Harvia Oyj

Hello everyone and welcome to Harvia's fourth quarter 24 earnings webcast. My name is Mattias Järenfelt. I am the CEO of Harvia and with me I have Ari Vesterinen, our chief financial officer. Hello. Today we will cover first the highlights of the quarter four in terms of business performance and financial performance. And I will also give you an update on our strategy implementation. After my part, Ari will be covering the financial numbers in more detail. After this introduction, we would be more than happy to answer any of your questions. And as usual, you can submit your questions via the chat box in this webcast. So let's first summarize the quarter four and also year 2024. In terms of the last quarter, we delivered strong growth. And in fact, it was our all-time high quarter in terms of top line. Revenue increased by 29% and amounted to 51 million euros. Organic revenue growth was 21%. In terms of geographies, we delivered very strong growth in North America and Asia Pacific and Middle East. And in Europe, we did grow, but the growth was on a modest level. Fueled by the overall strong growth of the group, we grew across all product groups. In particular, we had very high growth percentages in steam product category as we had acquired Thermosol, a US-based steam company, in the summer of 24. In terms of cash flow and profitability, cash flow was strong, and profitability during the quarter was somewhat below our long-term target level of 20%. Adjusted operating profit this quarter was 8.7 million euros, and that's 17.1% of revenue. The profitability margin was impacted by a few factors. Very importantly, a higher share of lower margin campaign sales in the United States. And I will be coming back to this point when I cover United States or North America more in detail as I go through the regions. We also had partially one-off sales and marketing actions, as well as we have been keeping investing in building Harvia for the future through strengthening our R&D and commercial organizations. Cash conversion was at excellent level at 140%, and that was driven especially by favorable development in accounts receivables and accounts payables. If we sum up then year 24, it is a strong year for Harvia. The group achieved all of the updated long-term financial targets during the year. We delivered double-digit growth, both total growth and also organic growth, strong profitability, and we have a very solid balance sheet. We also worked to sharpen our strategy and the North Star for Harvia's coming years. We launched our updated strategy in our first ever Capital Markets Day in May, and the execution of the new strategy has started very well. We also strengthened our portfolio by acquiring Thermasol that helps us strengthen our position in STEAM, digital solutions for sauna and spa, and strengthens our position in the United States. We have also been launching exciting new products and the innovation pipeline looks strong. So all in all, Harvia is very well positioned for future success as we continue to implement our market leadership strategy. So quarter four, 24 key figures. Revenue, 51 million euros. That's a bit over 11 million euros more than quarter four last year. That's 29% growth. And in comparable exchange rates, that's 28% growth. Organic revenue growth was around 22%. Adjusted operating profit for the quarter was 8.7 million euros. That's down around 9% from the year before. The relative profitability or operating profit margin was at 17% during the quarter. Operating free cash flow was 15 million euros, and that's an excellent cash conversion of 140%. Full-year key figures are here. Revenue, 175 million euros, and that's growth of 16.4% from last year. At comparable exchange rates, we grew by 16.2%, and organic revenue growth was around 13%. Adjusted operating profit for the full year was 37.1 million euros, and that's a growth of 10% from the year before. The full year adjusted operating profit margin was 21%. Operating free cash flow for the year was 35 million euros, and that's a very healthy around 80% cash flow for the full year. The regional overview for quarter four is here. And as you can see in the figures, we grew very fast outside Europe, while European growth was much more modest. North America grew over 60%, and APEC and Middle East grew by over 90%. Northern Europe and continental Europe grew by single digits. I will then go through each of the regions a bit more in detail, starting with Northern Europe. So Northern Europe covers Finland, Scandinavian countries and the Baltic countries. And in the quarter four, it represented 21% of our group revenue. And revenue increased by 4% to around 11 million euros. It was a bit mixed in terms of market conditions. Market in Finland has been continuing to be weak due to weak construction and property market. But we have seen improvement in our momentum in Baltic countries and Scandinavia. And in Scandinavia, particularly in Sweden, we have been successfully strengthening our distribution during the year. Continental Europe has seen a gradual recovery now for over a year. And the share of revenue in terms of total group revenue is 29%. The revenue grew by 6.6% to around 50 million euros. And as this gradual sales recovery continued, we've observed that in particular, we have been performing strong in the high price point categories and with our high-end brand EOS that is based in Germany. Then very interesting regions, so North America. North America now represents 40% of Harvia's group revenue, and revenue grew by over 60% to around 20 million euros in quarter four. Organic revenue growth of the region was around 30%, so the 60% growth is pretty much 50-50 split between inorganic growth coming from Thermasol and organic growth delivered by the rest of the organization. And overall, the market conditions remained strong and there was strong demand for our products. And this was also visible in a very high volume performance of our key high season campaigns, such as Black Friday. And now we need to put American market in the strategic context for Harvia. It is already the largest market region for us today. In addition to that, we see massive growth potential for many, many years to come for Harvia in this region. And thus, we deem it very important that we strive for market leadership and significant growth and also market share gains in this region. Now, important part of success in Northern American market is participation in the key sort of consumer sales season throughout the year. And maybe the most important of them is the Black Friday, Cyber Monday campaigns. Now, these campaigns are agreed with retail partners many months in advance where we agree on the product portfolio, pricing and other key commercial terms. Now, what happened to us during the quarter four this year is that actually key material prices, which is wood in our case, as a large portion of our sales is sauna cabins and kind of do-it-yourself sauna kits, kind of wood price, as you can see from the public sources, grew quite significantly throughout the second half. And that impacted somewhat the margins, and there was a bit of a deviation from what we had planned originally. And then the other thing is that we were super successful in terms of actually getting orders in. So sales volumes during these campaigns were very high. And these two things in combination resulted into a situation where we had a higher portion of lower gross margin sales in Harvia's group sales in this quarter than we would normally see. At the same time, we take this as a very positive sign of continued high interest to sauna and spa and the kind of wellness and sort of enjoyable experiences that we can provide to American consumers through our portfolio. APEC