Vend Marketplaces Asa B

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our Q3 results presentation. My name is Malin Ebenfeldt, and I'm Investor Relations Manager in Vend. As usual, our CEO, Christian, and our CFO, Pisi, will walk you through the key developments in the quarter. We will then finish with a Q&A session for financial analysts via Teams. Please use the raise hand function. Before I hand over to Christian, let me quickly take you through the disclaimer slide. This presentation contains forward-looking statements, so please refer to this disclaimer on this slide for more information. And with this, please go ahead, Christian.

Thank you, Malin, and good morning, everyone. And big congratulations to Jann-Boje, who became a father last night. That was why Malin was stepping in this morning. So, our third quarter results show further progress for a simpler VEND. Revenue growth, a lower cost base, higher margins and continued capital returns. But there are also areas that need further work, most notably the recovery of blockade and continued improvement on cost efficiency. Over time, we see clear potential to keep growing revenues and increased margins. Group revenues in Q3 were 1,641 million, up 3% year-on-year, or 6% in constant currency. Our four verticals grew 11% in constant currency that was partly then offset by the phase-out of transition service agreement revenues from the shipstead separation. Group EBTA increased 11% to 711 million with the margin expanding around 3 percentage points to 43%. Our focus on cost is delivering ahead of what we indicated earlier in the year. And we now expect the 2026 cost base, OPEX excluding COGS, to decline by around 250 million year on year, which is up from the 150 million we indicated at Q2. And this is why we retain flexibility to invest as we do in REICommerce. Year to date, our EBITDA margin is 40%. That is up from the 27% that we had in the same period in 2024. But it is still below leading international marketplaces and improving this remains a key priority for us. Our capital allocation remains focused on long-term value creation. We have returned excess capital consistently since 2024, and the first 2 billion tranche of our current 4 billion buyback program was completed in August, and the second tranche had reached around 1.4 billion as of October 23rd. As we announced last night, we are now taking steps to enable continued share buybacks beyond the current program. Our 14% stake in Adevinta continues to develop well operationally. PC will come back to this a little bit later. Its valuation increased by 3.9 billion NOK in the quarter to 11.1 billion NOK. Our view on AI as a meaningful opportunity for marketplaces has not changed. If anything, we are more convinced, and I will come back to this and our AI agenda and product updates a bit more in detail in a few pages. But first, I want to give an update on Blockit, where we continue to see positive momentum following the platform transition. User satisfaction reached 3.5 in September. That is up from 3.3 that we had in June and well above the post-transition low of 1.5. It's now approaching the pre-transition levels. And importantly, Blockit continue to benefit from significant scale, strong market position. We attract on average 70 million visits and more than 8 million visitors every month. And we have a stable and strong brand position with 97% brand awareness in Sweden. In mobility, Blockit continues to hold a strong competitive position We have a significant advantage in both traffic to car listings but also in available inventory. At the same time, private car listings continue to recover and the year-on-year decline is narrowing from 26% in Q1 to 8% in Q3 and further to 5% in September. And this is in fact in line with the market, the C2C ownership changes declined by 5% in that month. Professional car listings increased by 1%, and this is actually outperforming the B2C market, which also declined by 5%. And if we look at the demand side, both visits, leads per visit, and the share of ads generating leads within 14 days are all up year on year. And at the end of August, we launched Tryggad Bilaffær. This is our transactional C2C solution, which is based on smidig bilhandel from Finn. I can say that our priorities remain strengthening the private car supply, driving traffic and growth in the subvertical categories, and increasing app traffic. We are still not where we want to be on these things. In e-commerce, transacted GMV grew 17% and private listings are approaching last year's levels. And in September, we launched our seller benefit program, which aims to increase volumes further. And all of these developments increase our confidence in the progress towards bringing Blockit back to growth. And now over to AI. And of course, there's been a lot of debate whether AI agents will bypass marketplaces. But when you look at how people across the Nordics actually use our platforms, I am confident that they won't. In fact, I think that AI makes our direct user relationships, our proprietary data, our transactional services, and our strong brand trust even more valuable. First, our core positions remain strong and robust. In a study we did in August 26 with nearly 4000 respondents across the Nordics, 70% had used an AI tool in the last month. 