Vend Marketplaces Asa B

Good morning and welcome to our Q4 results presentation. As usual, Christian, our CEO, and PC, our CFO, will walk us through the performance and key developments in the quarter. This time, we will also spend a bit of time on AI to share our perspective, and we know it's a topic which many of you are interested in. Afterwards, we will, as usual, have a Q&A session with financial analysts, which you can join by Microsoft Teams. So please go to the website and find the link. Let me then just show the disclaimer slide to go through. And then, Christian, the floor is yours.

Thank you very much, Jan Boye, and good morning, everyone. Very happy to be here to present our Q4 results today. But I just quickly wanted to take a moment first to reflect on our 25 results as a whole. Because 2025 was a defining year for Vend. It was a year where we delivered on key strategic priorities and where we made good progress towards our financial targets. And a year where we fundamentally reshaped this company. Vend now is a much simplified marketplace company with a leaner cost base and with a sharp focus on our four Nordic verticals. And I'll come back to this in just a little bit. The results that we present for the fourth quarter today are strong. They demonstrate the resilience of our business and they come as a result of targeted efforts in line with our strategy. Group revenues remained rather stable at 1,510 million. This reflects, on one hand, anticipated headwinds, both in advertising and soft volumes in jobs. But at the same time, discipline focused on monetization, and ARPA was very strong, with 15 to 20 percent growth in several of our key segments. The growth in classifieds revenues combined then with the disciplined cost management delivered exceptional results in terms of profitability and group EBITDA rose with 53% year on year and ended up at 491 million. This represents a margin expansion of 12 percentage points to 32%. Let me also mention that the EBITDA for the full year increased 30% compared to 2024. And I think this is a good opportunity to thank my team and all our fantastic employees for the efforts to make this achievement possible. Now, in the last quarter of the year, we also continued our simplification agenda. We sold our skilled marketplace portfolio, also several of our venture investments, and removed the dual class share structure. And that means that we are now operating with this one share, one vote system. We also reached a major technical milestone in November with the migration of Blockit to our common Aurora platform. I'll also mention this a little bit more in detail in a few minutes. Finally, reflecting our solid financial position and confidence in our trajectory, we launched a new 2 billion share buyback program in Q4. And last evening, the board also resolved to propose increasing the ordinary dividend for 2025 to 2.5 kroner per share, compared to 2.25 kroner last year. In November 2024, we presented our strategic agenda at the Capital Markets Day in Barcelona, and today I'd like to give a summary of our progress on this plan since then. And I already touched upon some of the simplification measures that we have done with our organization. First of all, our cost level is significantly reduced. If we look at our OPEX to sales ratio and excluding COGS, that has improved by 8 percentage points from 65 to 57 percent compared to the baseline we presented at CMD. We have now also found new homes for most of our non-core assets, and I also want to say that the sales progress for delivery is progressing well. We've simplified the company structure materially, the separation from chips and media has been completed, and as mentioned, we no longer have this dual-class share structure. As mentioned at CMD, verticalization is really the essence of our growth strategy. We have successfully executed on a number of, let's say, vertical specific product and pricing initiatives that has resulted in a strong ARPA growth. And we have rolled out our transactional re-commerce model to all our markets. And the transition to one common platform is also on track with the Blockit transition in November. On the expansion part, we continue to scale our transactional models in mobility and real estate. And we have seen a strong growth in both Netbil, Autovex and Kasa through last year. In Finland, we reached the number one position in real estate, and our focus now is to translate that leadership into sustainable category leadership with stronger monetization. And last, but certainly not least, we have also forcefully executed on our capital allocation agenda. And we have returned close to 8 billion kroner to shareholders in 2025 alone. And our share buyback program is continuing into 26 as well. So, now I'd like to just tie a few more comments to the platform transition. This is the slide we showed at CMD, and moving all our marketplaces except Oikotie to a common Aurora platform is something we see has several benefits. It unlocks cost efficiencies, it supports our long-term monetization agenda, because it means that we can roll out pricing and product innovations and structures simultaneously and uniformly across all our markets. I would also say that it's a key to scaling our AI initiatives. It means that we can develop things once and then rapidly roll out those with few or no adaptations in all markets. And as I said, this is the chart that we showed at the CMD. It shows that we still have some things to do. But all our main brands, except Finn in Norway and Bilbasen in Denmark, are now on the common platform. And I also want here to remind everyone that Aurora, the common platform, is built on the Finn technology. and the