and Middle East also grew fast, now representing 10% of our total revenue. And when you look at the bars here on the left-hand side chart, you can see that we are nearly at the same levels as during the peak season during the COVID times in 2021. And during 2021, big portion of the sales was sales in Russia, which we decided to exit during the financial year 22. And we are very happy to see that in a relatively short period of time, we've been able to bridge the gap that the exiting Russian market left to us through fast growth in key markets in Asia, which is countries like Japan, China, Australia, and also project business in the Middle East region. So here is then the full year picture of the regions. Essentially, Northern Europe declined by around 5%, continental Europe up by around 5%, so Europe as a whole flat, North America growing over 40%, and APEC Middle East and Africa growing over 50%. Then I will briefly take you through our business performance by sauna type and product category. So essentially Harvia wants to be the global leader for all sauna types, which is the traditional sauna, infrared sauna and steam. And also we're keenly looking at other temperature related wellness products, such as our cold bathing products. Where we are today, heating equipment represented a bit over 50% of our total business. Saunas and Scandinavian hot tubs was around 30%. And of this part, significant majority is the sauna cabins and sauna do-it-yourself kits. Steam product category grew from three percentage points to nine percentage points of our total sales, fueled by our acquisition of Thermosol. And it has been consolidated as part of Harvia Group financials since August last year. Accessories and heater stones represented seven percent and spare parts and services six percent of our total sales. And when we look at the growth across product categories, we can see that percentage-wise, clearly fastest growth was in steam products, which grew nearly 300% fueled by thermosol. But we see also a very healthy, nice double-legged growth across the other key product categories as well. The full year picture is here, heating equipment growing by around 15%, saunas and Scandinavian hot tubs growing around 9%, where sauna kits have been performing better than the hot tub part of it. Steam products growing by over 100%, accessories and heaterstone business by around 40%, and spare parts and services flat around. So then let's briefly cover Harvia's strategic role that we see for ourselves in this very exciting market that is supported by strong growth drivers. We strive to be the company that shapes this very interesting global sauna market so that everyone has a reason to experience sauna and hence also this, you know, we fuel the growth of the whole market as the market leader. So we have four strategic focus areas. First is related to what we offer, and that's about delivering the full sauna experience to the market. Where do we focus on? We focus on winning in strategically most important markets like the United States, like the big markets in Europe, Germany, United Kingdom, Spain, France, etc. And also in Asia, China, Japan and Australia. to whom relates to our channel strategy, where, for example, direct-to-consumer plays an important role in many regions, and how relates to kind of the solid platform that we want to have to keep scaling up this business in a profitable manner. So that's best-in-class operations and great people. We've taken systematic steps in executing this new strategy, and these are steps that we've taken during quarter four. Delivering full sauna experience, which relates to offering products across the sauna types, traditional on steam, infrared, and also about design innovation, digital innovation. We've taken steps to strengthen our position in the traditional sauna category, both in equipment business and sauna cabin business. We acquired Thermosol during the summer, and we have successfully been leveraging that to strengthen our position in steam. Also, we have been strengthening our innovation and differentiation, and I will cover that in the next slide. We also have been definitely winning in the key markets where we need to win. North America growing very strong, as we discussed, and it is already our largest sales region, and we see plenty of future potential there for many, many years to come. APAC in Middle East and Africa, very strong growth throughout the year, and it's now representing 10% of Harvias Group sales. And in continental Europe, despite the tough macroeconomic situation in many of our key markets like Germany, we've been able to drive growth, and we've been especially leveraging our premium and professional brand EOS there. And in Northern Europe, the market as well has been challenging, especially in Finland, and we have had also some headwind in other countries, but we've done excellent work in expanding and strengthening our distribution network, in particular in Scandinavia. Leading the key channels, our progress is strong across the channels, and the progress is particularly strong in our direct-to-consumer online business in North America, which we are very happy about. And essentially, we've been working a lot on our so-called right product to right channel strategy so that we have exactly right products that help us maximize the chances for growth and profitable growth across channels and also provide the right business incentive and profit opportunity for our channel partners. We've also been working to strengthen the foundations of our business. So we continually are upgrading and kind of doing maintenance investments in several of our locations. We are also increasing the level of integration across a group to drive more synergies and leverage best practices across our business. And we have also been working a lot to integrate Thermosol in the most successful way into our group. And that work is progressing according to the plan. We also made a key nomination announcement during the quarter, which is that Ivan Sabato will be starting as the head of Continental Europe and member of the group management team starting 1st of April in his role. And then a bit of a glimpse of some of the innovation that we've launched during the latter part of last year. So first wood burning version of a cylinder heater. This is very important for us because cylinder heater family is very, very successful. It's a product where the form factor really excites the market. And so far it has been only available in electric heater versions. And for the first time, it's now available also as a wood-burning version, and the demand that we see for this product is very solid. Another one relates to market leadership and innovation leadership and making a statement. So we launched a sauna cabin called Kirami Tile, which is the world's first fully solar-powered outdoor electric sauna. And this means that you can have the convenience of electric sauna really anywhere, regardless of whether you have the electric grid or not. And of course, it's a statement of our commitment to sustainability. Harvia Phoenix is a full touch control panel for our mid price points volume range. And this is following on a very successful Harvia Xenio product family. And we also have been working on to make sure that there's backwards compatibility so that customers who currently have a Harvia Xenio control panel actually can very easily upgrade to this more exciting full touch version of the control unit. And then on the right hand side, you can see one of the examples of our ongoing work to excite the market in the United States. So that's Blackwater Cube Sauna by Almost Heaven Saunas. So with that, I will hand over to Ari, who will be covering the numbers in more detail.

