Boozt AB (publ)

Welcome to the Boost Group Q3 2025 report presentation. For the first part of the presentation, participants will be in listen-only mode. During the questions and answers session, participants are able to ask questions by dialing pound key 5 on their telephone keypad. Now I will hand the conference over to CEO Herman Haraldson and CFO Michael Bjerg B. Please go ahead.

Thank you and good morning all and welcome to our Q3 2025 webcast. Let's turn to the first slide, the agenda. We will have the usual agenda for the presentation. I will present the highlights of the quarter and the business update before handing over to Michael for the financials. So if we look at the next slide, our highlights. Overall, Q3 was a decent quarter. with strong operational performance. We had good margin progression and a solid free cash flow, which is a testament to a strong business model. Our revenue growth is not where we want it to be, but we have seen a gradual improvement, which is important heading into the most important part of the year for Boost. This increase in the quarter was achieved despite a slightly difficult September, which was impacted by less favorable weather conditions for the autumn-winter collection. It was a bit warm. In the quarter, Boost.com gradually gained revenue traction, and particularly in September, where we made a very clear strategic shift to focus on premium in-season sale on Boost.com. This change in September changed the composition of growth between Boost and Boosted and improved the gross margin significantly. I will come back to this shift later. Our profitability improved significantly in the quarter despite continued headwind from currency. The increase was driven by all OPEX ratios. Free cash flow was again strong. The underlying business is fundamentally very cash generative and with our disciplined management of inventory, it shows in the free cash flow. We have now generated almost 500 million SEK in the last 12 months and expect to generate more than 500 million SEK in cash in the year 2025. With this performance in Q3, we are pleased to be able to both upgrade our EBIT margin guidance and expand our share buyback program. The board has now initiated the process to increase the current share buyback program from the current 300 million to now 415 million SEC. With this increase, we will have delivered on our target to return 800 million SEC of capital back to our shareholders in three years as communicated at the Capital Market Day in 2023. On the outlook for the year, we now expect revenue growth of 0% to 3% or 2% to 5% in constant currency growth. Additionally, we increase our margin guidance. We now expect the adjusted average margin for 2025 to end between 5% and 6%. Now let's turn to slide 5 for the business update. Driving multi-category purchases remains a key strategic goal of our department store model as it directly correlates with customer loyalty and improved financial performance. And crucially, in the current market environment, our diverse categories also help mitigate the impact of a muted fashion demand. Over the last 12 months, we have successfully increased the purchase percentage of customers shopping from more than one category to 53% on Boost.com. This is a step up from 51% last quarter. This improvement occurred despite a strong inflow of new customers, around 170,000 joined this quarter, who typically start by shopping in a single category. Our total active customer base over the last 12 months was broadly unchanged and stands around 2.7 million. This is a number that we need to improve. It has in 2025 been impacted by a slight decline in female shoppers and this is now starting to improve. Please move to the next slide please. I want to provide a few comments on the trend of female shoppers. This is critical for us as we move forward on our growth journey. Revenue from the women's fashion category is gradually stabilizing after a longer period with some softness. This improvement is important because a stronger performance in women's fashion directly benefits other categories as women are more often shopping from non-fashion categories, home, sport, beauty and kids. The improving trend is supported by the number of women shopping on our site. If we isolate the numbers for Q3, active customers shopping women's fashion on Boost.com declined by 2%. We are taking several strategic steps to strengthen our women's category and continue the positive momentum we're seeing. First and foremost, we have expanded our teams within buying, merchandising and marketing to bring in new expertise and fresh perspectives. This enables us to create an even stronger and more relevant brand and product mix that meets the evolving needs of our female customers. The results are already showing. In October alone, we saw a good increase in women shopping on Boost.com compared to last year. At the same time, we are reinforcing Boost.com as a premium destination by elevating the customer experience, making it more inspirational, personalized, and fashion-driven. Through richer storytelling, curated campaigns, and the use of advanced AI tools, we are creating a more seamless and engaging shopping journey. By the SS26 season, our product listings and pages will feature more enriched and inspirational content to help customers find what they love even faster. Finally, we are diversifying our media mix to reach and inspire more women and men across platforms such as Meta and TikTok, while also experimenting with new opportunities on emerging AI-driven platforms. This improvement is supported by the clearer strategic distinction between Boost.com and Boosted.com. Please turn to the next slide. This slide summarizes the strategic clarification that is fundamental to performance going forward. We have since September and into Q4 deliberately made a clearer distinction for the roles of our two platforms to maximize both brand value and operational efficiency. For Boost.com, the strategy is firmly centered on its position as a premium destination. we are actively reducing promotional activity to