Matas A/S (MATAS) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

August 18, 2021

Nasdaq Copenhagen DK Consumer Discretionary Specialty Retail investor_day 134 min

Earnings Call Speaker Segments

Gregers Wedell-Wedellsborg

executive
#1

Welcome to our Capital Markets Day. This is a very exciting day for Matas because today, we present a simple and bold strategy for Matas. This strategy will make Matas a bigger company, and it will make us a company that is better positioned for long-term, sustainable growth, which has been one of our issues over the last few years. It is a very simple strategy because the centerpiece is really that we want to sell more to existing -- to existing customers. And that is really the simplest strategy that you can have. And we will do so by expanding the range, the offer to customers, on the number of products, brands and categories we offer. And in fact, once we are at the end of this journey that we now start, the customer will be able to buy and choose from a selection that is 10x as high online as compared to the major store down the street from where they live. It is also a bold strategy because it represents the biggest change and investment program in our recent history. And ultimately, this is a strategy where we, as a company, aim to play a bigger role in the lives of our customers and also in society. And now, of course, timing is everything when you start out on a new strategic journey. And right now, times are unusual, to say the least, yet we believe that this is the best time to start out on a new journey. And why is that? Well, first, Matas is in really, really good shape. We're looking at all the indicators, and we see nothing but green lights. So we launched this strategy from a position of strength rather than being a company on its heels, and that is always a good thing. Second, we've just been through 3 years of very dramatic and very fast digital transformation, and we are now way ahead of the competition on digital. And really, there is no reason to wait for others to catch up before making the next move. Third, it is evident that we were one of the companies who were plainly lucky to be at the right place and the right time to benefit from COVID. The current tailwind will surely not last forever, but we believe that the best remedy for us and for the company is more ambition, more initiative and more speed. So I look forward to sharing our plan with you today for how we're going to grow Matas towards '25, '26. The agenda that we've put together for you, I will start out by looking back at what we have been through, our point of departure, and then put a few words to our new strategy, which we call Growing Matas Group. Then I will hand over to my good colleagues to take you through the different areas of our business and how they will change over the coming years and what their key initiatives are to support our strategy and reach our financial ambitions. Our CFO, Anders, will then take over at the end to talk about our financial ambitions and how we manage the risk in our strategy. And I will close with a few remarks, and then open for Q&A. And this is the team that you're going to meet. My good colleagues: Anders Skole-Sørensen, who many of you know; Brian Andersen, our E-Commerce Director; Lise Ryevad, our Commercial Director; Christian Schmidt, who runs the stores; Michael Shin, our recent international addition; and Brian Poulsen, our Logistics Director who has a huge task ahead of him. Now it is very, very important to understand that Matas is a different company now than Matas was just 4 or 5 years ago. And I will spend some time just to go through what is it that makes us different and what is it that makes us positioned to grow and to even have an ambition to cross the DKK 5 billion threshold at the end of the strategy period, because it's only possible because we are the company that we are now. We launched a strategy called Renewing Matas, and that's what we've been working on for the last more than 3 years. And the results of that strategy has been very compelling. I have seen very fast and very secure and able execution in all aspects of the business. Our brand position is historically strong. Our online journey, we have talked about many times, but it is very, very impressive and very, very fast digital transformation that positions us for long-term growth. At the same time, the doomsayers that said the stores are going to go away, they have been proven wrong. We have a great store footprint that we have adapted over the years of profitable stores, and we have even upgraded a lot of those over the last 3 years. We've also been able to get new growth both through acquisitions and especially in the health and well-being area, we've seen spectacular growth. At the same time, if you visited Matas, you would have noticed a lot of changing around on the internal parts of the business with a lot of cost savings in some areas of the business and reallocation of those costs to new areas of the business. We have executed the strategy [indiscernible] mainly organic but also with a few [indiscernible] and investments over the years. And what is the bottom line? Well, the bottom line is that Matas is now a digital company, and we don't use that word in vain. And we don't only think about our e-commerce business, we think about the whole company having been on a transformation, making us digital across all functions in the company, all roles in the company. And just to highlight a few examples, so the core of what we're doing, the core thing that Matas is able to do, whether it is how we set the range, now starts out with an online view of the customer. And -- an online range, and then adapted to the store, whether it's how you are a member of Matas and our very important Club Matas. That is a fully digital experience right now. And even the way we run our stores. It is a much different job to work at a Matas store now than it was 3, 4 years ago with a lot of new gadgets and a lot of new ways of interacting with the customer and serving the customers. And even our media business, which used to be mainly a physical leaflet distributed to the -- most of Denmark, is now also a digital business with social media and a lot of other digital media to support the sales and the brand building. Now we are also a digital company in the way that we lead the online market. We are the definite market leader in beauty. We crossed the DKK 1 billion threshold milestone in the last financial year. 26% of our revenues last year were digital, of course affected by COVID. But having just reported on the first quarter, that level of 26%, 27% is still where we're running on in the first quarter of this financial year. So a quite dramatic change to our business composition. Now you could be caught up in the fear that going digital means losing earnings and losing margin. And what we have seen over the years is that we have been able to grow the business without materially sacrificing the gross margin even though as we go online, there is some gross margin erosion because there are more campaign sales online. So we've been able to grow our gross profits broadly in line with our top line growth. And perhaps even more importantly, because this speaks directly to the business model of the company and why it's competitive against pure-play onliners, we have seen that omnichannel businesses that both have stores and online, they are capable of delivering better margins from their online business because there are a lot of synergies in sales, in sourcing, in marketing, in fulfillment and in how we share the back end of the business. And that's going to increase even more with some of the initiatives that we're going to talk about today. So really a proof that going online doesn't mean sacrificing your long-term profitability. Now it is also the case that we expect and have been expecting and have seen a lot more competition online. And we have been really focused on building competitive advantages in all parts of our business so that we can fight the likes of Amazon or pure players or new entrants to our market. And we think that we have built a quite impressive list of what we call moats against competition or competitive advantages that will help us resist and help us defend our market position even though online competition increases. And I would encourage you to go through this list but maybe just highlight 1 or 2, namely the fact that we are not just a retailer, we are also a retail media company. So we are the best place to launch new brands and to reach Danish consumers and to build the brand premium if you own a brand, if you want to take a brand to market. And we think that position is very defensible. And also, we have a good share of house brands, which we aim to increase, but we also have selective distribution agreements, and that means really that you won't find the goods in our stores just anywhere. So there is some kind of protection against commoditization. I think the most important thing to take away from the transformation and from the fact that we are now a different company is that we have better long-term growth prospects now. We used to be constrained by the number of physical stores and the size of the physical stores. There really wasn't a lot of room to build more stores in Denmark. It was fully penetrated. We had our market leadership. But now, having built our digital position, we have a lot better long-term growth prospects. Now precise market data for the Danish health and beauty market is hard to come by. We have just taken 1 supplier of market data, Euromonitor. And what they expect to see for the coming years and what they have reported for the past years is something that we have seen through and through, namely that the health and beauty market is a market that grows a bit more than inflation. You will, of course, see some volatility over economic cycles. You will see a lot of volatility due to COVID and post COVID, of course. But underlying this is a market that is growing faster than GDP. And even though we, in the Mass Beauty area, see some drag on value but still a growth in volume, then in the high-end business, where we are strongly positioned, and, in particular, in the health business, we expect the growth rates to be markedly higher than inflation. And that is an interesting opportunity for us. So the market -- the health and beauty market is very attractive from a commercial point of view. First of all, as I mentioned, it does tend to outgrow the general economy, and that is also due to demographic changes. People simply start being interested in beauty earlier in their life, and they are very interested in living longer and staying younger for longer, as we say in the business. So there is this underlying growth in the market, and there is an eternal need for the products that we have on the shelf. We even saw in the most dramatic crisis that we have ever seen or have seen for at least my lifetime over the last few years that the need to take good care of yourself doesn't go away. It's also a market with large profit pools that can be shared across the entire value chain. So no matter what player in the value chain, if you're in it, it's an attractive place to be. And the main reason for that is that consumers, they like brands, they like newness, they like experience, they like advice. It's not just commodity products where price is the only thing that makes the consumer happy. It is also an interesting space in the sense that we see consumer health, digital health as an area with massive innovation, massive product innovation, massive innovation in services. And as I mentioned, it is also a business that is quite resistant to economic cycles. So if you were to choose a category to compete in, we are fortunate to have chosen one that is attractive both from an underlying growth point of view, from a resilience point of view and from a profit point of view. Now as we look ahead to the coming years, we still expect that outgrowing of the general economy to be the headline for the entire market driven by 3 things in particular. One is the continued shift towards digital. We're simply able to reach more customers more times every day, and customers seem to have an ever-growing need to represent themselves online in new ways. Also, and I think that's what we are seeing right now, the expectation in the business is summarized on the headline, the roaring '20s, that we believe that this is going to be an era of high growth and a lot of partying for the foreseeable future. And then finally, as I mentioned, health demand. This is the greatest cost humanity has ever been on, on taking care of ourselves, and we think a lot of the lessons learned on health are going to be sustained and fueled even further by demographics and product innovation. On the other hand, we do expect people to go traveling again at some point. How fast and how many and how often remains to be seen. But of course, that is going to work a bit against us. We do expect physical retail to consolidate as online grows. And we do expect intensified competition in the online space for the attention of the consumer. But overall, we see tailwinds as we look ahead. Now as a new business and as a business in an attractive market, we see that we have new growth opportunities mainly related to expanding the assortment and also building our own brands and even opening the door to the world. And we will talk about that today. Our absolute overriding intention with this strategy is to position Matas and put Matas on a long-term, sustainable growth trajectory and get out of these limitations and constraints that we have been living under and leveraging the fact that we are a digital company. So that is our overriding concern and challenge to ourselves over the coming years. Now the strategy itself, we call it Growing Matas Group. We have a purpose and a purpose that we take very seriously. That is that we want to be the partner for the consumers; and b, the partner that helps them be healthy and happy and stay beautiful all of their lives, from the very first time that they start thinking about these things to the very last time they think about these things. And beauty is something you think about a lot when you're young, and health is a thing you think about a lot when you're older. So this is really holding the hand of the consumer all the way through their life. Our ambition and why this next strategy is different from the one we have just been through, where it was mainly a matter of making sure that the -- what we lost in the stores we gained online and that we got that #1 position online, we are now positioned to grow the online business without materially sacrificing sales in our physical stores. So as we look ahead, our business model is really evolving, if you look over a 10-year stretch, from being on 1 leg, the physical stores, to being now on 2 legs, the physical stores and online, to eventually being on 3 legs, the physical stores, online and a good portfolio of brands that you find nowhere else but in Matas. So a vertical integration as part of our strategic viewpoint for a number of reasons. Now I don't think that there's ever been a time where business and society has been so closely interlinked, and the role that businesses play in society. And we have thought about where can we make a difference to society. And there are really 3 areas where Matas as a company can make a difference. First is in sustainability, that as shopping goes online, it actually becomes less climate positive. We aim to be CO2 neutral in 2030. We aim to play a big part in what we might call the plastic revolution, in figuring out how we can reduce or reuse plastics. That is an area where we can play a big part in being innovative and finding new solutions. We've just seen through Covid that our contribution to public health is significant. So we want to increase access to digital health solutions for all, and we want to bring more products with health benefits on the shelves, both online and offline. And then finally, we take great care of our great colleagues in the stores and in our HQ, and we aim to be the best place to work in retail despite all these changes going on. As for our long-term ambitions, we have set out 2 ambitions and a price tag. And we have set a target of reaching more than DKK 5 billion in the financial year '25/'26. And that is driven by growth in the online sales and some consolidation in stores. It does not include significant M&A. For our EBITDA margin, slightly down from where it is today but still sustained at a high level and a very competitive level. It is affected by 2 factors. One is that we do get some margin expansion from growing the business, from our investment in the warehouse and from vertical integration. But that is, we expect, counteracted by the fact that we will get more competition, and we need to respond to that competition. And also, with more growth ambitions comes more growth investments as and when we enter new categories. So the price tag, excluding M&A, we expect a CapEx of DKK 1 billion to DKK 1.3 billion over the strategy period with the Matas Logistics Center, of course, being the absolute main part of that. As we look at what's going to happen to the business in an illustrative way, and we compare to a situation before COVID, we think that the pressure in the stores is going to continue. Even though we're seeing quite compelling performance from the stores in Q1, we do think that over the long term, there is going to be pressure on the number of stores. We think matas.dk will be the biggest growth driver in the foreseeable future. We believe our investment in Firtal, which has paid off very nicely, will continue to deliver growth. And our newest acquisition in Web Sundhed, positioned just right for digital health, will also drive growth. So what is our strategy? Well, our strategy is to become the first choice for health and beauty. It is to have absolutely the most attractive offer when it comes to the assortment. It is to be the #1 choice online. It is to be the #1 choice off-line. And it is to own or have rights to the products that the customers most desire. And then the big change project is to be a very efficient operator of both store logistics and e-commerce logistics, and we will return to that. So with that introduction, I look forward to introducing you to my good colleagues who have been absolutely instrumental in driving the results over the last 3 years. And the first one I'm pleased to introduce is Lise Ryevad. Lise is our Commercial Director. She comes from an industry background in FMCG in L'Oréal -- Mars Denmark and L'Oréal. She's had experience with travel retail from Copenhagen Airport, and she's now with Matas. And her mission is quite clear. She is going to be the one to lead the assortment expansion. So with that, I will hand over to Lise.