Okay. Here we see first the comparison of the different quarters. And actually, the quarter four in 24 was the highest sales quarter ever. But there were certainly some cost effects in that quarter too, which reduced its adjusted EBIT level to 17%. And those extra... reasons were, first of all, we had quite a concentration of trade shows in Q4. In three, four years, we haven't had so many international trade shows in the fall as we now had. We had altogether in H2 four international trade shows, and three of them were in the costs of Q4. And we had also other marketing initiatives during Q4 and that reduced also the relative profitability. But of course, we will reap the benefits of these marketing investments in the future too. Mattias mentioned there were also some reasons in the sales mix and campaign products and small reasons also in the US lumber price increases, which are not so substantial, but they affected also this profitability of the quarter. I see already a lot of questions about the EBIT levels and the reasons behind them. I have to say that the marketing expenses in Q4, they were at least 1.2 million higher than in the earlier quarters in that year. So we invested heavily in marketing during that quarter. And since those expenses can't be capitalized, we will reap really the advantage of that in future. Here we see again the comparison of the P&L figures and some other key performance indicators. I have to say that the full year figures for 2024, they have already been audited. So they are audited figures. We don't audit, no company actually does it separately, the quarters, but the full year is now done through the audit. And it has been discussed also with the board of directors. But here, You see on the two left columns, Q4, and the increase of the sales that was really heavy. And as Mattias already mentioned, over 21% was organic. And in the whole year, actually, the organic part of the sales increase was almost 13%. So we have been actually ahead of our financial targets in that respect for the whole year. The same happened also with adjusted operating profit for the whole year, 21.2%, having the extraordinary Q4 there, and it's about 1% less than a year ago. The operating free cash flow, we were able to turn it really back into very positive during Q4 since we were able to reduce the inventories, collect the money from customers and increase also the trade payables. So we turned to the, let's say, normal Harvia levels, the operative free cash flow. Harvia is very strong in cash generation traditionally, but there are changes, fluctuations between the quarters. The leverage went slightly down compared to end of Q4. And networking capital was about 9 million higher than a year ago, even if we had a strong cash conversion. And I remind you that Q4 and Q1 are usually internationally, especially the strongest sauna sales companies. So we have still munition on our inventory to serve also Q1 well. And we got about 90 new colleagues in our group in 24 compared to the end of 23. But as you notice, the increase of the headcount is far lower than the increase in the net sales and production output. So we are taking care of the effectiveness of the production and all the functions all the time, even if we have been also now investing in more, let's say, higher quality people in sales and marketing and R&D. Here we see the excellent free cash flow and cash conversion development. The pattern is actually quite similar to last year, but now the Q3 was lower this year than last year, and then the bounce back until the end of the year was even stronger. So we had a very strong cash conversion for the whole year. The net debt went down during Q4 slightly. It went up in Q3 because of the Thermosol acquisition. And as we go on, if we don't make any acquisition and so forth, the net debt will go down further during the quarters to come. We had end of 24, about 46 million euros on our accounts. That's 6 million more than a year ago. So Harvia is a cash flow strong and cash rich company. It was already discussed that the thermosol increased the net financial items and of course the interest burden, but we had also some good decisions made in exchange rate gains. We have had some deposits in in US dollars not converted to euros, we've been able to catch some exchange rate gains there, and we have been more active in demanding interest income from our banks for the deposits we have the money. We have had several investments during the year, mainly in production facilities in Finland, central Finland, Muurame, Sastamala, that's the place where the kirami products are produced, and in Germany. We will have additional production facility investments during the couple of next years to come. And for that, we already acquired space around our Louisburg sauna factory, about eight hectares. So we will invest in production there also in future. The Harvia's long-term financial targets, they were updated in the Capital Markets Day in last May. Now in the target, we have the growth rate, annual average growth rate of 10%. profitability over 20% adjusted operating profit and net debt divided by adjusted EBITDA, so-called leverage, under 2.5. We reached those figures nicely for the whole year 24, but Q4, as explained earlier, was a bit lower in profitability. We usually don't publish a short-term outlook. The simple reason is that our order stock is always quite short and we also have fluctuations in campaign and so forth. So that has been our practice in the past years and we continue with that practice. Harvia is paying regularly increasing dividend twice a year. So that's our dividend policy. If we look back a little at the years, what we have experienced after the IPO in 2018, here you see in this picture how it has developed. We had really the peak year of 21 during the COVID years and total growth was was 64% and organic growth 43% during that time. It was a very, very special situation. And I haven't, for instance, I've been in this business quite a long time. I haven't experienced such a peak in the industry demand earlier. Then we went down a couple of years, and now in 24, we are almost on the same level as in the COVID time peak. The profitability is now on a lower level, but it's partly because we invest in future growth, develop the business models and new products. The average growth rate over the time has been 19%, so we've been quite nicely over the long-term targets during the whole time. And the acquisitions, of course, they bring part of the growth, but the organic growth has been also over 10%. The shareholder structure during 24 changed quite a bit. Actually, we got a lot of new international shareholders. The share of the international shareholders went up over 5% units from 44 to 49, 9%. So about half of our shareholding is now outside of Finland. And at the same time, the Finnish households, they reduced their shareholding in Harvia. Finnish institutions and corporations, they increased. So because of the decrease in the household shareholding, the number of shareholders went down. During 24, we had about 20... 31,700 shareholders in our lists at the end of 24. Dividend proposal has also been discussed also by the Harvia's board of directors. And Harvia board of directors propose to the annual general meeting, which will be held, by the way, April 8th in Helsinki. The dividend for the last year of 75 euro cents, about 14 million in total. And that is planned to be paid in two installments, one in April after the AGM and a second one in October. And I just would like to remind you that the company Harvia is actually turning to 70 years old in 25. So the 70 years old company is now paying 75 euro cents of tax. dividends and there will be a lot of happenings and activities related to this three quarters of age for a family-owned company and during the year and we express our gratitude really to our employees and loyal shareholders and want to continue with you also multiple years to come. So now it's time for questions and answers. I have here in my my tablet a lot of questions and probably Matias will answer most of them, but I will add probably something also. So let's start from the oldest part. By the way, the word EBIT is now visible quite many times here in these questions, so it's understandable. Can you quantify how big the effect on EBIT was from growth initiatives this quarter and how big from campaigns?

