Harvia Oyj

Hello everyone, and welcome to Harvia's second quarter 24 earnings webcast. My name is Mattias Järnefelt, I'm the CEO, and with me I have Ari Vesterén, our Chief Financial Officer. Hello. In the presentation, we'll cover the following topics. First, I will go through the highlights of the quarter in terms of business and financial performance. Then I will be talking about Harvia's strategy and our recent acquisition of Thermosol. Then Ari Vesterinen will cover our financial performance more in detail. So let's talk about the highlights. The quarter was a strong one. Our revenue increased by 20.7% to 43.2 million euros. And we're very pleased to see that we delivered growth in all sales regions. In the regions that have been growing also in the past quarters, like North America and Asia, Pacific and Middle East, delivered strong growth. But we're also pleased to see that Europe, that is our traditional marketplace, also grew after a long period of challenging market conditions. Our revenue for the quarter was also supported partly by some deliveries that were shifted from end of quarter one to beginning of quarter two because of strikes in Finland. While growing the business, we also maintained our strong profitability, delivering adjusted operating profit of 9.4 million euros, and that is 21.8% of our revenue. We are very pleased to deliver this result as we have also been simultaneously increasing our investments, aiming to drive sustained accelerated growth for the coming years. We've been investing in commercial structures and teams. We've also been investing our R&D to make sure that we can deliver exciting innovation and differentiation in years to come. The quarter also was a key milestone for us as we held our first ever Capital Markets Day in the end of May. There we talked about the market, the key trends and key opportunities we see for Harvia. We also talked about Harvia's operating strategy and our updated long-term financial targets. Essentially, we are a market leader in a very interesting, growing global specialty market where we intend to grow both organically and also be an active market consolidator and pursue acquisition opportunities when they arise. And after the reported period two weeks ago, we announced a very exciting acquisition of a US-based steam solutions specialist, Thermasol. And I will be talking more about that in a while. So quarter two, key figures in brief. Revenue, 43.2 million euros, up from 35.8 million in the comparison period. And that's 20.7% growth. In terms of organic revenue growth, we delivered 20.1%. Adjusted operating profit was 9.4 million euros, that's 1.4 million up from the comparison period, and that's 18% growth. In terms of operating profit margin, that was 21.8%. Operating free cash flow was 5.5 million euros, that's down from the comparison period of 9.1 million. It was impacted by multiple factors. Some of the key ones were increasing inventory levels. That was driven by two particular factors. One, after quarter one this year, our materials inventory levels in our Murame factory were on an unusually low level because inbound logistics was impacted by the strikes at the time. And we have normalized the inventory levels in that important production facility. The other key factor is that we are seeing continued growth, fast growth in America and also in Asia. And that's why we decided to increase somewhat our inventory levels to make sure that we can serve our customers really well in those regions. There's also some impact from increase in receivables that is a sign of a growing business. Cash conversion was 50% for the reasons explained. First half key figures summary. Revenue 85.5 million euros up from 77.2 million euros in the comparison period last year. And that's double digit growth that we are of course very happy to see in the middle of the year. 10.9% and in terms of organic revenue growth, 10.4%. The difference comes from a rather small acquisition that we executed during last year, a company in Italy called Fenix L-MEC that is providing some key components to our production. Adjusted operating profit for the reporting period for the first half was 19.5 million, and that's up from 17.3 million last year. In terms of operating profit margin, 22.8%, so on a very solid level. Operating free cash flow for the first half was 16.6 million euros, and that's 73.2% cash conversion. We had a 95% cash conversion during the first quarter, which is really, really high. And now combined, quarter one and quarter two, we are at 73. And that is a very good figure for a company that is growing double digit. Then let's talk about the regions. We are, first of all, very happy to see that all of the regions were growing. The other thing we're very happy to see that the growth regions, North America and Asia Pacific and Middle East, really delivered very strong growth. North America grew by 4.4 million euros, and that's 43% growth. And APEC and Middle East and Africa, although starting at a rather low level, but the impact on our growth figures starts to be meaningful as the growth rates are so high at nearly 80%. After roughly two years of really challenging market conditions in Europe, we're happy to report that both of our European regions, Northern Europe and continental Europe, grew. I will then go through each of the market regions in a bit more detail. Northern Europe comprises of the Nordic countries, that's Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and also Iceland, and the Baltic countries, Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia. We delivered 11.6 million euros, and that's around 4% growth in the region. And we're actually very pleased to see this, because this region has been really under rather challenging market conditions for past two years and this is now the first growth quarter in the region actually in that two-year period. We are gradually seeing signs of improving market conditions but we also