Thank you very much for coming here and joining the meeting. Thank you for being with us today. From management board time alone, Costas supposed to travel as well, but after he saw temperature zero in Warsaw, he did everything not to do it. In our agenda today, actually, there are three major topics. We will update you about major corporate events and developments, and financial results of Q4 and the whole year of 2025. Also give you further outlook of 2026. First, about the business units of ASBIS Group and their development in 2025. Basically, you know that Apple is the biggest vendor for us.
Last year, Apple, however, had single digit growth, 7% or about 7%, and it was very weak start in Q1 of last year was oversupply and big price wars with illicit traders in Kazakhstan and Ukraine. However, we finished quite well in Q4 because after after launch of iPhone 17, demand is extremely strong. My take is that because it's renewal cycle after COVID time, and it just started, so respectively, we have limited supply, we have shortage, and Q4 was quite strong, and we see actually the demand is remains strong. Currently, the constraint is supply, but we manage supply.
ASBIS South Africa, who started Apple distribution from July of 2024, demonstrated very good growth and results, established quite well. ASBIS South Africa gained strong position in the market within 1 year. What I'm happy to see and to announce that from September of 2025, they already became profit contributor to Group. To what was one of the quite good for me, very good investments. Yeah. ASBC, our premium and luxury retail business unit, grew 24%. Now we have, it's like 58 retail stores and eight B2C commerce stores. I will talk later bit more in depth about that. Breezy trade-in business unit, more than, I mean, doubled the business, and they continue to grow.
We have gained number one position in CIS. Our major aim now is to expand and to develop in European Union and South Africa and probably in Gulf as well. We are happy to support the growth. Consumer distribution last year was almost flat. The major driver of that was because Logitech, who is one of the big vendor for us in that consumer route to market distribution, changed business model. We moved from master distributor to distribute in Middle East and in South Africa directly all retail, right? It take us time to develop it, but again, is growing quite well together with private label and third-party brands.
Core business of ours, IT distribution, that's where we face and demonstrate more significant growth, like ICT distribution for data centers mainly, and not only, it's got client computing as well, and different peripherals and finished products, I mean, co-computing products and peripherals. The major growth driver is components and building blocks for data centers, and that's where we face serious growth because we are one-stop shop, and we are one of the leading distributors across EMEA, for most of the vendors. Respectively, they select us to make to and to conduct serious projects.
ICT and the active equipment for data centers and building data centers, so these kind of value add projects, it's again, 120% growth last year, and it just beginning. We have continuously, we have strong pipeline for data centers. We build data centers ourself, but not housing, not passive or cooling equipment. We only focus on our core business: server storage and networking, right? Yeah. NVIDIA and other vendors, they welcome and they want us to do this kind of installations ourself. Of course, we outsource it to third parties, but we manage it, and we are comfortable to continue that. This is a picture overall for of 2025 dynamics.
Geographically, basically, yeah, we already reported that we developed back in 2024 our distribution. Most of the development to support the growth from distribution infrastructure standpoint, we completed in 2024. In 2025, the only project was, I mean, the project which was serious, we build up 20,000 sq mi distribution center in Kazakhstan, in Almaty, to support the growth in that area. You know, Kazakhstan is the biggest country by revenue for group, driven by Apple, but not only lately. In Kazakhstan, we also do data center business, data center infrastructure development business. In terms of geography, we already announced, I just highlight that, yeah, this year, in next quarter actually, we plan to start local operations in Saudi Arabia. Market is big.
We wanted to be there. We already have the business there, serving from Emirates, we see good opportunity to operate locally. Also next quarter, we're starting operations in two more countries. In Northwest Africa is Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire. We started, after studies and analytics and agreements with the vendors that they will support it, so we open these two local operations as well. That's up-update from geography standpoint, right? About startups of ours, look, the update is that all of them are alive. All of them still promise and develop best-in-class technologies to impress the world. Most of them started to sell their products, right? NRSL and Clevetura and others. Yeah.
Clevetura, they mainly sell in the U.S. market because the keyboards are quite expensive, and user price is like EUR 200. It's well adopted and accepted in the U.S. They do there. They also starting in Western Europe and in Middle East. Basically, we may be looking for partial exit starting this year or with Clevetura and DISPO. We'll see. Others are growing. Let them grow. That's update on the startups. We don't plan to buy more, we manage this, what we got. Corporate updates. Okay. This light is here again. Basically, yeah. What I have to say, interim dividend payment November 2024. You know that. New iSpace store in Moldova and Bang & Olufsen flagship store in California. Okay.
