Meko AB (publ) (MEKO) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

[Presentation] Enabling mobility. So hello, everyone, and welcome to MEKO's Capital Markets Day 2025. So glad to see you all here, traveling in the rain to a brand-new facility that we will talk much about today, but we are also going to talk about something else, and that is the first half of this year, how we see a slower market, a more challenging market and what we are doing to handle that. So my name is Anders Oxelström, and I'm your moderator today. So why don't we have a look at the agenda. So we are starting with welcoming our President and CEO, Pehr Oscarson. He's going to give a presentation about how we are navigating this market and the kind of investments that we are doing at the moment, including a status update on our initiative to create a stronger company, building a stronger MEKO, that initiative that we've been working for a couple of years. And an important part of that initiative is supplier optimization. Jessica Tjulander is our Wholesale Director. She is going to guide us through what we are doing in that area. And then we will turn to a new -- not a new area, but it's an area where we have new ambitions, commercial vehicles. And Nils Hollmann, he's our Director of Commercial Vehicles. He's going to share the plans and the targets that we have for this area. Turning then to Henrik Pettersson, Director of Exclusive Brands, another growth area for us, and he will also guide us through where we stand and where we want it to go. And then we will enter a Q&A session. And if we can get the next slide, if you want, you can scan this QR code, if you want to. Otherwise, we will pass the mic, of course, in this room. So you're more than welcome to ask questions that way. But if you want to ask questions along the way, you can do that whenever you want to, and we will address them when we enter the Q&A session. And then moving to part 2 of this day. No -- yes, after we have -- after we actually -- if we can go to the -- back to the previous slide, we can see that we are also going to talk about the EV transition. And we have our Managing Director, Geir Hoff, here from Norway, and he will share the latest insights of how things are going there and how this transformation is affecting us. And after that, we will have a more practical view actually on the EV transition, and we will go next door to a modern EV workshop where we will be educated how things are going when you repair an EV. So hopefully, that will be interesting. And then we will have a short break, and then we will enter this part of the day where Jessica will deep dive into exactly what it means when we say that we are leveling up our logistics capacity. More details about this. And after that, we will also look even closer to this market. Denmark is, as you may know, one of our most important markets. And we have our Managing Director, Michael , here to tell us more and also about what we are doing in this market situation that we are in. And then, of course, when we have gone through all these items, we'd like to see where this adds up. And our CFO, Christer Johansson, will enter the stage and give his insights as well. After that, a Q&A session with Christer, Johansson and also Oscar-san before we head out to a guided tour in this, I would say, very large building, but it's very interesting as well. So we have 2 guys that are very suitable for doing this. It's Michael and also Kim Storbank, our Chief Operating Officer here in Denmark, who probably could answer any questions you might have about the technology. And then we go head back here to get a brief summary and then the program ends. So quite a lot to dive into. And don't forget to ask questions along the way if you want to. So why don't we start by the first item and welcoming Pehr, our CEO. So how are you?

I'm fine.

So if we -- well, we're standing here. This is a brand-new build, and we're going to talk about the logistics capacity and so on. But looking at the first half of the year, slower growth, decreasing margins, a bit tougher situation. So what are your thoughts around that situation?

Yes. But if we look back in Q2 and as we commented on that quarter, it has been a slower start of the year. I would say that maybe the first start of January, February was more a comparison issue when we had an extremely strong cold winter the year before. But after that, we have seen a decline in the demand, and we see that more or less all over Europe. And it's the uncertainty in the economy who is driving that. So it's a bit cautious consumers, and we will back a little bit later on that. Then, of course, we also had maybe very strong focus on the big projects. This was one of them, but we also have automation in Norway and in Finland. So it has been quite a lot of focus on that also, which also has, in some cases, driving a little bit extra costs also. But we're not satisfied with the outcome of Q2. So we have -- and we will explain later today all the efforts we are doing to mitigate that situation. But one of the very important thing is, of course, the new cost saving program, which we also communicated.

Yes, yes. But this new situation then, is this do you think -- has it -- does it affect our strategy in any way or...?

Not at all. Because I mean very much our strategy is based on what we call building a stronger MEKO, which we introduced a couple of years ago. And that is about efficiency. It is about cost control and it is about organic growth. So that's exactly what we need to do and just more of in this situation.

Yes, more, and we will look closer to what we are doing more. But before that, maybe we should have a brief introduction to our company if you just could please.

