Fielmann Group Ag U/Adr

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and a warm welcome to today's analyst and investor call of the Fehlmann Group AG following the publication of the financial year figures of 2024 and the first quarter results of 2025. And with this, I'm happy to hand over to Fehlmann CFO Steffen Betje.

Yeah, thank you very much, Sarah and everybody. Hello and welcome. Good afternoon or good morning to the US and welcome to our first Earnings Call in 2025. I'm here with Mark Fehlmann, our CEO. Most of you know me. I'm Stefan Baecher, Fehlmann Group's CFO. And as I said, I'm here with Mark today and I'm going to hand over to him for an introduction to the company and to our financial year 2024 results.

Hello everybody from my side as well. Warm welcome. Thanks for joining today's call. We will give you a very short update here in the beginning about our group. I'll keep this really brief because most of you do actually know Fielmann Group already quite well. So I'll keep the introduction short. and then we'll hand over to the main points of today which is of course the 2024 full year numbers and the Q1 numbers and obviously we'll have plenty of time afterwards after we presented our vision 2025 which will conclude this year as you know And then afterwards, we're going to have plenty of time for your questions. Just a very quick run through of who the Fielmann Group is. We are a globally active vision care and audiology provider. So that means we are mainly active in optical retail, associated health care activities, primary eye care and audiology. Audiology we only do in Europe Vision Care we actually do in Europe and the United States. We count currently 29 million active customers. We have a great big family of 24,000 team members all across the world. We regularly record customer satisfaction rates of 90% and above. So that's customers saying that they are happy or very happy with us and the company generated 2.3 billion last year. In terms of geographic breakdown, here you see a bit of an overview of where we are active. So these are our sales, our retail markets. In the middle, you see the sales split down by countries. As you can see, Germany is still our biggest market with 63%, followed by Switzerland 10%, Spain 9%, U.S. 9%. Mind you, We have only consolidated half a year of Schopko Optical last year. So the US will actually become our second biggest market this year. And the international market sales share is already at 40% in Q1. Other than the countries I've mentioned, we also are active in Austria with 4% and then all the other markets in Europe. So here we're talking about Poland, we're talking about Italy, we're talking about further markets in Eastern Europe. They make up another 5% of our sales split. Looking at the right hand side of this chart, you can see our market position. Traditionally, our legacy markets where we are still very, very strong with the market leader in the German speaking markets. So that's around 100 million inhabitants, of course, very wealthy countries. We hold a very strong number two position in Spain, a market that we've entered around five years ago. did two acquisitions, one in 2020 and then another one a couple years later. We are a very strong number two and we expect to take over market leadership in the medium term. Eastern Europe, we are number two in the overall market. There's individual markets where we are leading and in Italy we're number three. Looking at the left hand side, you see our market position in the United States, by far the largest vision care market in the whole world. Here, just two years after entering the market, we have become the market leader in the upper Midwest. So that is a market leading position in states like Michigan and Wisconsin. And again, we have a pretty strong number two or three positions if you look a little bit further towards the West. So upper Midwestern states were number two in Nebraska, in Minnesota, And we have a strong position in the Dakotas. And so this is the areas we feel pretty confident in the Midwest. And we think that we will take over market leadership in further United States in the coming years. We're not only a vision care provider and a retailer of products, but we are actually also a manufacturer. So the Fielmann Group has its own product development, design and also manufacturing organization, actually a pretty large organization. And we are highlighting this chart because I would suppose that many of you would want to know how the tariff situation affects us. So this chart is to show you guys that we actually have a manufacturing footprint across three continents. This manufacturing footprint makes us pretty flexible. In general terms, we do manufacture our main products in the countries that we are active in or in the geography. So let's say in Europe we manufacture for Europe, in the US we manufacture for the US. and we