Let us talk more about retail business unit. Basically, you guys heard from us and knew that, okay, this ASBIS, on one hand is B2B company, that we have Apple stores somewhere in CIS countries, et cetera. Let me give you full picture. What is a retail business unit now in ASBIS Group? It's not only 58 doors what we have already. We position and we develop it as a premium and luxury retail business unit. And it is growing nicely, and it's not only Apple anymore. On premium side, we have acquired recently, and from January of this year, it's already in ASBIS Group, these certain stores of Samsung premium mono-brand retail here in Poland. And we will grow number of stores. I don't have picture yet, how many.
Bang & Olufsen, this is luxury. Again, it's luxury mono-brand retail with very interesting clientele to serve because through this we serve high net worth individuals and upper middle class. We already have 3 in CIS countries. We have two in South Africa, two in Italy, in Milano particularly, and one in San Francisco in California, which we opened in December of last year. In California, it's only beginning. In next three months, we are opening three more stores, one in West Hollywood in Los Angeles, flagship store, one in Palo Alto, Stanford, and 1 satellite store in Orange County. With this, we believe that setup in California will be good enough for us, and this is our first expansion to the U.S. market.
Through this retail business unit, we decided to learn how to deal with this U.S. market. In my dream, I thought that I was naive enough to believe that they have everything so easy to do business. No, no administration hassles, et cetera. Very simple taxes and everything computerized. No way. It's so complicated, right? Everything is, yeah, it's settled already. Yeah, we have good first experience. We manage it well. This gave actually global scale and setup to this retail business unit. Our retail business unit become global, U.S., Africa, Europe, Central Asia. We plan to support the growth of it. It is profitable business for us as well, and completely new business unit, which we had recently after board approved in September.
We, you know, we developed this robo cafes and robo pubs, robo bars and et cetera. We aiming, we're selling to third parties to operate. After we saw, I mean, they raised my attention as well on P&L projections of conducting this business. We like it. It's not only because of our technology, but because business model is good. Return on investment on this expensive coffee machine or kiosk be it more than 1.5 year . Then very high margin on coffee market. I did not expect, and it's growing market. We do really also premium coffee.
It's barista quality coffee, our baristas, they are not get tired, do not compromise after first two, three hours of work. They do consistently 24 by 7. We populate it in the right locations. It's hospitals, it's universities, it's malls, and other public locations with good traffic, big office areas as well. We tested and piloted already last year. This year we are very comfortable. We focus our with our own retail to operate this retail business unit on our own in Emirates, particularly Dubai, because we do activations by cities, not by countries. We need to have good economy of scale. We need minimum five machine per city, because each machine requires service. Yeah, we have one here in Poland we are piloting.
We see which will be demand here. For sure, Emirates and Cyprus and Saudi Arabia, we already know, and it's matter of population. Production is there. And we are minimum 24 more kiosks. What I like is retail is detail, right? Retail is location, and location, right? Unlike brick-and-mortar store, this one I can put forklift, in 24 hours move to another location if this location doesn't work for me, right? Good business model on that. That's what I wanted to update you about this retail business unit, why we want to develop it, what we want to do with that, right? We don't have particular product yet. However, we see is that this retail business unit, it's good subject to spin off on IPO in three, four years from now.
That's our strategic object. Okay, I mentioned about B&O and opening of these new stores in California, and they have the major thing that we operate on platform. We have lots of sensors. It's lots of automation. We measure traffic in front of the locations. It's really well automated business unit. And the machines as well. We have predictive analytics of the health of the machines as well. We not only see to use it ourself, we sell it to others already. We finished development mid of last year. For second half of last year, we started populating them. We had production here in Poland.
It didn't work well. We moved production actually to Dubai because we see more demand as well from that market. Logistically makes sense for us, but also it's too expensive here in Poland. Top line, last quarter, 35% growth. Mainly, again, it was combination of strong Apple, because it's big, it give serious impact. The data center building blocks or components, which is fastest growth driver for us, the biggest contributor to the growth. You know, we've been more or less, we've been flat last previous year years, from 2021. 2022 war in Ukraine. 2023 issues with Kazakhstan, right? 2024 again, Kazakhstan, we were like more or less flat. Now, from 2025 or in 2025, you see 28% growth year-on-year.
We are of course very happy, and it's also good growth on profit margin and bottom line result as well. Main markets or contribution by markets, Kazakhstan is still biggest single country in terms of top line. It's not only Apple, it's already in Kazakhstan, we complete several projects on AI data centers, it is first phase, so we have projects to continue in 2026. Consider businesses. Sometime it's very nice when you get $50 million-$60 million to your bank account in one day. That boop. It's big work behind it, of course, but we have strong teams to do it.
