Vend Marketplaces Asa B

Good morning, and thank you for joining our Q1 2026 results. My name is Jan Boje, and I'm heading Investor Relations at Vendt. And you're probably aware that last week we shared a trading update for our Q1 results, including a revised mobility outlook for revenues for 2026, an updated cost outlook and preliminary figures for the first quarter. With today's presentation, we will provide the full context for the quarter. And as usual, we have our CEO Christian and our CFO PC here, who will walk you through the performance and the key highlights. Following the presentation, we will then have a Q&A session with financial analysts through Microsoft Teams. And before I hand over to Christian, let me just quickly show you also our disclaimer slide.

And with this, Christian, the floor is yours. Thank you so much, Jan Boye, and good morning, everyone. In our annual report, I described 2025 as the year where Vend took shape as a focused pure play marketplace company. And I think that the first quarter of 2026 demonstrates the strength of the foundation that we have built. Group revenues ended at 1,543 million, which is up 2%. If you look at the revenues across our four verticals, they grew 10%, while group revenues were impacted by the phase-out of transitional service revenues. Group EBTA improved by 36% to 563 million, and the margin expanded to 36% from 27% one year ago. This is a reflection of the sustained cost discipline and the positive development that we have seen across our verticals. Real estate had a particularly strong quarter, where we saw ARPA growth driving both revenue and profitability across real estate. Jobs also delivered solid growth, supported by strong ARPA development. And real commerce showed really encouraging progress with strong transactional growth and improved unit economics. In mobility, Norway and our transactional businesses performed well. However, Sweden was held back by the platform migration stabilization. And in Denmark, the professional ARPA growth was offset by volume declines. And as we communicated last week, we don't expect mobility to achieve revenue growth in line with our stated medium-term target of 12 to 17 percent in 2026. Our other verticals are performing in line with their respective targets, however. And our market position in mobility remains strong. And of course, bringing this segment back to stronger growth is a key priority for us. At the same time, we are really focusing on the things that we can control. And we now expect the 2026 cost base, which is OPEX excluding COGS, to decline by approximately 100 million compared to 2025. And this is a revision to the broadly stable commentary that we made in Q4. Also, our platform migration continues to advance, and we are accelerating our efforts in AI. These are things I'll come back to in a minute. We completed the sales of Mitt Anbud and Lendo. We received Adevinta Spain proceeds. And now, having completed our $2 billion buyback program, we are today announcing a new $4 billion program, which will be conducted in two tranches. So while we acknowledge that there are some near-term headwinds in mobility, the underlying health and the underlying trajectory of our overall business remains strong. Let's move to transition status. And in Q1, we really focused on establishing a clear path to recovery for Blockit. We are now seeing this marketplace regain momentum, and we are working really hard to improve the user satisfaction score, which is recovering, but quite slowly. From the low we had of 1.5 in December to now 2.6 for mobility and 2.9 for e-commerce in April. Improving the net promoter score is going to be a key priority for us throughout 2026. The good news is that the new platform is proving to be more efficient. We have some examples here. For instance, leads per visits are up 27%, and we're also seeing shorter times to sell in the marketplace. We also see that ads generating leads within the first 14 days is up 37% year on year. And I think these examples really validate the strength of the market, but also the effectiveness of our common platform. At the same time, we do continue to see lower engagement than we had on the old platform. And this is something that remains a key focus for us to improve going forward. And we're doing a number of things here. We are, for example, specifically working on moving users from the mobile web community to the app because it is in the app where we see the strongest engagement, the highest login rates, and also the best retention. And I'm happy to say that we already see positive results of the work that we have done. Total visits and app visits to Blockit are growing week by week. And right now there are some seasonality effects, but we are closing the gap that we're aiming for. And on the commercial side, the planned price adjustments for the dealer packages will take effect from May 1st. When it comes to the private volumes, we recognize that more is needed than just, let's say, technical fixes. This requires us to rebuild the perceived value of the platform and also making sure that the listing process is efficient and safer. And then finally commenting on migration in Norway. Here we reach a key milestone in Q1. This process remains on track. And again, I want to remind you that this is more of a back-end focused transition in Norway. It doesn't really affect the user interface or the experience that consumers are seeing. And to finalize this is important to us because this consolidation really enables us to build once and scale innovations across the Nordics. We are also accelerating our AI agenda. Here, our approach is to combine advanced technology with our deep and proprietary data. We think this is an advantage that we have that is very hard for others to replicate. And throughout Q1, we have made significant progress in several areas, particularly