Fin business logic. And that means that the upcoming Fin transition is of a different nature. It's a more tech transition, which then leads to the shutdown of the old legacy Fin platform. And that means that there are no kind of planned changes to the user interface or the product experience, which means that this is an initiative that carries low business risk. Then I'd like to spend a few minutes on Blocket in Sweden. And Blocket continues to come from a position of strength. It's a well-known and highly loved brand in Sweden with lots of engagement across categories. And I think that is a very important context for what we've seen through this platform transition. Blockit users really care about the Blockit brand and product. And many of the users have long established habits, particularly in vehicles. So on November 18th, we completed the platform transition for Blockit. And as in previous transitions in Finland and Denmark, we did expect that there would be some user and dealer reactions to changes in the product and in the user journeys. But it's fair to say that the reactions we have seen have been stronger. They have been more widespread than we expected. And we are also seeing some of that in the engagement on the site afterwards. Early on, we did experience some technical issues with data and ad statistics to dealers, but I also want to mention that these issues were quickly identified, quickly resolved, but they do explain in part some of the initial reactions from the dealers. If we then look at the metrics, on the professional side, the number of professional sellers, the number of professional car ads is in line with last year. Leads are slightly down, but that is also partly due to seasonality. But on the private side, new car ads are down around 27%. We've also seen that the user satisfaction has recovered more slowly than what we experienced in Tori and in DBA when we did those transitions. But it's also important to say that the conversion is better in the new product compared to the old Blockit product. And that explains why, for example, dealer leads and re-commerce transactions are much less affected than the overall traffic on the site. And I also want to say that we have seen improvements on these key metrics since the beginning of this year. Of course, improving the blocking situation is a top priority for Vend as we enter this year, and we are working continuously to roll out product improvements. We have particular focus on the app experience, on the search, and on the ad insertion for private ads. And, of course, also we are in parallel in continuous dialogue with both users and customers. We have increased our support as one example. And from a commercial perspective, we have postponed the planned price increases to later in the first half of 2026. And our goal is to be a long-term partner with the car industry. And this initiative has been very well received by our customers. So our overall objective is quite clear when it comes to Blockit. Stabilize usage, stabilize customer satisfaction, and then restore and build on the momentum from having a shared platform. Then I'd like to turn to AI, and I'll begin here by reminding you of the incredibly strong positions that we have across the Nordics. The brands that we operate are true household brands. They're known and used by almost everyone in our markets. Finn, of course, is in a complete league of its own with 99% unaided awareness. and close to 30 visits per capita every single month. And I really think this matters in an AI context, because it means that our brands are really destinations in their own right. They're not dependent on traffic from other sources, whether that is from Google, social media, or other sources. Users come directly to our sites. And importantly also, traffic from AI platforms today is negligible. Even when users use AI tools, they still go directly to our sites to act on that. And that direct relationship with users is really visible when you look at our engagement metrics. For example, 70% to 80% of our users are logged in. Half of them are even identified with electronic IDs, so we know exactly who they are. More than half of our traffic comes through our apps, which is really the channel that is the most engaging. And this combination of trusted brands, direct traffic, deep user relationships is something that is extremely difficult to replicate and what we believe is an incredibly strong starting point in this new AI world. And it is really against this backdrop that we are, as we've said many times before, very excited about opportunities that come from AI to improve the user and customer experiences. And we truly believe that we have the right assets to build winning AI products in the features. And in particular, I would say that we see three structural advantages that we have. First, it's about the unique data that we have. This is our most important strategic asset. And we truly believe that the most powerful AI products come from combining, let's say, general purpose models with deep structured deep structured and domain specific data and this is exactly what we have in our company. Of course we will take active measures to protect this data and the approach we will take will vary somewhat across verticals and brands depending on the strength of those and it's also something that we will experiment with and adapt to as we see the landscape evolves over time. Now the second structural advantage is the vertical focus. Our marketplaces really support quite complex, high-stakes and long-running user journeys. And this is really something that makes them particularly well suited for tailored AI solutions. And we will work in particular with