Now we have comfort to also to support and to conduct installations. In Ukraine, it was also very good growth despite environment where they are, because lately they are Russians even more active with missile attacks and drone attacks on Kyiv. Fortunately, everybody in our team, nobody got injured or nobody got problem. I admire our Ukrainian team. They're very strong, and they develop, and they're very motivated to do business, and they do it. Good growth in Poland thanks to the team and Przemysław and Jozef, who also supervise it as a Regional VP. About Taiwan, basically I want to clarify, Taiwan is not final destination for IT components.
Basically, we have order from data center, which could be Europe or Middle East, but we supply components for these orders to known makers of servers in Taiwan. Then they deliver to our customers. That's why, because our transactions to Taiwan, you see Taiwan, but in fact, it's not that we are supplying Taiwan market. Yeah. By geographies, if you look... I'm very happy also to see and to share with you that every region grew quite coherently, right? About 30%, Central Eastern Europe and Middle East and West Europe and CIS, right? In others, it's again, it's data center components. Because we supply again, the owners of the data centers would be U.S. companies, but they build data centers in Europe, right?
They build data centers in Central Asia, or they build data centers in the Gulf area, right? In EU as well, every single member state got budgets to build AI data centers, and it will continue, we believe, for next five years. 'Cause this AI era and AI saga, we need to be careful about that, need of computing infrastructure is there. It's not short term. It's long term. It's minimum 5+ year . In terms of product categories, yeah, smartphones good growth eventually. The biggest is, again, the server blocks and components. This is, yeah, number one growth driver for Group in 2025.
Basically, you know, we ASBIS, are for decades, we are IT distributor of components and building blocks for not only for computing, but for servers, for data center equipment or for data center infrastructure. In CPU, we are strong and with AMD and with Intel, and now we work with NVIDIA. We don't buy directly from NVIDIA, but for our project, they supply CPUs to Supermicro, and Supermicro provide us finished servers. Every single project, lots of documentation, releases from U.S. Chamber of Commerce, et cetera. Again, we do it. We have all processes in place. We have teams in place and competencies, and we continue that. For AMD and for Intel, we are number one, number two in EMEA.
That's why we being leading distributor, they comfortable to, to give us projects also because we have expertise and now we do it. On SSD and hard drives we have all major brands for decades, starting from Seagate with who we are from 1992 in distribution. It was my first distribution agreement actually. Then Samsung, Kingston, Western Digital, SanDisk, et cetera. We have multiple brand for that. For RAM we have multiple manufacturers, and that's what plays a role because in this time of severe shortage, being working with different manufacturers, we manage to provide supply to customers of ours. That's what they value. That's what they like. We like because in the time of shortage, it also allow us to gain a little bit more premium, right?
Your sole margin of ours. We are in a good position to continue to support the growth, being one-stop shop in that area. Okay, we have Dell and HP. We have Dell in six or seven countries. HP Enterprise we have in two or three countries only. We have Supermicro in every country where we operate, and they support us. I tell you that if you look analytical reports for AI data centers, Supermicro is already bigger than Dell worldwide from 2025. This vendor become critically important for us, and we have this, we cooperate with this vendor in more than 25 countries. Right. NVIDIA, we did not work with them before.
As I said, we don't buy from them directly. We work very closely with them in every region. It's win-win because they navigate us also for new projects, and they got good level of comfort of working with us, cooperating with us, right? We are getting the deals and projects. Right. Another good thing, if you move to next slide, please, is that we manage the growth without growing number of employees. In fact, it was 24, if I remember, or 30 people less than end of 2024 because we have established teams. For that we don't need extra staff. The only employees where we grow it's in the new business units.
It's U.S. operations or populations like we opening in Africa or in Saudi Arabia. It give us opportunity to gain economy of scale going forward, right. As SG&A expenses, they grew, but they grew because many compensation packages are linked to gross profit or net profit commissions, but they are variable respectively. We have good setup from this perspective as well. Now, that's it from my side so far. Costas, can you take care of.
Yes, Siarhei.
Oh, glad we hear you, my friend.
You hear me well?
Absolutely.
Very good. Okay, guys, it's not only the weather that I saw, but also LOT Polish Airlines decided that I will not fly to you. It's good to see you all. Thank you very much for being there. I will try and give you some more flavor on our financials, although Siarhei said almost everything. If we touch a bit the networking capital, we will see that not only the group delivered a very good result on revenue and profitability, but also to the other extremely important KPI of ours, which is cash flow. We managed during this intensive quarter four to deliver super revenues, but even a much better cash flow.
We managed to turn around the company and deliver more than $200 million of cash from operating activities, ending the year with a stunning $155 million from operating activities. Not to mention the extremely strong cash position of the company at the end of the year. This, I repeat, is a result of the group being able to take opportunities but also excel in operational efficiency. Of a relief on the financial condition of the company, literally a zero-gear company that we are today with very little reliance on debt. This makes the company rock solid from all perspectives, given that our net position, if we exclude factoring, is almost zero or negative.