Yes, happy to do that. I mean we have vision, which was mentioned here in the beginning also that we enable mobility, and we do that today, tomorrow and in the future. We want to be the most complete partner for everybody who service, repair and maintain vehicles and that regardless of technology and also doing that by offer logistics of the highest international standard. But looking into a little more details about the company, we are the market leader in the independent aftermarket in Northern Europe. We have some very strong brands, most people from Sweden here and of course, know the brand Mekonomen, which is very well-known brands even regardless in the industry. And -- but we also have here in Denmark, I would say, AutoMester and Car People is very known brands here in the market. We have a very wide network. And as you see, there's a lot of dots in this map. And those smaller dots, that is our branches, approximately 700 of them, they are the one who deliver the parts to the workshops every day, sometimes every hour. Workshop needs is very much, I would say, very often more than half of the purchase need in the workshop is daily. That is parts where that you order when the car is already up on the lift. So that's why we need this very extensive network of branches. Then we have the central warehouses in the bigger markets. That's where we have the product comes in from the suppliers and then are distributed to all these branches. We need that in each local market by 2 reasons because we want to have very, very fast deliveries to the branches. That means that order can be taken here until in the evening, delivering overnight, ready in the morning at the branch and already early in the beginning of the day, delivered to the workshop. And the other reason why we have the central warehouses is that we need specialized assortment for each market. It's not that we are selling bicycles in Finland and brake pads in Sweden, but there is a big difference in how the car park is populated and then I'm talking about brands of cars. For example, Volvo, very common in Sweden, not that common in other markets. So that also gives the differences in what kind of spare parts that is needed for each market. We have large part of the revenue is sales to the affiliated workshops, 4,500 who carries our brands. That is, I would say, kind of a franchise-like concept. Maybe the most advanced is Mekonomen in Sweden, where it's very branded workshops. They have our science. They do have our way of working. We provide them with training, with the diagnostics, but we also provide them with customers within marketing and digital bookings, fleet sales and a lot of other things. I will come back a little bit more on that. But that is where we have the closest relation with the car owner. And being a business-to-business company, we still have a mindset to be very close to the car owner and how they think because we want to make sure that we develop both the products and the concepts so they will be -- so we can meet the customer demands for the future. For example, we see the last 4 or 5 years, a very strong increase from the car owners that they want to book the service online. Then we help the workshops with that kind of system so they can adapt to that future need. The next slide is a little bit the same, but from another angle. And here, I more want to explain how we are reporting in our regular reports. So we have divided the business into 5 business areas, where Sweden and Norway is one business area, and that is actually the old Mekonomen and the old MECA in Sweden and Norway, which is that business area. We have combined Poland and the Baltics into one business area. Then we have Denmark, Finland being just country specific. And then the little bit exception is then Sørensen og Balchen, who is -- we are back in Norway, but they are their own business area due to that they have a little bit different business model. It's much more retail sales directly to end consumers from stores, and they have a little bit another assortment also and especially a huge EBIT margin. So it's important to that we can see that separately. And when we talk about the start of the year, of course, when we see this decline in demand, it's still good to remember that we have in this industry a proven solid demand over time. So if you look a little bit more than just into specific quarters and years, there is a very solid demand because there is a constant need of service and repairs. And this is based on how many cars are out on the streets and how many kilometers they are been driving. And here, we see no change. And even in this, let's say, uncertain times, there is still a lot of car and actually the car park is not declining, stable in some markets, but growing in other markets. And we, as a company, we can handle all vehicles and all technology. And we also are more or less everywhere and very, very close to the customers. And as I said, with these many branches, we can also deliver very, very quickly. Another way of looking into the business is if you look in the value chain, and I will not go through that very much in detail. But as I said, the car owners, private person or a company, that is the end customers, which we do very little direct business with, but indirectly through our concepts. It's the workshops who are main customers that is more or less 90% of the revenue is through workshops with a very strong branch, which I mentioned. Then we have the warehouses and the branches, which I explained before. But what's important here is to talk a little bit about sourcing in this industry. We -- most of our products are sourced from the same manufacturers, producers that also deliver to the car manufacturers. So it is the same factories, it's Bosch, it's Schaeffler, it's Brembo also doing the aftermarket and directly to the car manufacturers, which means that it's the same quality, it's the same product. It's different boxes. However, we also expand our ambitions within exclusive brands, and Henrik will talk more about that later, but that is still a small part, but we have large ambition into growing that. So that summarize the description of the company.