have a bigger joint venture in China, in Danyang, which is the city for ophtalmic lenses. All prescription eyewear that we dispense in the United States is actually manufactured in the United States and a large share of our ophtalmic lenses is also manufactured in the United States. where we have two facilities, one manufacturing facility in Detroit, Michigan, another one in Green Bay, United States. Those are pretty automated and very modern facilities. I'm not going to go through all manufacturing facilities, but this is basically just to tell you that we manufacture where we are present. And this is why the direct impact, and Stefan will speak a little bit more to this later, but the direct impact of the tariffs on the Fielmann Group, specifically in the United States, is very, very limited. And again, Stefan will say a little bit more to the extent of it. With that, we come to the agenda of today. We're going to walk you through the financial year. Just a quick sum up. I'm going to speak to some highlights. Stefan's going to walk you through the main numbers. We're going to then speak about the Q1 numbers. We're going to give you an outlook of 2025 and we'll wrap up by having a look back on the last five years of the Vision 2025. And as you will see, We have already reached or exceeded all goals and the last remaining goal, the profitability goal, is something we feel super comfortable in achieving this year. Let's start with the financial year 2024. Here's just some highlights. As you know, our most important KPI is on the top, customer satisfaction. We're very proud with all the change, change both from the outside and from inside our company that we have maintained a record high level of 90% in customer satisfaction across all major markets. Last year, we grew the top line to 2.3 billion. That's a 15% top line growth, about half of it organic, half of it due to the acquisition consolidations. We reached 491 million in adjusted EBITDA. That's a 23% year on year earnings growth. I think really nice also the fact that it's disproportionate so means that it was a significant margin extension yet again our international sales made a huge jump to 833 million so the total growth was 33 percent last year obviously driven by our US acquisitions but also a lot of other international markets performed really well and we're going to show you the numbers just in a bit of time iHealth checkups. This is our new telemedical offering in Europe is actually something that is growing exponentially, as I will show you in a minute. It's only been available in three countries so far. We've just started it in the recent years and it's growing a lot. And this is one of the ways that we actually move more into the direction of being a healthcare provider, a vision care provider in healthcare. Let's have a look at this last point about the healthcare. Primary eye care already today is an essential part of our offering in the United States for those of you who are not living in the United States or don't buy their glasses there. Just as a quick summary, when you buy your glass in the United States, generally you have an eye exam and an eye exam also contains a medical exam. So it's a bit different in Europe. In Europe, generally you go to your optician and you get a refraction. So you get your values measured with the exception of the UK. But in continental Europe, basically, there is nothing medical going on at the optician. In the US, that's different. The Fielmann Group employs, as of today, roughly 300 optometrists, optometric doctors who carry out 800,000 in-person examinations, so refraction, but also a medical primary eye care In Europe, as I briefly mentioned before, we started a telemedical offering. We have actually 25 contracted ophthalmologists. The program is growing a lot. We actually have dozens of further ophthalmologists on the wait list, but the system is actually very, very efficient because all the measurements are made in store by our certified opticians. And so our partner ophthalmologists have actually carried out based on the data measured in the store around 100,000 eye health checkups in the past year. The European telemedical offering is actually something that is great, has big advantages to customers, ophthalmologists and to our family business. Of course, the customers obviously benefit from easy access to primary eye care. Regular checkups are super important because they allow us to detect not only eye health diseases, but you can even detect other diseases such as strokes and avoid them through this early detection, obviously treated in time. Ophthalmologists also benefit from this system because we obviously bring more efficiency into the system by screening and triaging those patients that actually do need care. And so ophthalmologists can focus their attention on what they like to focus on, notably on taking care of patients that actually do need