securing ad supply, improving discovery and matching, and supporting better decisions for users and customers. And thirdly, we benefit from scale. Common Nordic platform allows us to build once and roll out to all our markets. And already 18 months ago, we built up our department of AI that ensures that we have specialist competence across the organization. And then finally, I just want to mention again that we don't foresee any AI investments beyond the financial guidance that we have given. So turning to data, and as mentioned, this is what we believe is a decisive differentiator when it comes to building the winning AI products. Of course, the actual data varies somewhat from vertical to vertical, but it broadly falls into these four categories. First, it's real-time ad data. And unlike e-commerce, as an example, all our objects are unique and they are constantly changing. That means that the global AI platforms, if they want this data, they either have to rely on crawled snapshots, which are quite quickly outdated, Or they have to rely on, let's say, on-demand lookups, which are slow. And both these approaches lead to a weaker user experience than what we can provide natively on our sites. Secondly, we have aggregated and enriched data, which we build from both the ads and also the user behavior. This can be things like price insights, demand trends, popularity signals, things and models that are proprietary to us and also quite difficult for these other parties to replicate. And thirdly, we have deep personal and behavioral data Of course, AI platforms will also know a lot about you as a person, but we truly believe that we have the most detailed insight into the intent that people have in our verticals. And then fourth, we have transactional data. This is an area that is growing quite rapidly for us. Data from fixed fare in e-commerce, from smidig bilhandel in mobility, netbil and so on. This really reflects actual transactions between people, including what you have bought, at what price and so on. And altogether, this data is quite unique, I would say. It's something that we continuously develop and evolve because this is what we believe will allow us to build the most personalized, the most accurate products for our users and customers. As I mentioned, we established this central department of AI more than 18 months ago. And since then, we have developed, rolled out, and tested a range of different AI features across the company, as you can see on this page. But I would also like to say that it is still early days. There isn't any established best practice out there yet. And our goal and priority is to experiment, to learn, and then to scale what we see working. And we will, in particular, focus our efforts on a few areas. It's about securing and improving the quality of ads. It's about improving discovery and matching. And it's about providing users and customers with the best decision support. And I thought it would be useful actually to show jobs as an example, because this is the vertical where we so far have launched the most AI features, and where we've also seen quite solid improvements in key metrics. And what we really see in jobs is that the user and customer needs, they actually differ by stage of their journey. And as you can see also on this page, in the consideration phase, for example, when you're early, candidates explore more, let's say, the range of options that they have based on preferences they might have with regards to how they want to have their life or how they think about their career and so on. Then, when you come into the more active search phase, the experience becomes more tailored towards more concrete job opportunities. And then finally, when a candidate has found a relevant and attractive job, We use job match to analyze the fit at that individual role level, helping that candidate make a decision whether this is the right opportunity or not for them. And I really think that this overall, this vertically tailored products that we build on unique data will outperform more generic AI platforms in delivering the best user experience for these kind of use cases. And we are confident that we will be able to develop these tailored AI products. I think we have a history where we have shown that we are willing to innovate, and we take that mindset with us also into the AI era, and we go into that shift with a quite strong position, I would say. So, let's move to the more, let's say, regular part of the presentation, and let's start with mobility. Here, ARPA growth remained strong across all markets and segments in Q4. Professional ARPA was up double digit in every market. It was particularly strong in Norway, and that was following the package launch, and also in Denmark, following price adjustments that we made both in January and in August of 25. Private ARPA also showed solid momentum, most notably in Sweden. This was driven by upselling, by the value-based pricing, and new packages. And Denmark was softer year on year, and that came as a result of the reversion to freemium for cars below 50,000 kroner. If we then turn to volumes, and here we have already shared the volumes for October and November in our pre-silent newsletter in December, so I think you should know the general direction. In Norway, professional volumes declined. That was mainly due to weakness in the sub-verticals, boats, motorcycles, caravans, which is a reflection of the macro environment. Cars, however, remained stable. Private volumes in Norway was increasing quite a lot, and this was driven by the tax changes regarding electric vehicles starting in January of 26. Then in Sweden, and also as we have mentioned on the previous slides, volumes