We take a step back and touch upon what we've talked about a couple of times already, the weak market looking at as we speak. If we take a step back maybe and see on the next slide, a couple of companies in Europe with presence in Europe. They're not exactly like us, but they are, well, in some ways similar. We see this is the first half of the year and whether you can say it's kind of a mixed organic growth development here. What is your thoughts when you see this picture?

Yes. But if we -- firstly, if you look at the European market, it is still very fragmented. It's not so many companies that are listed. These are the ones that are listed that we can look more closely into. But there's also a big difference in the car population in different countries and also the macro and so on. Just to taking outside example, it's a huge difference now. We have one -- a couple of colleagues who are both in Spain and France. And they say that Spain are doing all-time high and France super bad. So there is fluctuations in the market, mostly due to what I talked before with the uncertainty and the general economy. But we can see that there is a decline with many of our colleagues, but there's also some companies that are growing. And the 2 who sticks out here, it's our Polish colleagues into cars and auto partner who is doing very good. But it's not all domestic sales. They are also very, let's say, very active in export. So they sell the product all over Europe. And by that, actually taking market share from -- maybe from players like us. But that's also a reason why we -- which we'll come back to, are also expanding in our assortment when it comes to also more price value products.

Okay. So if I think about the market shares. So if we -- where we have talked about cautious consumers, and it might feel a bit fluffy, maybe, but we have -- if we go to the next slide, we can look a bit closer on what that could mean. So what we have done here is that we deep dive into 440 workshops in Sweden. And you know Sweden is an important market for us. So 440 workshops, they do approximately 50,000 service jobs per year. So it's a good kind of temperature meter on what is going on there. And you could say -- looking at the second quarter here, it's a lot of negative numbers. And it's -- well, to summarize, the car owners, they don't seem to consume as they did? Or what can we say?

Yes. The first block here is where we see how they postponed the vehicle service and that we can see how -- when it finally comes into workshop, how long time it has been since the service lamp actually was fighting. So we know that statistics. And that is, as you see, in May, it's 9% of the job which came from postponed services, but more than 5% the other month also. So that is one effect, which proves the fact that the is the cautious market. The other one is that when they do the service, but also including brakes jobs, then we -- it's even bigger numbers. in April was down 12%, almost 13%. And that is because we -- it's so much more repairs in terms of need to have than nice to have. Normally, when it's a good economy and you go to the workshop and they say that you need to change the brake on the right side. We propose that we take both sides now because the left side will be worn out in some time. Usually, a car owner careful about his car, say, yes, do it, so it will be good. Now they say, no. On the right side, I don't want to have what really needed for in this moment. So that's what we see in the second part there. And then there's also not that big numbers, but still there is a clear pattern that they also want us to replace with cheaper parts. Do you have anything cheaper because my car hasn't that high value as it is.

Okay. So do you think that this situation is here to stay? I mean, if we take a guess.

Take a guess. No, but I've been in this industry now for 30 years plus. And this -- exactly, this has happened before. It was [ 28, 29, ] the last time it was [ 22 ], and we saw the same pattern. And it usually is stabilized if it goes back to the level before stabilize and how fast that depends on the factors which we can't control. That's more of the world politics and so on.

Okay. So we just have to wait and see then. But what actions are we actually taking? How are we handling this situation?