Ability of the company to obtain financing is at its best, plus, financial cost, weighted average cost of debt for the year went down from 9.9- 8.5. When compared to 2024. I repeat, this is a clear indication of how important for us is to have not only strong profitability, but managing internally our cash flows and our financial expenses as well.
2026 outlook, you can read this from a screen, but what I want to say how we see it. Very dynamic. On Apple, we see, and we started quite well. We see double-digit growth this year, meaning from $1.8 billion last year to close to $2.2 billion. It is shortage, at least, they say that shortage till end of this quarter. I believe it will be longer because shortage most probably driven by shortage of a memory because all memory worldwide, all memory producers worldwide, they move to make server memory today. It's massive, right? But we manage supply. Team make a great job on that.
Major driver of growth going forward, we see again, the continue with components and building blocks for data centers infrastructure. You saw most probably top line growth in January, 78% if I recall. Yeah, we don't promise every month like that. Don't take us wrong. Yeah, we see strong demand so far, but we oversee two, three months ahead. As I said, business is so dynamic. The memory prices update every week. They can grow 10%, 20%. We cannot secure any contract with data center owners on the price. They must accept the price of that time when they need supply. If they don't accept, they're out of the game. Today nobody in the world can predict, including Tim Cook. Everybody pay new market price.
Same time, we see that supply-demand ratio is 80%, meaning we get supply. Not 100%, but we like this kind of terms and conditions because it allow us again to gain a bit more premium on the products. When industry will move from undersupply to oversupply, finally say after 2030. Same time, I have to say my personal take and my personal opinion that valuations of AI companies are huge and corrections may take place. It may reduce demand to build new data centers because in fact, cost of data centers, it's already more than 2x more expensive than a year ago. Companies when they plan to build data centers, right, they will calculate. Yes, I mean, okay, many of you are analysts.
You follow this AI saga and AI-driven demand. Yes, AI is new era. And it is huge technological competition between U.S., China, Europe, and everyone want to get a pie in this thing because if you're not supporting AI going forward, then your economy risk to be I mean, such economies risks to be behind, right? But what I said, I repeat, fundamental need in the data center infrastructure is huge. Not short term, minimum five years, if not more, right? And if Chinese or Americans or Europeans will succeed actually to let humanoid robots what they say are will serve us soon, right? And we will have here lots of humanoid robots to serve us, right?
It requires so completely different level of data computing, right? I will buy my first humanoid robot, probably next quarter from China. We want to try it, right? We as ASBIS, in era of humanoid robot, our strategy is following. You know, in time of gold rush, one of the good businesses is to sell shovels. Shovels.
Yeah.
Yeah. Everybody know that. We don't aim to design humanoid robots, but we designed already, we producing, we started production actually here in Poland for last quarter, actuators, motors for humanoid robots. Our motors are well-demanded. Market is small yet, but, yeah, in couple of years we see it will be growing exponentially. Yeah, we supply. Today, I would tell you, the motors cost of hardware of humanoid robot today is 60%. Majority of cost of hardware of humanoid robot is my shuffles, my motors. Yeah. We do better motor than the Chinese, etcetera so far. Yeah, that's what we do. It's small business today, but everything was small one day. Yeah.
To summarize, today name of the game for ASBIS is to support this growth mainly for AI data centers. Support it financially, support it with from risk management standpoint, support it from supply. To support the growth, we need bigger credit lines, we need to control more Forex, etc., and we are very comfortable to do it. We do it. Yes, Marios and Costas and the IT distribution team, they're very busy weekly and daily sometime, right? This is our core business. We know how to do it. We did it for years, right? We continue. We have right fundamentals. We are one-stop shop. We have right contracts, which we do to succeed to get years ago. We have right processes, we have right team.
That's what I want to tell you and share with you about outlook of 2026. Costas, if you'd like to add something.
Siarhei, I think you covered it all, and, yeah, I think we are ready to take any questions our guests have.
I have a simple question on tax rate. Probably Pillar Two is appropriate to you, at least as [crosstalk]
We lived through that already. Costas or Marios, you take it? Pillar Two.
The question is the tax rate is quite high. It's 21.5%. It's over 20%. Pretty high, right? Is there any possibility to reduce it in the future or do something about it, or will it remain like this in the future?
Marios, you take?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a good observation. Given the introduction of Pillar Two full impact in 2025, we expected the effective tax rate of the group to increase, where we are sitting before with that with an effective tax rate of about 18%. Now we are sitting with rightly said, about 22%. We are trying different directions. We are running different projects with tax experts to legitimately see what else refinements we can effect to further reduce that 22%. If one, and especially this is addressing the investors and the analysts who want to draw their projections, I would ask them to assume 22%. Though we may see certain improvements, I believe that 22% is a fair effective tax rate to plan on.