Lise Ryevad

executive
#2

Thank you, Gregers. So my contribution to this new strategy, I can say it in a very simple phrase. I'm going to triple our assortment. I'm going to sell more products to our current customers. In this way, we will have our customers to spend more money with Matas and thereby increase the customer lifetime value. It seems simple. It will be very simple. But let me just explain -- during the coming few minutes, let me explain more in detail. Historically, Matas has been a monochannel retailer. We have been market leaders, but we have been monochannel. So physical stores, 300 stores nationwide. In each and every store in average, people would be able to find 10,000 products in a store. Some stores bigger, 18,000 products. But in average, 10,000 products. Now since the last 3 to 5 years, we have grown to become an omnichannel business, an omnichannel retailer. We are still market leaders. And what we see is that having people to spend money both online and in-store actually is very valuable for Matas. Actually, what we see is that omnichannel customers, they spend twice the amount of money with Matas as does an offline customer. So this is really valuable. We have also seen that we have been able to grow the assortment to 50,000 products, so products that you'll find only online but also can be bought via connected retail. Now in the future, our strategy is to triple the amount of SKUs that we have today; so to offer a lot of new products to our current customers. We will stay within our categories, our core categories. We might go into adjacent categories but within health and beauty and the close area around health and beauty. This is where we want to expand. And 100,000 extra products, that is massive. These products will be available mainly online. And we know that the biggest part of the turnover will come online but also via our stores, our connected retail, also via these endless aisles. We are training our assistants and our advisers in-store to be much better in not just offering the 10,000 units on the floor physically in the store but also looking into and offering the full endless aisle assortment which we offer online. Now to describe that a bit differently, it means that typically, a customer that would historically come into the store and find these -- choose between these 10,000 SKUs, they will now be presented up to 15x that amount of products. And putting it into another context, we would offer twice the amount of what a consumer will meet when they enter a Firtal warehouse. So it is a huge expansion that we are planning to do, but we believe that with the distribution system we have and with the machinery -- or the marketing machine, et cetera, that we have, that we will be able to do so. And this is what this slide actually shows us. We have a second-to-none distribution and marketing power. And we have built that over the last 10, 20 years. First of all, distribution-wise, we have the 264 nationwide stores from Skagen to Gedser. We have our very strong online channel. We have the app that people are downloading and using every day to find products. So distribution-wise, we are second to none within our categories. Furthermore, over the past 10 years, we have built Club Matas. Club Matas today is one of the strongest loyalty schemes in Denmark. We have 1.7 million loyal consumers. We know exactly what these consumers are interested in. We know exactly what they've been buying over the past 10 years. And we will also be able to tell what they would be interested in buying in the future. So this is a great strength for Matas. And finally, we have our very strong media portfolio, a media portfolio that we have also built over the past 5, 10 years and where we, every single month, are in contact and communicate and reach 1.8 million Danish consumers. So adding a whole lot of new products and using this distribution and marketing machine to build awareness, desire, bring offers directly to the consumers, by doing that, we believe that we will be successful with this new strategy. So to begin with beauty market. Huge market, DKK 8 billion. We are, by far, market leader today. But when we go a bit further into details, we experience subsegments where we are either not present or very, very small. Furthermore, the health business, it's a bit smaller, DKK 5 billion market but growing very fast. We are underrepresented in this market. We believe we have a much higher fair share that we can reach. So we have -- we will be able to grow the market by adding further products to our assortment, and we will be able to win market shares. Let me go in detail. So to begin with the beauty market. As mentioned, an DKK 8 billion market. And especially in High-End Beauty, Matas is very strong and by far market leader with 50% to 60% market share. But when we go beneath, we see, for example, a segment like the professional hair care segment where really we are not present at all. We have less than 5% market share. It's a DKK 0.5 billion market. And with less than 5% market share, it really does not make sense. And it doesn't make sense to me that we are not present in this market, but what is lucky is it doesn't make sense to our consumers either. Our consumers are used to buying styling products and hair care products in Matas. So why not professional hair care? So professional hair care will be the first subsegment that we will enter. We have made agreements with the biggest 18 brands within professional hair care to distribute their brands. So from August on, we will have these brands, 18 brands, 700 products, online, and we are planning to add another 15 to 20 brands within the coming year or 2. But launching brands is not all. We want to win this market, and we want to become #1 in this professional hair care market. And to do so, we need to be very professional. We can't just sell products and put everything on a very low price. We want to be professional. We are all about advice. So of course, we should be the best in giving advice to our consumers also in professional hair care if we enter this market. So on the 23rd of August, we will launch a new destination on matas.dk, a destination where we have hairdressers, we have hairstylists that are giving tips, that are showing how-to guidance, tutorials, that is doing live chat. They will do one-to-one consultations with our customers. So all in all, probably the best destination -- the most professional destination you can go to find information on professional hair care and, of course, the full assortment. Jumping into health. As I mentioned, slightly not as big market but growing quite strong. We have a low market share of 20%. We believe our fair share should be closer to 30% or 40%. And it is actually within all categories that we believe there is an attractive market position for us to grab into. And it's with OTC, over-the-counter, supplements and even personal care where we do believe that we have potential. And when going into health, for sure we want to build our -- we want to become a trusted health adviser. Historically, Matas in many consumers' minds, we are stronger in beauty than we are in health. And we know that. So apart from launching products, we will also go out and do partnerships in a stronger degree than we do today with experts that do know, have details about products and markets that we don't have. And we will deliver all the good knowledge we have from Club Matas, from customers, what they buy, what they want. And when we put those 2 things together, we believe that we can be -- in great partnerships, we can develop new products. So apart from the partnership we have with Novozymes, we are planning to do more partnerships with experts. We want to be the trusted adviser in health in Denmark. We have taken in pharmacist/technicians. We are training our plus 2,000 advisers in the store to become even more competent within health. That's going on as we speak. And second and finally, we want to -- we know that the health market is undercommunicated, simply not a lot of money spent in marketing in health. So we do believe that this is a way for us to take a larger market share as well, to use our media machine and to spend money and thereby to grow our position in the health market. So finally, an example of a subsegment where we do believe that we can make a difference, the dermatological skincare. Dermatological skincare will be the first subsegment within health where we will increase our number of products. Today, it's a DKK 600 million market. We have less than 5% market share. We do believe that we should have closer to 30% market share. On top of that, we see that it is a market that is underdeveloped. In Denmark, only 19% of the skin care market is dermatological skin care, whereas in Western Europe and in Sweden and Norway, it's 30% to 36%. So together with dermatological skincare brands and suppliers, we want to build further the market as well as gaining market share from some of our competitors. So in June, we launched the first 3 dermatological skincare brands: ACO, Neutrogena and Cetaphil. And within the coming 3 to 4 months, we will launch another 6 brands, some of the very biggest brands within the dermatological skincare. And we will take this position not only to what brands and products that we launch but also built online a destination with the [ green cross ] and with the advice from specialist on dermatological skincare. So these are 2 examples of how we believe we can grow our existing categories. We can grow the number of products tremendously and thereby make our customers spend more money -- our existing customers spend more money with Matas and, finally, growing the customer lifetime value. Thank you.