Well, there's some things that you can actually find out when you analyze the numbers in our financial statements. So, for example, one of the things that you can look at is the development of material costs as percentage of our sales. And if we take an example from a quarter four year before, so quarter four twenty three, our so-called materials margin was around 63.5 percent, whereas now it was just a tiny bit below 50 percent. And essentially that's a 3.8 percentage points impact. So if you would take like a simulation where you would calculate what's the difference, if we would have maintained the same level of sort of materials cost to sales as we did a year before. So that's around basically 3.8%. As Ari mentioned, we had also quite significant investments in marketing, and that's more than one percentage point. So practically, you could potentially, if you do a simulation, take a bit of a working assumption that the combined effect of the campaigns plus the enhanced activities in marketing As we have very exciting innovation that we launched and really want to share that with the key trade partners was in total around five percentage points.

How big impact from growth initiatives or higher OPEX should we expect in 2025?

Well, we don't give short-term financial guidance, so that would relate to this ongoing year, but it is very clear that we see as Harvia plenty of opportunities in this business. And the way we at management see that we are very interesting position for the future. Harvia is the global market leader in a specialty market that is, in our assumption, turning from niche market to a volume market. So we feel that we are extremely well positioned to capture significant growth opportunities in the coming years. And of course, we reflect our performance on the other hand, the opportunities that we as management see, and on the other hand, to the long-term targets that we have published and what the board of directors are holding us accountable for. And we feel confident that we see a very good path for us in front of us.

Can you please discuss the sales performance of different channels in the US? You say that the good receivables management during Q4, as most clients paid pre-delivery, this sounds direct distribution, which is the highest matching channel for you. Why EBIT matching for group level is still is the lowest in over 10 quarters?

Well, basically we have, say, three main channels there. One is our own direct-to-consumer. Another one is sales through what we would call the volume retailers. And essentially one of the examples is Costco. How it works in practice with most of our volume retail partners is that actually they carry none or very little inventory. So actually a consumer orders on their website and pays. We get the money actually very fast and we ship the product directly to the consumer. So kind of from kind of the cash flow point of view, working with them, kind of our volume retail partners where we ship direct based on online orders or through our own direct to consumer, they are actually fairly similar. And then the kind of third channel is what we would call the independent retailers that specialize in sauna, pool and spa. And in particular here of course oftentimes our pricing on our D2C matches quite closely the pricing on our volume retailers websites. So there is a bit of a combined effect that kind of when we agree on campaign pricing with our key retail partners that basically also kind of leads to pretty much fixing our own D2C pricing also for the key sales season, which in this case was the Cyber Monday and Black Friday.