feel that it's still pretty early in the days so we'd like to see more evidence of the real market recovery in this region. Continental Europe delivered 12.7 million euros and that's 5.9 percent growth. We've started to see signs of recovery in this region already since the end of last year, so we feel even more confident on the continental European market situation than the northern Europe that is more recent in terms of signs of recovery. We also feel that continental Europe really has a lot of pending potential, as you can see from the kind of levels where we were during the kind of 21, 22. Obviously, there's an element of the boost from the COVID periods, but still, we feel that there's a lot of pending demand, very important sauna markets like Germany, where there's about 3 million saunas, and very interesting markets like the United Kingdom, 65 million people in a country where there's plenty of opportunities to increase popularity of sauna. North America has been a really important region for us now for multiple years. If we look at kind of the annual development since 2019 to 23, we delivered on average 39% growth in this region. And from a very small region, it's grown to be our biggest reported region, representing now 34% of our total revenue. And we delivered now 14.7 million euros, and as I said, it's 43% growth. We feel that we're still in the very early part of the journey, as the market penetration in the US stays still very low, and we see that there's plenty of growth opportunity. Also, kind of the story of natural health and well-being resonates extremely well in this market. We also know that we're also tapping only into part of the market potential as we are practically playing before the acquisition of thermos pretty much only in the traditional sauna category. And there are two important sauna categories in addition to that, namely steam and infrared. And we are now taking steps to accelerate our journey there. Asia Pacific and Middle East, when you look at the chart on the left, you can see that the path has been pretty rocky during the past few years. And if you look at the quarter 21 and 22 figures, it's important to note that half of the sales during that time was sales in Russia. And during 22, we decided to withdraw from the Russian market due to Russian sanctions. attack on Ukraine. That's, of course, very visible in the results during the quarter two, 23. We're also very happy now to report that due to significant growth in Asian markets, in particular in Japan, in China and Australia, we are pretty much bridging the gap that Russia left when we decided to exit that business. In terms of product perspective, we wanna be global leader of this very exciting market. That means that we wanna deliver solutions for the traditional sauna market or Nordic sauna, also for the infrared and steam markets. We wanna provide both equipment business and also full solutions when it makes sense. We also cater to the private applications and also professional applications such as hotels and spas. Where we are at the moment, before the acquisition of Thermosol, still over 90% of our business was coming from providing products and solutions for the traditional sauna type. It's dominated still by the heating equipment business, which in the quarter two represented 54% of our business. That's the sauna heaters, that's the control panels. It actually also includes the infrared heating panels, but they represent rather small share of this business. The solutions business is represented by the kind of saunas and Scandinavian hot tub in this picture. So when we have an opportunity to sell everything a person needs for a sauna, like in the picture here, a barrel sauna for an American home owner's backyard, that provides us an opportunity to serve our customers even better and also opportunity to tap into a bigger spend potential than if we were just selling the heating equipment. In this quarter, it represented 30% of our top line. Steam generators during quarter two was 3%. Now after the acquisition of Thermosol, we expect this to significantly increase to double digit. Accessories and heater stones was 7% of our top line and spare parts and services also 7%. If we look at the growth or change in revenue across the product groups, the picture, of course, is very pleasing with a lot of growth figures here, with the exception of one that I'll come to in a minute. Heating equipment delivered nearly 5 million more business during the quarter one than the year before, and that's a 26% growth. Roughly 2 million more in sales from saunas and Scandinavian hot tubs, and that's roughly 16% growth. If I dive a little bit deeper in that, essentially sauna solutions or sauna kits grew faster than that. And then Scandinavian hot tubs has been a business that has been still in a headwind situation and grew significantly less than that number that you can see there. Steam generators has been a rather small part of our business until the acquisition, but it's also very pleasing to see that it has been growing well, nearly 20% during the quarter two. Then we come to the accessories and heater stones, that grew by over 50%. But there's also a but, which is that the spare parts and services declined by 10%. There's a little bit of a dynamics between these two product groups, because we actually recategorize some of our products that used to be part of the spare parts and services business, but more naturally sit under the accessory and heater stone product category. So there's a bit of that sort of, I would say, accounting impact on these figures. But all in all, a very positive picture indeed. Then let's talk about Harvia's strategy. We operate in a very exciting global specialty business that has strong fundamental long-term growth drivers, also plenty of opportunities for differentiation, innovation, and also very interesting competitive landscape because the market is still very much a fragmented market. So