Gregers Wedell-Wedellsborg

executive
#3

And thank you so much, Lise, for that presentation. To me, the key takeaway is a change in mindset at Matas. Over the last maybe even a decade, we have been defending our market position against new entrants and making sure that we are still the #1 choice for consumers. Now we are moving into the offensive. We are driving a massive increase in our assortment and using our strong digital position to win market share and sell more to existing customers. Now online is going to be the big driver of our growth. And therefore, I'm happy to present to you Brian Andersen. Brian has been a very close -- together with Lise, a very close teammate on the last 3 years journey and done an amazing job of actually 10x-ing and 10x -- or increasing our online revenues by more than 10x. And now we hand him the next challenge. And the next challenge for Brian is to double online revenues by selling more to the 600,000 customers that are already shopping both online and offline with Matas but also to keep on the impressive acquisition of new customers that maybe only shop at our stores or shop with other onliners to Matas.dk and our colleagues at Firtal and Web Sundhed. So with that, I will hand over to Brian, who brings more than 20 years of pure e-commerce competence to the table. Thank you.

Brian Andersen

executive
#4

Thank you, Gregers. Today, I will share how we'll deliver growth through our 3 digital platforms, matas.dk, Firtal and our collaboration with webapoteket.dk. First I will focus on matas.dk and how we have broad assortment and strong customer experience with growth in '21. First, it is important to understand our point of departure. In the last 3 years, we had had a tremendous growth of matas.dk. Three years ago, we were the 20 most used webshops in Denmark. For the last 3 years, we had outperformed all our major competitors in growth. And last year, we were the second most used webshop in Denmark. And this strong growth has also had an impact on the Danish consumer's brand perception about Matas. Each year, YouGov asked Danish consumers about which brands they believe are the strongest in Denmark. Three years ago, Matas was not in top 10. But last year -- or this year, we were third the strongest brand in Denmark. And we have a lot of indicators that shows that this lift in brand perception is mainly driven by our digital stronger experience. If we focus more on our internal number, we had -- the last 3 years, we have had more than 600% growth in our digital turnover in Matas. 2018 and 2019 was very strong, but it really accelerated in 2020. And as we just shared today, we had -- in the first quarter of this financial year, we have been able to deliver lower number double-digit growth on this, so we believe that we have a sustainable level that will grow from top of in the future. If we should focus on why had we been able to deliver this growth, we have really focused on improving the customer experience. The last 2 years, we have improved the customer NPS by 13% at matas.dk. If I should share some examples about what has driven this, we have -- I have 3 examples with me today. First of all, we're really focused on the delivery experience. Now we deliver same-day delivery to 50% of the Danish consumers, and we get some very strong customer satisfaction for customers that have used the delivery service. We also introduced live advice and guidance from our stores. So in matas.dk, you can be guided by a trained Matas person direct from a store, and therefore we can deliver the same guidance experience at matas.dk that consumers have loved Matas stores for, for decades. Finally, we have introduced a lot of engaging content. Matas is one of the global leaders in using live video shopping, and the last year, we had hosted more than 100 live events from our webshop, and they are driving very high customer satisfaction and also strong conversions. So to follow up on our Lise's section, we believe that there are a lot of headroom in our -- both existing and new categories to drive digital growth. If we first look at the High-End Beauty and the Mass Beauty, Matas is a clear market leader, and we are pretty sure that these categories will continue migrating online in the future, and this will impact a lot of our growth numbers. So we have very high number of turnover going for dk. If we look at the new categories and the upcoming categories for Matas, well-being, dermo cosmetics and professional haircare, we have large market shares in these categories, but we see this as a double opportunity for growth. Both of these categories will turn online in the future, and that will impact growth for Matas. And we also have a possibility to grow our market share in these categories. So I should sum up our strategy for matas.dk in the future: to strengthen and expand our market leader position. It, first of all, starts with we will offer the broadest assortment. Next, we will give the strongest guidance and inspiration and localized to Danish consumers. We will offer the fastest delivery, and a lot of research showed that fast delivery is very important both for conversions and customer loyalty. We will also use our strong Club Matas data gathered both in stores and digital to provide personalization in these [ tough times ]. And we'll do a lot of one-to-one communications to secure share of wallet and win the consumers across categories. Fifth, we -- at our digital platforms, we are in contact with most of the Danish consumers. And based on that contact, we can build a very strong pool of first-party data. And we will use this data to be very relevant. And then the largest share of voice online to be in contact with the Danish consumers on continually basis. Final but not least important, we will build very strong digital partnerships with our suppliers, and we will use our internal digital media and external digital media both to build new brands and grow existing brands. If we combine these 6 elements, we are pretty sure that they would [ enforce ] [indiscernible] and expand our market-leading position that we have at the Danish market today. Okay, so now I will shift to Firtal that has a price-led niche position and a portfolio of webshops with a very low-cost operating model. We acquired Firtal 3 years ago, and since, the group has outperformed our investment case. Three years ago, Firtal had an annual turnover of around DKK 140 million. And last year, they almost have a turnover of DKK 350 million. So we have a 2.5% growth. But also very important, they have a very strong margin compared to peer pure-play online retailers. Firtal operates with around 10% profit margin. And if you compare that to peer group that has the same growth, they're around 1%. And this is driven by a very strong operational focus. We have very strong e-commerce system and expertise, and we also have some strong synergies with Matas. And then finally, about the background about Firtal, it is that the 2 founders, Mikkel and Jesper, is still on board, and they are really focused on building a scalable team and keep their learning culture. There they educate their own staff direct from school, and therefore, they have a very strong internal company culture. We also recently gathered the services we had developed under the brand Geni, and we will use this focused sub-company of Firtal to further develop these services. And we also started delivering these services to other parts of the group and a selective number of external customers. So for the future, we believe that Firtal has a strong platform for future profits and growth across their portfolio of webshops. The 2 strongest brands Firtal has is Helsebixen and Jala Helsekost. And when we new measure these positions and compare them to peer groups on perceived price and perceived value, they have some very strong positions. Since they are priced by their positions, we are, of course, performing strong on price, but they also performed very strong on the perceived value they deliver to consumer, and this value is driven by a large assortment, strong customer service, fast delivery. And they also give very strong category expertise to their consumers. So we believe that Firtal will be able in the future to sustain their margins, and they will deliver a low and double-digit growth. We believe there is still a strong possibility to enhance their assortment and keep price fighter strategy. And then we also have a platform, if the right bolt-on acquisition shows up, that we could include these new brands on the platform. And we believe that through keeping focused on the low-cost operating model, we will be able to sustain our margins. And we have -- still have some synergies that we collaborate with purchasing together with Matas. Okay. So finally, we're focused on webapoteket and Web Sundhed, that -- our most recent digital platform, that our goal is to deliver a very strong customer experience to the Danish consumer, should go online and buy health and pharmacy services. Web Sundhed works closely together with webapoteket. And webapoteket was first pure player on the digital pharmacy market and has a clear ambition of being the Danish market leader on the pharmacy industry. Web Sundhed consists of 4 services, storage/logistics, purchasing, IT platform and marketing services, and they deliver that through webapoteket.dk. That is the platform that's owned by Trine Persson that is a pharmacist, and she runs the customer handling, the pharmacy operations and the commercial strategy, including pricing, assortment and the campaign timing. So from an investment perspective, we believe there are 4 very broad rationale behind these acquisitions and the collaboration with webapoteket. First of all, we believe that the Danish pharmacy industry will be digital -- poised for digital transformation in the years to come. A lot of other industries have gone through a digital transformation, but the pharmacy industry has not yet in Denmark. So only around 2% to 3% of the Danish transactions in the pharma industry is digital. And if you compare to Sweden, the same number is 8%. And also, if we look to U.K. and Germany, there are a high degree of digitalization in pharmacy industry. So we believe that, that is a huge opportunity. Then this market share will increase in Denmark. We also believe that the collaboration with Matas and webapoteket can speed up this transformation, and we can deliver a better shopping experience for Danish consumers going online to buy health and pharmacy services. We can give webapoteket access to a stronger assortment, we can deliver best-in-class delivery services and we can deliver very strong digital marketing services. And in this collaboration, the pharmacist, Trine Persson, can focus on the core pharmacy operations since she'll outsource some of the core operations to Matas. And finally, if the Danish pharmacy industry will be further liberalized in the future, we have a strong position to be part of this. So to sum up by 3 sections, I will tell short about how the 3 platform can reinforce each other. If you look at the assortment, matas.dk contributes with purchasing power and very strong scale advantage to our large suppliers. And these large agreement can, in many cases, be shared with our platform in the group. Firtal is very strong in collaborating with a lot of suppliers. They have a system for integrating with hundreds of small suppliers. And therefore, they, in an efficient manner, can make a long-tail assortment. And they can also offer this and already do that for our part of the group so that we can access to a large number of long-tail products in all parts of the group companies. And then finally with Web Sundhed, it contributes the consumer insights on health products, and they're very strong in niche products from the niche -- health industry. And in the future, we can also make relevant -- these products relevant to all part of the groups. So combined, we believe that these 3 approaches on assortment can make -- that Matas will have the strongest assortment to offer Danish consumers on the Internet. And then, we also can make relevant services available across the group, and we can share best practices on our areas.