Are you planning campaigns in Europe to boost revenues similar to the campaigns in the US?

Well, the market dynamics, there's some differences between the US and Europe. And one big one really is this massive portion of consumers ordering via online, either from us directly or from what I described as volume retailer partners. And we don't see yet that similar dynamics in the in the European market. But then again, of course, it poses the question that, you know, could we replicate some of the successful business models that we are executing very well in the United States in at least selected countries in Europe? And this is certainly something that we are working on. And maybe there's some news to follow in the coming quarters.

Should we expect lower sales in the US in Q1, following strong Q4 demand boosted by the campaigns?

Well, again, we don't give a short-term guidance. Unfortunately, I cannot directly comment on that. We at Harvia take this quarter four and the sales result as a very encouraging sign of continued interest and demand for our products in the category we represent in the United States.

Finnish economy and especially construction market is still challenged. How is the Finnish sales performing? Is it still down?

Yes, it's still down. And this is also something that I kind of opened up a little bit as I covered the northern European figures. So basically we have delivered growth in Scandinavia and the Baltic countries during the latter part of the year, while the sales in Finland has continued to decline for now around two years. And during this period of time, the Finnish market has been under, I would say, lots of headwinds. And in the sauna business, Finland is a very special market. Everywhere else, you know, we closely follow kind of the trend of the wellness and health and enjoyable experiences. Whereas in Finland, our business follows much more closely new-build construction and property market. The reason for this is the huge sauna penetration in Finland. So we estimate that there's around 3 million saunas in Finland. And as a bit of interesting data point, in the Finnish car register, there is 2.7 million passenger cars in Finland. So there's actually more saunas in Finland than passenger cars. So that tells the story that sauna is... you know, everywhere in most apartments, most houses, many summer cottages, et cetera. And hence it is more closely linked to new build construction and property market as in the other countries. And property markets for buying and selling used apartments is a key trigger for renovation. So when a couple or family moves into a new apartment, they oftentimes look around and yes, we will do a bit of a renovation in the kitchen and we'll do also bathroom and sauna renovation. And once this kind of people don't move and property market is slow, we are lacking a volume of those trigger events. It seems that there is now a bit light in the end of the tunnel. There are now early signs that the Finnish property market starts to pick up. And also based on the recent earnings calls by some of the big construction companies, it seems that some of them are also now starting to accelerate again their residential new build activities.

This might sound a little repetition, but I ask how the questions come, because there is certainly some hidden criticism also. If Harvia wants to be a premium sauna brand, why participate in discount campaigns? What good is the growth in turnover when bottom line sinks and the brand's value is diminished in the eyes of consumers?

Well, I think there's different ways to look at this. And one important distinction is that Harvia is a multi-brand house. And we have globally two master brands, Harvia, which is our group mother brand. It's inclusive, welcoming brand that we want to be the category leader for the sauna and spa. Another global master brand that we have is for the high end, kind of the top of the range, EOS, which is based on the acquisition we did in 2020. So a German company, German sauna brand that we bought. Now, United States is actually a little bit of a special case for us, where we have a tailored brand approach to the market. And we have what we would call good, better, best brand strategy. And actually, the biggest part of our business is on that good entry level that we sell under almost Heaven Sauna's brand. And you can consider almost Heaven Sauna's brand as like the IKEA of sauna. easy to buy, easy to assemble, do-it-yourself kit that looks good, is well thought through and it's also affordable. And in this segment, participation to campaigns is important and it's part of playing that category game. And as explained during quarter four, it was hugely successful in terms of sales volume. And of course, it is a moment of learning, of course, for us also on Harvia's side as we fine tune and finalize our plans for this year. It is very clear that we value the Harvia brand a lot. We feel that there's really an opportunity to establish Harvia as almost like a synonym to the sauna category. If you think about Tesla being like a synonym for the electric vehicles or to Google to be a synonym for the internet searches. There's not really a widely recognized consumer brand in the sauna space. And it is our ambition that over the years, Harvia brand will become the category leading brand here. And we are surely taking good care of it.

Okay, then we have a lengthy twofold question. The first part is about, so to say, to normalize the queue for EBIT. Okay, Mattias answered that already earlier. But then the following question. Also, you've been able to... Have you been able to pass or higher wood prices in North America to your sales prices so that these are no longer headwind in Q1?

Well, the short story is that generally we feel that we have a good agility in passing increases in input materials to our sales prices. And I think this is a bit of an exception when we talk about these Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaigns. As explained, they are agreed several months in advance. And it's a bit of a balancing act that we want to grow. We want to take market share. We want to also defend our position in the key retail channels as the number one partner. So there is a certain ambition from our side to be attractive from the offer point of view towards the customers. But of course, we want to grow in a profitable manner. But it is a bit of a balancing act between where to place the price points in these campaigns. And basically, since the summer, which is after these campaigns were agreed, you can also Google yourself, lumber price United States, and you can see the charts that there's been actually, you know, clearly an increase during the quarter. during actually the whole second half of the year. And basically what came to the campaigns themselves, basically we had no option anymore to change the prices with our retail partners. Those campaigns are no longer alive. Having said that, there has been a really good order intake and actually some of it will be also delivered during the quarter one. But all in all, we see that this is a very good... sign and evidence of a said continued interest towards our category and we are looking forward to many successful years to come and see huge potential in the United States.

