remain committed to enhancing our customer satisfaction, maintaining competitiveness, and of course, ensuring sustainable growth in destinations that drive profitability. Moving to the next slide, let me now take a closer look at the customer satisfaction and the trends shaping their travel preferences. Our Net Promoter Score, NPS, is a key indicator of customer satisfaction and loyalty, has remained consistently strong throughout the year.
Starting at 37% in Q1 2023, we achieved steady growth, reaching 51% in Q4 2024. While this represents a significant long-term improvement, breaking it down by market in Q4 of the last year, Lithuania recorded an NPS of 54%, again, maintaining a strong customer sentiment. Latvia actually led the way with an impressive 68%, reinforcing its position as our best-performing market in Baltics in customer satisfaction. Estonia also showed substantial progress, increasing from 11% in Q1 2023 to 42% in Q4 2024. That's really significant progress. This remarkable growth highlights the effectiveness of our service quality improvements and also operational enhancements, what we are doing in this market. In terms of travel preferences, customers have rated several destinations highly in Q4 2024 with Tenerife, Alanya, Tunisia, Antalya, and Sharm el-Sheikh. In Egypt, they rank among the most popular ones.
Over the full 12 months of 2024, the highest-rated destinations included Crete, Burgas, Sharm el-Sheikh, Antalya, and also Tenerife. These results reaffirm the success of our diversification strategy, which focuses on expanding travel options while retaining and growing high travel customer satisfaction. By continuously enhancing our offerings and ensuring exceptional travel experiences, we remain well-positioned to sustain strong customer engagement and loyalty. Examining travel booking habits over the past three years, we see a clear shift toward earlier travel planning. The percentage of bookings made less than three months in advance has decreased from 75% in 2022 to 68% in 2024, while bookings made more than three months in advance have increased from 25% to 32% over the same period.
This trend suggests a growing tendency among customers to plan their trips earlier, providing an opportunity to optimize pricing strategies and secure revenue further in advance for the company. However, when comparing the full year of 2024 to 2023, the shift toward earlier bookings was only marginally higher, with a 1% decline in early purchases overall. A particularly strong Q4 2024 contributed to positive momentum with bookings made three months in advance, increasing by 6% compared to Q4 2023. This increase was partly driven by a group workation organized by our company for Tesonet Group, highlighting the strength of our corporate partnerships and ability to successfully manage workation travel, which is typically planned well in advance and offers more favorable conditions.
Looking ahead, we will continue to leverage targeted sales and marketing initiatives to encourage earlier bookings, ensuring that our customers do benefit from the best travel options, while further improving revenue stability and operational planning. Again, continuing on the customer perspective, we have made significant progress in reducing flight delays. This is a very important KPI for customer satisfaction and loyalty, reinforcing our commitment to operational efficiency. Our on-time performance, OTP, in Q4 2024 remained at 77%, the same level as in Q4 2023. While the percentage remains unchanged, it reflects an improvement over Q1 and Q2 of 2024, demonstrating greater operational stability. One of the most notable achievements is reduction in our long delays exceeding three hours, which are actually, as we know, the most painful ones, which decreased from eight in Q4 2023 to just one in Q4 2024.
Additionally, shorter delays, which are under three hours, were also significantly reduced, dropping from 109 in Q4 2023 to 61 in Q4 last year. These improvements are a result of better scheduling, enhanced coordination with our airline partners, and of course, proactive risk management. Minimizing the delays is crucial not only for enhancing customer experience, but also for reducing operational costs and strengthening our brand reputation. Moving forward, we will continue prioritizing punctuality and reliability, ensuring that Novaturas remains a trusted and efficient travel provider. Again, to look at operational efficiency, which remains a key focus for Novaturas, with load factor serving as a crucial metric in optimizing capacity management and profitability. In Q4 2024, our load factor reached 98.9%, making a 2.2 percentage point increase from 97.7% in the same period of the previous year.