You had extremely nice revenues in January. Can you tell a little bit more what's behind that? Whether we [crosstalk]
It's combination. The major contributor again, the data centers, component, projects. Also Apple was with 25% growth year-over-year. I like shortages when I have supply during shortage.
Yeah. Of course.
We managed it so far. Yeah, and consumer distribution also showed growth, double digit, low double digit but growth, right? That's what was behind.
So this [crosstalk]
This project
should like triple digit growth, yes? Okay. Like the nearest months, do you expect this trend like to continue?
We oversee. Okay, we almost finished February with, right? We publish when we publish.
It was very strong as well. Right? We oversee two, three months ahead.
Yes.
Maximum. As I said, it's very dynamic market. There are many projects, we supply only what we can supply so far. That's why, yeah, prospects are good.
Okay. you say that you sell like a lot of NVIDIA's GPUs, but you don't do it directly with.
We sell servers on GPUs. GPUs-based servers, yeah.
Like is it possible to have a direct business relationship with them or like?
We don't need it. I mean, we have direct business development with them. Their sales team work with my sales team on every project, right? It's very transparent between us. Do I need to buy or I have saga to buy GPU from NVIDIA? I still need somebody to build a server, right? We're not building servers on GPU, right? It's anyway to go to Supermicro. Sure.
Okay. In the financial statement, we've seen that U.S. market appear like in top 10 markets they pick in fourth quarter. It's same like Taiwan, so we like you buy their, like, players over there buying.
U.S. market.
I think it was U.S.
Yeah, we sell IT components to U.S. companies. The components go somewhere in Europe, Nordic, Scandinavia, Finland, Norway.
Okay.
Yeah.
You also have, like, impressive growth in Germany. Can you say.
Similar story.
Same story. Okay.
Yeah.
I think the last question for me, costs. General costs, they increased a lot with like some sort of reserves or something else.
Combination. Costas, maybe you take it.
I take the. There are three major reasons for the increase of expenses or SG&A, yes? The first, obviously the most obvious one is that we deliver more gross profit, more net profit, we pay more compensations to the.
Commission
Indirect or to the people that are getting commissions, and salaries based on the performance. The second very important factor, if we take all the expenses of 2024 and we extrapolate the exchange rate of the local entities, we used to run in December 2024, EUR to dollar rate 1.05 as opposed to 1.18 in end of 2025. These are the two major ones, plus we didn't have offices in the U.S., in Italy, in Saudi, in Uzbekistan with multiple expenditure there that have not been delivering as yet to the group. These are the three major reasons of the increased expenditure.
Okay. Maybe the last one, the gross margin, it's improved significantly. Do you expect, like, further improvements in the near future because of what's happening in the memory and the short supply, not only in memory, but as well in Apple? Is, like, possible for the gross margin in the first or second quarter to reach eight or something?
We'll see.
To have.
It's possible. It depend again. It's only driven by supply-demand ratio, right? Including Apple. Apple doesn't allow us to gain much price, to raise prices much.
Yes.
it being like 40%, being 40% of our revenue, right? It's serious part which you cannot, we gain a little bit, but you cannot gain much. However, with IT distribution and respectively these components will be more flexible. It is possible.
Hello. Congrats on your results.
Hello, Piotr. Y ou addressed one of my questions regarding tax rate. I also wonder about using of factoring. Why do you use factoring to such a extent, whereas your cash position is so strong? Does the conditions of this factoring is better than keeping cash? Or, I mean the potential, alternative for using of factoring is, using your cash bill.
Piotr [crosstalk]
Like total 2%-3% yearly.
I don't see, but I recognize the voice of Piotr Grzybowski. Thank you for the question. Factoring, which we see there, it is used for us as a very good tool to hedge our positions, especially in countries where we cannot really have much or any other financial tools to hedge.
Tools to hedge, yeah.
Yes, we have enough cash, but factoring is necessary from our side in order to turn the local balance sheet into the same currency and save ourselves from exchange rate movements. In addition to that, factoring is used in multiple other countries to pull cash early and pay and gain on early payment discounts. If you remember, our factoring lines used to be much highly utilized in the past years. What we need is what we use, and the major reason is mostly to hedge our local balance sheets.
Okay. It's complementary to drawing adapt in the currency that you operate in.
Look, factoring, like Costas said, is extremely important tool for us for hedging local currencies.
Understood. Thanks. The perfection concerns guidance for 2026. I don't expect any fixed numbers for now, but do you even plan to publish any guidance for 2026?
Look,
[crosstalk] Taking into account the current situation.
Exactly
Geopolitical and financial.