Gregers Wedell-Wedellsborg

executive
#5

Thank you, Brian. To me, the key takeaway from what Brian has just said and from how the business has developed over the few years is that 5 years ago, the digital revolution was really bad news for Matas and a structural threat for Matas. But now it is an opportunity. We are very well positioned both to protect and maybe even expand our position in our existing categories towards existing customers, but we are also positioned, again, to go on the offensive and sell more to our existing customers of new categories, especially within professional hair care and health and maybe even more to come eventually. So this was assortment. This was digital. Now it's time for the stores. And I'm very pleased to introduce Christian Schmidt. He's a new colleague. He had joined us from a long and impressive career in running physical retail jobs in ALDI, in TOP-TOY and in Salling Group, where he started out. He is responsible for the stores. And I can't say this clearly enough: We believe in the stores. We believe that stores are part of the future, and we believe that well-run stores are super attractive to consumers of all ages. So Christian has a very, very exciting job to use all the new opportunities for integrating with digital and connect our stores but also drive the consolidation of the store network and continually make sure that Matas stores are the #1 choice when you're on the street and continually make sure that we can protect the profitability of our wonderful stores. So with that, I will hand over to Christian for a review of our store strategy.

Unknown Executive

executive
#6

Thank you, and as mentioned, I'm Christian Schmidt, responsible for the Retail Division. I look super much forward to take you through our retail strategy, and I will start with providing you with our perspective on the market and afterwards go through our strategy. As most market participants, we believe that the pressure on the physical retail market will continue. However, we are confident that our strategy of operating, consolidating and connecting the stores can mitigate this. The COVID-19 restrictions and lockdowns has pushed the customers online to an extent we haven't seen before. But if we compare our online share, matas.dk, versus our offline share, as shown on this chart, we clearly see a picture that once the restrictions are lifted, the customers know where to find our stores. In the coming strategy period, we will change focus from a conventional store renewal program to a digital store renewal program. We are focusing on 3 areas to be successful operate, consolidate and connecting the stores. These 3 areas are equally important, and we need to balance our attention on each of these. I will walk you through each one by one, starting with operating the stores. I actually look very much forward to share this page with you because I think it's very impressive. Matas has a long history of being a strong store operator. Even during a pandemic with several restrictions and lockdowns that limits the traffic to the stores, we have been able to sustain profitability across the store network despite for 2 stores, I need to remember to say. Even though we have been able to keep positive profitability and sustained flat development in our store salary percentages, we have -- in several years, we have some major improvements that will ensure continued profitability despite a heavily market pressure. The 3 major categories are staff optimization, and that's basically, for me, that we improve our capability to match our staffing with the consumer footfall. We have what we call ease of payment through digital products, such as a mobile POS terminal, in order to free up staff to spend on better customer service and more sales. Last but not least, we are working with best practice. Best practice means, for me, that we are benchmarking our stores in clusters in order to improve the staff efficiency. On top of operating the stores even better than we do today, we also see a potential in continuously adapting the store network -- or consolidating the store network, I mean. The current store fleet situation is that we have 264 with a nationwide coverage filled with more than 2,000 trained health and beauty advisers that provide a very strong customer satisfaction. Our store network has undergone a significant transformation the last 3 years, and we have reduced our fleet by 13 stores. Behind this number comes the large work of consolidation and relocation in order to adapt to the consumers' needs and behaviors but, of course, also increase the traffic. We have closed 12 stores. We have consolidated 14 stores into 7 stores. As an example of this, we have [indiscernible], where we, in a distance of 200 meters, had 2 stores. We combined these 2 to 1 big store that allows for more customers and products. We have also relocated 9 stores to new addresses with higher traffic. On top of this, in the last -- or in the past 3 years, we have also been able to open 6 new stores in white spot areas. This store network transformation has only been possible due to our best-in-class agile lease terms. All our stores are rental spaces with an average exit term below 6 months. Historically, we have been able to exit the leases at a cost below the upfront deposits. And what does that mean? That means actually that we can exit a store without having a cost, and therefore, it allows us to do as we please. These facts actually also allows us to have a very agile and dynamic, you could say, aggressive store fleet strategy to continuously adapt the store network to get fewer, bigger, better stores and, of course, also push the rent cost down. This also means that there will be no 5-year store number target that we are working towards, and that's because, as mentioned before, that the store network needs to adapt the (sic) [ to ] consumers' needs and behaviors. The final part of our digital store renewal program is our connecting the stores. And this is probably the most exciting of today's presentation. In the Renewing Matas strategy, we launched a conventional store upgrade program, which gave good learnings that we can achieve same customer satisfaction with a less CapEx-intensive store refresh program. We are now building upon this learning to refresh more stores by upgrading the look and feel and adding a lot of digital store features, such an in-store app mode for the Club Matas mode, easier or convenient payment and much more. Our connected store is a conventional Matas store but with a layer of multiple digital services. Our endless -- or a connected store have endless aisles with the full matas.dk assortment that the staff can offer. Currently, it will give us a SKU uplift from 11,000 articles to 50,000 articles. At the end of this strategy period, it will actually increase to 150,000 articles. matas.dk currently provides traffic to the stores as customers come to pick up their online orders. We can upsell to more than 25% of the currently 1.1 million customers that come to pick up their orders. As matas.dk continue to grow, this number will only goes up. We have also live event in the stores through Facebook with 50% conversion rate and best -- and a super strong aftersale in the period after. It is now possible for customers to get access from anywhere to their beauty advisers to solve their problems. Ease of payment is, as mentioned before, also a part of the connected store in order to release staff time spent on transactions. It is also possible that customers can book a one-to-one shopping session with a specialized adviser in the stores. Product subscribers have a 25% higher spend and buy products at a 20% higher frequency and, therefore, has a high value to the Matas Group. We are able to recruit these products -- these customers directly in-store while they are doing their regular product purchases. Through Click & Reserve, we can both make low-cost fulfillment from store but also increase store traffic. As you can see, we have the model in place for connecting the stores. Now it's basically just about rolling it out across the network. As an example on the potential, we have the endless aisle. And if we lift up all stores to the level of the 10th best store in terms of endless aisle, we will have a revenue uplift on DKK 80 million to DKK 100 million. This example is actually before the assortment expansion, which provide an even higher long-term potential. If we combine just these 3 examples, it will allow us to have an uplift in revenue above DKK 200 million. To sum up or to wrap up the presentation, I want to conclude this. We do see -- or we do foresee some physical retail market pressure that limits store traffic, but we expect to mitigate this through our digital store renewal program, focusing on, one, operate the store even better than we do today. We still have much to do here. Two, continuously adapting the store network to match consumers' needs and behaviors by leveraging our best-in-class agile lease terms. Three, rolling out the connected store model across the entire network. Thank you.

Gregers Wedell-Wedellsborg

executive
#7

Thank you, Christian, for that presentation. I want to make clear that we believe in stores. We think stores are going to be part of the future. We will continue to invest in refreshing our stores. But I want to highlight the fact that our store network is so flexible. That is a massive advantage that ultimately the customer will decide how many stores we have in Denmark. And we can get in and get out very cheaply and very quickly. But also to highlight that a store is no longer a store of the past. The way we operate stores, the services we offer in the stores, that is a massively new experience. And it is not only a new experience, it is an experience that allows us to have a digital footprint that is even larger than just the physical footprint of the stores. And talking about footprint and talking about what we offer in the stores, now it's time to move to our next team member. And in a moment, I will introduce to you Michael Shin, who is a recent addition to the team. He is the first full-fledged international member of the team, and his job is really to build what we call the third leg of our strategy, namely to widen the portfolio of what we call house brands, brands that are particular to Matas, to support our differentiation and to improve our margin. And then his job is also to open the door to the world and initiate international sales of some of our own brands. And with that, I will hand over to you, Michael.

Michael Shin

executive
#8

Thank you, Gregers. Hi, everybody. My name is Michael Shin, and I joined Matas in April of this year. I have more than 30 years of experience working in the beauty market -- beauty industry, working for companies such as L'Oréal, Elizabeth Arden and the Icelandic biotech company, BIOEFFECT. And it's my pleasure today to tell you more about our plans on building a portfolio of Scandinavian beauty brands. Now brands, as you know, has been an integral part to the Matas business. And over the years, we've been very successful in commercializing both health and beauty brands. But today, we want to go one step further by becoming a stronger brand owner and thereby increasing our share of own branded sales. Now this means that, ultimately, we will be able to improve our margins, and we will be able to find new avenues of growth when it comes to net sales both in Denmark and in international markets. Now this is not a new model. We've seen other retailers go down this route, such as Boots with the No. 7 brand or Sephora, who have their brand incubator, Kendo. Also online, we have retailers such as the Hub Group that are both commercial platforms and are owning their own brands. Now the objective of the brand ownership strategy is to improve our differentiation because we will be able to control where our brands are being sold and how they are being positioned. And this will help us differentiate ourselves against competition. And secondly, it will give us an option to also expand the portfolio international and add incremental growth to our Danish business. Now we've developed a 3-step strategy in order to execute this vision which I will take you through. In step 1, we want to upgrade our brand-building competencies. Then, we want to expand our portfolio of house brands and partnerships. And step 3, we want to test the appeal of our Scandinavian beauty brands in international markets. I'd like to go into each one of those steps in a little bit more detail. First of all, step 1. Now when it comes to developing and launching new beauty brands, today it has become much easier and much -- financially much less riskier than years ago. Previously, what you would do typically is to develop your brands and then you would have to put quite a bit of money up front to invest in TV and print to build awareness, image and pull for the brand to be commercially successful. Once that model has been proven, we would then roll it out internationally. In today's digitalized world, that model has slightly changed. We're now able to launch frontly in a number of different geographies at the same time, and we are able to do so with less investment up front because we can use very targeted social media, online media, we can use PR and word of mouth. So the risk to develop our own brands has become more mitigated. A way to upgrade the brand-building competencies is also very important, and we've looked at our internal processes. And as you know, we are world class when it comes to launching brands. Where we see opportunities to grow is when it comes to product development and brand building. And here, we will be recruiting talent with an international mindset, we've done this before, both when it comes to product development, branding both from the digital point of view and also from a more classical point of view. And by having the full scope of the process in-house, we think that we can really gain major benefits in the value chain. Now to step 2 on how we will execute and how we'll go to market with our various brands. We will deploy these in 3 different groups, the first one being with the Matas brand. Now as you know, Matas enjoys more than 90% awareness in Denmark as a retailer. However, internationally, we will be positioning Matas as a beauty brand. This means changing our mindset from being an own-label producer to a branded owner. So what we will do, we'll have Matas as the mega brand, and then underneath we'll have Striberne, Plaisir and My Moments.. Group number 2 will be via our acquired brands or brands where we have an investment. So we acquired Nilens Jord, Denmark's largest makeup brand, some years ago. This has gone -- undergone some new branding for international markets, and we will be launching Njord in international markets in the coming months ahead. Secondly, our investment in MIILD. MIILD is a Danish sustainable, ecological, clean makeup brand founded by 2 makeup artists. We see great potential with this positioning, and we will be accelerating the sales of MIILD both domestically and in international markets. And because both of these are makeup brands, we see a lot of synergies in the back office when it comes to new product developments but also when executing in the market and in best practice sharing. And thirdly, our new brand incubator brand, GRÆNN . The purpose of GRÆNN is to feed the Matas house brands with new brands, and we're able to do so in 3 different routes, the first route being, for instance, creating brands from scratch. Secondly, what we'll be able to do is also have partnerships with fashion or lifestyle brands, brands that already have quite an awareness and who want to enter into the beauty field. And thirdly, we'll be able to make investments in existing or upcoming beauty brands in the Scandinavian region. So with these 3 routes, we are able to find brands and find products that are both in makeup, skincare and fragrance across the different price points. We prepared a small video of GRÆNN to show you a little bit more what our intention is, and I'm very happy to show that to you now. [Presentation]

