Verkkokauppa Com Oyj

Com Oyj Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Verkkokauppa.com's third quarter 2026 results presentation. My name is Elisa Forsman. I'm the head of investor relations, and I'm joined here by our CEO, Panu Porkka, and our CFO, Jesper Blomster. As usual, we'll start with the presentation by Panu, where he will go through the key highlights of our third quarter results and the drivers behind our numbers. We'll then move on to the Q&A session with both Panu and Jesper. We have a few of our analysts joining us live in Helsinki, so we'll take their questions first before moving on to the online questions. And just a reminder, if you want to ask a question, please type them into the question box on your webcast panel. I will then address them during the Q&A session. But with that, I think it's time to get started. Panu, please go ahead.

Thank you, Elisa. Good morning also on my behalf and welcome to our interim report presentation. Like Elisa said there will be an open Q&A at the end of my presentation where Jesper will be joining with me and we are available for the questions at that point. As always I will start my presentation first of all with few words about the operating environment mainly here in the Finnish market. Then we will jump into the report published this morning, some highlights from financials and also strategy execution, then market outlook, guidance and key takeaways. The operating environment has stayed pretty much the same throughout the last couple of months. After the summer, we saw that there is some positive signs when looking at these leading indicators such as consumer confidence and consumers' confidence in own economics. But we still don't see any positive impact of that in the consumption as such. There seems to be uncertainties, energy prices and inflation, interest rates. So this seems to be still burdening the consumption in the Finnish market. On the other hand, we see that the B2B market has been more stable and the demand is more of a natural kind. Despite the consumer consumption not still picking up, we saw that we were able to record growth and which was in line with the market development. So growth 2.1%, again, mainly driven by our online parts of the business, which is fueled by our strategic key cornerstone fast fulfillment. Fast delivery is growing as much as 27% again. Besides the Finnish market, second growth area, international sales, international businesses grew by over 40%, mainly successful due to the Swedish market and some Central European partnerships as well. In the Finnish market, B2B was the key highlight, growing over 15%. while at the same time the consumer demand was muted and that part of the business decreased by 3%. One of the key focus areas throughout the last couple of years has been the margin, the underlying parts of the business. For the first time now, since we have sold the consumer financing business, we were able to report actually an improvement in the gross margin, which yielded into the positive development in gross profit. We have been working rigorously on our category management with the profitability in mind. We have been optimizing our pricing. Dynamic pricing capabilities are on track. Also commercial parts of the business are yielding positive results. We have also been quite successful in certain well time purchasing throughout the year. So always trying to mitigate possible price increases to be able to sell the products through with a healthy margin. And it's also good to mention at this point that already now we see the positive impact of our own brands, especially from the margin having a positive contribution in the company's overall margin development. From the P&L, growing volumes at the same times improving margins and tight cost discipline leading into a clear comparable operating result improvement, 4.7% compared to 3.9% from the previous years. So on a profitability level now 3.5%. So we are nicely on track towards our long-term targets. Inventory, we're on a healthy level. At the beginning of the year, we made some decisions that we took an overstock in certain categories where we had the assumption that the prices will be increasing. Those decisions seem to be the right ones. We were able to sell those through. First of all, the inventory level is healthy. And secondly, we were able to sell them through to a nice healthy margin. So inventory is now back on track and we are looking ahead to the main part of the season coming in the fourth quarter. Com Oyj a strong financial position from cash wise equity ratio almost at 25% so the first target already met at this point the business continues to be investment light and there are ways of distributing positive shareholder return Today morning, the board resolved the third dividend installment of 0.049 euro cents. So thank you for all the investors. And also there's an ongoing share buyback program. The total amount of 5 million at the end of the quarter, the amount was 3.9. So it's still ongoing as we speak. A few words about the strategy execution. We are successful taking our business abroad. We have been successful for many quarters now in a row. Again, growth over 40%, mainly due to the Sweden market growing by almost 100%. We are also quite proud that we have been developing the Swedish business further Com Oyj In all of those markets we are quite successfully already introducing our high qualitative own brands and this is a key growth and profitability component going forward the next couple of years. Fast deliveries continuing to grow and outperform the market. 27% growth. Even more important for me is that the customer base is growing. The customer base grew by 50%. What it means, more and more customers are adapting to this new way of shopping. Our strategic mission, accelerate online shift, through fast delivery is really taking place and I think we can already say that we have created a new norm of buying in the Finnish market. Com Oyj Offering fast deliveries should be with fast deliveries and we have actually met that target already at half point. So what do we expect out of the last quarter? Obviously, as every year, the fourth quarter is the main quarter for us. It has the most important time of the year, the most important season of the year. Throughout the year there have been early indicators that the consumer demand might be picking up because the confidence is starting to grow but we have not yet seen that to have a positive push to the consumption as such. We do believe that increasing interest rates and the inflation energy prices might be something that is still holding the consumption on a moderate level. We also see that our competitors are adding aggressivity into the pricing, but we are totally prepared for this to happen. As always, the last part of the season is also somewhat price driven. We know for certain that we have a scalable business model. We have an effective underlying business cost discipline in place. And we also see that we are the ones who is transforming the market at the moment. So therefore no reason to revisit our guidance. We expect the year of 2026 be a growth year in a perspective of revenue and comparable EBIT as well. So what I would like you to remember from the third quarter, it was a solid performance from the company, somewhat subdued consumer consumption. Still, we have a clear number of growth initiatives and channels and segments where we can gain growth, even if the Finnish market is not in favor of consumption. Underlying business is really effective. We have healthy margins, healthy inventory turned, cost discipline in place. So we are able to improve profitability despite market difficulties. Strategy is executed as follows as the previous quarters as well. We are transforming the Finnish market the way of consumer are behaving and we are the preferred channel now and we expect that to continue. We are distributing positive returns to our shareholders with our dividend and share buyback program and we are well prepared for the most important time of the year as always the fourth quarter. Thank you all and let's then start with the questions.

All right. We are ready for the Q&A now. And as I mentioned, we'll start with questions from the live audience. And Arttu, please go ahead.