Harvia's strategic role, as we see it, is to shape the global sauna market so that everyone has a reason to experience sauna. And we do it through driving our four strategic focus areas. One, delivering the full sauna experience, which you can consider the product dimension of our strategy. Two, winning in strategically important markets that you can consider the geographical dimension of our strategy. And three, by leading in key channels, which you can consider our customer dimension in our strategy. And all of these three commercial strategic focus areas are supported by having a strong foundation in best-in-class operations and great people. This is a strategy that we unveiled only very recently on the 29th of May in our Capital Markets Day. We've been working on already now. So delivering the full sauna experience, it's actually a very fundamental part of Harvia's business as we are going to buy hard a product, an industrial business. It's about providing equipment and solutions for the traditional sauna, the infrared sauna, for the steam sauna. It's also making sure that we cater to the right price points and have the right offering available for the key markets. And it's also about inspiring the market, innovating, leading in digital and making sure that we have the portfolio we need to succeed also in the future. As can be seen in our figures, we have been increasing our investments in this area lately. Winning in strategically important markets is an obvious part of our strategy. Our products are widely available across the world in roughly 90 countries. So for us, the key thing is not to find the 91st or 92nd country to sell Harvia products in, but it's more about winning in the markets that really matter. It's places like the United States, it's places like Japan, China, in Europe, places like Germany and the UK and France. And I'm very happy to say that we have been taking good steps to lay even a stronger foundation for future growth while delivering also great results as we speak. Part of strengthening our position in a very strategically important northern American market is the acquisition of Thermosol that I'll come to in a minute. Leading in key channels means that we want to have the best availability, be in the right places with the right products across the world. It's about strengthening our own direct to consumer online in the markets where it makes sense, like the United States. It's working with our dealer partner network expansion program in Japan, where we have in just a few years developed the leading distribution set up in that market. And we are ongoingly kind of marrying our commercial side and our product development to make sure that we have the right offering for the right channel to win in the future. And the foundation is best-in-class operations and great people. In terms of changes in Harvia Group management, we made an announcement of appointing Philip Krauth as a managing director for EOS, which is our high-end global brand. And he comes with a very exciting international multi-year experience in branded discretionary consumer businesses. I'm convinced that he will be doing great in that role. We also made a lot of investment kind of behind the scenes to make sure that our people development capabilities get improved. We strengthen our roles resourcing human resources, competence development, etc. We also made investments to make sure that the core of our competitiveness, which is that we are great at the industrial production, stays as our core competitive advantage. So we've, for example, invested in a new and more automated wood-burning heater production line in Murame which is now in live production. So then finally, I will talk a bit about the acquisition we announced a couple of weeks ago. Essentially, we have signed and now closed the acquisition of Thermosol. And it's really in the kind of strategic sweet spot for Harvia. As we discussed, we really want to win in the markets that make the biggest difference. The United States is a key market for us. We see plenty of growth opportunity there, but we also see that we play only in part of the market. And essentially, steam is a market where it's quite hard to penetrate that through organic means, as the decision making is heavily driven by professionals in the business. And we've learned that they are actually highly brand loyal and kind of going there as Harvia without having the base would have been a very long journey. Now, we managed to acquire Thermosol, which has great products, great brand, and great distribution, and we feel that that fits our strategy extremely well. The purchase price was $30.4 million on a debt-free basis. We financed this transaction from our cash fund, but we also decided to take a bullet loan for 20 million euros. We see plenty of growth opportunities, but we also see opportunities for annual cost synergies at approximately 1.7 million level on an annual basis by the end of 2027. And as part of our kind of operational presence in North America, our head of North America, president of Harvia US, Jennifer Thayer, has been appointed to be also the CEO of Thermosol. So what is this company all about? It's a company with real roots and real competitive advantage and heritage of innovation. It was actually founded by the Altman family in 1958, and still today it was owned by Altman Group. family three generations later. It's based in Round Rock near Austin in Texas and it basically provides equipment and components to build high-end steam saunas and steam showers. Basic products like steam generators, steam valves, steam heads and visual control units to control the system. Net sales 14.4 million last year dollars and roughly 40 employees. We're really excited about it and we're really excited now to take steps in the integration and also drive our growth initiatives that we plan for this business. But now I would hand over to Ari to talk about more in detail our financials.