were impacted by the platform transition. Professional volumes also declined, but this was due to the business model change that we have mentioned before in heavy machinery from where we went from a subscription to a paper ad model. Cars was broadly flat in volume. And private volumes were down broadly across our categories. Then in Denmark, the market still remains a healthy market. That means fast sell-through rates. And that, in the model that we had in 2025, reduces the average daily listings for professionals. And the decline in private volumes reflects the introduction of the listing fees that we have mentioned before. If we then move to the financials, revenues in mobility increased 11% in Q4. And supported by the strong ARPA growth, classifieds grew 12%. And the transactional business model delivered 23% growth. And this was driven by a strong quarter in both NetBeal and in Autovex. Finally, I would say, advertising returned to growth in Q4, where we saw 3% year-on-year growth following the declines that we have seen previously. OPEX, excluding COGS, increased only slightly, and this is despite the continued investments in the transactional business and in our core product and platform. And then overall, EBITDA increased 21% over Q4 last year, and this results in a 54% margin. Moving on to real estate. In Norway, ARPA increased 22% year-on-year, This was driven primarily by residential for sale, which delivered a 21% ARPA growth in Q4. And for the full year, ARPA in residential for sale was 12% growth. And in Finland, ARPA increased 12% year-on-year in Q4, and it was supported by underlying drivers that we have also discussed before. Price increases, mix effects between for sale and rentals, and also continued growth in upsell. Turning to volumes, in Norway, residential for sale actually returned to growth in Q4, and that was after a decline in the quarter before, so we saw 3% year-on-year growth here. And this capped an exceptionally strong year for residential for sale, where ad volumes reached an all-time high, ending up 6% for the full year. Total volumes for Norway declined 4%, and this was driven by lower activity in the rental segment, together with commercial and leisure homes. And in Finland, total volumes were down 4% year on year. Residential for sale actually grew, but rental volumes continued to decline further, which is a reflection of the ongoing market dynamics in Finland. So in total then, classifieds revenues grew 15% in Q4. This was driven by the strong ARPA growth and also the high volumes in residential for sale in Norway. The transactional business led by Casa and HomeQ in Sweden continued to develop well also. And here, transactional revenues were up 31%. And these businesses, of course, they continue still to be smaller in absolute terms, but they are actually becoming now increasingly so, and a meaningful contributor to the growth in real estate. And then on costs, OPEX, excluding COGS, declined 4% year-on-year, and this is despite the marketing investments that we're doing in Finland, which I think reflects the solid cost control that we have in real estate. And overall then, as a result, EBITDA reached 123 million in the quarter, and that is up 60% from the year before. Then we have jobs. Here, jobs continued to deliver exceptional ARPA growth of 21%. This was, as before, driven by our segmented price model, by adjustments to volume discounts and better upsell of distribution products. Same pattern as before, also on volumes continue to decline due to challenging macro. And again, I just want to say that if we compare our volumes to, let's say, the available numbers from Statistics Norway, our numbers reflect what we see in the total national market. Then in Norway, jobs delivered 7% underlying revenue growth in Q4, and that means that the strong ARPA growth more than offset the 11% decline in volume. And OPEX, excluding COGS, decreased 22%, and this is primarily a reflection of the exits from Sweden and Finland, as well as some FTE reductions in Norway. And in total then, EBITDA grew 33%, and this resulted in an EBITDA margin of 56%. And then finally, we have re-commerce. And here we saw transacted gross merchandise value continue to grow. Finland in particular delivered solid GMV growth in Q4, while, as mentioned before, Blocket's GMV declined, and this was a reflection of the temporary impact of the platform transition. In Norway, we also saw transactional volume growth that improved to 15% year-on-year, and take rates remained solid across all markets, which is a reflection of the scalability of the model that we have in e-commerce. And in total, re-commerce revenues then increased 4%. That means that the strong transactional growth and the private growth offset a 19% decline in advertising, as well as the continued phase-out of low-margin and non-core revenue streams. Transactional revenues grew by 23% and we also had a continued improvement in the transactional gross margin. This was supported by both lower COGS as well as pricing initiatives. And here it's worthwhile to remind everyone that in Q4 last year, we had a one-off of 10 million VAT accrual that reduced the reported transactional revenues. That means that the underlying year-on-year growth in transactional revenues and in the total revenues for e-commerce then will be somewhat lower than what you see reported here. And OPEX excluding COGS declined 6% year on year, driven by both FTE reductions and increased AI automation. And EBITDA then improved to minus 44 million, which is an equivalent to 16 percentage points margin improvement. And with that, I will conclude my section and hand it over to PC to go through the financials in some more detail.