care and not only check up nothing, check up nothing, check up nothing. They can also be part of a new and innovative, efficient and efficient concept that actually makes our health care systems sustainable in the future. Because as those of you who've been following us for quite some time know, we actually have a big growth in demand and a shrinking supply across most major developed markets. We're closing that gap and that is appreciated by the ophthalmology community. For us as a family business, this move into vision care and telemedical offerings obviously also has a big advantage because we have a great new service that is highly appreciated by our customers. And that obviously leads also to extended customer loyalty for our opticians. It's a huge step because it upgrades their professional image. They can now take care not only of the optical needs of our customers, but they can also play a sustained role in the health of our customers. And this is super exciting to them. And for us as a company, that's great because it's a big factor that allows us to retain our skilled colleagues. And last but not least, we actually make a very cost efficient contribution to the healthcare system and this opens a lot of doors for us. We really enjoy making a positive contribution here. Here we brought along some numbers to underscore how successful the iCheckup is. Left hand side you see our store network. As you can see we have a nationwide offering in Germany and in Switzerland. In Austria we are just concluding the pilot phase and in the next weeks we will move on to a nationwide rollout of this service in Austria as well. On the right hand side, you can actually see the numbers of iHealth checkups per month. As you can see here, we are now tracking at more than 15,000 iHealth checkups per month. And what you see here is a pretty exponential growth driven primarily by two factors. Number one, in the individual stores, we see more and more customers coming in, making use of this service. And number two, obviously, we're adding the number of stores and that in combination leads to this exponential growth. We believe that probably today we already have the leading teleophthalmology platform in Europe. If this is not the case, the growth that we see right now will bring us there shortly, but probably we are already the largest provider of teleophthalmology services that we know of. What I personally find super exciting is not only the numbers that are obviously very impressive, but also what this means in the daily life of our customers and patients. So if we look at the roughly 170,000 patients that we have screened with our eye health checkup on the left hand side, You can see that around 77% of them can rest assured that with their eyes everything is okay. They get their doctor's report fine. About 22% actually do have some things that need some findings that require a medical exam and potentially further treatment. and actually 1% of the patients that we've screened, they actually have something very serious. So here we're talking already about thousands of patients that we have screened and that require an immediate medical exam and treatment. So here we're talking about very serious things. I propose very serious things just brought to customer stories along here that are exemplary of hundreds that we have seen so far. We already know of hundreds of cases where our eye health checkup has avoided blindness, the example on the top. So thanks to this checkup, we could avoid people from going blind, in this case, customer in their early 40s. And we even have non eye diseases that we can identify and prevent by referring the respective customers to immediate treatment. So in this case, customer in their mid 50s, we were able to avoid together with the colleagues in the clinics the risk of a stroke. It could be treated. And so that person did not get a stroke. And those are obviously Life changing experiences and this makes us very, very excited that we can play a role in improving our patients health. Last thing is a call out. Everyone aged 40 and over, please do tell them and please recognize that having a regular eye check is super important. Please do it at least once every two years. We don't mind if you do it at an ophthalmologist or at Fielmann. Just please do get your eyes checked regularly because it's much, much easier when you detect diseases early on. It's far more complicated when you detect them later. With eye checkups, the beautiful thing is all eye diseases are either curable or delayable. That's the nice thing about our profession. And you can even detect other pretty serious things by looking at the retina and other parts of the eye. So I highly recommend to you have your eyes checked at least every two years. And with that, this would be the highlights. I would hand over to Stefan, who will walk you through the numbers first of 2024 and then of Q1 2025.