Michael Shin

executive
#9

Now to step 3, to test the appeal of our Scandinavian beauty brands in international markets. Now we've seen that in other categories, such as furniture, design or food, that the Nordic region has had a major impact in global markets. And we think that now is the turn for beauty. We think that Nordic beauty brands will have major appetites in international markets, and that is because the values that we represent are so relevant in today's world, values such as inclusiveness, sustainability, [ pink ] formulas and responsibility. We think that these values fit perfectly alongside existing brands coming from France, American beauty brands or Asian beauty brands. So we do believe that there's a major appeal or major appetite for Scandinavian beauty brands, and we will be testing this in months ahead. I hope that this presentation has given you a good first overview of our strategy of building a portfolio of Scandinavian beauty brands. And I hand over back to Gregers. Thank you.

Gregers Wedell-Wedellsborg

executive
#10

Thank you, Michael, and welcome to the team. Two things I want to take away from this. Building a bigger portfolio of house brands is a good thing for the Matas business that you already know. It will provide differentiation in our stores and online. It will add margin to our business. So on that alone, this is a sound and good initiative. But it is also our license to play outside of Denmark, and I consider this a first step to meeting demand and requests that we have heard over the years at a time where Nordic values are in vogue. But historically, we haven't had the competence or the people to respond to that demand. So now we will take a first step outside of Denmark with this initiative. So all of these ideas and all of these initiatives to support the growth, we need a backbone that is different from the one we have now. So our next speaker, Brian Poulsen, I'm going to introduce in a slightly different way by taking you on a short road trip. And right after that, Brian will take over and go through the facts. [Presentation]

Brian Gøbel Poulsen

executive
#11

Thank you. My name is Brian. I'm the overall responsible for the supply chain in Matas. I must say I have really looked forward to this because the reason why I'm here is to introduce you to a very exciting project, the new Matas Logistics Center. And in my presentation, I will try to reveal some of the backgrounds and some of the details about the project. As you already have heard, Matas have a strong growth strategy for the coming years. And a lot of the elements in that strategy requires a lot from the logistics. So we need a step change in logistic to support the future strategy. We need a higher -- a larger assortment, we need faster delivery, we need a scalable capacity and we need also, of course, the lowest cost. So in my presentation, I will have 3 main topics. One, I will go through the current warehouse structure and also give you some insights on why we have to invest in logistics in Matas. Two, I will take you through some of the details in the project about the new Matas Logistics Center, and I will also reveal some of the future performance in the logistics center. And finally, I will talk about the CapEx investment and, of course, also some of the benefits. All right, let's start by looking at the current warehouse structure. We are currently operating 7 warehouses in Matas in Denmark. They're mainly located in Allerød, fairly close to our headquarter. We have a quite lean setup, but it is a very manual setup, and we work with a very low degree of automation. So in order to support the future strategy -- and when we look into the future, we see 2 things very clear. One, this warehouse structure is not scalable up to the extent that we need in the future growth strategy. And two, we will never get the operating cost down to the world-class level that we need. So the conclusion is quite clear. We need to consolidate our warehouses, and we need a higher -- a much higher degree of automation in order to drive the costs down. So therefore, we have decided to initiate the project, the new Matas Logistics Center. It's a well -- state-of-the-art warehouse. And we expect it to be located in Lynge, very near to our headquarter. And we expect -- by 2025, we expect to have consolidated 4 of our existing warehouses on this location. We expect the building to be about 25,000 square meters. And it will be designed for automation, and it will be designed in a way that we can -- so we can expand it if that's necessary in the future. If we take a look at the inside of the warehouse, we will design it in a way that it's channel independent, and that means that the capacity is fully flexible between online web orders and physical store orders. So we are not depending on a certain share of volume on one channel. It's fully flexible. We will have a strong focus on the sustainability when we build the building and also in the operation afterwards. It's -- we will work with a high degree of automation. We will have machine for picking. We will have machines for packing. And we will also have a high-performing and well-proven shuttle system in our warehouse. We will also have an advanced box storage system. And when we look at the products that we have in Matas, it fits perfectly into a box storage system. So that's, of course, why we chose it. So all right, let's look into some details about the future performance, and let's start by the storage capacity. If we look a few years back, we had the maximum capacity of about 20,000 products in our warehouse. And if we look at '22, '23, we expect the maximum capacity to be around 70,000 products in our warehouses. And this is a very big increase, and it is quite impressive in a few years. However, it's not enough. We need a step change in order to support the future strategy. So we have designed the Matas Logistics Center to be able to have no less than 150,000 products. And furthermore, it will be possible to scale it up to 500,000 [Audio Gap] And with the increasing share of web orders, of course this will have a very important effect on the future margins. All right. Finally, let's have a look at the CapEx investments and some of the benefits. The Matas Logistics Center requires a quite significant investment on about DKK 500 million, and the investment is for the acquisitions of land, building and machines. And of course, it's a very big investment, but the benefits are also very significant. We expect 1.0 to 1.5 EBITDA margin improvement effect from the new Matas Logistics Center, and that, of course, is mainly coming from reductions in the staff cost for web orders. And that will have a huge effect on our margins in the future. If we look at the capacity, and this Matas logistics center will enable us to fulfill our strategy. And we will be able to, as I mentioned, to have more than 150,000 products in the warehouse, and we will be able to ship out more than 100,000 orders per day. We will have the possibility to have a very strong focus on speed to customers, and we will also make sure that we run a very sustainable operation. All right, I hope this presentation have shown how the Matas Logistics Center provides a really step change for logistics and also how the Matas Logistics Center will be a key fueling element in the future strategy or for the future strategy in Matas. Thank you.

Gregers Wedell-Wedellsborg

executive
#12

Thank you, Brian. It's a big job you're taking on here. And my takeaway here is that we are building a big house. We are building a house that is capable of supporting the growth ambitions that we have set forth in supporting the expansion of our range, supporting our ambition to be super fast on delivery and supporting our ambition to be an efficient operator and modern operator. We use proven technology, so we're not treading into completely uncharted territory here. But this is what it takes to bring Matas into the next generation from an operational point of view. And now my good colleague, Anders, has joined me. And Anders, who probably needs no introduction as CFO of the company for many years, will take you through the financial ambitions.