Look, first of all, let's see that first year ASBIS did not provide forecast, we grew significantly. It's a joke, but, look, our position as I said, today it is so dynamic market. As soon as we see it's, like, more settling and it is more clear, we will come back and we'll provide forecast. We remember that, and, we work like that. For time being, we are not ready.
You said in the past that you don't expect to that the revenues from data centers will increase, will overtake your revenues from smartphones or Apple components. What is your approach now? Has something changed?
When did I say that?
Oh, maybe-
I did, Siarhei.
Oh, you did. Okay.
Yeah. You know what? It
How does the situation looks now?
Different. Yeah. Look, the growth of this data-centric equipment, it is, like you said, not double-digit. It's sometime triple-digit. It's not small business for us as well, right? Already in terms of revenue for Group, that's why. It may be bigger, right? Same time, again, we are on a smartphone segment, the segment itself, it doesn't grow anymore, right? We are gaining share. We are growing because we are on emerging markets. But the growth is between 20%-30%. That's what you see. Yeah. A good question.
Maybe now, a question regarding more, the financial statement. Did you have an write-offs in quarter four that's affected P&L?
We had some write-offs, but nothing outside the ordinary course of business. We had some bad debts to write off. We had some provisions for inventories, but nothing extraordinary.
In general, what was the amount of this write-offs?
It is, I don't recall the number, exactly, but it was between $1 million and $1.2 million, where it was budgeted before.
Provisions were a bit more. Yeah.
maybe 1.5.
Yeah. I will follow up on this if you couldn't mind. Because if you compare an report for fourth quarter with the prior one for third quarter, actually the provision for the inventories increased by $3.3 million, which is quite high in my opinion. For receivables, $3.8 million. Is there some inconsistency or... I'm talking about the increase of provision for current year. It's total-
Yeah.
If we mix this together, it's $7 million. It's pretty much, I would say.
All right. Look, the question I answered-
Mm-hmm
was referring to quarter four standalone.
Yeah.
Now you're referring to the overall year, yes?
No, no.
Yes.
Change between third quarter and fourth quarter.
Uh-huh
I cannot see fourth quarter alone, but I can see the change, how the provision changed.
Uh-huh.
The change in fourth quarter alone for inventories, $3.3, for receivables, $3.8, which is quite high.
The whole picture.
I think you're looking at the year. Yeah?
Year total.
I comp-
Uh-huh
... prior report with current report.
Second report.
Okay. Don't...
The provision for obsolete stock in note 13.
Mm-hmm.
Yes?
Mm-hmm.
That's what you see, right? We see the same thing, right?
Yes.
It was 9.6.
Wait, wait. That's.
It was, that one.
... those provisions into that.
There is a $3.7 provision for the year, yes?
Yes, after three quarters, it's been 0 before, and now it's 3.7 as you mentioned. Exactly.
Uh-huh
... is 3.3.
Still movements.
look, we can provide you analysis for that.
Okay.
I repeat, we did not have one-offs. Usually our provisions are coming into the towards the end of the year. All right? We accumulate and we make them at the end of the year. My Marios and myself, we make sure that we send you analysis for both inventories and receivables, so you can see. Yeah, we resolve this.
Perfect. Thank you very much. Maybe one last question for the interest expenses.
Mm-hmm
... the math itself has been rather stable between last quarter and this quarter at this end of it, the interest expenses increased quite materially. I think everybody noticed worse financial result. I mean, as a result from financial activities. Why have interest expenses increased in fourth quarter? Why was the financial result worse?
The question about Q4 increasing interest expense
Yes
... I think, Piotr mentioned it earlier. It's cheaper to borrow on a cash line versus on the factoring line. To the extent we borrow in hard currencies.
Namely EUR and USD. You know, we buy, we borrow this money more cheaply, therefore, we have a tendency to use throughout the year. This is representing the quarter and the year. We borrow more from overdrafts and from loans. Yeah. We do use factoring. We do need factoring in the countries because of the range, reasons mentioned earlier. Given the huge growth exceeding $800 million in the course of 2025, we had to grow the lines, and we had to increase the utilization of these cash lines. This brings the increased interest expense shown on note 7 of the financial statement.
Okay.
Yeah. I have one more question. You write in the financial statement about entering new markets in Africa. I'm just wondering whether it's other material, in terms of...
It will start, so this year we'll be starting here. We selected to enter locally, Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire because our analytics showed and our practice showed this is two most transparent markets where we can do a local operations. We want to have a base there in that part of North Africa to supply other countries from there, not only locally. It will not be material this year. It's, it's starting here.
Okay. Next year, potentially, just to understand what's, what kind of business you are fighting for.
Wait. In couple of months we will make announcement.
Okay. Thank you.
Can you tell something more about your investments and generally cooperation with Olaf, with Bang & Olufsen? You are making a very big investments.
Mm-hmm.