those where we focus like ad quality and search and matching and also decision support. And we have some notable examples from our core verticals. For example, in real estate, we launched a conversational search pilot in Norway. This is a product that moves beyond, let's say, the traditional search filters and allows users to use more, let's say, their intent and their life context. And it's also a very map-based service. Okay. And in mobility, we have integrated AI-driven recommendations in our ProTool dealer hub. Here we support dealers with market insight and real-time optimization of their inventory, which is something that is important because it reduces their time to sell. This was just launched in Norway, but we plan to also have it in the Swedish market in Q3 of this year. Now, to ensure that we remain at the forefront of this development, we are today announcing that we are establishing a new dedicated AI unit. This team is tasked with building a completely new and let's say AI native marketplace experience. We purposely set this up as a separate and lean unit to make sure that it has the speed and the autonomy needed to really innovate outside of the core product environment. And the goal here is to shift toward a more, let's say, intuitive and agentic user journey, really ensuring that Vend also remains the preferred destination in the future. Worth mentioning that this initiative will be managed within, let's say, the existing financial framework. It doesn't change our financial guidance in any way. Let's now move to the verticals. And as Jan Boyes said, we pre-announced revenue and EBITDA per vertical last week. So the key numbers should already be known. But let me just put some flavor to this development. Let's begin with mobility. Here, ARPA growth continued to be strong in Norway in Q1, with 27% growth for professionals and 13% for the private segment, partly explained by the yearly price increases. Professional ARPA was further boosted by packaging and improved upselling. And car volumes in both pro and private increased, but we did see a decline in sub-verticals and this offset the car growth in the private segment. So we have already discussed Sweden, but let me just mention that we launched new packages to dealers on February 1st. We delayed the price increase to May 1st, which will now be implemented. And this leads to the pro-ARPA being at the same level as last year in this quarter. Car volumes for pro are in line with last year. But just like in Norway, this was offset by a drop in the sub-verticals. For private, ARPA growth continued, which is driven by the value-based pricing that we introduced last year. Volumes were, as we have discussed before, impacted by the platform transition and were down across categories in Q1, but worth saying that the trends were improving in March. Then in Denmark, here we now report the same KPIs as we do in Norway and Sweden for our professional business. This is after the change that we made to the business model, going from pay-per-day to pay-per-add. We are replacing the pay-per-day gradually, and this will be phased out. There is a strong starting point for the pro-ARPA at 644 kroner. This represents, let's say, an underlying growth, which is similar to the levels that we have in the other countries, around 15 to 20 percent. And I think this really represents the strength that we have with our Danish position. Now, after a strong year for used cars last year, pro volumes declined at the start of 2026. This was particularly true for combustion engine cars and the lower priced segments. And this was driven by a combination of, let's say, dealer adaptation to our new model, but also a market development where we saw softer domestic demand and an increase of exports of around 35% this quarter. So you can say that roughly 50-50 of these effects were driven by the market and by the changes in the business model, respectively. The decline that you see here in private ARPA is explained by the reversal to the free list model for cars priced below 50,000 on DBA. And the Bilbasen volumes remain somewhat under pressure as dealers continue to source directly from private sellers. But also here we saw an improvement in the trend in March, and this seems to be holding up also in April. So moving on to the financials. Overall, revenues and mobility increased by 5% in Q1. Classified revenues grew by 3%. And this time, I would actually like to comment on each country specifically, as the situation is very different in each one. Norway continues to deliver strong development, 21% revenue growth, primarily then driven by the professional segment. We have talked about the block transition challenges in Sweden. This, of course, contributes to the negative growth, where Sweden saw a decline of 7% in classified revenue. And the software volumes in Denmark led to weak classified revenues development also here. So Q1 ended up slightly 2% up. Looking then at the transactional business, here we continued to deliver well with 15% growth, driven by strong quarters in both Netbil and Autovex. And advertising also remained on growth in Q1, up 7% year-on-year, most notably in Norway. And OPEX, excluding COGS, increased 6%, primarily driven by increased marketing investments in Sweden. And this leads us to an overall EBITDA increase of 2% over Q1 last year, resulting in an overall margin of 48%. Moving to real estate. And here in Norway, ARPA increased 20% year on year. This was driven by residential for sale, where we had 19% ARPA growth. And in Finland, we, at the beginning of the year, successfully pivoted our business model to, let's say, a fixed monthly structure. And this was done to improve monetization. And as a result of this, you can see that we have adjusted our reporting metrics. So we have moved away from ARPA to ARPO, Average Revenue Per Office. And ARPA isn't