Anders Skole-Sorensen

executive
#13

Thank you, Gregers, and thank you to the rest of the management team for the very interesting presentations. Let me begin this section, which focuses on the financial ambitions of our new strategy by making it clear to you that we believe that the Growing the Matas Group strategy that you've just been presented with, combined with our strong omnichannel business model, will position Matas really well for long-term and profitable growth. As Gregers has already revealed, we are working towards 2 key financial targets by '25/'26: a revenue of at least DKK 5 billion and a solid EBITDA margin of between 17% and 18%. And to reach these targets, we expect CapEx over the strategy period, so that's including this financial year and the years up to and including '25/'26, we expect that to be realized in the range of DKK 1 billion to DKK 1.3 billion, with the establishment of the Matas Logistics Center that you just heard about being the biggest single investment, of course. In the coming few minutes, I will try to add a little more color to this financial guidance. On the revenue side, our growth ambition is to reach, as I said, at least DKK 5 billion by 2025/'26. Growth will primarily be driven by our online channels. And we expect our flagship, that is matas.dk, to be the main contributor in helping to double online sales. As you can see, we expect our physical stores to lose sales over the strategy period in part due to store consolidation. I can, however, reassure you that Christian will do his level best to prove us wrong on especially this one. We also expect Firtal to continue on their present growth journey, albeit at a more moderate pace. Finally, we are looking to expand our sales in the new acquisition, Web Sundhed. I would like to point out to you that this revenue growth target is purely organic and is expected to be delivered without significant international sales. We are confident in this organic and, indeed, domestic revenue target. We expect to make good use of what we believe will be continued growth above GDP in the health and beauty market while we, at the same time, will see a situation where there's a lot of headroom for Matas to increase our market share in multiple categories as we are well positioned to benefit from a continued online shift in demand. With regards to our earnings ambitions, well, we are -- we think we will reach our revenue target while maintaining a solid EBITDA margin of between 17% and 18% by '25, '26. As shown here, the growth in earnings will be driven by a number of factors. Growing top line will naturally create earnings as the underlying business remains both healthy, robust and profitable. Significant positive impact will come, as Brian talked about just a few minutes ago, from the establishment of our new Matas Logistics Center, which, on a stand-alone basis, is expected to add more than 1% to the EBITDA margin. And in addition, we also see further scale advantages from matas.dk as the business grows. Finally, we expect earnings to go up due to an increase in the role our house brands play in the business overall and over the strategy period. As you can see, we expect all of these positive drivers to leave a substantial headroom, some of which we expect to use to respond to the increased competition we are seeing and also to fuel further growth. The end will be a Matas in '25, '26 which has a turnover well above today, but maintains a strong profitability, as I said, with 17% to 18% of EBITDA margin. Now naturally, there's risks. And there are risks when you go forward, and there are risks in any kind of plan and any kind of ambition. In the coming years, we foresee 3 major risk areas. But at the same time, we believe that we will be able to limit the damage they may cause due to our underlying strong business model and the decisive mitigating actions that we will be able to implement. An obvious risk is increased competition from multiple angles, but of course, foremost from online competitors and increased competition, which could pressure the price perception of Matas and the margins. This is a risk that we believe is likely to manifest itself at least to some degree. But based on our historical experience, we are convinced that our strong omnichannel and brand owner business model will protect us and limit the damages. However, let me remind you that we have explicitly taken this risk into account in our financial ambitions. Naturally, Matas does not operate on a desert island. And thus, we are also subject to potential macroeconomic setbacks. Any such setbacks will, of course, affect the entire industry. And based on what we've seen over previous cycles, we remain firm in our belief that the health and beauty market will in itself show strong resilience to such economic cycles. And in addition, Matas, in particular, will be protected by our broad assortment, which ensures that Matas stays relevant for the customers, in both up and downturns. And we've seen this demonstrated time and time again. Finally, we are fully aware that in the medium term we are increasing our operational risk by establishing the new Matas Logistics Center. This is -- Gregers mentioned it already, it's a very big and very important investment for Matas. And as such, it's good, it will drive efficiency gains and scale advantages. However, as is always the case, such projects entail risks, but we would like to point out -- just again point out that Matas will be implementing proven and tested technologies. We are not going to be moving on the cutting edge. And we will also make sure to monitor the process very closely. And we will not, not, I say, transition to the new warehouse before we are sure that everything works as planned. Given the significant investments that we're just talking about and the journey that we have to embark on, it's only natural to ask the question, how is the financing going to look like? Well, we expect Matas' underlying operations to continue producing strong cash flows throughout the period, driven by our stable and strong earnings. CapEx, obviously, will be high in the first part of the strategy period due to the building of the new Matas Logistics Center, but will decline significantly towards '25, '26 and reach a level -- a more stable level of between 3% and 4% of sales. Now working capital is expected to remain fairly stable, seen as a percentage of sales, throughout the strategy period. And this is in spite of the range expansion that we've been talking about. The burden on working capital is expected to be limited because the range expansion will be online only, while stock levels at our more than 260 stores are expected to be lower as store consolidation progresses. Finally, let me leave you with some thoughts on our capital allocation towards '25, '26. Firstly, we will make sure that Matas remains financially sound by keeping our debt level in check and maintain a gearing level of between 2 and 3. That is not to say that the gearing level cannot exceed 3 for shorter periods of time, but the target remains a gearing of between 2 and 3. We will, of course, as we've talked about, invest heavily in the business to enable our medium and long-term growth. And as mentioned, we will be spending between DKK 1 billion and DKK 1.3 billion of CapEx in the period, driven in part by the Matas Logistics Center, but also by the continued digitalization of both our on- and off-line activities. We will -- I think Gregers already mentioned this -- we will continue to maintain and refresh our stores, but more CapEx-intensive concept upgrades will only really be relevant when we are consolidating stores, when we are expanding stores significantly or when we are opening brand-new stores. Finally, we will distribute at least 20% of adjusted net profit after tax annually, subject, of course, to maintaining our gearing target and any perceived near-term risks. With these words, I will hand you back to Gregers for some concluding remarks.

Gregers Wedell-Wedellsborg

executive
#14

Thank you, Anders. The key takeaway, of course, is that we can finance our growth ambitions on our own and that we have a solid business throughout the strategy journey. And that is a very, very good point of departure for a new strategy. So closing remarks. What is our strategy? It is a profitable growth strategy where we aim to remain and even build our #1 position in the market vis-à-vis the customers. We aim to offer the broadest assortment and the most attractive assortment both off-line and online. We aim to be #1 in the online space and build on that impressive journey that we've been on for the last few years. We aim to refresh our stores and connect them even more to our digital business. We aim to integrate more vertically and build a bigger portfolio of house brands that nobody else can carry. And we are going to take a generational step change in our logistics to support all of this. The phasing of that, on the commercial part, you have already heard Lise say that we will waste no time in getting started. So actually, in the coming weeks, you will see the first couple of initiatives taken to market. And then gradually, over the next few years, you will see an expansion of our assortment, particularly in the health area. And then ultimately, an option and a possibility to enter new categories, not all over the place, but related to the Matas brand and the Matas customer base. On e-commerce, it is going to be a continuous journey of growing the platforms we have and really marketing the new assortment and making the customers aware that it's that now they can use Matas for even more. Our stores, where the agenda will be to connect and consolidate the store network and, in particular, broadening out those digital best practices. For our brands, we will start out by building our brand portfolio and increasing the level of competence to be a good brand owner. And then we will try out our initiative to open the door to the world. And if demand is out there, we will be ready to scale to meet that demand. And then finally, on logistics. We will -- we have a logistics setup that is capable to carry us through the next couple of years while we build the Matas Logistics Center. So it's limited risk operation. We don't foresee any disruptions to our existing business, and we have capacity to grow for the coming years. So we are not under significant time pressure. But of course, the main thing here is the building and the opening of the Matas Logistics Center. So what does this sum up to as an investment case? What do you get if you invest in Matas? Well, you buy into a case where the digitalization of health and beauty will drive profitable growth and the fact that we have a very strong foundation already. So really, our story is to leverage our historical strength, which has actually become even stronger over the last few years, to drive profitable digital growth. We address a market that is in its nature around DKK 13 billion. That is without prescription, which we're not allowed to sell, are growing above GDP in a noncyclical market, with low pressure on commoditization and with an underlying growth, in particular, in health that we think will be strong. We come from a position as the absolute market leader, and I will not go through those numbers once again, but just highlight that we are now well positioned to benefit from an online shift. And it's a position that we don't only have in our own health and beauty market, but also overall as one of -- or the second most used webshop across all categories in Denmark. We have a strong financial position. We can finance our growth on ourselves. And we see positive scale effects of our initiatives going forward and a good headroom for addressing eventual competitors and launching new initiatives. And then I hope that with this presentation you also get the impression that we have a leadership team with a very proven track record at Matas or outside of Matas who will be able to drive this journey to its conclusion. So the opportunity here is to grow towards DKK 5 billion in revenues by expanding the range, winning market share in selected categories and becoming the preferred nonprescription health destination. We believe we can maintain profitability around 7% to 18% due to online scale effects, gradual store consolidation and the effect of connecting the stores, vertical integration that is becoming more of a brand owner, automating our logistics and continuing the track record that we have of being disciplined about always running cost-improvement projects. The ticket size for this is a CapEx investment of DKK 1 billion to DKK 1.3 billion in the coming years, which is basically the same run rate investment for the business that we have had and then adding on top the DKK 500 million investment in the Matas Logistics Center. We -- as Anders mentioned, we have a capital allocation policy to distribute more than 20% of adjusted net profit after tax to shareholders. And what is not in the financial ambition is the options beyond '25 to expand further into more categories to see a real breakthrough of our international export initiative or even a major bolt-on or adjacency M&A that is not part of the long-term target that we have given. And then maybe finally, as Matas becomes more health-oriented, we believe that we can gain access to more male target groups. Matas, as it is today, is not particularly relevant to male, but -- to men, but this is an option for the long term if we succeed on this journey and when we succeed on this journey. So with that, we conclude our presentation from myself, Anders and the rest of the management team. And we are now happy to take any questions. Anders and I will be answering as best we can.

Operator

operator
#15

[Operator Instructions] We have a question from the line of Magnus Jensen from SEB.

Magnus Jensen

analyst
#16

Sorry about that. I have a number of questions that I would like to ask. And by the way, thank you for very thorough and interesting presentation. My first question is to Anders on sort of on the margin. I understand that you're targeting 17% to 18% in '26, '20 -- sorry, '25, '26. But what's the journey towards that? What should we expect in between? You don't have to guide for each and every year, of course. But is it going to be slightly going down from where we are today? Or what kind of development should we expect?

Gregers Wedell-Wedellsborg

executive
#17

Yes, Magnus, we probably guessed that either you or someone else would ask that question. So I think the long-term ambition here, as you have seen, is composed of a lot of initiatives that improved margin and then headroom to fight off competition, to invest in growth, to invest in entering new categories. So we don't give a year-by-year guidance. We have decided to stay with our current practice of guiding every year because the margin will reflect the number and scale of new initiatives. It will reflect the intensity of the competition, market needs, economic cycles. So we think we know our business model well. We know the effect of our initiatives. And we believe that it's a super solid plan that is capable, with the proof that we have given you and we have seen ourselves over the last few years that the omnichannel model can be -- can deliver real strong profitability. We believe that this is an achievable and realistic goal. But as to the final details of the journey of getting there, I'm afraid that we can't help.

Magnus Jensen

analyst
#18

Next question to your -- it's a significant expansion of a number of products, clearly. Is there a risk of having too many products on your website? I mean, basically, confusing the end consumer with too much of a choice. Got any thoughts about this?

Gregers Wedell-Wedellsborg

executive
#19

Yes, that's a very good point. And you should not expect us to do like let's get to 150 (sic) [ 150,000 ] as fast as possible. You should expect us to do what we have indicated today, namely to do drops of new assortment that we make sure to really market. Because this is as much an assortment game as it is a marketing game. And I think that's where you really have to take into account that Matas has this position of reaching 1.8 million unique people every month with the media bandwidth that we have. So this is assortment plus marketing, and we will make sure that when we introduce new assortment, when we have to educate the customer that now she can use Matas for something new, it's really also a marketing game. And that's why you will not see us just chasing the 150,000 target blindly. You will see us introduce new categories, building awareness, building the interest, seeing the performance, culling what doesn't work, adding and expanding on what does work. And that is very much in line with how we have been working over the last few years as well.