Thank you so much, Mark. And the one thing that Mark always omits is our primary eye health care business is already worth about 40 million euros in pretty high margin revenue. So it's also an interesting growth engine for us. I'm going to walk you through the 2024 numbers. They are basically completely in line with what we released as preliminary numbers. So I'm going to be very brief and just point out, should there be any differences? Total consolidated sales in 2024 were 2.3 billion, up 15%. Mark already said about half half acquisition related and organic growth. EBITDA 471 million up 17% adjusted EBITDA you know we've introduced that measure last year up 23% and the adjusted EBITDA margin for the group at almost 22% The margins, you know, we split out the margins for the U.S. and Europe because the U.S. is still margin dilutive to our business. So it's good to see, you know, the big 400-pound gorilla in Europe as well. European margin up 2.1 percentage points. to 22.8% in 24 and the US business up to 9.9 almost 10 there I say almost 10% from a negative 7% in 23 which was due to only consolidating a few months of that business adjusted EBT is 240 in our million in our preliminary numbers it was still a 200 37 million, but that cleaned up over time. So 240 million, 10.6%, 10.6% adjusted EBT margin, also that up almost a full percentage point. And the net profit unadjusted after tax at 154 million, up 21%. So overall, I'd say very easy numbers for me to present as the Group CFO. And I'm getting even more proud when I look at where the growth comes from. And I can tell you basically from everywhere. The Fielmann, as you see here, the Fielmann Group, as we said, grew by 15%. Filman Europe, which you can basically say is organic growth because we didn't acquire anything in Europe up almost 7% to 2.1 billion. Germany growing, Switzerland growing, Austria even growing by 10%. So you see Those established markets where we have like a 30, 40, 50% unit market share still growing organically by 5 to 10%, which obviously makes us very proud. We talked a lot about Spain, a company or a country that we entered in 2020, where we acquired a second company in 2022, which we're now bringing together as one company growing by 10%. and North America growing at 506.6%. And we're not guiding individual countries, but I can tell you we're not going to continue on that growth trajectory. That is obviously due to the consolidation of shop go in from 1st July onwards on a like for like you know as if day one basis North America grew still organically by 11% which is far outpacing the market all other but all other countries are growing as well with the exception obviously of Italy where we closed 12 out of 50 stores so it could be hard to grow top line when you're closing that many stores, but EBITDA improved in Italy dramatically, and we talked about that. On the next slide, I'm going to show you the sales or the growth by product category. So you see here our main product categories. We're going to add iHealthcare services to it during the course of this year because it becomes for us a sizable new opportunity. and you basically see the growth in the numbers for the group which is the grey part and then the blue part is Europe which is the organic part in Europe so you see prescription eyewear up 13% in Europe up 7% 7% is the organic part and 13% is driven by the US acquisition same for contact lenses a pretty stable business in Europe but a big market in the US that we added to our portfolio and therefore You know 15% growth year-on-year driven by first-time consolidation Sunglasses at 6% group as well as Europe and Hearing aids is 10% We only do hearing aids in Europe. So there's no difference between the European and the group numbers Because this is the year 2024 earnings call as well, I brought you a few information on the balance sheet and the cash flow. undoubtedly if you've already read and analyzed the full pack that we released this morning but just in case to answer your most pressing number questions we brought you these two slides on on the balance sheet you're going to see that we have an increase in total total assets of about 14 percent but this is mainly driven by three big effects that you need to understand when you look at those numbers and then it'll be all very very clear we have our zero cost insurance which is a great customer loyalty project product that we offer in five european countries we updated our accounting treatment on that on that cost insurance and did a non-cash adjustment of the accounting which led to a You know, minimal P&L effect, but a pretty significant balance sheet adjustment. It's all non-cash, obviously led to an increase of about 34 million in 2024 and about 70 million in several positions in 2023. Because you do these adjustments to the prior year and not in the current year. And you're going to see that when you compare those numbers, it's going to be very obvious to see that. Secondly, second effect, we acquired Optical Universitaria in 2020, the great business in Spain, one of the two that is growing. The seller still held a 20% option. or share, and we had an option to acquire that. We are very happy with Spain. So we acquired the remaining 20% of the business, paid 60 million for that, and now we have 100% ownership in Optical Universitaria. We always had 100% ownership in Medical, and we're now bringing these two companies together and lifting synergies in What is already a pretty profitable market for us? Lastly, and third, large effect is obviously the acquisition of Shopko Optical all over the balance sheet. Obviously, we acquired assets, goodwill equipment, et cetera, et cetera. to the tune of €368 million, and we paid for