CDON Ab

Hello and welcome to the earnest call for the third quarter for Cityon Group. With me today, we have as usual our CFO, Carl Andersson, but also a special guest. We have our CTO, Atra Sami, who will guide us through the platform migration that we finished this quarter. But to summarize the quarter, I'm very relieved to announce that all four CD1 markets are now integrated to the shared platform. On time and on budget. We still have a negative GMV development versus last year. However, we have a sequential improvement month by month within the quarter. And I'm really happy that we now again have a positive EBITDA of 5.5 million versus last year of 3.2 million. But now we will dig into the platform migration and I will come up, Atra. Thank you Fredrik.

Yes. Hello everyone. I'd like to briefly introduce myself. My name is Atra Azami. I'm the CTO here at CDON Group. Prior to this, I was the CTO at Findic for about four years prior to the acquisition of Findic by CDON. At Findic, I was the architect behind Findic's second generation platform. And I also led the migration back in 2020 from Findic's first to its second generation platform. And today I'm really happy to say that we have now completed a few weeks ago the migration for CDON to this very same platform that we did back in 2020, created back in 2020. This is a very complex operation and to quote Fredrik, our CEO, it's kind of like performing a heart transplant on marathon runner mid-race. And I'm happy to say that we did that not only on time, but also without disruption to our customers. This is something that I'm extremely proud of and it really shows the power and what we're capable of in our organization today. This platform consolidation was also one of the most important objectives of the CDON and Findic merger to unlock synergies, drive cost savings, but also to increase efficiency. And by increasing efficiency, what I mean is that we now have one platform, but two different brands, CDON and Findic. So every time we make a new tech investment, it will benefit both brands. And in addition to that, we're now prepared with our new and modern scalable platform for the future growth of the whole CDON group. With that, I'd like to also talk a little bit about the platform itself that we have migrated to. So this new platform is a modern cloud native microservices based state of the art marketplace platform designed for scalability. Compared to our old platform, it means we now have a much faster time to market for all new tech initiatives. What that means is that every new opportunity that comes up, we can quickly capitalize and be very agile and respond to changes in the market very quickly compared to the old platform. In addition, we have better maintainability, which means that we can put more of our resources into actually creating business value. In addition, one more feature of the platform is that it's completely event-driven. What that means is that everything that happens in the platform creates a corresponding event, and we can use these events to enable data-driven decision-making on a whole new level compared to what we could do before at CDON. The next thing I want to talk about is AI. Now AI is one of those things where a lot of companies today are using it, but it's often a side project or something that's not at the core of the business. But for us with our new marketplace platform, AI is at the very heart of everything that we do. We use it for product data enhancement, which increases conversion rate. It's better for SEO. And as an example, we're using this to solve what I think is one of the most important problems for e-commerce in specifically marketplaces, which is product categorization. We've used AI to solve this problem at a cost that is much lower than our competitors. And finally, I'd like to say that this AI powered future, we are exploring a lot of different projects in this area and there's a lot more things to come. So please stay tuned for more updates from us in this area. Back to you, Fredrik.

Thank you, Yatra. And the whole organization is now really switching focus from just moving stuff, but also now building new features and innovating, which we have been longing for. Looking into our result, as I mentioned before, we are back on positive numbers and we now plan to stay on this side of the line. As you can see here also, we have our important fourth quarter ahead of us, where we have a lot of the sales, but also the profit for CDON centered around this quarter. We have a GMV growth of minus 8% for the whole quarter for the group. However, we can see here that we have a sequential improvement month by month. And looking into the Ceylon segment, it's still in total negative growth versus last year. But on Fyndik, we have a slight improvement and we have a slight growth compared to last year. This growth is partly derived from the non-SE countries, Finland, Denmark, and Norway. And looking at this graph, you can see the pink line is the GMB from non-SE countries, Finland, and the dotted line is our supply for sales. And here we can showcase the correlation between improved supply, increased supply, and increased sales. In addition to this, we have also strengthened our management team with a true A player when it comes to supply. His name is Vesa Jarvelainen, and as a new CSO, he comes with the experience of 17 years from the Finnish verkkokaupa.com. Verkkokaupa is the leading consumer electronic retailer in Finland. And Vesa has been part of this journey from their turnover of 90 million euro up to 580 million euros, where the last seven years were part of the management team. And we're really happy to utilize Vesa's experience and knowledge about driving consumer electronic business online. We remain committed in our long-term goal to become the leading marketplace in the Nordics, and we still believe in the core elements of the marketplace model, supply and happy customers. We also believe that what drives GMV growth and customer satisfaction is spelled as improved supply. With that said, I would like to hand over to Carl and dig into the financial performance. Thank you.