Magnus Jensen

analyst
#20

Okay. And then a question to some of your online business. Matas is going to be clearly the most important driver, Firtal also benefiting and [indiscernible] Do you include other sort of online outlets in your guidance? So Firtal could add other sites? Or how about that?

Gregers Wedell-Wedellsborg

executive
#21

So we have successfully bolted on a couple of minor acquisitions to Firtal. That is still in our strategy to do M&A that will accelerate our journey and get it in the right direction. As for our DKK 5 billion guidance, it doesn't require significant scale M&A, but we might see smaller opportunities that will help us win a year or 2 in executing parts of the strategy, and we're open to doing that. And having seen the success of Firtal and our ability to bolt on to Firtal, having seen what we can do with brands like Nilens Jord, I think we know what we should do and not do to accelerate.

Magnus Jensen

analyst
#22

And then just one final question before I jump back in the queue. Michael talked about launching products outside Denmark, which obviously sounds very interesting. But what [ goals ] have you done in terms of how to distribute your products outside Denmark?

Gregers Wedell-Wedellsborg

executive
#23

Yes. So this is early days, and we're really setting ourselves up to respond to a demand that we have had over the years. We've had requests, I think, for as long as Matas has existed.

Anders Skole-Sorensen

executive
#24

Very long.

Gregers Wedell-Wedellsborg

executive
#25

There's been people saying, "Oh, you're doing something in Denmark, something in the Nordics, that's interesting." And we've only seen those trends of sustainability, of pure beauty, of Scandinavian aesthetic, Nordic values. We've only seen that demand increase. And at some point, the noise becomes so interesting that you think we should set ourselves up to try this out. So now we are making a serious commitment in terms of getting the right people on board, getting the competencies. It's not a huge financial commitment. And even if we don't succeed outside of Denmark, it will benefit our local business. As for distribution, we're quite open. We think that digital is going to be the main way to get our products out, but we have had interest from conventional retailers as well. So we don't have a set preference. We will follow demand and follow through on demand.

Magnus Jensen

analyst
#26

Okay. And I think I heard you say that the international sales is not really part of your plus DKK 5 billion...

Gregers Wedell-Wedellsborg

executive
#27

And that's important, you don't have to believe in our -- obviously, we believe that we can make headway internationally otherwise we wouldn't have done what we're doing, but you don't have to believe in the international part of this equity story today to believe in the DKK 5 billion. That's a Danish story.

Operator

operator
#28

[Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from the line of Poul Jessen from Danske Bank.

Poul Jessen

analyst
#29

Yes. I would like to start by the EBITDA margin. You guide 7.5% -- 17.5% to 18.5% for this year and then 17% to 18% long term. That means a contraction of 0.5%. At the same time, you indicate the benefits of 1% to 1.5% on the new warehouse. That means total additional cost of 1.5% to 2% if we exclude these 2. Can you say something -- is where they are going, is that the headroom you're having? Is it lower gross margin? Is it marketing? Where should we -- which kind of line should we look at to add those costs?

Gregers Wedell-Wedellsborg

executive
#30

Yes. We have bundled it under the heading headroom for competitive response, which could be gross margin effective, but also our headroom to do growth investments. So if we enter a new category, we have to build their awareness for Matas now offering new categories. Then obviously, we would have to support that in the beginning with the promotions, with the marketing effort and in the ramp-up phase, accept lower earnings on building those new categories. Still, we have the advantage that we don't have to spend what is usually the biggest cost in doing those things, namely acquiring the customers, because we already have the customers. So it is really a combination, Poul, and we bundle it together to say, okay, we don't know exactly how the next 5 years are going to play out. There might be areas where we should really spend money on fighting new competitors and making sure to adapt the business, but also with headroom to enter new growth areas. And you can say that, as you point out, the initiatives that we have, they all point in the right direction, leaving headroom to address the world that's coming and our own ambitions.

Poul Jessen

analyst
#31

So it's not because that the new product categories would have lower margin, it's more so have the headroom to follow competition down on prices?

Anders Skole-Sorensen

executive
#32

There might be some of them. There might be some of them that have slightly lower gross margins. But as Gregers pointed out, it is a mixture of a lot of things. Some of it will be things that we do. Some of it will be based on what the market develops. So yes, we are -- we're doing a lot of good things, and we are creating the headroom, but we're just not -- I mean I think we'd be -- to be honest, it'd be fairly naive to think that we wouldn't need to spend some of that headroom with regards to the sort of the competitive pressure that we're seeing going forward. And also, frankly, we are still moving ahead with moving a part of the turnover from the physical stores to online. And that, of course, also has some -- entails some risks on the gross margin side.

Poul Jessen

analyst
#33

And on the capital side, DKK 1 billion to DKK 1.3 billion, if I subtract the DKK 500 million for the warehouse, then it's DKK 500 million to DKK 800 million. Over 5 years, that's DKK 100 million to DKK 160 million a year. And I think in the past, when it was more normalized, we were below DKK 100 million every year. So this increase to move above DKK 100 million, is that the upgrade of the stores? Is it IT investments or -- and is this the level we should look for on the really long term?

Anders Skole-Sorensen

executive
#34

First of all, I think what you should really look for is the 3% to 4% of sales that we're talking about as being the long term sort of where we see investment. And frankly, Poul, I don't know how the world is going to look in 5 years, neither do you, neither does anybody. So there's the risk in this. But there's no doubt that you are seeing and what you've been seeing over the last years is that we have been moving to a world where we do spend more CapEx on the digital side of things. And I think I've talked to you about this before. The generations for IT systems is actually moving. They're becoming shorter, not necessarily something I love as a CFO, but it's the real world. So we are also seeing that we have to spend somewhat more on IT. Yes, as I think we mentioned on several occasions, we will be working with our stores, but we will not be going through this big constant upgrade. We will do it in a more intelligent way and making sure that the stores stay relevant. So it's not -- we're not trying to hide some kind of big upgrades in the stores portion of investments here -- or CapEx, sorry.

Poul Jessen

analyst
#35

Okay. And the other side of the calculation is depreciation is just to move below your EBITDA. How should we look at those going forward? I'm thinking should we look for depreciation on the new warehouse when it's fully completed and up and running? And when would that be?

Anders Skole-Sorensen

executive
#36

Well, yes, that's a good question, of course. We don't have a specific date as of yet. I think we just talked about we are damn sure it's going to be up and running by Black Friday in 2024, hopefully before that. But obviously, there will be an increase in the depreciations as we go along. We have not yet specified exactly how we're going to depreciate. Well, I can tell you, we're not going to depreciate the land. We never do that. We're probably going to depreciate the physical buildings over a fairly long period. But as to the machinery and so forth and so on, we haven't actually discussed that yet. I mean we're still in a fairly early phase. But this, of course, is going to be increased depreciation, that goes without saying.

Poul Jessen

analyst
#37

Okay. And my final question is on the high-end beauty market. You've had a long -- high market share for a very long time. You now disclose its 55% to 65%. If we exclude the hair care in both that and in the mass beauty, shouldn't we just expect that you grow with the market in those categories because it would be tough to increase shares there?

Gregers Wedell-Wedellsborg

executive
#38

Yes. That's probably guiding on too many specifics because there are so many moving parts. And there is also a dynamic that we haven't talked about, but we're seeing a premiumization of the mass beauty area. And we're seeing more selectivity in the mass beauty area as well. So I think to guide specifically on the different categories would be outdated soon because there's so much dynamic going on in that area.

Anders Skole-Sorensen

executive
#39

And I also think that -- I mean, one of the things that we're trying to demonstrate here is that, yes, if you look at selective high end on a general scale, yes, of course, we're not going to go to 85% market share. That's not going to happen, we're not unrealistic. But there are pockets within that area. I mean a very good example of that is professional hair care. We are nowhere in professional hair care. And we should be a big player in professional hair care. So there, there's absolutely a lot of room for us to expand our market position. That doesn't mean that we're going to expand our market position across the board or we're going to sell a heck of a lot more -- relatively more perfumes. But there are pockets out there. There are areas where we actually have not been anywhere close to a market share that reflects the overall market share of the business. So the picture is just a little more, I should say, complicated or differentiated than that.

Poul Jessen

analyst
#40

And the final question on the high-end beauty. You can now -- in the past, you had to have a store to be in high-end beauty. You needed to have a hairdresser service to be in the high-end hair care. Now you can do it with an online consultancy in the hair care. Is it moving in a way that in a few years we should see that hypermarkets and others could go into the high end by launching an online service within their online stores and thereby be able to sell the high-end beauty brands directly? Or do you still believe that, that is no-go so far?

Gregers Wedell-Wedellsborg

executive
#41

It would be a quite significant departure from how the high-end brands have operated for many years. What we are seeing right now is that they're becoming very clear about selectivity online. Whereas they've been super clear about what you need to do in the store, they've been more like something is going on in the digital space. Now they know that their ability to build their brands, protect their premiums is just completely linked to where they're distributed online. So what we're seeing is actually kind of a tightening of requirements and restrictions to be able to carry the high-end brands. And we're also seeing the major brand owners becoming much more disciplined about gray market and parallel imports and being more sophisticated about that because they know that that's one of the greatest threats to their business.

Anders Skole-Sorensen

executive
#42

I think it's very, very important to understand that the profit -- I mean what we're seeing really is that they're becoming more professional about their digital distribution, which, as Gregers pointed out, it was a bit of a strange creature for them just a few years back. They've really moved a lot, and they've moved very quickly. So in that respect, I think that's an advantage for us because we are the professionals. We are the kind of people they want to work with. And the last thing Chanel would want was to [indiscernible] or whoever else to have a small part of their online store suddenly present themselves as being, "Oh, by the way, we're also high-end purveyors of Chanel products." That's simply not going to happen. They would hate that just as much as having their products physically displayed besides the washing powder in a [indiscernible] store.

Operator

operator
#43

And we have a follow-up question from Magnus Jensen from SEB.

Magnus Jensen

analyst
#44

Yes. I just have a couple of more questions. First, you say that you can sort of do around 70,000 deliveries a day in 2 years' time. What level are you at today in terms of web orders today?