Okay. Here we see first really positive development, which we have had now in our net sales already three quarters in a row, also maintaining the good profitability, continuously over 20% adjusted EBIT. Historically, the sauna market has had its seasonality so that during Q2 and Q3, we have had lower net sales levels. But as you see, this time we had quite a nice growth rate, especially in the US and in Asia, and that helped us to grow further compared to Q1. In this comparison spreadsheet, you can see that now the cumulative growth rate of revenues has been almost 11% for the first half year. We had our capital markets day end of March. May, and we update the targets really on purpose. We believe on this growth rate also in the long term going forward. The adjusted operating profit came a little bit down compared to last year, this same quarter, percentage-wise, and that's because of some growth investments we have had in our sales. We have actually hired quite much new talent and new people to develop business further down you see the number of employees at the end of the period year ago we had 619 and now 683 people out of those over 60 percent more The biggest growing company in the headcount has been US. We had there plus 34 full-time equivalent employees in quarter two compared to last year. And in Finland, we have been also growing the staff with over 30 people. So we believe in growth and we invest also headcount and development resources for the growth. The operating free cash flow went down, as Mattias already mentioned, because of quite obvious short-term reasons. We had quite low inventory levels at the end of May, and we wanted to invest in the inventory, especially in the growing areas like the US and Japan. reasons are there the inventory growth about 3.3 million compared to the end of Q1 and also increase in the sales trade receivables. The investments in tangible assets have been cumulatively clearly higher than A year ago, we acquired, beginning of this year, some land in the US. And after that, we have had some... efficient improving investments in most of our replacement investments in most of our plans. The net debt went down 29% compared to last year and leverage was 0.8% end of Q2. Since we have already announced the Thermosol acquisition, somebody may ask what happened after that with the net debt and leverage. Net debt is now somewhere close to 60 million and leverage something like 1.4 billion. So the net working capital is down by 10% compared to last year, same time, but about 7 million up compared to end of Q1, and that decreased our short-term operative free cash flow. Here we can see how the operative free cash flow and cash conversion were affected by increasing inventories. And I personally feel that this is a bit temporary situation usually. Usually, Harvia has been having very, very strong cash conversion somewhere between 80 to 90, but this is now the time we had to adjust the inventory levels and prepare our fast-growing units to serve the customers better. The net debt has been going down continuously and now only because of the inventory levels and trade receivables we had a small increase in Q2. The leverage was 0.8 and as you may remember, we have the long-term financial targets up to 2.5. So there is still room to take more net debt if needed. The financial costs were quite steady, actually, cash flow-wise. There are certain variations in the valuation of our debt and interest rate swaps. They are described with this box, but the dotted line shows the cash flow effect of the financing costs. As mentioned, the investments have been quite low now in Q2. In Q1, we invested in the plot of land in the US to have an option to grow the business there and the facilities. Here are the Harvia's long-term financial targets, which were updated end of May. And the average annual growth is now 10%. We want to keep the good profitability adjusted operating profit over 20%. We have been a long, long time there. And if we have one quarter which is a little under it, we will make the correcting actions very quickly. And the debt leverage target is to could be below 2.5. We had earlier there also the lower limit, but we removed it end of May. We pay twice a year dividends and the next dividend payout is planned for the end of October. So now it's time for questions. We don't have a telephone line here, but we got already plenty of good questions through this chat, so I start to ask business questions and development questions to Mattias, and I will probably answer the financials. You mentioned in the report that you have been gaining market share over the last years. Could you please elaborate the competitive situation? Who are your best competitors? And is there anything that you could learn from them?