25% of these AI users had used it for something related to cars or real estate. Yet, Our user behavior remains unchanged. In fact, Finn grew in number of visits over the past year. 95% of our traffic is still owned. More than half of it comes through apps. And less than 0.5% of our traffic comes through external AI tools. Our brands lead the Nordics when it comes to awareness and also consistently ranks highest when it comes to trust, safety and also being fun to use. So you can say that people come to us to search, to decide. But quite many also come to us to browse for inspiration, dream about a cabin, a car, look for these interesting secondhand finds. And this is an engaging, habit-driven behavior that I think is very unlikely that AI will replace. Secondly, I believe that we will lead the genetic future with our unique data. The key here is that AI agents will only be as good as the data they rely on. They can of course pull open listings from multiple sources. That is not different from what Google has been able to do for years. But that doesn't mean that it will be the best experience. To get the best outcome for consumers, these agents need data that cannot be scraped. What is the right price for this exact car? Which models are holding up in value? And which sellers replied within the hour? This is data that we have, that we have earned transaction after transaction over many years, and it compounds every day through these four layers of data that we are showing here. Real-time ads, aggregated outcomes, verified users and behavior, and transaction history. We are now building on this advantage, scaling native vertical agents across our platforms. In addition to that, we have set up what we call Team Aura. This is a small independent unit. And in our portfolio of bets, they are tasked with thinking more radically, answering one question. If we were building a marketplace from scratch today with AI at the core, what would it look like? And third, I would say we are very excited about the opportunities we see that our markets are getting bigger because we can serve needs beyond search. In fact, search is only a small part of the deal, but AI lets us do so much more. Think about all the things that a consumer needs as part of a deal. Valuation, comparison, financing, negotiation, and many more things. And it's the same thing for the professionals. And I think the logic here is quite simple. The more of the transaction that we coordinate, the more we can create trust for the two parties. And the more unique data we can capture, and in the end, also the more value that we can create. And we are fortunate to have significant transactional services already, such as Fixferdi, Smidig Bilhandel, Netbil, Kasa and others. And we will continue to build services that help users beyond the search, so to speak. So in essence, you can say that our brand trust, our deep domain insight, our real-time transaction data, that is what gives us the best foundation in the Nordics to build native AI agents. We are certainly not sitting back, waiting to see how AI impacts our marketplaces. We are using actively all the things we have built over many years to make sure that Venn stays the best place also in the future to find your next car, your next home, your next jobs, or your next pair of sneakers. And that is no matter where you come from, who does the search, or what starts the search. So let me now take you through a few of our recent products and AI-powered features. In total, we now have around 30 AI-driven products and features, and these are some of them. In mobility, AI is now working for both car dealers and car makers. DealerHub gives dealers AI advice on price, on ad content, and on visibility, and usage of this tool doubled from August to September. With New Car, which is now live on Blockit, it's actually AI that builds the car makers' brand stores over a few hours, and that extends our marketplaces into the new car sales. In real estate, we have our AI tool we call BitSteel, which lets users redecorate a home virtually to see its potential. And it's interesting to see that users who try it are six times more likely to sign up for a viewing. We've also launched image-led discovery on Oikoti, Megler promo on Finn. This latter feature is a new agent promotion feature, which is part of the large package. In jobs, we have Agentic Apply. This is a feature that simplifies how candidates apply to jobs. Here, we use an AI agent to fetch the recruiter's application form, and it fills it in with data from the candidate's profile on Finn. And this is actually solving a significant pain point for many users. We're also piloting two AI-powered offerings for recruiters, FinPartner for our largest customers, and TalentSearch, which is a completely new business model, which I will come back to in just a moment. And finally, we have Recommerce. And here we are building the foundation for agentic item creation. AI already helps sellers through the whole listing flow with everything from photos to titles to description to price. And what we see is that these AI generated ads, they actually have 42% higher liquidity in the market. And as I mentioned before, we've also launched Seller Benefit Program, which is a key source of the volume growth that you will see in e-commerce. So all in all, we're excited about these things. These products and features make our marketplaces more valuable. And we're also monetizing these things through a number of measures, packages, upsell, transactions. But Talent Search actually takes it one step further with a new outcome-based business model. And let me just go a little bit more into this product. Now, as you know, historically, our