Anders Skole-Sorensen

executive
#45

I mean the thing is that the web is interesting as far as on everyday basis we have loads of capacity. And we have absolutely no problems. We can even run big campaigns and have no problems. There's basically just a very few days a year around Black Friday and perhaps up to and including Christmas where you need to be able to expand your capacity quite significantly. And we're not going to go in here and say, "Oh, by the way, our hard cap at the moment is X, Y, or Z." That would be very commercially sensitive, and we're not going to do that. We will point out that we think we have put in enough investment in our existing setup in order to accommodate for the growth that we foresee over the next couple of years. And that's the important part for you to understand. Secondly, I think there's another small point that sort of hides here, and that is the fact that -- there's a lot of bad things to be said about this more -- how should I say this, more manual process. There is one advantage to it, however. It means that we have a lot more flexibility. So we don't have a hard cap, one of the issues that you're going to run into with a fully automated system. Now we're going to build one that's big enough so that we're not going to run into this. But you can run into the problems if you underestimate your growth rates, then you will suddenly run into hard caps on your capacity. And I know for a fact that Boozt is -- they were talking about this. So this is a real problem. And one of the things we do have is a lot of flexibility. But we have been expanding. I mean not to make [ a mess ] of it, we just expanded our warehouse up in Humlebæk by another 2,000 square meters in order to be sure that we are not suddenly going to be rushed into something because we don't have enough capacity.

Gregers Wedell-Wedellsborg

executive
#46

But we don't have a cap problem between what we do now and what we expect to be doing at MLC. And also last year, Black Friday is always the test bed for what we are saying right now, Anders and I. And I have to remind you that last year we had to do a Black Friday, where there was significant restrictions on store traffic. People had to wear masks, all these things. So we are well trained in those peak days. And as Anders says, it's -- the advantage of what we're doing now is it's super flexible.

Magnus Jensen

analyst
#47

Very clear. And then to Christian's presentation on the physical stores. He talked about sort of the connected stores performing much better than or better at least than the average store. How many of your stores have you sort of -- are connected stores today? And how many is able to become connected stores? I guess some maybe it wouldn't make too much sense. Could you give some flavor on this?

Gregers Wedell-Wedellsborg

executive
#48

Yes. So the slide that Christian talked to, you remember, it had a lot of digital features. And it's only quite a few stores where we have all of those features implemented to the full degree because, really, the last 3 years have been about experimentation. So what we do is we want to test something out, we take 20 stores. We say, let's try this. We see how it works, and then we roll out. So what you're seeing from Christian is really the sum of those experiments that have gone well that we think a store in the future will be able to serve the customer with. So there's, I'm afraid, no answer that you can use for modeling in for these purposes other than to say that we are damn sure that there is a potential in rolling out the connected store concept to all our stores.

Magnus Jensen

analyst
#49

Okay. Yes, it sounds like it's...

Gregers Wedell-Wedellsborg

executive
#50

Now this is really -- sorry, go ahead.

Magnus Jensen

analyst
#51

Yes. Just saying that it sounds like there is a really good potential in doing this.

Gregers Wedell-Wedellsborg

executive
#52

Yes.

Magnus Jensen

analyst
#53

And my final question in terms of -- you talked about doing your own brands. Is there -- how many are you thinking that you can handle? Or is there a limit to this? What kind of thoughts have you done in terms of increasing your share and number of home brands?

Gregers Wedell-Wedellsborg

executive
#54

Yes. You'll notice when you reread Michael's section, there are not a lot of numbers in there. And this has to do with the fact that we think we are going to have to do things differently from the way we have built brand historically. And it's even in the name that it used to be that as a retailer, you would have private label. So a product that has the same specs as someone else, just a bit cheaper and not branded. So we want to be a brand owner. And that's actually a different game because it requires that we become good marketeers, that we treat our own products as brands and not just as something to put on the shelf. And we -- there is going to be a journey here. We started that journey with the acquisition of Kosmolet. We have a lot of in-house brands already that we can ramp up and build awareness and turn into stronger brands. And then as Michael went through and with the initiative of [indiscernible] we also strive to do this in partnership with beauty entrepreneurs, with established brands who want to grow, with established brands who are already well rolled out in Denmark but would like a partnership to go outside of Denmark as well. So no numbers, but I hope a very clear direction that this is going to be a more significant part of our business in the future.

Operator

operator
#55

And the next question comes from the line of Claus Almer from Nordea.

Claus Almer

analyst
#56

I have a few questions and I'll take them one by one. So the first question goes to your DKK 5 billion revenue target. I guess that includes around a 4% average revenue growth assumption, which probably is above the underlying market growth. I hope I'm correct on that assumption as you -- do you agree?

Gregers Wedell-Wedellsborg

executive
#57

Math. So yes, I'm sure you can do your math.

Anders Skole-Sorensen

executive
#58

Trust your math.

Claus Almer

analyst
#59

Yes, yes. Okay. So if that's the case, and I understand that you're moving into new categories, et cetera, et cetera. But still, when you're taking market share, then someone is going to lose market share. Who do you think would be the ones losing market shares? And obviously, I'm not talking about specific names, but more types of competitors. That will be the first question.

Gregers Wedell-Wedellsborg

executive
#60

Yes. I think that's the wrong time and place to be answering that question. Because obviously, when we enter new categories, when we do new bids, the first ones to hear about it will be the consumers and not competitors. So we can't really point out and say these people are going to lose market share, these people are going to lose market share. As Lise mentioned, we think there is room in professional hair care immediately because we haven't had it on the shelves. And people, our customers, they're asking for it. We think there is room in nonprescription health, where we are well positioned to win a portion of that market. And then there might be other stuff that we can also go for.

Claus Almer

analyst
#61

Okay. So you showed we're thinking -- sorry if you had already mentioned this, but the way of thinking is that the market growth and the market share gain is mostly all about moving into new categories?

Gregers Wedell-Wedellsborg

executive
#62

I think it's fair to say that this plan is not based on Matas just winning market shares in our existing categories. This is a strategy of growing through a wider assortment, both in our existing core categories, but also in adjacent categories. So it's not just that we believe, despite more competition, we will be able to win market share in existing business -- in existing markets and submarkets.

Anders Skole-Sorensen

executive
#63

Just to be concrete here, I mean, we're talking about professional hair care. Obviously, we think we're going to steal some of the cheese from the hairdressers. That's clearly because we think we're more professional. And also, frankly, after having spent a lot of time -- long, long time with our suppliers, they've actually really come to the same realization that we are more efficient. So that's -- if you just want an example, that's an obvious example of somebody from whom we surely expect to steal market share. In a market that is, yes, it is selective. Yes, it's where we are already. But it is a submarket where we are not present. And I think, again, let me just come back to that and say there are lots of niches. There are lots of small submarkets where we are actually not represented in the right way and where we think there's lots of opportunities. And you can call that a category expansion if you want. But it's still within areas that are relative even to Matas. We are, as we usually joke about, we're not starting to sell bicycles.

Claus Almer

analyst
#64

Okay. That makes a lot of sense. So the second question goes to more broad-based online sales, it appears like health and beauty products have a lower price sensitivity than we see in many other industries. Have you looked into this? What's the key reasons? Is it the average basket size? If people want to buy it close by, not from an onliner, say, outside Denmark whose website is setup and so on?

Gregers Wedell-Wedellsborg

executive
#65

It's a combination of all those factors, including the fact that -- and we see this in food as well. This is something that's super close to the body. It's something that you want to be perfectly sure that whatever you're using that there is a trusted partner selling this to you. So even though you do price comparisons and you find that perfume or that skin care brand on a site you don't know, you'd have to be a pretty high-risk appetite to buy it elsewhere than someone you really trust. And then there are all these other issues that you mentioned, Claus. Advice is super important, exclusivity, newness. We have a very -- quite high turnover in what products are selling every year. And brands are really aware that when they launch the new ranges and series and sub-brands, they want to do it with professional partners, professional retailers. So there is a lot of protection against commoditization in this particular industry. And the same goes for health. Obviously, it's a trust game. And this is one thing that Matas has built over more than 70 years is the trust of the consumer.

Operator

operator
#66

And we have a follow-up question from Poul Jessen from Danske Bank.

Poul Jessen

analyst
#67

I have more overall question now that you have the new strategy, where it's clearly that you want to sell more to the existing customers. I was just wondering if you would or will not give any insight into the thoughts behind -- or I was just thinking you could have taken Firtal maybe more international, you could have set up the Matas online store should also be a .de or .se. Is it just because of focus and the easy fruit from your doorstep relatively seen that made you decide for this direction? Or -- yes, just to hear a little about the thoughts kind of not going that direction.

Gregers Wedell-Wedellsborg

executive
#68

Yes. So what you mentioned -- the examples that you mentioned, I would not consider that to say something is out of scope for Matas, we will never do that. But we think there's such an obvious opportunity right now to leverage what we have built over the last years and really open the easy door first, as you say, and really build on what we have instead of doing something that is more risky, more speculative. But you're quite right in pointing out that this is not the end of the future, Matas to do just what we've said today. We will continue to do what we've done over the last 3 years, have little experiments running of things that we're doing. And if we see them catching on, then maybe it's a headline in the next strategy or a future strategy update. So really, one takeaway from this day, the new Matas, the Matas that we built over the few years that got a boost from COVID, it is well positioned to grow sustainably. It has more business development opportunities and not speculative ones, but ones that are right in front of us.

Operator

operator
#69

And as there are no further questions, I'll hand it back to the speakers.

Gregers Wedell-Wedellsborg

executive
#70

Okay. Thank you all for joining for our Capital Markets Day. We have a simple strategy. It's a bold strategy. I hope that after this presentation you also leave with the impression that it's a very solid strategy, that we have concrete actions behind the strategy to grow towards DKK 5 billion in '25, '26. We're not going to waste a lot of time getting going. So in the next couple of weeks, you will see the first of our initiatives go to market. So please stay tuned, and we will see you at our next event. Thank you, operator. Thank you for today.

Operator

operator
#71

This concludes our conference call. Thank you all for attending. You may now disconnect your lines. .

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