Zinzino AB (publ)

Good afternoon and welcome to this live video interview with Zinzino following the Q2 2026 report. My name is Niklas Elmhammer from Karlsruhe Equity Research and we're very pleased to be joined today by the CEO of Zinzino, Dag Bergen Pettersen. And as usual, we welcome questions from the audience. So please use the chat function and submit as many questions as you like, and we'll try to address them as many of them as possible. But now, without further ado, welcome Dag. It's great to have you with us here again.

Thank you for having me and thank you for being here.

You released the Q2 2026 report today. Why don't we just dive into that? You showed 18% sales growth, 23% in local currencies. Despite somewhat slower growth compared to previous periods, the operating leverage seems to improve with reaching almost record margins of 16% and the EBITDA itself doubled almost. So what are your general remarks about this quarter?

It's kind of the numbers talking a little bit for themselves. So you sum it up pretty well. What last year when we were having like I call it a hyper growth of Approximately 50 percentage. It's hard to sustain that kind of growth We've slowed down this year a little bit on Acquiring companies. So we did I've done one real acquisition this year and then I Another one came in late last year and the last six months we have consolidated and put a lot of effort into to make sure that most of the functions internally and at the Zenzino is working. So I'm quite pleased with the growth in itself. If you say 23% in local currencies, it's still kind of a high growth and also remembering that we are coming from higher kind of targets to hit on. So in itself, the growth, it's good. It's gonna be tougher and tougher to reach those kind of growth. All that said, we still are very positive when it comes to the next three years. So we still believe that we will have an average growth of 20% over the next three years and maybe pushing for even more. So that in itself is good. And then on the margins, of course, it's quite much above what we have talked to and promised the market. And that is a really, really good thing. We see that the cash flow is really strong. We see that the margins are strong. We have cut some losses. We had some losses in the last two quarters previous year, which we are comparing against. So we've done some smart moves, I would say, and we have some scale advantages. on top of that, which is really, really coming through here in the numbers. I don't see a lot of dark or any dark clouds on our sky, but it's going to be tough to retain a growth margin. So that's going to be a focus. And then the margins will be following the growth patterns. Then if we do have a good cost control, which we are aiming to do and have, and then increasing the numbers of new customers and new partners, then I believe we're going to have a really good year ahead of us. So very pleased, I would say, on most of the things. And we've done a lot of investments, which I'm probably going to speak about a little bit later in this interview.

Thank you for that. The first half growth was 22% in line with your target. We have a question from the audience here. How confident are you about 20% growth in 2026?

Well, I cannot promise anything, but I will keep all my promises. So I strongly believe in 20 percentage growth. We are in the high season for us when it comes to sales. So August, September and October. But it's hard because we compare the numbers from last year. So we need to up the game. And that is always a little bit tricky. But I strongly believe it's going to be a good year in total. And I strongly believe we're going to keep the 20 percentage at the end of this year. So I'm pretty confident in that. And if it's 19, then it's 19. If it's 22, it's 22. So we're going to be around that level. I'm pretty sure about that when I'm calculating the numbers of clients and everything that we do, for sure.

So a follow up on that. In the short term, what are the sort of drivers that could help drive growth in the second half against the backdrop, as you mentioned, the very strong comparison?

So we have some, I would say, new markets coming up. So I would say that with some of the acquisitions that we did last year, we have much higher numbers in the Latin American market. So Mexico is now probably the fifth largest market that we have within Cincinnati. And that floats over to the American border. So you will see a growth both in US and Mexico, which is super strong. So the American market are really definitely giving a lot of, I would say, It's a good trend. Then we are still very strong in Europe, led by Germany, with Austria and Switzerland around. We have good growth in the French market and in the Spanish market. So we have those I would say big markets that are leading towards growth. Then we have some new markets that we didn't compare our numbers against last year. That is Korea, South Korea and Japan. And in Korea, we just did a relaunch, Recently and remember we started up in South Korea in November last year so we and this year in July and in this next quarters we have we see a good trend on those markets and So my belief is that most of the markets will be really, really increasing their numbers, and that we have some addition to that, and that is new markets. On top of that, I would say that our products, we also have, we are relaunching and we are launching us a couple of new products that will be in addition to the growth of only the market grow in itself and new customers.

Okay, thank you. That's very, very helpful. And regarding Asia Pacific, as you mentioned, it was down in Q2 and in the first half, but strong performance in July. Could you please elaborate a little bit on the sort of up and down development we're seeing in this region?

Yeah, I think one of the things that we've seen, we've been around for 21 years. So we've learned like with the faces of every five year, we learn something and in between as well, for sure. But one of the things that we've learned is that it takes a little bit time to stabilize a market. So we've been aggressive in opening a lot of markets, like super aggressive. I mean, If you look at the numbers of markets that we are in Asia, it's quite significant and good. The same in Latin America, we have a bump in two new markets, Peru and Colombia. And it takes a little bit time to stabilize those markets. Sometimes you can have a little bit of a growth to begin with, and then maybe it could fall down a little bit. And we saw that like in India last year, we had a significant growth, but it was not sustainable. And we even lost money on that revenue. and the reason for that is that the products were sold a little bit too on the low end so and that is also basically one of the reasons why you have higher profitability today we have a better mix of where the growth comes in and towards the margins so asia um are probably going to be the biggest region five years from now. That's my, if I'm going to really, really think about where we're going to have a significant growth, Asia is going to be there, Japan, Korea, The e-commerce shopping in China is going to be significant. We are very strong in Taiwan. Malaysia is a very good market on our products. So all of these markets will be really, really significant for us in Zeno. But we need to invest. We need to be patient. We need to build it. strongly and strong fundament over time. So this is going to be one of those focus areas for porous inzino. We put a lot of effort into them. So even though the quarter two and quarter one didn't give out like an increase, I can see the signs of greatness moving forward for sure.