This improvement reflects our successful optimization efforts, ensuring that available capacity is efficiently utilized, which is a key factor when we are working now in a very competitive market. For the full year of 2024, the annual load factor improved to 95.7%, slightly up from 95.5% in 2023. We can look at the market breakdowns. Lithuania saw a 2.1 percentage point increase, rising from 96.9% in 2023 to 99% in 2024. Latvia maintained a strong and stable load factor at the level of 98.6%. Our northern market country, Estonia, recorded the highest growth, with a 2.5 percentage points increase from 96.7% in 2023 to 99.2% in 2024. These results highlight the effectiveness of our capacity management strategies, allowing us to maximize efficiency while maintaining flexibility in response to market demand.
The ability to sustain high load factors across all three markets underscores our strength of operational execution and, of course, reinforces our commitment to deliver both profitability and optimal customer experience. Moving forward, maintaining and further improving our load factor will remain our priority, ensuring we continue to operate at peak efficiency while adapting to changing market conditions and competition. Let's now look at our distribution channels' performance. The B2B segment, driven by travel agency partnerships, saw a 3.9%, almost 4% increase in sales, strengthening its role as a dominant distribution channel. As a result, the effective commission rate also increased, reflecting the growing reliance on third-party agency sales. Our e-commerce, our web, and GDS channel sales faced a decline, decreasing by 2.7% compared to the same Q4 period in 2023 and 3.9% compared to Q3 in 2024.
This has largely contributed to adjustments related to our sales channel strategy, shifting our focus to the growth of our B2B sales channel. Own retail channels remained steady throughout Q4 2024, maintaining consistent performance. However, when looking at the full year trends, the revenue share of our own retail increased from 14.2% in 2023 to 16.8% in 2024, which signals the gradual progress and strengthens our direct sales channels. B2B continued to hold the largest revenue share, growing from 68.7% in 2023 to 72.4% in 2024, reinforcing the strong role of travel agency partnerships. Meanwhile, the web GDS segment saw a decline of 4.5% in the revenue share compared to the previous year, reflecting, first of all, the impact of digital transition challenges we have encountered when launching our new e-commerce website in Q3 2023.
Going forward, Novaturas remains focused on optimizing our distribution mix by enhancing direct sales channels, while, of course, maintaining strong partnerships with our dear travel agencies. To continue in distribution, we continue to rely heavily on travel agency partnerships, which remain the primary driver of our revenue across all markets. In Lithuania, our partners contributed a substantial 79% of total revenue, making it the strongest market in the segment. Latvia followed with 64.4% revenue coming from the travel agencies, while Estonia recorded a similar reliance at 63.5%. Despite this dominance, web sales and our own retail channels are playing an increasingly important role. Estonia leads in web sales, accounting for 17.7% of total revenue, followed by Latvia. Sorry, I accidentally moved to the next slide. Going back, Latvia follows at 13.2% and Lithuania at 7.2%. In Lithuania, the B2B channel is the strongest.
In terms of own retail, Latvia holds the highest share, and Lithuania has 13.8%. These figures reinforce the critical role of B2B partnerships, but also highlight the potential strengthening of our direct sales channels to increase the profitability and customer engagement. We have maintained a strong position in web traffic, capturing 34% of total market traffic in 2024. Although we lost our leading position in Q2, it successfully increased web traffic in Q3 before experiencing another slight decline in the market share in Q4. This trend underscores the intense competition in the digital space and, of course, the ongoing need to refine our online strategy. Again, as I said, seeing the importance of the B2B channel, we shifted our focus, our strategy, to our partners of travel agencies. Throughout 2024, we focused on several key developments to enhance website performance and user experience.
Performance analysis allowed us to gain valuable insights to optimize conversions, while improvements in stability and reliability addressed technical issues to ensure a seamless customer experience in our e-commerce platform. Efforts to refine user experience included enhancing site navigation and, of course, responsiveness. Additionally, we introduced AI-generated hotel descriptions and pros and cons summaries from customer reviews, making it easier for travelers to make informed decisions. Despite these challenges, our commitment to web optimization and direct sales growth remains a priority. Strengthening our online presence and refining our distribution strategy will enable us to unlock the full potential of digital channels and further enhance our competitive position in the market. Now, looking forward into 2025, so as we look ahead to 2025, from the financial perspective, Novaturas aims to serve between 170,000-190,000 passengers in 2025, with revenue forecasted of EUR 150,000,000-EUR 170,000,000.