protect our brand equity, as well as the value of our brands, strengthening long-term partner relationships. On top of that, our customers' multi-category shopping is the engine that drives loyalty and diversification, as well as reducing our overall risk. We believe this has been an important step to get Boost.com back to growth with 3% organic growth in Q3. Boostlet's prime focus, on the other hand, is on selling prior season stock with very limited access to current season products. Current season products could be accessed by Boostlet through campaign buys, for example. Boostlet will continue to help reduce risk when purchasing and to maintain a current inventory. Overall, Boosted's role as a clearing mechanism is working exactly as planned as we are managing inventory well, even in a year like 25, where our growth is not what we had planned for. On top of this, Boosted also gives us access to another custom group, which is looking for bargains when shopping. Active customers on Boost.com are now over 1 million, showing the relevance of the channel. Of these, 60% shopped only on Boost.com and not Boost.com in the last 12 months. The clear distinction between the sides is a fundamental part of our business model. It is long-term sustainable and ensures that we can optimize our premium market position while simultaneously safeguarding our balance sheet through effective inventory management. Before I hand over to Michael, I want to highlight the significant effect of our clearance sales on Boosled. The clearance sale, which was started in September last year, is now fully concluded and our inventory is definitively right sized and at the right quality. This crucial de-risking would not have been possible without Boostlet as a dedicated clearing channel. As deep discounts on our main site, Boost.com would have tainted our brand equity. Inventory as a share of last 12 months revenue is now down to 38.2%, which we believe is a healthy level in our current state. This is a significant decrease of 5 percentage points compared to the same period last year, illustrating the importance of this exercise. It also supported our cash generation, driving our free cash flow to 292 million SEK in the quarter, a solid improvement compared to last year. We are now entering the most important trading season with a healthy and high quality inventory position. This puts us in an optimal position to capture demand and to exploit market opportunities without excess risk. With that, I will now hand over to Michael and the financial review.

Yes, thank you Herman and good morning to all from me as well. I'll start on slide 10 as we start off with a review of the performance of the quarter. Now in Q3 it was important for us to get back to growth after Q2 and see an incremental improvement in the growth rate. With 3% organic or constant currency growth, we delivered this improvement and from a category perspective driven by recovery in women's fashion, as Herman also described. Our largest and most important, strategically most important category. When reviewing the revenue across the two stores, Boost and Boostlet, it appears like quite stable and uniform growth, but the quarter was in fact divided into two very different trading periods. BoostLED generated strong growth in the first months of the quarter during the clearance sales and this reversed actually in September. For Boost it was opposite and the stock generated very strong growth in September as the clearance sales was concluded. With a sharper distinction between the two sides and our focus on premium sales on Boost.com, the relatively stronger growth on Boost compared to BoostLED continued into early Q4 and we believe that this is the right competition and the most healthy growth dynamics. Looking at the geographical revenue, the growth was relatively uniform across our key markets and all growing in the low single digit area from a constant currency perspective. I'll move to the next slide and provide some comments on the profitability of the quarter. because overall we are satisfied with our profit development. It shows the strength of our business model, which can be quite scalable and something that we can continue to optimize across the value chain. It should not be a surprise that the gross margin is down in the quarter. It's quite natural when it is driven by the clearing sales in July and August. It is quite natural that the gross margin is affected in a year where revenue is lower than planned and expected. On top of this, we continue to see a negative impact on the gross margin from the FX development. But as Sir Herman mentioned also in September, when the clearance sales was finalized, the year-over-year development on the gross margin actually was positive and the local currency improving compared to last year. We improved the EBIT margin as we were able to more than offset the gross margin development through leverage on OPEX lines. We are continuously striving to optimize our efficiencies. We see that within the marketing spend. We see it within our fulfillment and distribution ratio. And as we continue to develop and also grow, we see long-term room for improvement on these lines continuously. We also saw continued good development on the admin ratio, driven by the previously communicated ceasing of Norwegian customs, as well as the downsizing of their white-collar FTEs earlier in the year. The projection was slightly up, driven by continued investment at our automated warehouse at Engelholm, but also investments in our best-in-class IT and technology. Now, please move to slide 12, as I turn focus to our cash flow. The cash development was strong in Q3 and is really a representation of our operating model and setup between boost and boost-led as we are managing our inventory and working capital. It's quite an achievement to manage inventory and even reduce inventory in a year where sales is lower than planned. This is a key strength in risk mitigating accomplishment of the business model and the dynamics between the stores. Now, generating free cash flow, which is seven