CDON Ab

Good morning and welcome to the CDON Q1 2026 earnings presentation. We are joined today by Fredrik Norberg, CEO and Karl Andersson, CFO. Welcome, gentlemen.

Thank you. Thank you and welcome to this earnings call and at a new time, early hours and we will continue with this new time going forward as well. Together with me today as usual we have our CFO Karl Andersson who will dig into the numbers later on. First, a little bit summary of who we are. We are one of the leading marketplaces in the Nordics, having 3 million active customers with 100 million annual visits. We are operating two segments, Cedion and Fyndik, with an asset-light and scalable business model. And we are operating in a highly attractive market with large potential where we can see an anomaly in the Nordics compared to the rest of the world in how you shop online, where we shop much less online through marketplaces in the Nordics. And that we want to change, of course. To summarize the quarter, we have a solid start of the year. We continue a solid growth from our last quarter. We have 14% in GMV growth and 9% in GPAM growth. We continue with a positive EBITDA trajectory and rolling 12 months we have an EBITDA of 27 million SEK. And now really happy to show that our European giants have begun to show their really good potential. And ending this quarter, 5% of our CDON's GMV consists of GMV from these giants. And really happy to also report that our growth initiatives are running according to plan. And we expect to see some scaling in that area through next quarter. So our GMV ended up just below 400 million SEC, plus 14% versus last year. Our gross profit after marketing, our main KPI, was plus 9% versus last year, ending on 42 million SEC. And our EBITDA ended on minus 2.8 million SEC compared to last year's reported of 0.2%. but also compared to adjusted for extraordinary costs of minus 4.4 million SEK. And we can now conclude that we have four consecutive quarters with growth and we continue with this solid growth trajectory that we had from Q4 last year into Q1 this year. And one reason for this, a small reason, but still now we can show the numbers for our European giants. So these numbers are from our five giants that now are live on CD-ON with supply with the sales. Looking at the bars at the bottom, you can see how the supply have grown. And now they have roughly 200,000 products live on CD-ON. Looking at the line, you can see the growth in GMV for these giants. And you can see it now for March, they are just below 7 million SEC in total GMV. And looking at the top, you can see their share of our total GMV for the CDON segment. Starting at end of September, October, just above 0% when they got onboarded. And now looking at the end of March, we can see just shy of 5% of the total GME. And we will continue to follow up on these giants as we see this is the main strategy for us to really create growth in our core business. Moving over to our growth initiatives. Starting from the left, we have our retail media business, enabling our merchants to push their products on site, getting higher positions in the listings and so on, but also enabling an open up for external brands to market relevant products on our site. We will report on retail media revenue that now according to plan is zero. but we are really going according to plan here. We have our technical solution in place. It's implemented during Q1 and is live now. We have our retail media manager have started and we have been able to run and test the whole technology with 15 different merchants throughout the quarter. And we're now looking into wrapping this up and starting to get the first revenue in the second quarter. Moving to the right, we have the Nordic growth opportunities where we want to really expand our exposure in the rest of the Nordic countries. We can see that we are very under-penetrated in the rest of the Nordics compared to Sweden, and we want to change that. Here we have chosen to share our main KPI, which is the Nordic growth. So these are the growth in the countries except for Sweden, of course. Looking into CEDEON, we have a 7% growth for this quarter versus last year for the Nordic countries versus 2% last year. For FINDIC, we have 32% for this quarter versus 38% last year. And of course, I mean, as we grow in FINDIC, it's harder to keep up this really high growth rates, but still we're happy to be above 30% in growth rate. We have throughout the quarter done improvements in the customer experience for the Nordic countries, but also focusing a lot on enabling more supply. And this is really the main enabler for the Nordic countries to get more of the good supply into the Nordics. One way of doing that is to integrate to aggregators, which we are just in the final step of a big Finnish aggregator, which will enable a lot of other merchants to be able to sell through Cedeon. We are also looking into expanding our existing good merchants in the Swedish market into the Nordic markets. Looking into the brand marketing, we are talking about really revitalizing our brands and reintroducing both brands into the market. It was a long time ago since we had brand marketing efforts in both brands. Here we will follow up on our main KPI, which is brand consideration. We will not share the brand awareness, and this is due to the fact that we have really high brand awareness. Both CDON and Fyndik are well-known brands, but the problem is rather the consideration that people can consider to buy from both segments. So this is the KPI that we will follow now. For CDON, We have a brand consideration of 42% and Fyndik 31%. And we compared to August last year, which is when we started doing this measuring with this measuring tool. So this is why we're choosing August last year. We have signed a partnership with a brand marketing agency called Save Our Souls and looking forward to be able to push the first brand marketing ads already now in the second quarter. And last but not least, we have our tech resource boost. Our new full-time employees but also consultants are in place and delivering with high output. And this has really been boosted with our agent decoding enabled by Claude's recent updates. And I must say I haven't seen this before. big of a change of output in the company ever that we have seen in Q1. Of course, the value from it is not instant, but I see that throughout the year, this will really boost everything that we're doing from finance to marketing to analysis and to building our platform. So really looking forward on that area also for the rest of the year. All right, that's it from me. Let's talk a little bit more about the numbers.