What is the percentage of sales or profits? Is it just idea to support ASBIS?
We distribute Bang & Olufsen products exclusively in 40 countries. In Africa, Eastern Europe, Middle East, and former Soviet Union. Business itself, it's about $40 million business for group with good double-digit margin. We also see that to conduct retail, it's quite interesting for us as a part of our premium and luxury retail business unit strategy. For us, it's also good way to penetrate new markets which are not known to us. Like I say, U.S. In Italy, we also started with this retail business unit, but we learn how to conduct business, and we learn it quite fast because connections also what we get through B&O business is quite interesting.
Do you have a idea of increased business with Samsung after this buying shops in Poland?
Yeah. Look, again, first, yes, we do have midterm, because, okay, Breezy already have contracts with Samsung on second life products, but this is a bit different. However, we need six months now to make sure that we fix all basics in this business unit what we got in from January, right? Because it was good interesting business unit, but it was heavily undercapitalized here in Poland, right? We already provide an I think double credit lines with Samsung for this business unit here in Poland, right? Yeah, now we more and more often we talk with Samsung on different level.
On different market
... yes, and for different markets as well. We have established good dialogue with Samsung now because now we are in a business.
It will be competition between Apple and Samsung here.
Apple and CIS. I don't have Apple for Eastern Europe.
Uh.
We try not to mix up.
Given the higher prices of RAMs and, maybe it could switch to other components as well, what inflation do you expect in midterm, 2026?
Inflation.
On your total portfolio.
I didn't get the question actually. Inflation in terms of what?
Your unit prices.
That I don't know. nobody know. We just, yeah, start every Monday with a new price list from the vendor. Yeah. It cannot be forever. These prices growth mean a huge incremental cost for data centers. AI guys who uses data centers, right? Question, do they have enough business or for how many years they have to extend return on investment? I mean, it's not so flexible with it. Yeah. That's why I said it's a very interesting question. Yeah, we monitor the situation. Again, our job, we supply to demand what we have. Yeah. I hope it will be less than last year, because last year is triple the cost of RAM for servers.
That's why every maker of memory, they switch from memory for computers or smartphones to build memories for servers because they gain so much additional premium. Memory makers and big corporations, they building up new factories for memory. It will take couple of years, we need to monitor when it will be oversupply. We've been in the industry many years. We face under supply situation and oversupply situation, right? Again, we are living in the era when this AI is not just future, it's next to us. Every country, every region, doesn't want to lose competitive advantage, not to use this AI assistance on agents and predictive AI. Yeah. Right? It's a big game between China, US, Europe.
No, we go with the questions first, and then I will make a comment actually.
Guys, I need to leave in five minutes.
Regarding your business activities like AROS, Breezy, and operations in South Africa, could you give us some color on the revenues and net result that these businesses made in 2025?
South Africa in 2025 was $50 million. Breezy was about $100 million. AROS we just started. AROS is not big. It's about $10 million, but with margin 30%-40%.
Okay. That's where I understand the revenues. What about net results of these businesses? Are they profitable?
Okay. AROS should be profitable from 2026. Breezy was still in investment mode, but we easily can gain profit from Breezy. Our strategy is to expand and to get bigger pie. If now we expanding in Europe, we expanding in Africa, and it's very fast growing sector. It's not small anymore. For us, it's more important to gain an increased portion of a pie for us, meaning markets. Yeah. It doesn't eat much of our cheese.
Could you give some rough numbers of these losses that Breezy and AROS made in 2045?
For Aros, I don't remember. probably we better... Costas, do you remember or we better answer-?
I do not. Piotr, I will be happy to share with you.
We will send you analysis, more precise. I don't want to speculate of it.
In last years, you were developing a lot of many new businesses. Did you close any of them?
Well, do you mean startups or what kind of business?
Yes. I'm thinking about different businesses you started. You started to develop. If you decided to close any of it.
Look, On AROS, on robotic, we started to work on 6 or 8 different kind of solutions. Now we narrow it down to 3. Yeah.
Your own brands like Prestigio and, or Canyon, they're still developing, yes?
Yes, they still develop. Okay. Prestigio. Prestigio is, how to say, is in a incubator. In incubator now, we actually we don't have much of expenses. Right? It is very small. AENO is growing. It's all domestic appliances. Lorgar gaining. We finish all developments last year. Already we start selling from end of last year. And, yeah, they predict as good growth. Small business still, but good growth this year. And it's more loud and well-received by customers, by retailers. Canyon was kind of flat. It's accessories, mobile accessories, et cetera. For this year, we see good growth opportunity with Canyon. But again, it's, h ow to say free, safe, about $20 million visits.
Additional question about Breezy. Do you believe that Breezy can benefit from these trends on the market with increasing prices of memory and smart costs as well?