recruitment business has been built around visibility. But of course, recruiters and employers, they are not looking to buy clicks or applications. They want to hire the right people. And this is where we see that AI and agentic technology actually opens up an entirely new space of opportunities for us. So with Talent Search from Finn, instead of publishing an ad, and Waiting for Applications, we have an AI-powered recruitment agent that helps employers find relevant candidates. It handpicks them, invites them directly through Finn, and our vision is to be able to serve interview-ready candidates in as little as three days. And this builds on all the strengths and advantages that we have. A proprietary candidate database, unmatched reach in Norway, and of course, a trusted brand. So I think we are still, of course, at a very early stage with this product, but the first pilots are showing some promising signals. And I think this product also signals something bigger for Vend as a whole, namely that we are focusing more on outcome-based revenue streams beyond the traditional ads. So with that, let me now turn to the verticals. And as usual, we will start with the mobility. And this time, before we go into the numbers, I would highlight some of the progress that we are making on the product offering and go to market. One year ago, we announced the introduction of car dealer packages in Sweden that followed a successful launch in Norway the year before. And today, around 50% of dealer ads are on our higher tier packages. And throughout the year, we have continued to introduce new features, strengthening our value proposition and improving the dealer performance. The results are reflected in the measures and the metrics you can see here. That includes higher traffic to ads, improved conversion rates, and most importantly, fewer standing days. We've also completed the rollout and migration of all customers to DealerHub. And as I mentioned earlier, we are seeing encouraging performance and positive customer feedback on this product. DealerHub really strengthens our value proposition through AI-driven recommendations and ad optimization. They also add new lead management and integrated insights based on the unique insights that only we have. And we will begin the rollout in Sweden in November, which then will benefit all the Swedish dealers with these capabilities. And to align pricing with the value that we deliver, we have recently announced price increases for our car dealers. This will be effective from February 1st, 2027. 10% for Blocket in Sweden, 18% for Finn in Norway, 8% for Bilbasen in Denmark. These increases are then expected to support our financial growth in 2027 and beyond. With that, let me turn then to the financial performance. And we start with Norway, where ARPA growth remained strong, up 17% for professionals, 10% for private. This was driven by the annual price increases and also for professionals, the basic package adjustment that we did in June. And this comes alongside improved packaging and upselling. Car volumes grew in both segments, while private sub-vertical volumes declined. In Sweden, professional ARPA for cars grew 15% following the price increase from May 1st. This was partly then offset by lower voluntary spend from dealers. Including sub-verticals, professional ARPA was up 12%, that is back then to double-digit growth. Private ARPA was flat, and I covered the volume development in my section of Blockit. If we then turn to Denmark, professional ARPA continued to improve. This was supported by the package splits and renewals. Private ARPA declined. This was as expected because that reflects the reversal to a free-to-list model for cars below 50,000 kroner on DBA that we introduced last December. And the professional segment in Denmark continues to face headwinds from market developments and also some structural shifts from the changes we have introduced. Private volumes increased 39% year on year. This was driven then by the same free-to-list model on DBA, but also 16% growth on Bilbasen. Turning then to the mobility financials, revenues increased 8% in constant currency. Classified revenues grew 8% in currency as well. That was driven by all markets. Transactional revenues also increased 8%. Advertising revenues declined 2%. That was mainly driven by Sweden. OPEX excluding COGS decreased 2% that follows the organizational changes we made at the end of the second quarter while we have continued to invest in marketing and also in our C2B models. And overall EBITDA increased 7% year on year to 406 million with the margin expanding 2 percentage points to 59%. Moving to real estate, and here we've also focused on strengthening our package offering. This autumn we launched several product enhancements. They are all included in the large package. Priestips, which is our price estimation tool, is now easier to find. Monthly price estimates have nearly doubled to 16,000 per month. Megle Promo now generates 25% of agent profile leads and together these two send agents a lot more sellers who are ready to act. The large package continues to outperform the medium package with 31% more clicks to bid, 24% more unique visitors in the first days after a listing goes live. And we're also now changing how we prove our value to customers, moving from traffic and clicks to real buyer intent. And by tracking qualified leads like bid clicks and viewing signups, we give agents and sellers clear proof of Finn's unmatched value in Norway. And these were