Okay, that sounds exciting. And another market that has been perhaps a bit challenging is Eastern Europe, down again in this quarter. When do you expect stabilization in this region?

That's a good question. What I can say is that we are working hard to change a couple of things. We have We have invested in some small tools. We have had some issues that we are solving. Without going too deeply into that, we have some webshop sales and copies of our products a little bit, so we are bandaging those negative things. So I'm thinking that we are ready for a growth. With that said, it takes a little bit time to recover when you have a little bit of a decline. But we are on it and we're working hard and it's a lot of activity and a lot of customers that are super happy with our products. But yeah, I believe we're going to hit back again this year and next year.

And the question about the margins, I mean, you have 11% target and in the first half you are almost 16%. So do you expect any significant cost headwinds ahead?

A little bit depending on what you mean. I think that when we are establishing our goals, we are a little bit cautious. I had a board meeting yesterday, and we were talking about this, and then our long-term target would for sure be to be over 11%. I think we have shown that we can have higher margins, although we want to over deliver on our promises. So you can say that we are over, over delivering on the margins levels. But we also show that this is a kind of level that we can stabilize on. So if you look forward, we will do some investments. Depending on how big those investments will come, that might be buying some companies M&A's that could be investing in some markets or in some products or in factories. So all of these things could cost some money, I would say. But I think we we need to stabilize ourselves and have high expectations on our margins moving forward. And I think that's an internal overview of this internally as well. But if you balance growth and margins, we've been pretty good at this. If I, Remind the audience or those who are listening here, we have been paying out dividend for 13 years, so we can balance growth and margins pretty well and paying out dividend. And we would like to be sustainable growth, a sustainable growth company, which are profitable. and paying out dividends. So let's say that we have some struggles in the next half a year. Maybe we need to put a little bit more gas on the pedal for keeping the growth on 20, then the margins might go a little bit down, which would be okay. If we don't need to put too much gas on the pedal and we keep a 20 percentage, then the margins will be kept on this level. What we have shown now for some quarters is that we can keep up with pretty good numbers and margins. I think also quarter four, quarter one and quarter two just shows that.

Yes, thank you. And a question related to that, the cash flow. You have 800 million plus cash position. What is the plan for that cash?

Well, we are We are paying back money to the shareholders. So we have a sentence in our report, page six, saying that the dividend policy shall be at least 50% of the group's net earnings, as long as liquidity and equity ratio allow that, meaning that we are paying back to the shareholders. We are doing a lot of investments. Yesterday, we just approved a new machinery to the factory. One interesting detail, in July, I flew down to our factory in the north of Spain to look at our new facility on algae oil. This is in a locked system. This is going to be the new era of how you're creating and making omega-3s. So today, most of the omega-3s in the world comes from fisheries, fish. But the future probably would be in creating and making omega-3s. And we do a lot of investments. So we have invested quite heavily in that production facility as we speak. over the next years, lots of money will be used to that. The second area is that we're using a lot of money on technology. We just launched a new technology system for all our support globally. And the fantastic thing with that is that all the members who are working and helping out customers, they can answer now in writing on their own language and it translates to the language that the person is connecting to us. We are answering probably 35 different languages very easily globally. We are putting a lot of effort into AI. I would say no coder in Zenzino do code We use cloud or anthropic or other tools to do coding and then the coders are reviewing the code. So we're very up to date on technology. We are using AI tools as we speak on lots of different things which will speed up the company. and increase the speed of everything that we do, so time to market is extremely slow. And we've been ready for this for years because we have a lot of talented people within our company, so I'm super happy to see all of these things. A note on this, every customer Now, 30% of all the customers' inquiries to the support system today, 30% is answered by machine learning, meaning AI, and we're monitoring it, which makes a huge difference on speed and also to help customers. So there's a lot of investments. We do a lot of investments in studies. in product development and also in the ingredients in development. So we need that money to make sure that we have enough goods in our storage and warehouses as well. It was a long answer to the cash flow, but I hope everyone got what I said.

Absolutely, I think so too. Another part of growth investment is of course acquisitions. You made a significant acquisition in January, but you mentioned also it's a continued focus area. Should we expect acquisitions for the rest of the year?

Well, I think we have said quite vocally that we look into companies that could improve Zenzino, could help us with growing product side or ingredient side. So we will be searching for candidates that fits our culture. But it is a lot of effort bringing those companies into the system. So what we're doing is that we are taking most of those companies and then we put them into our system. And that needs to be played a little bit for a while before it's really, really are playing the tunes that we want them to play. So we've been using that time well. We are having a lot of different other projects on tech side and product side that has been good for us to focus on. But we are ready for more acquisitions, but it has to be the right ones.

Regarding this year's largest acquisition, it works. Do you have any updated target for the revenue you expect this unit to contribute with?

I think they will contribute with around... Well, this is a hard question to answer because parts of that will be physically, I mean directly, and then you have indirectly organic growth. But maybe around 400 million Swedish kronor or something about that in total if you add everything to it.

Okay, thank you. That's very clear. And on that note, I believe it's time to wrap things up. Do you have any final remarks, Dag, that you would like us to have?

Now I'm not sure if I need to do that, but it's always a pleasure to be here. Thank you for listening. And I hope that everyone, if there is question, then please send them to you so I can be well prepared for next time. So that's a good thing. And thank you for having me.

Okay. Thank you, Dag, for taking the time with us today. And thanks to all the viewers and all the questions coming in. And I hope to see you all soon.

Thank you.