Essentially, this is a... I would say very interesting, but also a specialty market. So we also learned it's very difficult to find external reliable market panel data. So this is actually an area of investment for Harvia because we really want to have the best insight to the market. And we actually regularly do market studies together with our research partners to come up with kind of the key figures, key trends, kind of key splits in the market, also in different parts of the world. As a result of that work, we decided to change our market view for the next years into slightly more positive than we have said in the past. What we traditionally have said is that the market is growing roughly 5% on an annual basis. We also see that now in the shorter term, mid-term, this market growth is likely to be somewhat higher. At the same time, you can consider this with our long-term top-line target of growing 10 percent of course you know we take take more share and growing faster when the opportunities there as you can see but we also said that reflecting the market growth and we definitely want to take more share of the market it's a fragmented market and there's plenty of opportunity for us to us to grow faster than the market generally So that hopefully helps to put things in perspective. Overall, we feel that we've been taking share even quite substantially. And when you look at numbers in the US, even if the market has been growing pretty well, our estimate is actually 15% roughly on an annual basis during the past years. Our average growth rate has been 39%. So it gives you a really nice concrete example that Harvia is doing really well. It was also a question that, you know, what are our best or kind of worst competitors? I guess that depends on the perspective. They are actually quite different in the traditional sauna or infrared sauna or steam sauna. In the traditional sauna, we are clearly the market leader and we have more, I would say, traditional competitors there, like Sauna360 that is now owned by Masco, so many smaller regional players, but clearly we are leading in that business. Steam is also actually fairly fragmented, also regionally. So there's not, I would say, strong global players. There's more like players in the US, players in the Middle East. And now with Thermosol, we really took a real stake in the US market. And then the infrared business also actually quite local still. So there are infrared players in the US, there's infrared players in Asia. And that just tells the story about the fragmentation of this market. And we see it as a great opportunity because there's not so many companies who have the scale, the profitability, the cashflow generation capability to keep investing, innovating, consolidating the market and making sure that we stay in the leadership position also in the years to come.