some of the key messages that we took out to customers when we announced our new packages and prices for 2027 this I think agents have received them very well and we expect these changes to improve ARPA in line with our medium term targets. In Norway then, total ARPA grew 16% year on year with residential for sale as the primary driver at 17%. On volumes, residential for sale declined 4%. This is against a very strong quarter last year. And total new approved ads were down 6%. And in Finland, average revenue per office and the number of offices were stable quarter on quarter. That means that real estate delivered another strong quarter with revenues up 14% in constant currency. Classified revenues grew 12% driven by the ARPA growth in residential for sale in Norway. Total revenues in Finland increased 13% or 22% in constant currency. This follows the move to the subscription-based model in Q1, but also growth in Kasa. And if we look at our transactional rental business as a whole, Kasa and HomeQ grew their revenues 10%. OPEX, excluding COGS, increased 2% driven by higher personnel costs. This means that EBITDA reached 206 million, up 23% year on year, with the margin expanding to 53%. Then moving to jobs, here our work on product and pricing changes for 2027 is not final yet. The plan is to adjust prices in line with the index across our products, but also to continue to simplify the discount model and to refine our segment model. So we continue to deliver strong ARPA growth in jobs. That's up 11% year on year in Q3, driven by upsell products, but also this continued refinement of the volume discount model and the index increase. And on volumes, new approved ads were down 3% year on year, and this is an improvement from the 6% decline that we had in the first half as a total. And then on the jobs financials, revenues increased 8% year-on-year, as ARPA growth of 11% more than offset the 3% decline in volumes. And here, OPEX, excluding COGS, increased 6%, driven by higher personnel and marketing costs. And this led to an EBITDA growth of 7% year-on-year to 146 million, and a margin of 55%. And then finally, let's continue with the re-commerce. Here in Q3, we stepped up marketing, shipping campaigns, and seller benefits in Norway to really accelerate our transaction growth. And we see positive results. GMV growth accelerated in Norway to 28% from 17% in Q2. On Blockit, GMV grew 17%, which is a clear sign of traction of the transactional model in Sweden after the platform transition. Finland grew 33%, Denmark 52%, away from a smaller base. Take rates were stable in Sweden at 10%, Finland at 16%, Denmark at 14%. But in Norway, the take rate declined 0.7 percentage points to 15%, which reflects the shipping campaigns we had in the quarter. ReCommerce then grew revenues 16% in constant currency. Transactional revenues grew 19%, driven by the record volumes, but it was partly then offset by the shipping campaigns. Classified revenues grew 5%, driven by the private segment, and advertising declined 3%, primarily in Finland. OPEX excluding COGS increased 11% and that was driven by the aforementioned marketing investment in Norway. I just want to say that this is a deliberate choice that we have made. We are investing to strengthen our position, to accelerate growth and this investment has led to an EBITDA decline of 8 million to minus 43 million. But with that, let me hand it over to PC for the financials. Thank you.

Thank you Christian and good morning everyone. Let's move to the financials for Q3. In total, revenues on a constant currency basis increased 6% compared to Q3 last year. Vertical revenues, that's a better read on the underlying performance, grew 11% in constant currency, driven by double-digit growth in both real estate and e-commerce, and 8% growth in both mobility and jobs. Revenues in other HQ declined 58%, as expected, mainly due to the lost revenues from exiting the CSAs with Shipstead Media. Total EBITDA ended at 711 million, up 11% from the same period last year. The EBITDA growth was mainly driven by real estate and mobility. Christian has covered the vertical performance already, but let me give you some comments on the other HQ segment. Despite the significant revenue drop, other HQ EBITDA improved to minus 8 million from last year to minus 4 million this year. Lower personnel and consultancy costs following the reorganization and optimization efforts after the shipstead media separation more than offset the lower revenues. The low loss in the quarter also reflects seasonality, as it also did in Q3 last year. The personnel costs are lower during the summer months, but the allocation that we do from other HQs to the verticals are stable throughout the year. Now, let us look closer into the cost development in the quarter. As before, this slide shows OPEX excluding COGS. In total, OPEX excluding COGS in the quarter declined by 6% compared to last year. Personnel costs declined by 2%, where the lower FTE base were partly offset by salary inflation. Total FTEs ended at 1,565, down 83 from Q3 and down 119 from Q3 last year. And this is mainly driven by the reorganization processes that we executed on during the second quarter. During the last two years, we have reduced the total workforce with around 500 FTEs. At the same time, we have invested into key capabilities, but also supporting the growth in our scaling units in mobility and real estate. As Christian has commented on, we have invested into marketing in quarters, so the marketing cost is