directly comparable to the old ARPA. But if we do, let's say, a like-for-like comparison of realtor revenues, we can indicate an approximate increase of around 25% year-on-year. Turning then to volumes, and in Norway, residential for sale declined 5% in Q1. But let me also here remind you that Q1 last year was an exceptionally strong quarter. And also, the earlier timing of Easter this year impacted Q1, because what we usually see is that the listing activity cools off in the weeks leading up to the holiday. And in Finland, after changing to the new business model, we are no longer reporting on the listing counts, but instead we follow the total number of offices as the core volume metric that represents the new operational reality. And here I just want to say that we are satisfied that we retain almost all Finnish realtor offices as our customers post this transition. Classified revenues for real estate grew 11% year on year in Q1, primarily then driven by the strong double-digit ARPA growth across multiple segments, actually, in Norway. Total revenues in Finland grew 28%, driven by the business model change that I just explained. And our transactional businesses, Casa and HomeQ, continued solid growth, with revenues up 20% year on year. And on costs, OPEX excluding COGS increased 3% year-on-year. And this, in total, led to that the EBITDA reached 164 million in the quarter, which is up 30% year-on-year, with a margin of 48%. So to jobs, here we also continue to deliver strong ARPA growth, 13% year on year. This improvement was driven by upsell revenue growth and continued modification of our discount model. Volumes, as you can see, continue to decline somewhat slower than we saw in Q4. This development mirrors what we see in the overall market and in the publicly available figures. So this means that Q1 jobs delivered 8% revenue growth, the 13% ARPA growth more than offset than the 4% volume decline. And OPEX, excluding COGS, decreased by 2%, and this led to an EBITDA growth of 18% year-on-year, with a margin of 64%. And then finally, re-commerce. And here, if we look at the transacted gross merchandise value, we have a mixed picture with very positive development in Finland with 44%, continued improvement in Norway with 19%. But at the same time, we see that in Sweden, we recorded a decline of 10% due to the block platform transition and the temporary effects of that. Take rates remained solid across all markets, with Norway and Finland reaching 16 and 17% respectively. And this means that re-commerce revenues increased 20% year on year, driven by a 24% increase in the transactional revenues. Classified revenues increased as we saw strong growth in private classifieds, which more than offset the decline in the pro segment. And advertising revenues increased 30% year on year, driven by increased activity in all our markets. And we continued improvement of the gross margin in Q1, driven by several successful initiatives around COGS and pricing. OPEX, excluding the COGS, declined 1% year-on-year, and this was primarily driven by FTE reductions and increased AI automation. And I think it is really good to see an EBTA improvement of 43 million year on year. This is actually a 25 percentage point margin expansion. But it is worth noting that this EBTA performance was supported by one of effects of sponsored shipping campaigns for around 6 million and low marketing spend in general. If we look going forward, the underlying transactional margin will remain healthy, but we think there will be stabilizing a bit more as we move past these, let's say, campaigns. And we also expect marketing expenses to increase in the coming quarters, both due to seasonal campaigns that we have scheduled across our markets. So with that, I'll hand it over to PC to go through the financials.

Thank you, Christian, and good morning, everyone. Let's move to the financials for Q1. As previously mentioned, revenue and EBITDA for the group and also for the verticals were announced at the trading update last week. But let's just summarize the key figures. In total, revenues on a constant currency basis grew 2% compared to Q1 last year. This is driven by solid underlying revenue growth in real estate, jobs, e-commerce, while mobility saw a somewhat muted growth momentum. Revenues in other HQ, as expected, declined 63% due to the exit of the TSA with Shipstead Media. Total EBITDA ended at 563 million, 36% up versus last year, driven by positive developments across all our segments, in particular real estate, jobs, re-commerce, and also other HQ. Christian has covered the vertical performance, but let me give you some more context on the other HQ segment. At the end of 2025, the TSA services with Chipset Media were fully terminated, with the mentioned significant impact on the revenues. EBITDA ended at minus 72 million in the quarter, compared to a loss of minus 110 million in the same period last year. We have accelerated our cost reduction and delivered ahead of our original plan, more than offsetting the declining revenues. Now, let's take a closer look at the cost development in the quarter. As this slide shows, as before, focusing on OPEX excluding COGS. In total, OPEX excluding COGS in the quarter declined by 12%. Other costs decreased by 34%, driven by positive effects from the company's simplification and cost efficiency agenda. In addition to some one-off costs that we have mentioned in 2025, in particular the big kickoff that we have starting 2025. Personnel cost increased by 1%, reflecting increased personnel cost in the verticals, largely offset by the decline in the other HQ segment. Total marketing cost increased by 15%, driven by some increasing activity across all our verticals. Overall, this resulted in an almost nine percentage point improvement in OPEX, excluding COGS over revenue, from 63% in Q1 last year to 55% in Q1 2026. This