it and incurred financial liabilities, etc., in the amount of €370 million. And if you take all these three effects together, and deduct them from the balance sheet you're going to see that the balance sheet basically the balance sheet changes basically amount to two percent points on a total balance sheet sum of two billion so a very very stable balance sheet as you would expect that from us the second more closer view on our year in numbers is a view on our cash flow um operating cash flow up to 410 million from 283 million last year three big effects uh obviously EBITDA improvement and because you know our customers typically pay on pay on collection with the exception of those insured EBITDA to cash conversion rate is extremely high we also improved our working capital so really really looking to improve the cash efficient efficiency in the business and we're pretty successful with that and then you should note that when you look at the cash flow statement there's a 70 million impact in the working capital section because of the zero cost insurance topic that I mentioned in 2023. That's a non-cash obligate long-term obligation that obviously goes into the operating cash flow part of the cash flow statement. Secondly, cash flow from investing activities also looks very exciting. 331 million versus 143 million last year. But no worries, we're not spending money and investing and investing in things that might not and SvS Vision. We also released some securities and turned them into cash. if you take all that out and look at our operating capex excluding all these things you're seeing that we spent about 82 million in 2024 and versus 85 million in 2023 so a very stable operating capex over the years despite a much bigger business so we're really working on higher and improved cash efficiency here as well. And then lastly, cash flow from financing activities. Lots of positions there. There's the drawdown of the bridge facility to finance the Shopko acquisition. There's the repayment of the bridge facility that we took to pay for SVS Vision. There are higher dividends in as you probably all noticed in 2024 than we paid in 2023. And we obviously paid for the Spanish 20% option, which was a 60 million payment. And all that, those are the big effects in our cash flow statement. I think that the overall story is we're improving, we're diversifying our revenue sources, we're improving our total sales, we're improving our profitability, and we're also working on our cash efficiency to basically provide from revenue to net cash flow a much more efficient and yielding business. Overall, concluding 2024, what did we promise you and what did we deliver? We gave updated guidance in July 2024 after the acquisition of Shopko. And I'm going to go through that because it's just so great to present. We said group sales, we're going to reach group sales of around 2.3 billion and we delivered 2,266 million, which in my world is 2.3 billion. and we said that the adjusted EBITDA will have a similar or slightly higher margin than in 2023 despite transaction cost the margin was 20.2 percent we delivered 21.7 so that's probably a tad more than just a slight improvement we also said Europe should be nearly 23 percent 22.8% is nearly 23% and we said around 10% for the US and we delivered 9.9 and there was really nothing I can do to bring it up to 10. So 9.9 is still around 10. I'd say Group EBT we guided you towards the margin should be increasing compared to 2023 is 9.8 percent and it increased by 80 pips year on year so we conclude with 2024 which which I think was a pretty successful year for Now let's look at how the journey continued in Q1. The first The first view, we always need to have a look at the macro environment in which we're performing. We put this here on one slide, looking at our core and home market. Germany is still in a difficult spot, third year in a row without economic growth. The growth prospect was taken down by the outgoing government about last week to a zero percent growth. So that is for us a still a red arrow down and a difficult environment. which, don't get us wrong, doesn't scare us because in times of economic uncertainty, people typically turn to a provider where they're sure that they get the best service and the best product at the best value. And in audiology and vision care, that's undoubtedly Fielmann. In Europe, in our neighboring countries where we also hold market leading positions or are number two in the market, the environment is slightly better, but it's not great. And the uncertainties with respect to U.S. trade policies could lead to a worsening there. So we carefully put a yellow arrow to the side to say, you know, a bit greater, a bit better than Germany, but really not great. In the US, the economic climate really changed a lot in the first quarter. You know, going out of 2024, the US was standing very strong and then And then with the incoming administration and the changes in trade policies, for example, they began a full array of uncertainty and uncertainty is never good for economic climate. So we put a yellow arrow to the side here as well. One thing, just to be very frank and clear about it, the trade policies do not really affect us to any significant degree. We're producing locally. A lot of the products that we do are made in the US. We do have in Detroit and Green Bay labs that service our U.S. customers. We don't import any frames to from Europe to the U.S. So it's really a local business and the major, major part of the of the value add happens in the U.S. So we're kind of sheltered from the direct impact of tariffs where we calculated at the maximum is like a 0.1 percentage point on margins. So it really is not a great thing