Should this margin of 16.5% be extrapolated to the coming quarters, or should we expect you to come back to the 22-23% EBIT margin in Q1?

Well, again, just repeating myself a bit, but as you know, we don't provide short-term financial guidance. But for us as management, there's a few things. One is the long-term financial targets, and we strive to deliver or overdeliver consistently. So that's kind of one point to take into account. The other one is that we feel that we are an actual... privileged position as a company. Many other companies are facing headwind in their core market. They might be like flat or slow growth or even decline, whereas we are opportunity rich in terms of where we see growth opportunities. How we want to go after these sometimes does require investments, for example, investment in R&D when we talk about digital new product development, organic growth to the infrared categories where we see plenty of opportunities. So it requires some work for us to make us well equipped for strategic growth. Now, the thinking on our side is that how do we finance this increase in OPEX to drive growth in the future is by two means. One is solid top line growth and solid gross margin. So we can rest assured that we have a lot of attention on securing both as we move forward, essentially continue to drive growth and continue to drive solid gross margin so that we can keep the wheels running and keep developing our business for a long-term success.

Are you seeing increased competition in the US and is that then the reason for the lowering your prices in the quarter?

Well, directly it's not the reason. The other part of your question, do we see increased competition? We see actually quite intensive competition in the United States. We have seen it already now for definitely some years. Actually, we know that many of our competitors are also watching our webcasts. So hello to our dear colleagues in other companies. And actually, they are following our success. And our success in the United States clearly is attracting also attention from competitors. And as the industry keeps growing, it attracts even more attention. At the same time, we feel that we are extremely well positioned to keep growing, keep growing profitably, and even extending our lead in this market. We have some really exciting things that we've been working on and feel very confident that our strategy and our plans are effective and will help us as we move forward.

I noticed also that our big customers are following us. There is one question from one customer whose name I don't mention, but out of the 63% growth in Harvia in America, What percentage of the growth came from other distributors than your own company, Almost Heaven Saunas?

Well, this is something I don't have the figure here, and this would not be something we specifically would open up publicly. As I said, our competitors are also following... our presentations and you know we want to provide good transparency for our investors to assess us as a company they own or as a company that they might want to participate in the ownership but at the same time we need to balance also in terms of realizing that I said there's a lot of interest to Harvia and part of that is coming from our competition.

Then there is a question which we can't probably answer so directly. Could you quantify the costs of the trade shows and how that compares to previous years? I mentioned that in Q4 we had about 1.2 million more marketing cost in the group than in the quarters before. So majority of that is somehow related to the trade shows or launching new products or launching new web pages and this kind of marketing activities. It's quite substantial. Organic revenue growth was very solid in North America. However, if I calculate thermosol sales contribution in Q4, it looks not to be meaningful up on a sequential basis despite more months involved and Q4 being the high season. What was the performance according to your expectations?

Well, largely the performance was in line with our expectation. Now there's actually an excellent question and it gives me an opportunity to open up a bit of the sort of the sales dynamics across the different sauna types. Infrared saunas are the easiest to buy sauna. Basically, the only thing you do is online. And we estimate that roughly 90% of the infrared saunas sold in the United States are actually bought direct to consumer. So consumers buying online store directly from the manufacturers. And the reason for this is that they are super easy to take into use. You basically assemble them and plug to electrical plug and you're ready to go. Now, in the middle, there is the traditional sauna that depending on the case, if you buy an outdoor sauna for your backyard, maybe it's a wood-burning heater, it's actually super easy do-it-yourself project, fun, maybe one day DIY project, very easy to buy. But then when you start to move inside with the traditional sauna, you might face questions like moisture control and maybe some drainage related things, and it gets a little bit more kind of, you know, effort in having that traditional sauna inside your house. And then steam is the most, I would say, installation-heavy sauna type. Basically, it's steam. Basically, you need a plumber to connect to the steam generators. There's a lot of steam generated, and there's a need for the water drainage, et cetera. We see that for infrared saunas and these sort of easy to assemble outdoor sauna cabins, there's a lot of seasonality and it's very much like this consumer market that follows. On the other hand, these sort of main sales seasons in the United States and partly also there's some annual seasonality. So the quarter four and quarter one typically are the highest. Whereas the steam sauna is more tied to the construction and property trades, and also it's much more steady over the year. And essentially we bought Thermosol for long-term success. It provides us unique capabilities in steam that we definitely need as a company. they have the industry-leading digital platform so you can also go to their website and see actually really nice android-based control panels that you know work extremely well even in hot and humid environments that we feel that you know we fit also very nicely more broadly in harvia's portfolio and again provides us more distribution and more more more more strength in in the united states So thermosol acquisition in particular was made for the long term, and hopefully this answer also explains a little bit that there is a bit of a different dynamics between the different sauna types and seasonality.