time, we have added an FTE overview to highlight the reduction and development in FTEs from the CMD in November 2024 until Q1 this year. Total number of FTEs has declined at around 290 since the time of the CMD. The reduction is, as expected, concentrated around our common functions and custom operations, driven by the execution of the Venn's simplification and cost efficiency agenda, including the exit of the TSAs with Chipstead Media. We have increased FTEs in mobility and real estate to support the growth of both the core business, but also our scaling business. And these increases also reflect some moments between common functions and the verticals. For jobs, the decline is mainly driven by the exit of our jobs business in Finland and Sweden, while re-commerce have driven quite significant reductions from an operational perspective. Our total product and tech organization across the common functions, but also what is included in the vertical numbers, is around 800 FTEs. And this is around 100 FTEs lower than at the time of the CMD. At our trading update last week, we announced the carrying value of Venn's 14% stake in Adevinta has been revised down to 7.2 billion Norwegian kroner. And this is 8.9 billion lower compared to Q4 2025. The reduction is due to the following factors. We received cash proceeds from the Adevinta Spain transaction of 3.2 billion in the period, and around 6 billion is attributed to the effects of the peer multiple contraction that we have observed during the quarter. The underlying performance from Advinta is solid, and as you can see, we have made a small upward adjustment of 200 million based on better performance in 2025, partly offset by some negative currency effects during Q1. Going forward, we will, on a yearly basis, provide the high-level metrics for Advinta. The 2025 full-year revenue and EBITDA numbers for the winter show strong underlying operational development, with total revenue growth of 9% and adjusted EBITDA increase of 30%. Total net debt at the end of 2025 stood at 5.9 billion euros. Let's move to our operating profit. That increased to 331 million compared to 222 million in Q1 last year. The positive development reflects the improved EBITDA, partly offset by some increases on depreciation and amortization costs and somewhat higher net other expenses. As mentioned on the previous slide, the fair value of a 14% stake in Adevinta has decreased from 16.1 billion to 7.2 billion in Q1. Adjusted for the capital distribution of 3.2 billion, a loss of 5.8 billion was recognized as a financial expense in the quarter. In totality, net loss for the group ended at minus 5.5 billion. Now let's move to cash flow. Cash flow from continuing operations, focusing on operating activities, ended at 485 million compared to 254 million in Q1 last year. The increase is mainly driven by the improved EBITDA, but also some positive effects related to working capital and provisions and lower paid taxes, partly offset by increase in net interest payments. Cash flow from investing activities in Q1 ended at plus 2.9 billion, mainly driven by the capital distribution from Adevinta Spain. CapEx was 116 million in the quarter, slightly lower than Q1 last year. And finally, cash flow from financing activities ended at minus 1.5 billion due to the share buyback program. In accordance with our principle for capital allocation, we continue to distribute and return excess cash to our shareholders. We deliver solid operational cash flow, and in addition, we have received proceeds from Advinta Spain and our own transaction with Lendo and Mittanbud. The 2.0 billion Norwegian kroner share buyback program that we announced and started in November was completed in April this year. At the end of Q1, we had a strong balance sheet with a net cash position of 3.4 billion Norwegian kroner. Fully in line with our policy of paying progressive dividend, the board has proposed an ordinary dividend for 2025 of NOC 2.50 kroner per share, amounting to 527 million. To be resolved at the annual general meeting later today. And then today we have announced a new share buyback program of 4.0 billion Norwegian kroner with the first 2 billion Norwegian kroner tranche being launched already now in the coming week. Now let's take a step back and look at our midterm targets. Just to wrap up, I'd like to reiterate that our strategy, our medium term target and our capital allocation principles that we announced at the CMD remain unchanged. For 2026, we have communicated that we expect our verticals to grow in line with the medium term targeted range. And as we have talked about last week and today, mobility in Sweden and Denmark had had a slow start, and we now expect four-year revenue growth, 426 in the mid to high single-digit growth range for mobility as a whole, and this is below what we expected earlier of 12% to 17%. The medium-term targets remain unchanged for mobility also. The other verticals are expected to deliver revenue growth in line with their respective medium-term targets. In other HQ, as before, we expect revenue reduction in 2026 to be around 300 million compared to 2025, and this is reflecting the termination of the TSA, which gives that media, but also effects from our own exit processes with Lendo, Prisjagd, and also delivery over time. On cost, based on the current progress and additional measures, we expect 2026 full-year OPEX excluding COGS to decline by approximately 100 million compared to 2025. This represents the revision of the commentary at the Q4 report, where we expected the cost to be broadly stable in 2026. Overall, we remain committed and confident in our ability to deliver on our medium-term target, supported by our growth initiatives, a simplified portfolio, continued platform consolidation, and a sustained cost discipline. And with that, I'll hand over to Jan Boye to guide us through the Q&A.