Okay, then some number of questions. How much in euros is the shift from Q1 to Q2 due to Finnish strikes? And what is the impact in delivery timings in Asia? Well, we discussed that also at the end of Q1 session, and we estimated that What was shifted was something like between one to two million, depending on how we bundled the deliveries. And we still stay on that estimate. We haven't calculated that so exactly. And the ASEAN delivery times, okay, they are always much longer from there to Finland to get some materials or components, and from Finland to Asia, but we have a proper planning there, and the times haven't now prolonged anymore due to any crisis or reasons in the sea freights or so. Next question. Sales grew by 20% and adjusted EBIT by 18% year to year. Is there some reasons why leverage was not higher given that North America delivered such a high growth? typically very profitable market.

Yeah, I can take that. There are different factors in play here. When you look at our numbers, you can see that our sort of materials margin or gross margin was actually very healthy. And that's actually supported by factors such as we sell more in markets where the sales price tend to be higher, like in the US and in Asia. There's also, we can see in our operations, clear scale benefits. So when we scale the business up, it supports our our profitability. But at the same time, we made decisions to invest in growth. Because if you think about Harvia's situation, you know, a few quarters ago, we were a company that delivered great profitability, but was not growing. And we also saw plenty of opportunities in the market. And if we want to go after the infrared business, if we want to go after the steam business, if we want to go after key markets in Asia, want to strengthen our commercial execution, It doesn't happen by itself. So we've been investing in great professionals from different parts of this industry, brought them into Harvia family and generally have been professionalizing many of our kind of approaches and processes. And that has taken some investment. And that was also a reason why we decided not to really make a change to our long term target for operating profit, because while there is this sort of leverage, at least in the coming few years, we see a clear need for Harvia to invest to really kickstart this growth flywheel, which we feel makes great strategic sense and provides great value creation opportunities for Harvia owners.

Okay, thank you. Can you expand on how the Finnish and Swedish market has developed in Q2?

When you look at the northern European figures, one thing to know is that the clear majority of that is Finland. So pretty much when you look at that number, you can think, OK, this is how well Finland is doing. And Finland has had a long period of, I would say, tough market conditions. And we feel that there's still a lot of uncertainty and we are not fully out of the woods yet. But of course, we're happy to see the growth numbers during the quarter quarter. quarter two. There are factors such as construction, so new build, which is still very slow in Finland. It's also the property market, so selling and buying houses because moving typically triggers renovation. And one area of house or apartment that people renovate in Finland is the sauna. So with the slowness in the property market, that's of course impacting us. But when we see now, of course, Eurobar interest rates coming down, it's a positive thing. At the same time, we feel that the consumer in Finland is in a pretty strained situation with the increased cost of living, etc. So we don't expect a very fast turnaround, but hopefully stabilization from where we were during the past eight quarters or so. In Sweden, you must remember if you've been following our earlier webcast, I mentioned that actually Sweden has a very interesting play going on right now, which is not really related to the kind of the macro market or the demand side. It's more like our supply, our channel partners as our traditionally biggest channel partner for consumer sales in Sweden decided earlier to discontinue the consumer driven retail operation just focus on the professional builders market in Sweden so that has had you know during this year some impact but I feel also happy and proud of the way our Scandinavian team has responded to it and actually search for new partners to make sure that even if one partner pulls away from the consumer market then we go there through other channels

Okay, in Northern Europe sales down 17% year to year in Q1 and up 4% in Q2. What is the underlying growth rate? Is this confirmation that we are back at growth despite of still weak construction cycle and low consumer sentiment?

I think I pretty much answered it already. So of course, we were pleased to see quarter two as a growth quarter for Northern Europe. But we also feel that it's very early days and we cannot, in our view, still make a strong conclusion of that the market dynamics would have significantly changed. And as I said, I don't expect any miraculous fast turnaround. It's going to be more gradual that we need to follow up on a quarterly basis. But overall, we see that the Finnish market actually is a really great opportunity for us in the long term. The reason being that there is a great installed base of saunas in Finland. And while the market has been so much down for now, actually quite an extended period of time, we feel that there's a pending demand, that there's a good chance that we'll be released once the consumer confidence really starts to grow and the property markets really start to wake up again.

In terms of North American revenue, what are the revenue shares of B2C and B2B sales? What kind of growth trajectory do you see in those two?

Well, we haven't really provided a split between the professional applications and the end-user applications markets in the US. But generally, the more important is the consumer market. worldwide. And the reason is that, you know, if we think about Harvia's business model, we are an industrial player and we play when we can make something in a factory or we can provide a scalable digital service, you know, through application and cloud computing. But what we don't do is we are not in a construction business or project management business. That's something that is a different business. And we've decided at least so far to stay away from that. Now, that means that, you know, when there's a commercial spa being built, maybe there's, you know, five sauna rooms and we sell five professional grade saunas, let's say 3,000 euros each to that place. It's 15,000 euros to one actually probably a pretty big sauna spa area. commercial location. At the same time, one single individual can invest $15,000 in the US for their backyard paradise sauna. It's much more scalable. It's much more like kind of sell and forget, or at least there's not so heavy kind of aftermarket support needs, et cetera. So we feel it's more scalable. It's more accessible. It's more dynamic. It's more branded. And there's a heck of a lot of opportunities for us there. And majority of our business in the US is on the on the residential side or private customer side.