to us. What we cannot assess at the moment, and nobody can, I think, are secondary and tertiary effects like a slowdown in economic growth, the rise in inflation, an uncertain customer satisfaction and uncertainty, and the impact that would have on our markets. That's basically what we're watching more closely than the tariff discussion that we're having at the moment. Against that background, Let's look at our Q1 numbers, which are pretty good, I'd say. Total consolidated sales rose by 13%. Again, the US acquisition consolidation of SHOPCO is a driving force here, but if you're just for If you're just for selling days, which is important in Q1 because of Easter and Carnival and all that, we also show organic growth of about 5%. EBITDA up by 28%. EBITDA adjusted up by 28%. Adjustments are small because this is only integration and synergy realization cost in our US business. So EBITDA margin for the Group. at 24.2%, that's up 300 basis points, which makes us very, very proud because we've been working on that for a few years to get to these numbers and are very happy to see them now actually realizing. If you look at the European margin, we're at 25.6%. Everybody who laughed at me last year when I said we're aiming for 25% in Europe just wanted to make this point that we reached the number, at least in Q1. And we didn't reach it because of luck. We reached it because, as I said, 25,000 people out there worked every day for the last years to get us to that number. And that makes us very, very happy. The U.S. margin increased compared, this is to Q1, in Q1 we still had a 13% margin. In the U.S. increased by 90 basis points to 14.2%. So obviously, you know, The 13% was just SVS Vision. Then we put these two companies together. The two companies, Schopko and SVS, are now running at one at 14%, and we're obviously going to increase those margins a bit further. Adjusted EBT for the Group at 78%, also an increase of 28%, and an increase in margin by 1.6%. So overall, I'm happy with Q1. and diligently working on Q2, I think is the state of mind that we have. If we look at what that means for the year, there are obviously opportunities and risks. The main opportunities that we see is strong and continued organic growth, improved sellout structure, higher efficiency in the business in our established European markets. We still see a great potential for expansion even without further M&A. in optical retail in the US and Spain and Eastern Europe. All those countries, you know, we whoever I met, we talked about it over the last 12 months. This is really those are the growth engines that are going to deliver seven to 20% year on year growth. And that's what we're working on. And obviously the hearing aids, which did great in 24 hearing aids across Europe is also a great potential for us for expansion and I also said that when we met, you know, we put our hearing aids into separate business unit since early this year. So really working in a focused attempt to increase that business further. And then, as Mark alluded already, primary eye care is a promising market in the US as well as in Europe. risks there are a plenty obviously given as uncertain times but really since since the GFC's I don't think there was a period without uncertain times so let's get used to it consumer sentiment is typically this the thing that worries us most Group G G G from the insurance that helps to counterbalance consumer sentiment a little bit. Skilled labor shortage is still a slight issue. We don't see it as big as an issue as like two years ago. So the economic conditions here help us. The pressure on wages has subsided. We have increased wages, but also the ease of switching jobs has gone down a bit. But still demographic change is an issue that we're looking at and that's why we're also working on digital tools and using AI to Improve, you know our store efficiency and then obviously trade conflicts and tariffs. I already said I already said Most of the most glasses that we do in the US are produced locally and made in the US so no real significant primary impact, but secondary and tertiary impacts on the economy are the thing that we are watching most closely. Let's go to the outlook for 2025 and probably not a lot of surprises for those at least who I met and who talked to me because we already gave you a glimpse of that last year. Customer satisfaction has been high and around 90% for the last years and we have absolutely no reason to change that. It is our most important KPI because happy customers will return and become repeat customers and that is what we're working for and getting out of bed for. Unit sales should be around 9.5 million. That's unit sales growth in line with prior years. Total, this is just glasses. Total consolidated sales should reach nearly 2.5 billion. We continue the strong organic growth and we have the first, you know, we have another half year of first full year consolidation of the Shopko acquisition. The adjusted EBITDA margin, we said it over and over and over again, will be at 25% in Europe and therefore 24% in the Group. And there's absolutely no reason to doubt that, especially after those Q1 numbers give us a bit of a tailwind to that respect. And if you multiply it out, then you should end up at least at 580 million adjusted EBITDA. and the adjusted EBT margin is despite higher non-cash and planned amortization on the acquisitions and higher financing costs for the acquisition will still increase and will increase at the same or similar rate as in previous years. That is our guidance for this year. And with that, and maybe a little more importantly, I hand back over to Mark, who's going to talk to us about how the Vision 25 went and how it comes to an end.