Thank you, Christian. Good morning. Welcome, everyone. Let's move to the financials for Q4. In total, revenues on a constant currency basis ended 1% below Q4 last year. This is driven by decline in the other HQ segment, offset by solid underlying revenue growth in mobility, real estate, jobs, and e-commerce. Total EBITDA ended at 491 million, 53% up compared to last year, driven by positive developments in all verticals. Christian has already covered the vertical performance, but let me give you some additional insights for the other HQ segment. The year-on-year decrease in revenues in other HQ was, as earlier quarters, driven by a change in allocation model, combined with revenue decline following the termination of the TSA revenues linked to the split with Shipstead Media. At the end of 2025, TSA with Shipstead Media were fully terminated. Other HQ had an EBITDA of minus 76 million in the quarter compared to a loss of minus 71 million in the same quarter last year. We have accelerated our cost reductions and delivered ahead of our original plan, but we're not fully able to offset the declining revenues in the quarter. Now let's look closer at the cost development in the quarter. As before, this slide shows OPEX excluding COGS. During the second half of 2025, we have been able to accelerate the cost takeout ahead of our original plan. This is a combination of earlier termination of the TSA agreements with Chipset Media, but also a somewhat higher than planned cost takeout across our organization. In total, OPEX excluding COGS in the quarter declined by 17% compared to last year. Personnel costs were down 11% year-on-year, driven by significant FTE reductions, mainly from the downsizing process that was executed in 2024, combined with closing our jobs positions in Finland and in Sweden, but also ongoing FTE management throughout the year. Total workforce continues to decline, slightly down, and now stand at 1,669 FTEs. Total marketing costs were down 15% year-on-year, driven by the job exits, partly offset by higher marketing costs in real estate and e-commerce. Other costs have decreased 26% driven by general cost reductions in addition to the mentioned termination of the TSAs with shift-set media. Overall, this resulted in more than a 10 percentage points improvement in OPEX excluding COGS over revenue from 67% in Q4 last year to 57% in Q4 2025. Our operating profit for the quarter increased to 234 million from a loss of almost 1.4 billion last year that was impacted by the impairment in Finland. Adjusted for impairments recognized in 2024, the positive development in operating profit reflects the improved EBITDA, but also somewhat lower depreciation amortization costs and lower net other expenses. The reduction in other expenses is mainly due to lower costs related to restructuring and separation. The fair value of our 14% stake in Advinta has decreased from 18.9 billion Norwegian kroner in Q3 to 16.1 billion Norwegian kroner now at the end of Q4. Based on the updated valuation, a loss of 2.8 billion Norwegian kroners was recognized as financial expense in the quarter. The decrease is due to multiple contractions in the industry, partly offset by improved performance in Advinta. Our valuation methodology is kept totally unchanged. In totality, net loss for the group ended at minus 2.5 billion Norwegian kroner. Now let's move to the cash flow from continuing operations in Q4. Cash flow from operating activities ended at 555 million compared to 245 million in the previous year. The increase is driven by the improved EBITDA, but also positively impacted by lower restructuring payments, positive development in working capital, lower taxes paid, partly offset by some increased net interest expenses. Cashflow from investing activities ended at positive 68 million, mainly related to the proceeds from sales activities linked to our venture portfolio offset by capex of 137 million Norwegian kroner in the quarter. And finally, cash flow from financing activities ended at minus 1.2 billion Norwegian kroner, which includes repayment of interest-bearing bonds of 681 million in the quarter and the share buybacks