Then a bigger question. In the cash flow of Q2, tax deductions was 5.1 million euros. Can you explain why the high tax payment? First of all, our tax burden has been increasing a little in Q2 compared to the past. And that's due to the fact that we are making a bigger share of our results now in higher taxed areas than in Finland. That's one reason. And then the cash flow effects are, of course, depending on when we pay our taxes, for instance, for the last year and so forth. But we are working on the tax planning and optimizing these, and the accruals always in the middle of the year, they are not so exact. We will work on this on Q3 and Q4. How would you describe the competitive environment in North America and APEC-MEA? What are the keys to win market share in these markets?

We'll discuss this a bit, but essentially the key thing to understand is that the market is, it's a growing market where the biggest player globally is Harvia. And last year our turnover was 150 million. We are in a multi-billion business and that just talks that actually it's a market where there's a lot of competition, but typically they are way smaller and they might be even like a very local, kind of small family businesses. Now, lately there's been, I would say in the United States, in particular, bigger, or I would say even clearly bigger companies entering this business through acquisitions, Kohler buying Klavs, which is actually European-based sauna, high-end sauna cabin provider, and Masco, Publicly, it's a company with roughly $9 billion top line buying Sauna360 that traditionally has been, I would say, our competitor number one. But still, while they are bigger players as a whole, their sauna and spa-related business, which is comparable to the markets that we go after, they are smaller. But generally speaking, it's a very fragmented market, smaller players, a lot of local players, and that really provides opportunity for us to actually out-innovate, out-differentiate. There's not so many companies that can really invest in digital, energy efficiency, design, building a real brand that is not known only within the industry professionals, but also households, at least to a degree, at least among people who really want to live a natural and healthy lifestyle. So that pretty much is the picture.

Okay. Could you please talk about the sources of synergies in thermosol acquisition?

Yeah. There are actually many synergy opportunities. Of course, one is more on the cost side. One of Harvey's core competitive advantages is that we're actually good in operations. That includes we're good in sourcing. We're good in negotiating good prices for our purchases and also good at developing long-term win-win partnerships with our suppliers. And we feel that this is a very obvious area where we really go through the purchase prices, compare what does Harvia pay in the US, what does Thermosol pay in the US, and there's actually really very obvious opportunities for us to deliver even short-term value. Also, the commercial capability is actually very complementary. Thermasol's success is very much in the high-end market of the sauna and spa business in the United States, with a strong presence in the kind of sauna specialty dealers and more like a plumbing professionals markets, whereas Harvia's core cornerstone is more presence in the volume markets like big box movers, big hardware stores, significant direct to consumer online sales. And basically, we can really provide now a very interesting package for go-to-market as we combine these channels. There's, of course, very obvious opportunities for us also as we are in investment mode in the Northern American market, also in people that we can now leverage, for example, marketing, specialists not only for our Harvia traditional sauna business, but also to support Thermosol's growth in a steam business. So there are plenty of opportunities.

There is another Thermasol-related question. With the Thermasol acquisition, you now have a strong platform to grow steam saunas. Given that Thermasol already had solid profitability and thus presents fairly limited execution integration risks for Harvia, do you think you can soon close a transaction in infrared saunas? Well, thank you.