Okay, quite suitable follow-up question, then the thermosol. What was the EBIT contribution of thermosol in Q4?

Well, we don't open it up. It's basically we report our profitability on a group level. We do, of course, give some hints. So one of the hints is that traditionally, maybe not in this quarter four, traditionally, the further away you go from Finland, the better the margins tend to be, where sauna is considered more as a specialty product, whereas in Finland it's more like a kind of a very common product. And Thermasol, what we have said, though, is that as Harve is having industry leading profitability levels, that typically when we buy companies, they come in at somewhat lower EBIT margin levels. But then again, we always do plan for this and we feel that we have also solid plans when it comes to Thermasol to make sure that it is a profitable growth lever for us in the future.

there are good synergy plans and they have been also published the numbers when we published last summer the acquisition and we think we are ahead of that synergy plan but for the fall and the Q4 the impact was not yet so high so there is more to come from Thermasol certainly as Mattias said. What impact would possible US tariffs have on Harvia?

A very timely and excellent question. And of course, given our heavy weight on the United States and North America, representing now 40% of group revenues in the quarter four, we have been debating this a lot internally. Now, one question is that if the tariffs come, what does it do to our competitive position versus the competition? And we feel that we are very well positioned. So basically, we have two manufacturing facilities in the United States. The West Virginia factory that's mainly specializing in this sort of almost heaven sauna cabins. And then we have Thermosol manufacturing facilities in Austin. And give and take 70% and even above of what we sell, kind of the end products that we sell there, are manufactured and assembled in the United States. We feel that we are actually in a very good position in terms of, you know, having such a high share of production domestic in the United States. And based on our assessment, we are much better positioned than actually our competition that have higher share of manufacturing assembly outside the United States. Now, then the question mark is also then tariffs impacting kind of the input costs. And essentially, of course, one of the key questions for us is Canada. Canada is a big supplier of wood, so lumber and timber to the United States. So we are following that closely. Of course, that's part of our strategic pricing planning also, as we look at this year and also the campaigns. We are following that closely. Overall we feel that we are well positioned to pass on kind of increases in material prices in the market, you know, for many reasons. We've seen it happen many times. And the other thing is that also our competitors would be facing the same cost increases from potential tariff increases. So our assumption really is that, you know, us and also competitors have really an ambition then to make sure that that is also reflected in the sales prices. Then, of course, there's a question that what will happen to the U.S. economy as a whole. And essentially, again, looking from outside, it looks like a lot what the new administration is implementing in terms of fueling growth in AI. We assume that also they will have rather kind of business and taxpayer-friendly tax policies, etc. So while there's of course risks of, for example, inflation, but we largely see that the new administration is positive for the economic development of the United States.

Okay, thank you. The solar powered sauna. When do you expect to start selling? Is sauna gap in as profitable as for the group? And how do you see marketing costs for trade fairs etc. to incur during 2025? I don't know if related to this product or in general.

Yeah, well, I think that if we take this solar power electric sauna, I would take it still as more like a statement and a kind of spearhead product for a change that is taking place in the industry. I think it's actually a really exciting product that, on the other hand, can be solved with the argument of sustainability. It's 100% kind of green energy from the sun. But actually very important part of the value proposition is it's grid independent. So you basically think about like a resort in the Alps. You can just basically crane the sauna there. You don't have to worry about supply of electricity and you have actually ample time for sauna for every day. So it's actually surprisingly efficient from power consumption and kind of energy management point of view. We don't anticipate this to have substantial impact on the group numbers this year, but as years pass and as we keep innovating and providing super exciting stuff to the market, I think they will have more and more of an impact. Then there was a question about kind of launching products and trade marketing. And Ari mentioned that there's basically a few things that we've been working on lately. One is we were more active in the leading industry fairs across the world. So we were in the United States and we were in key trade fairs in Europe as well. And we felt it was, on the other hand, necessary. And also we had... the kind of right to go there. The reason being that we actually had an exciting story to tell. And a year ago, we actually were not participating in these events. And as a market leader, as the leading brand, we felt that we need to have the presence, and especially when we have such an exciting product portfolio to share, it's a great opportunity for us to build future demand. We are, of course, assessing this every year and we are looking at also balancing this with our affordability. So how much can we afford to invest in this? The other part that we've been working on, which I believe will help us greatly in launching products, is improving our digital presence. So this is also another area where we've invested our kind of marketing and OPEX have been going in, upgrading our brand presence, the kind of appearance of the websites that we have. And you'll even see some further improvements further enhancements during the coming months and first half. So this as a result of the work that we've been doing. And I think this is a key tool for us to help us launch products in an exciting and also cost efficient manner.

Okay, then there is a lengthy question about the operational leverage and near-term expense outlook. Do you think that the return of this incremental marketing cost growth will increase from here, given Harvia's increased footprint and your recent growth initiatives? Or put it another way, is the outlook for operating leverage still intact?