Piotr, I'm not sure whether Breezy would benefit from increases in memory given that it will inflate the number, the absolute number of the devices. The nature of second life products, it's also a price sensitivity included there. I would be more neutral as opposed to positive with these increases in memory.
Okay. I thought that it can be more appealing for customers to buy a discount, used products because of increased prices of the new ones.
The new ones, if we see... First of all, we haven't seen inflationary pressures on brand-new smartphone devices yet, all right? All I'm trying to say is that if it will happen and a brand-new smartphone will cost from $1,500-$2,000 or EUR 1,500-EUR 2,000, and then the second life will become from $500-$800 or EUR 500-EUR 800, which again makes it less affordable given the fact that the purchasing power of people will not grow so fast.
Yes. Maybe, I have also the question, can you maybe once again comment on the gross profit margin, which showed a very good increase quarter-on-quarter? My question is if it's, if it stems from the inflation on your inventory or maybe better, good purchases, or maybe you managed to increase the margin on data centers?
It's a multilayer effect. Yes. Part of it is because of shortages. Let me tell you that for the big projects that we had pre-agreed pricing, there is no chance that you can come in and raise the price in the middle of the project. You sell at the price you have agreed. However, now what this boom has created, has created an adjustment of pricing almost weekly. By next week, you get better pricing, and you might get an arbitrage and make a better gross profit margin.
I want to remind us what we have been discussing in June, July, and then September or November when we met, the ability of the group to bundle and sell more products, higher margin products when it sells to all these big data center providers, because that time it was mostly SSDs and hard disks for servers. Memory became extremely fashionable, extremely demanded. Because we have the portfolio, because we are the one-stop shop for these clients, we have the ability to bundle and increase our gross profit margin, taking also the advantage of shortages, of the price movements and the inflationary pressures, as well as the extremely high demand that it is around us. It's a combination of factors that drove the gross profit margin up.
I repeat, and I want us to again to remind that during Q2 of last year, when we announced the 6.67% gross profit margin, we said and we declared that we believe that we reached the bottom on that respect. That's why in Q3 was higher. Yes, in Q4 was much higher. Q1 in front of us, having seen this growth and having seen how the demand is around us, we are very optimistic. Like Siarhei said before, we cannot be certain for what's gonna happen from a period of more than 3 months now.
Far as I remember in quarter two, you said that gross margin for data servers was around 4%. Does the current situation allow you to increase this margin up to maybe 5%?
Yes. Yes. This, the current situation allows for higher gross profit margins on these product segments.
Maybe can you comment on the situation in Kazakhstan regarding the illegal competition? Any changes?
Yes. Situation in Kazakhstan is better than it used to be quarter one last year, much better, but it's not optimal. The situation with illegal traders is there. Some of them went out of business, but some new ones appeared. We know how to work with them. We learn how finally to work with them. The reality is that the exchange rates outside Kazakhstan did not help them recently, so they cannot buy cheaper, much cheaper from outside and get also the advantage of illicit importation. This is why we are in a position to gain some more market share given that, also the email registration legislation came in. We are optimistic that if this situation will continue and the government really imposes all these strict controls, we can be on the winning side of things.
I repeat, the situation is better, not, the optimal we want to see yet.
That's good. Thank you.
I'm, I have a question regarding the shortages in memories and SSDs. AB during the conference today said that the memory producer, it will take more or less two years to build new factories. Do you expect at least two years of shortages or what is your market expectation in these terms?
I confirm that the ability of manufacturers to build a full scale manufacturing plant is between 18-24 months. Now, the statement that they did is valid and we also confirm it. However, the demand and how and where these manufactured modules will go is very important. If it will only go to the data centers and it will create a shortage either on PC computing or on laptops or on all these segments, then we will see an anomaly in the market. All right? However, from what we see, memory makers that weren't so important in the past, now they've become more and more important. What Siarhei said before, the demand to supply ratio is 80%.
For every 100% there is a demand, there is 80% supply, which is not a bad thing in our days. At least we get 80% ratio. I don't know about any others, so I cannot speak for them. It's a matter of fact that memory is today like gold in our markets.
Basically these two years should be in, should put ASBIS in very good positions as you're a big supplier and probably you have some advantages in the supply of the goods as far as I can understand this. Yes?
We have the official distributorship, which makes us, puts us on the priority list to get supply. All right? We have the advantage that with one bill two, the suppliers get access into multiple markets. Therefore, yes, de facto we have an advantage to get the supply. Now, what the situation will be in the next two years, three years, nobody obviously can predict. A potential conflict in Iran might change things dramatically and might postpone things dramatically because we don't know how the overall situation might look like. As a general statement, we are optimistic on what the situation can be going forward. We close it. I once again apologize for not being there. Thank you very much for everything.