times larger than EBIT, as we did in this quarter, is clearly not sustainable. But the quarter illustrates how working capital is the determining factor for cash generation. And that is an important characteristic in a business like ours, where we trade massive volumes at relatively low margins. And I'll discuss these fundamentals of the cash flow over the cycle a bit more on the next slide. Because the more appropriate performance view of the cash generation is to review the last 12 months, i.e. over the full four quarters of the year. And in the last 12 months, our cash conversion has been close to 100%, and that's even with a slight outflow from working capital. We generated a free cash flow of 483 million SEK out of a reported 500 million SEK EBIT. It shows how strong our underlying cash generation potential is. It is clear that when the business is growing very fast, it requires investments in working capital and in our warehouse capacity. But with more modular growth, the cash conversion is fundamentally highly attractive, like this year. As we are guiding free cash flow of more than 500 million SEK for the full year 2025, it can also be concluded that again in Q4 2025 we expect to generate more cash than we did last year, reflecting continued operational improvements and continued strong management of working capital. Please move to the next slide for some comments on how the cash is used and generally our capital structure. As discussed, the business is highly cash generative in periods without the excessive growth. We are demonstrating this with our performance this quarter and with our outlook for the year. We do not want to sit on that cash. It has to work and it has to create return. And we strive to be disciplined in our return of excess cash to shareholders, currently mainly through share buybacks. As we are now extending our share buyback to purchase treasury shares worth more than 400 million SEK in the one year period since last AGM, we are actually returning quite a lot and we are also achieving the target that we set out in our capital markets day in 2023 and importantly thereby delivering on our promises generally. Despite the relatively large share buyback this year, we still have a very strong and quite conservative capital structure and currently with net cash, which means negative net debt of around 200 million SEK. This also means that we have very strong liquidity. We are maintaining a strong balance sheet because it creates room to maneuver and to capture opportunities in the market. And in that sense, as we face commercial growth opportunities in the market, we can attack and allow working capital swings in temporary periods. So with this, I have finalized my financial review and I'll now turn to the future and our financial outlook on slide number 16. As Herman mentioned in the beginning, we are satisfied with our strong operational performance and we are updating our guidance to reflect the performance year-to-date, although we are currently facing the largest and most important months and trading periods of the year. The new revenue guidance corresponds to 2-5% constant currency growth for the year, And we still expect fully a headwind of around 2 percentage points from currency. With the new guidance, the required constant currency growth in the fourth quarter is 2 to 10%. This corresponds to 0 to 8% in net revenue growth. It's a relatively broad range, but it underlines the uncertainty that the November and December inherently carriage. In regards to profitability, we are increasing the adjusted EBIT margin guidance, driven by the factors that Herman described earlier on the call. Fundamentally, we continue to see scope for further margin improvements, and this upgrade is an illustration of it. In a year with muted growth, focused on inventory clearance, and also a sharper distinction of boost and boost lead, and on top of this, quite material headwind from currency, we are still able to drive the underlying margin forward. For the full year, we estimate that the margin will be negatively impacted by around 1 percentage points due to the strengthening of SECs versus primarily Euro, but also Danish. The rest of our guidance remains unchanged. Free cash flow of more than 500 million SEC and CAPEX between 150 and 170 million SEC. I'll have my final slide with a few comments about our Relocating coming up shortly. Because as you are aware, we are investing in Boost to become a unique and really preferred employer in Copenhagen, the capital of Denmark. And creating a strong organization and really a powerhouse under one roof is a way for us to sharpen the organizational capacity. This investment carries some non-recurring costs and there are some compliance matters related to the move that I'll describe briefly. The non-recurring costs are relatively limited and amount to around 50 million SEK. And it's mainly a double leasing of the old headquarters at Hyli, but also other smaller locations that we have, as well as the restoration of our old headquarters. The larger part of these costs will be recognized in Q4 2025 and the rest in Q1 2026. The cash impact, however, will be spread across the year of 2026. Another implication of the move is that there will be a so-called exit tax related to the activities and operations which are moving to Denmark. Our core assets like the Engelholm warehouse and our listing etc. will be maintained in Sweden so this will not be subject to any new tax legislation. But the exit tax payment in Sweden will create, and that's important, it will create a deferred tax asset in Denmark based on the fundamental principle of the double tax treaty agreement between the two countries. So in layman terms, this means that the payment in Sweden can be deducted in Danish tax payments likely over a period of five years. And as a result, we expect no cash impact. over the period from 2026 to 2030. But in 2026 alone, we expect excess cash tax payment of 140 million SEK. This concludes the prepared part of my presentation, and I will now hand the word back to Herman for some final remarks.