Well, operating leverage relates to the scale, especially scale benefits in manufacturing. And, you know, when you look at our P&L, you can see that we are actually very healthy in terms of direct labor as a share of our revenue. There was, of course, now in the short term, this sort of deterioration of the material costs. as a share of our revenue, but I trust that you now kind of get the background story kind of why that took place. Overall, we are strong believers that Harvi has excellent means to harvest operational leverage as we keep growing. We have highly effective manufacturing supply chain, we are investing in optimization. We know that when we compare and benchmark with our competitors, that it is a key competitive advantage that we definitely want to maintain. Also, we feel that investments, for example, in enhancing our digital presence while increasing fixed costs in the shorter term, that investment will pay back in scale benefits because it's a highly scalable platform and highly scalable marketing kind of channel for us. So to sum it up, we feel that the story of Harvi's good chances for operational leverage are intact.

With the anticipated tariffs, do you expect to, or have you already started accelerating shipments from Murame to West Virginia? Or have you noticed some pent-up demand already in Q1? Are consumers buying your products ahead of new inflatory pressures?

Well, we've launched a new organizational model a year ago. So before the company was working, I would say, more like in more independent local units. But now we have a more integrated group approach, including having a global kind of manufacturing and supply network that Mika Suoja, our chief operations officer, is managing and optimizing. And on one hand, as I said, you know, already now a big share of what we sell in the United States is made in the US. So that's a good thing. What's the remaining part, which would be around 30 percent of what we sell? It basically comes practically from Finland or then China and a small part from the United States. And this is mainly related to the sauna heaters or the technical equipment that we sell for the traditional saunas. And the good thing, first of all, is that we can actually fairly flexibly swap production between the China factory and Finland factory, which both we label as our volume product factories. And then Germany is the value, more like a high-end EOS brand, professional commercial grade products. So basically, depending on the tax burden towards China or EU, we can make adjustments. We are also considering for the longer term, not because of the tariffs as such, because they might be also very temporary in nature. So we don't want like a factory investment cannot really be based on, you know, kind of too short term assessment of tariffs. But just because we see so much growth opportunities in the United States and we see continued volume growth. Actually, interesting data point is that if you look at the US specifically, Based on our published figures, you take 2019 as the starting point and now 2024 as the end point. The average growth rate every year is 40%, and we did 42% this year. So it's such a strong volume growth that we've seen there. And it being now our biggest region, of course, we're also considering whether we start to hit the volume triggers, which would justify even having heater manufacturing capacity inside the walls of the United States. But having said that, Murame is super efficient. It's the world's largest manufacturing site for heating equipment, highly automized, etc. So it puts a high burden or high barrier to pass for any other sauna heater factory for us. But this is something that we are debating.

Another question related to the same topic, but addressed to me. During the last call you mentioned that Harvia doesn't need much capex, which is true for the maintenance part of the business operations. However, considering the strong sales performance in Q4, Won't you need a new round of expensory investments by the end of this year in the range of at least 4 to 5 million euros? To put it in another way, how much capacity is there left from the 21 investments, also considering the complex trade environment, which warrants more proactive inventory management? We have announced that we will have an investment program, especially in the US, for some six million during the next couple of years to come. And we will certainly have investments also in other units. But there is not really a big investment round needed. It's just add-on investments. We have still plenty of capacity. It's more about the logistics and warehousing and these things where we need a bit more space. Or would you like to add something?

No, that's it.

Very good. Okay, another question. Do you intend to raise prices to transfer wood cost increases? Will wood price be headwind in 2025?

Well, the long story is that, you know, of course we are following the wood price closely, you know, where it will be heading in the coming months and during this year, the time will tell. But as I said, you know, it's something that we vigilantly observe. And generally, I would say that we have a good ability to pass on material cost increases to sales prices.

Asian sales almost doubled. Can you specify where the growth was mostly from and have you become more confident about your growth markets in the region?

So maybe I'll open this up a little bit broader and then I bring back to Asia. Essentially Harvia wants to be the absolute global leader of this growing market that, based on our view, is moving from the niches to the volumes. Now, this means that we want to be present and keep winning in the most important markets that really matter for the long term. And for us, the United States clearly is and for many years will be the number one. At the same time, we see clear opportunities both in Europe and in Asia. In Europe, I mentioned countries like Germany just being big. The UK, we see very positive trends, France, Spain, Italy. So these are the big markets where we see plenty of opportunity for us and we want to go after them in a targeted manner. The same in Asia. And in Asia, we have chosen three countries for the main focus for the time being. That's Japan, China and Australia. Of course, you have to consider that we are now a very global business, roughly 50-50 split between European revenue and revenue from outside. And at the same time, we are still fairly small, so sub 200 million euro revenue. So, of course, we need to be also very targeted. Where do we place the bets? But so far, the bets that we placed seem to be working very well. We're very happy about it and the plan is to continue. But for the time being, we do not expect to kind of add in Asia kind of additional focus countries instead. You know, we see plenty of opportunities, Japan, China and Australia. And then maybe I would mention that, you know, project business in Middle East where we are quite successful. We plan to continue that.

Okay, now we run out of questions. I have to say that I've been multiple times in these webcasts and this was the longest one. Thank you for all the questions. And then I will add just a comment from our Handelsbanken analyst in Stockholm. Congratulations, Harvia, on the 75th anniversary. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Take care. See you soon. Bye-bye.