I take it as a very positive kind of reaction to our Thermosol acquisition. I fully agree that I think it's a great acquisition and we can deliver even short-term value with it. By the way, we also feel that we can scale the business up. As you pointed out, it has a strong underlying profitability profile and under Harvia's wings, utilizing Harvia brand, for example, for the mid-price points in the steam market and more like direct-to-consumer strategy, I think we can really provide growth dynamics to Thermosol's PNL. What comes to the infrared players, the long story short is that we are constantly looking. We also decided now to prioritize in the short-term kind of steam for the reason is that we first of all really felt that here organic play is almost out of question. You have to buy your way in and then you can start growing. We also, when we look at the acquisition opportunities, realize that there's really not many players left. So we really got a great target. But if we wouldn't have gotten Thermosol, there wouldn't have been really, I would say, good alternatives left. So we are really happy that we were able to now close this deal and we decided to really prioritize now in the short-term steam. core part of our strategy is to be active consolidator in the market. So we are looking, we are constantly having discussions. For example, with Thermosol, I can just give you a very practical example. The discussion started two years ago. Then they became more active six months ago, and now we're here. And this is the story that we have with many players. So we have ongoing dialogue with many industry players. And while we feel that we have actually better chance with organic play, with infrared technology, and I can explain in a bit why, we, of course, are also interested in good deals in the infrared space. Now, why I feel we have a better opportunity with organic way in infrared, because unlike steam that is heavily driven by professional channel and professional kind of trade partners recommendations that what are the great steam generators etc and kind of building them behind the walls requiring professional support for the consumer infrared is very fast moving it's basically an infrared cabin standalone that you can put in the corner of your house you watch the social media hey this is something great i want to have it you can go online and basically two days later this is delivered to your doorstep it's very dynamic consumer driven And there we feel that we can make also organic play much faster than we would have been able to do in the steam market. We also feel that we have great competitive advantage because our infrared competition in the US is actually selling basically Chinese made infrared sauna cabins. We will be selling made in America, made in West Virginia, great infrared sauna cabins. So there's plenty of opportunities for us to go after this market, not only through acquisitions, but also through organic means. But as I said, we are definitely interested in talking.

The performance in the traditional markets has improved. To what extent is that being driven by replacement? A couple of other follow-up. Or do you see signs of new-built renovation to pick up And there is also question about how this has been in July, but we don't comment yet July.

Yeah. Well, there's a big difference when you look at the role of replacement market and replacement on the kind of new sauna sales. whether you look at Europe or whether you look at US or Asia. In Europe, and in particular the traditional sauna countries of Europe, like the Nordic countries and Germany, a significant portion of the business is replacement sales, so selling equipment to existing saunas on a regular interval. Also within Europe, there are, however, markets where new sauna businesses is actually the dominant part of the business, like the UK, which is actually a very interesting growth market right now. But generally, when you go to these overseas markets, sauna penetrations are very low. Install bases are still pretty low. Kind of new build is really kind of the key driver growing the market. So that gives you a bit of a picture of how the dynamics plays out.

Are you expecting more CapEx spending in the second half of this year, given your accelerated revenue growth, or do you think there is enough capacity left to support future expansions? Well, we are expecting a little more CapEx during the second half of the year than what we had in in H1. And the main reason is actually we have enough capacity in our factories, but we may expand a little the logistics opportunities in US on our new land there. But that's not a huge investment. But anyhow, we are planning also some future growth investments there. Then there is a question. There has been some uncertainty in the markets related to behavior of US consumers recently. Have you seen any signs of weakening in the sauna markets in the US?

Well, if you look at just our figures for the quarter two, the answer is no. Of course, we are also very vigilant to looking at the kind of the macro markets. And, you know, there seems to be, I would say, cooling of the sentiment in the U.S. that we've, of course, taken note. But at the same time, we feel that we're not in the kind of so much in the mercy of the kind of macro economics in the U.S. for the following reason. There's roughly, let's say, a bit over one million saunas in the US, and there's 340 million people living there. There's around 25, 26 million dollar millionaires. So the sauna penetration is one per 340 US citizens or one per 25 US dollar millionaire. So that just talks about the story that, you know, great wellness product that enhances the living. It basically does good for you in terms of health and wellness benefit. And it feels great. It's a story that resonates. And we feel that there is also during, I would say, tougher economic times, enough people for the means and willingness to buy our products.

Okay, there are no other questions. Thank you for listening. Please check our appendices in this presentation. There are some slides which we had earlier in the main presentation, and certainly some additional information you might be interested in. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, and have a good day.