of 448 million. With our solid operational cash flow and significant investments during 2025, we have, in accordance with our principles for capital allocation, returned material amounts to our shareholders throughout the year. We have paid out cash dividends of more than 1 billion Norwegian kroner. Additionally, we have bought back own shares amounting to almost 7 billion Norwegian kroner throughout ordinary share buyback programs, but also the reverse book bill that we executed in June. Despite these significant distributions, we ended the year with a net cash position of 210 million Norwegian kroner. During 2025, we have repurchased Venn Bonds for 753 million, of which 681 million in the quarter. As of 30 January 2025, we have around 1.1 billion Norwegian kroner remaining of our ongoing 2 billion share buyback program. The Board has decided to propose an ordinary dividend for 2025 of NOK 2.50 Norwegian kroner or around 537 million to be resolved at the upcoming Annual General Meeting in April. This is fully in line with our policy of paying a progressive dividend and a slight increase from the levels of 2.25 Norwegian kroner in 2024 and 2.0 kroner in 2023. The scope rating of BBB Plus with a stable outlook confirms Vend as a solid investment grade company. Now let's take a step back and look at our medium term targets and how we are performing. Despite 2025 being a transition year, we have made solid progress towards the medium-term targets. At the CMD in November 2024, we highlighted ARPA improvements and transactional revenues as our key growth drivers. In 2025, ARPA has improved significantly across mobility, real estate, and jobs. transactional revenues within e-commerce, real estate, rental, and mobility has increased more than 20%. In 2025, the strong underlying growth was partly offset by decisions to close down revenue streams, the separation from shifted media, and some volume headwinds. The announced and partly implemented product packaging go-to-market initiatives for 2026 across all our verticals are expected to support revenue growth in line with our medium-term targets. Despite somewhat muted revenue growth, the vertical EBITDA margin has improved significantly throughout the year. Mobility, real estate and jobs already have EBITDA margins around the medium term target levels, and re-commerce shows significant progress towards having positive margins in the medium term. Looking at our cost development, we are pleased to report strong progress against our targets. OPEX, excluding COGS over revenues, ended at 57% in 2025, compared to 65% at the time of the CMD. CapEx ended at 8% compared to 9% at the same time period. And improvements in these ratios have been delivered on broadly flat revenues, showing a significant cost reduction. Going forward, revenue growth is expected to be the main driver for further ratio improvements towards the targeted levels. Wrapping up, I'd like to reiterate that our strategy, our medium-term targets, and our capital allocation principles that we presented at the Capital Markets Day remain unchanged. As we enter 2026, we have a sustained ARPA momentum across our verticals, reflecting our go-to-market initiatives, and as I mentioned, we expect these actions to support revenue growth in the verticals in line with our medium-term targets. Visibility and volume remain limited. At the same time, the underlying health and resilience in our marketplaces is strong. In other HQ, we expect revenues to be reduced by around 300 million compared to 2025. Primarily reflected determination of the TSAs, but also effects related to the ongoing divestments of our non-core assets. On cost, following the accelerated delivery of cost reduction in 2025, we expect our absolute cost base excluding COGS to remain broadly stable in 2026 compared to 2025. Overall, We remain committed and confident in our ability to deliver on the medium term financial target supported by our growth initiatives, a simpler portfolio, continued platform consolidation and a sustained cost discipline. And with that, thank you for joining. And let me hand over to Jan Boye to take us through the Q&A.