That reflects the very much increased competition in the Baltic market and our optimization strategy to ensure that we do not have overcapacity, especially leading to the last-minute sales and also empty seats, increasing our load factor. We made this strategic optimization with a focus on profitability, not the market share, which costs to maintain and to keep or to gain, but to optimize our capacities, which we had a lot of learnings from summer 2024. This strategy proves the positive results since we are seeing Q4 2024 profitable, and this is basically the same strategy how we planned the whole year 2025. Our expected EBITDA for 2025 stands at EUR 3 million, with a net profit target of EUR 2 million. We are focused on several key tactical objectives that will drive growth, enhance efficiency, and strengthen our market position.
One of the priorities is the continued integration of AI-driven tools to enhance customer experience, and we will expand the use of AI-generated hotel descriptions and pros and cons summaries from customer reviews, providing travelers with more transparent and informative content to support their decision-making process. Additionally, we plan to launch hybrid packaging, offering customers greater flexibility and assembling their travel plans, combining flights, accommodations, and services in a way that best suits their needs. We have started working on a hybrid packaging in autumn. We've been successfully testing the solution, and we will implement it in the coming months. Driving early sales remains a critical focus, as securing bookings in advance helps to improve revenue predictability and capacity planning. Alongside this, we will continue to seek operational efficiencies, ensuring that we maximize resource utilization and maintain strong financial performance.
A significant step in our forward-looking strategy is the assessment of strategic alternatives. On January 24, last year, we signed an agreement with financial advisory company Superia to conduct a comprehensive review of potential strategic paths. This analysis will explore various scenarios, including attracting additional capital, engaging with strategic investors, divestment opportunities, or refining our current strategy. The goal is to identify the best way to enhance shareholder value and position Novaturas for long-term success in an evolving market. With a clear focus on efficiency with strategic growth, we remain committed to reinforcing our market position and delivering strong value to our customers, partners, and, of course, shareholders in the coming year. I would like to thank you for your trust, for your continued support, and we work toward a profitable 2025. Now I'm happy to open the floor for any questions you may have.
Thank you for the presentation. We'll proceed with the questions. Before that, I would like to remind everyone you can submit your questions in the Q&A section at the bottom of the screen. The first question we received was regarding dividends and when will they be paid out.
Looking at our financial performance and results of 2024, which are a negative profit of EUR 2.5 million, this shows that in this year, from the last year's results, the dividends cannot be paid. Our aim is to turn the company into profitability in this highly competitive market. Once we earn the profit, we will start exploring the possibility of paying dividends.
Thank you. The next question is, with several peace talks on the table, are there already any effects on traveler spending?
This is the key geopolitical topic.
I don't have a crystal ball to say what is going to happen, but of course, we all remain positive, and I can only judge by the results we are or activities we are observing currently. We don't see any negative trends in customer spending or the willingness to travel, as again, our Q4 results are showing that customers, they are traveling, they are looking for new destinations. The wallet of the travel package increases since we saw the results that with a slight decline in customer numbers, we still have an increase of collected revenue and the profit in Q4. We believe that this trend can continue into the next quarters. Of course, we cannot control what we cannot control.
Thank you. It looks like we've covered the questions so far. Oh, we have one more.
Join Up adding Turkey as a destination for Baltic countries. How are you planning to combat even higher competition?
To be more precise, Join Up added Turkey, not adding Turkey right now. We've been selling and promoting Turkey, especially from January 1 of the last year, and not only Join Up, but other competitors. As we discussed previously and mentioned during today's presentation, Turkey is the most competitive destination, especially during the summer season and the shoulder months. We are answering the increased supply of seats and capacity in the market by, again, successfully exploring optimization strategies. What is very important is not only to keep the market share, which has a lot of cost in this competitive market, but very precise, smart planning, ensuring that we have less last-minute seats.
Of course, our loads are as high as we reported at the end of last year.
Thank you. As all questions have been answered, on behalf of Novaturas and Nasdaq Vilnius, thank you, everyone. It was a pleasure being with you today. The recording of the presentation will be available on Nasdaq Baltic YouTube channel. Thank you for a very informative conference, and have a good day.
Thank you very much. Wishing you a good day.