up 15% compared to last year, driven by the mentioned increase in e-commerce. Other operating costs declined 18%, following lower consultancy costs and the exit of the shipstead TSAs. Overall, despite limited revenue growth on a reported level on the Group, the cost reduction resulted in another 4% improvement in OPEX excluding COGS over revenue. The ratio has improved from 58% in Q3 2014 To 51% Q3 last year and to 47% in Q3 2026. Working towards an OPEC to sales ratio around 40%, as stated in our last Capital Markets Day, continue to be a key priority for us. Let me also say a few words on Advinta. The carrying value of our 14% stake has been revised to 11.1 billion NOK, up 3.9 billion NOK in Q3. The main driver was a multiple expansion of around 4 billion. Around 3 billion of this comes from removing the 15% discount to the peer group. And around 1 billion comes from rolling the valuation model into 26 and 27, similar as we also did in Q3 last year. The 15% discount was originally introduced mainly due to two reasons. First, Adavinta has a higher share of mobility revenues that had a structurally lower multiple compared to the peer group that had a higher share of real estate revenues. And then second, the Arvinta performance at the time was expected to be sort of grow less than the peer group. But as we have seen over the last two years, that the actual performance has been very strong. And also the expected performance of Arvinta is in line or actually better than what is expected by the peer group. And therefore, we cannot really justify any discount on this stake. I cannot comment more on forward-looking performance, but the financial for the first half of 2026 Adevinta's performance remained strong. Total revenues grew 11% year-on-year and the three key positions that in totality constitute more than 80% of the revenues grew more than the total 11%. Adjacent EBITDA grew 22% with an EBITDA margin of 50% up 5 percentage points from last year. Atavinta's net debt as of end of Q2 was around 5.9 billion euros, slightly down from Q4 2025 due to underlying cash generation. On the income statement, our operating profit for the quarter increased 26% to 555 million, compared to 440 million in Q3 last year. The positive development in operating profits reflects improved EBITDA, lower depreciation and amortization costs, but also lower net other expenses. The other expenses reported in the quarter is mainly related to headcount reductions. The 3.9 billion gain related to the increased value of Advinta that I mentioned before is included here under financial income. In totality then, net profit for the group ended at almost 4.4 billion. Now let's move to cash flow from continuing operations. Cashflow from operating activities ended at 590 million, an increase of around 33% compared to last year. The increase is mainly driven by improved earnings, reduced cashflow or flows related to separation and transaction costs. Cashflow from investment activities ended at minus 73 million, where the main driver is the capitalization of our own workforce in totality of 81 million, down 25% compared to Q3 last year. And finally, cashflow from financing activities ended at minus 1.5 billion, but this is all driven by the share buybacks around the 1.5 billion number. In accordance with our capital allocation principles, we continue to return excess cash to our shareholders. The first 2 billion tranche of our 4 billion share buyback program was completed in August. The second 2 billion tranche was also started in August. And as of the end of the quarter, we have bought back shares of around 0.8 billion. As of 23rd of October, we have bought back 1.4 billion of our own share. And we expect the program to complete during Q4. We ended Q3 with a strong balance sheet and a net cash position around 1 billion Norwegian kroner, despite buying back 1.5 billion NOK of shares during the quarter. As announced last evening, the Board has resolved to call an EGM on the 23rd of November to renew the authority to buy back shares and to delete 14.4 million treasure shares. This gives us the flexibility to initiate a new share buyback after the second tranche is completed during the fourth quarter. Wrapping up, I'd like to reiterate that our strategy, our medium-term targets, and our capital allocation principles as we introduced in our Capital Markets Day in 2024 remain unchanged. For 2026, we expect real estate, jobs, and e-commerce to perform in line with the respective medium-term targets. Based on the results for the first nine months of 2026, the current market conditions, but also evaluating the effects of our mitigation activities, full-year mobility revenue growth is expected to grow in the lower end of our mid-to-high single-digit percent range. Our medium-term targets for mobility remain unchanged. We now expect our full year, 2026, OPEX excluding COGS to decline by around 250 million compared to last year. This is revised from around 150 million that we communicated in Q2 this year. And this reflects an accelerated cost and efficiency measures across the whole group. At our CMD, almost two years ago, we communicated an ambition to improve OPEX to sales from the current level at that time of 65% to around 40% in the medium term. And then despite the good progress I have to say on this metric over the last two years, more work is needed to deliver on this promise. And this remains a key priority for us. And with that, I'll now hand over to Malin to guide us through the Q&A. Thank you.