Perfect. Thanks very much, Stefan.

I mean, first of all, I think those are really fantastic numbers. So I think great work from all the teams across the globe. We are super grateful. We're super excited. This is great news. It has been, as we saw today at the stock market reaction, been a bit of a surprise to the capital markets. I think if we look at analyst consensus, it was not so much a surprise to those who track us a little bit further because we simply delivered what we said we would deliver. And that is actually a good handover to the Vision 2025, where we made concrete promises and we actually delivered on them. Let's have a quick review of what we planned in the Vision 2025 and what we achieved. The Vision 2025 had three strategic pillars and three major KPI goals. Let's start with the three strategic pillars. When we started the Vision 2025 around five years ago, We said we're going to modernize, we're going to digitize, and we're going to internationalize this business. In terms of modernization, we actually focused on five cultural dimensions. The Fielmann Group has been five years, six years ago, was a pretty German, fairly hierarchic, very centralized, and a bit conservative business. And mind you, I'm not saying this in a negative way. I actually say this with a lot of respect for the company that was built to be the market leader in Germany. I mean, this company culture made us tremendously successful and parts of that company culture, specifically our customer orientation and our performance orientation. These are things that we actually do keep up. At the same time, changes in time, changes in our customers, changes in our associates worldwide, And also, obviously, a change in our business model required that we did develop our company culture further. And we're still doing that today. What you see in this chart are the five dimensions. So it's about making information transparent inside our company, delegating decision making to the right levels, learning from mistakes, cross-functional collaboration instead of working in silos and obviously modern leadership. And what you see here is the development based on surveys that we did with our employees. And you can actually see a huge shift to roughly a 70% target level in just two years. And I mean, if you think about cultural transformations usually taking a decade or longer, we are super grateful and happy about this progress that we've made. If you are to visit the Fielmann Group, let's say five, six years ago compared to now, you would find really a modern family business. So that would be the first strategic pillar. Big move forward. And as you know, culture eats strategy for breakfast. So a very, very important basis for our company and for the change as part of our vision 2025. Second big pillar, we took a mostly brick and mortar business, really, and we transformed it into an omnichannel business model. This had the dimension of omnichannel services. So a lot of our customers, they do have digital touch points before or after the purchase. And in our core product, so in prescription eyewear, also actually in primary eye care, also in audiology, there is some touch points that are unavoidable. Some measurements, you might be able to repurchase things online. We've actually developed quite a few proprietary online measurement tools, but quite a lot of it requires in-store touchpoints and actually competent advice by skilled labor. So the key first point was to develop an omnichannel platform, which we did. We have more than 50 million users that visited our omnichannel, our digital sales platforms, and we're very proud about that. And secondly, we also built our e-commerce business. Here's just a small snapshot. Left hand side, you do see the parcels shipped during the period of the Vision 2025. Right hand side, you see the net sales basically both quadrupled. But what is even more important to me and obviously to us, and I know Stefan is very happy about this, we not only build a strongly growing e-commerce business, but we build a profitable e-commerce business. And that's obviously something that you didn't see that much in our industry. And that's obviously also reflected in the development of our company in comparison to others. What you can say as a broad summary of digitization is the future of our industry is an omnichannel. In our industry, all the pure players, they went either bankrupt, they were bought or they moved into an omnichannel business model as well. So for us, everything done right. We have developed an omnichannel platform and we have a profitable e-commerce business. Third strategic pillar of the Vision 2025 was to internationalize the business. Internationalizing our business makes us more resilient and less dependent on the performance of individual markets. Today we are the number three player worldwide. We have actually tripled our international sales, as I will show you on the next chart, and we moved our international