Thank you very much and welcome to the financial part of this presentation. Let's start with some headline numbers and reported numbers for the group. So growth continues with profitability on track and we can report a 14% GMV growth, equally strong across both of our segments. Net sales grew by 13% as 3P now make up an even larger share of our mix and therefore net sales correlates more closely with GMV. Also fairly high merchant performance fees in Findic contributed to net sales growth. GPAM increased by 9% following slightly higher marketing costs and an effectively flat take rate. OPEX increased compared to last year, but bear in mind that bad debt reversal of 4.6 million in the comparison figure. All in all, this led to an EBITDA of minus 2.8 compared to the 0.2 of last year. However, in an adjusted like-for-like comparison, we actually improved by 1.4 million compared to last year. So let's take a look at our segments starting with GMV and it was really balanced growth across both segments and both engines have been firing. The group was able to sustain the positive momentum from previous quarters and we did exceed the benchmark of Q1 last year and almost that of 24 as well. In the CDON segment growth was fueled by two strong forces. Both the giants that we spoke about that are improving our assortment, both in terms of competitiveness and coverage, and also overall strong performance in our large categories, both home electronics as well as home and garden. It was another strong quarter for Findik, where the growth could have been a bit questionable. Q1 could potentially be impacted by the timing of Chinese New Year's. However, this year the team worked very well and mitigated and managed those effects, and we got back to a double-digit growth in Q1, reversing the negative trend that we saw in Q1 of last year. So very happy about that. Segment take rates continue to diverge and just looking at the top line group take rate, which was effectively flat versus last year at 19.1%, we need to dive into the respective segments to understand this better. The CDO intake rate was down to 14% compared to around 15% last year. Part of that is due to the very intentional category and merchant mix that we see following the giants being onboarded and us focusing strongly in those two categories I mentioned. But also the negative gross profit from our 1P business, the clearance of old inventory, did have a negative impact on take rate in the quarter. Adjusting for the 1p negative gross profit, take rate would have been closer to around 14.5%, so not as big of a shift. In Findic, the take rate exceeded 34% and is very high. Last year, 31% was also high, and the growth this year is driven by the higher merchant performances. Underlying commission levels in the segment are stable. So this is really an incremental addition and not the structural shift to our take rates. Marketing cost intensity is stable and the spend infinity was rather elevated. So on a group level, marketing cost has percentage of GMV increased to 8.4 compared to 8% a year ago, but also down from the peak in Q4 of last year of 8.8. Also here, we need to study the respective segments. And in CDON, we were able to effectively stay flat versus last year and down from the peak in Q4. And the exit from PSEC as a channel did impact this. That channel was not profitable for us and we are actively looking to reinvest that marketing spend in other more profitable channels to find incremental volume to continue to fuel our GMV. For Findic, marketing costs increased to 13.5% and effectively showcases the continued growth of paid over organic traffic in that segment. Net of this, we land at gross profit after marketing, where Findic effectively drove the group GPAM growth. Effectively, all of the GPAM growth in absolute terms came from Findic. GPAM in the CDON segment was down 2%, but bear in mind that was driven of the take rate effect that we previously spoke about. In the case of Findic, the higher take rate more than offset the higher marketing costs, increasing our GPAN by some 25% year over year. Controlled OPEX as growth initiatives are proceeding well. OPEX is slightly higher than the adjusted OPEX of last year, up some 5%, but it remains controlled. We saw increased costs in personnel, reduced cost in consultancy, a very conscious shift. And happily, we can also see cost savings in our core tech platform, despite those increased AI costs that we spoke about. Also, in the quarter, we had 1.1 million of OPEX related to the growth initiatives, a number that we will continue to report on going forward for transparency. All in all, I would argue that cost control is maintained full stop. EBITDA trajectory remains intact when considering the adjustment of last year. Yes, negative EBITDA of minus 2.8 in a seasonally weak quarter, but it follows the pattern. on a like-for-like basis, it is an improvement. A small one, but it is an improvement. And I would really anchor on the chart on the right-hand side where we can look at the LTM EBITDA for the group. 27 million is a 3x improvement compared to Q1 a year ago. And the small difference versus Q4 is rather arithmetic than a dent to the trajectory. So we do remain on the positive trajectory where we see operational leverage on our costs where GMV flows through nicely to EBITDA. Lastly, a few words on our balance sheet and cash. Strong liquidity position with improving cash flow. Operating cash flow before changes in working capital was negative, 5 million, but follows the strong seasonal pattern of previous years. Q1 is our seasonally weakest cash generation quarter, and we do expect to get back to positive cash flows in the coming quarters. High end of period cash balance of 96 million compared to 77 million a year ago. The share rights issue completed in 25, of course, materially improved our current ratio. Merchant debt reduced to 107 compared to 133 million a year ago. So overall, I would argue that we are well equipped in a good position for continued growth in Q2 and onwards. With that, I leave it back to you, Fredrik, for some concluding remarks.