sales share, so the share of international markets in relation to our total sales, from 21 to 40%, so the sales share doubled. Here you can see how the sales roughly tripled. Last year we increased our international sales to 833 million and we're confident to reach nearly a billion in international sales. This corresponds roughly, as part of our guidance, corresponds roughly to about 40% of total sales. So all three pillars, big success. And with that, let's move to the three main targets. Our three core targets of the Vision 2025 was a record high customer satisfaction of around 90%, sales growth and profitability growth. In terms of the customer satisfaction, I will make it very short. You guys all know that we are a super customer centric company. We measure customer satisfaction everywhere. All the markets that we have installed customer satisfaction, we are at 90%. We're rolling it out to further countries and we're pretty confident that this is the level that customers can actually expect from us. But anyone who knows NPS scores, anyone who knows customer satisfaction scores knows how hard a work it is to get 90% to 90%. So we are super proud of our teams worldwide in achieving these numbers. Happy customers come back. Happy customers create repeat business. Repeat business is the key in our industry. And with that, this customer satisfaction also led to a top line growth of over a billion. Just to put that into context, originally in our vision 2025, we calculated with annual growth of around 5% CAGR that would have corresponded to 40% growth in the period. So by growing by a billion or 70% correspondingly, we grew nearly double as fast as we originally anticipated. What makes us very happy is that this was not only driven by acquisitions, but as you can see, if you take the breakdown of the sales growth 2018 to 2025, our prognosis, around 500 million actually do come from our core brand Fielmann in Europe. 300 million come from the acquisitions plus organic growth in the United States. 200 million come from the acquisitions in Spain plus organic growth and 10 million from Slovenia. So what you see here is really a nice mix between organic growth on the one hand and strategically sensible acquisitions that complement our portfolio. And that's what you have seen and what you continue to see in our numbers as well. Healthy balance between strong organic growth and obviously also acquisitions. Now, we not only want to grow, but we want to grow profitably. And again, here, big success. The earnings will have improved by the end of this year compared to the beginning of the Vision 2025 period by over 200 million euros. This is far more than we originally anticipated. It will be a 60% increase. And what was very important for us and what we emphasized again and again, this will correspond to our target adjusted EBITDA margin of 25% in Europe. So let's have a look at Europe. There's been a lot of discussions. As you know, when we transformed our business, there was a lot of change necessary and there were a lot of investments necessary. And this actually led to depressed EBITDA margin of 19.1% in 2022. We increased that in 23 by 1.6 percentage points to 27. Last year, as Stefan has just told you, we upped it by another 2.1 percentage points. And in summary, you could say 23, we increased it by roughly 2%. 24, we increased it by roughly 2%. And guess what we'll do this year? We're going to increase it by another 2%. I think that's about time to say a big, big thank you to all of our teams in the world. You see here colleagues from all over Europe and the United States. And I did spend quite a bit of time in the last weeks and months to travel around and to extend a big thank you because this was really a big challenge. And we're super proud that we have remained a fully customer-centric company. We focus on our customers and we could achieve these fantastic great numbers. We're super proud about our teams all across the globe living our customer centric philosophy and still focusing also on efficiency and profitability. So super proud about the numbers and about having achieved that. Now with the Vision 2025 goals all in sight, we're going to hopefully have a very realistic view on the whole year. We are very optimistic for now to achieve our guidance that Stefan has just presented. Our Q1 numbers do actually give us quite a bit of tailwind there and grounds for optimism. We are going to present our vision 2035. So we're going to look ahead to the next 10 years. in this year's annual general meeting, July 10th, 2025 in Hamburg. And we're also going to provide you with targets for the next five years, so targets until 2030. However, until then, our focus is on achieving all Vision 2025 target goals. And as you know, our main focus lies on our adjusted EBITDA margin of 25% in Europe and 24% percent at group level, which we have achieved in Q1. And we are super optimistic that we will achieve it in the whole year as well.