Yes, we are accelerating the initiatives, building a stronger MEKO and which we started to talk about a couple of years ago. And that has actually -- we have achieved approximately SEK 200 million from those activities. Then we now added another cost-saving program pure costs, mostly FTEs of SEK 100 million, which we will -- which we're implementing now. And we will be back on some of this. But what's part -- where we still haven't got the benefits is from the warehouse projects, where we're still running double operations. But now during the autumn, we will close down the old premises. We will leave the premises, hand back the keys and the people working with the manual warehouses will also leave. So that is well in progress. Supplier optimization, it's kind of an ongoing, but Jessica will be back on that. And then we have the new cost saving programs where we have done the targeting, the planning and are in the implementing phase now. Full effect should be from 1st of January. So there is still some work to do, but we have also pretty much know exactly what to do when it comes to building a stronger MEKO. But it's also very important that we look at what can get the revenue to growth again. And I will step into some of the areas, which we also will be back on later. But one very important is our focus initiatives around exclusive brands. We have had premium exclusive brands before. But now with the change in market and more demand for more price value products, we are introducing a new brand Every part matters. It's actually not new. It has -- we have been -- we have had it in Poland for 5, 6 years. So it's developed in Poland, and now we introduce that into all the other markets also. And this is a broad range of spare parts with lower price point that attracts some new customer groups, which we can address by this. But Henrik will be back on that. But talking about low price competition, we also have our e-commerce, maybe not very well known that we are doing that, but we have a company Mekster since some years, established in Sweden, Norway, who do e-commerce directly to end consumers. Here is the let's say, the difference to what we have seen with the other business with stable or declining demand. Here, we have had an increased demand and have very good sales development in the last couple of months. So this site will now be launched in some new markets where we will start with Finland quite soon and then Denmark to follow. This is also a very CapEx-light expansion. It's more -- we just use what we already have from a new sales channel. And then, of course, the logistics, where we also will touch more upon today, and you will see the warehouse. But this is very important because with the new capacity we will have in these new warehouses, we can broaden the range of products as we speak about commercial vehicles, for example, or exclusive brands, which means that we can more efficiency. So it's also to create efficiency, but it's also to be able to grow in the future because let's say, the simple cost for added revenue when we have this in place is quite small. So it's a very attractive business case in order to grow in. And we have done the 3 automation projects in Denmark, Norway and Finland. And in addition to that, we have also moved the warehouse in Poland from twice as big premises. And again, this is, of course, increased cost efficiency, but it's also an enabler for the future growth. I talked a little bit before about our workshop concepts. And this is kind of the core of the company where we have 4,500 affiliated workshops who carries our brands. And we have been many -- for many years now in the forefront in how to handle the end consumers that we -- but we are also doing a lot of new, let's say, concept parts for these workshops. We're helping them to run efficient workshop with the training of mechanics, actually recruiting of the mechanics. We have a campaign now in Sweden where we try to recruit 100 more mechanics to these workshops because we know that if we can help them to get mechanics, that will automatically give revenue to us, but also to help them with -- to get revenue and new customers. where digitalization is key, where we have online booking systems, where we have -- that also can be automated with parts ordering. So for example, there's workshops in Sweden that has -- when we get an online booking, we can also add the parts. So they get the booking for next Thursday, they have the parts they need for next Thursday. So they just need to open the door and they have a customer. So that is, of course, extremely efficient for the workshop. And it's good for us because it creates loyalty and revenue. We also can use these brands and this concept, of course, for commercial vehicles and for exclusive brands. So it's a good foundation. One very good revenue maker for the workshops is fleet sales. Fleet is when we address a company with a car park, often a blended car park, and we make a service agreement or a contract that they will service the cars in our workshops. And this is -- this has been a very -- a growing business. And the reason for that is for a company with a blended car park, we are a very, very good partner. It's one point of contact. You don't need to have a contract with a dealer and the Volvo dealer and the auto dealer. You can have one with us. We have a very extensive network. We have the workshop. We have the competence. We have the brands and the trust -- we have and can offer centralized administration. So we have a system of fleet portal so the company can see where the car has been serviced, the service cost for each car, for each driver. And we can also offer one invoice for monthly invoice and so on. So a very convenient administration for the company. We have the full maintenance. We can do all kinds of service jobs for the cars. And of course, most important is that it is for all brands, all cars and all technologies.

It's quite a substantial increase, 72% last year. So we think that this will grow. This not just our revenue, but also the importance of fleets, right? So thank you for that. But if we were to summarize what we see connected to the challenging market situation and what we're doing, how would that look like?

Yes. Just to summarize, I mean, it is a challenged market, no doubt about that, but we do take action. We're accelerating our cost savings. We're expanding in commercial vehicles. We're expanding in exclusive brands. We -- with exclusive brands, we also launched new brands for lower-priced parts, and we're rolling out e-commerce to more markets. And back to the day's most important topic that we are strengthening our logistics.

Okay. Thank you for that, Pehr. So that is interesting key takeaways that we will dive into more. So let's take a closer look at one of the most important parts of building a stronger MEKO supply optimization. And Jessica, you are the ones that are working with this very intensely. So we talked about this topic where we had our last capital markets update last year. So if you were to summarize what has happened since then?

We have been working hard, and it's more to come.

Okay.

Yes.

So maybe I just leave the floor to you, then.

Thank you. Thank you. So important when building a stronger MEKO and -- is the work with our suppliers and how to optimize that work. We also need to balance opportunities with this and also to enable the potential that we have in each of our markets. With such a big spend, it is crucial to maximize our commercial terms. But in parallel, this is the cornerstones that we are working with. We know that we have some risks that we need to mitigate. And along all this, we have our journey of sustainability that is very important for us. I will not go through all these key areas, but I will take you through what I think is most important here and focus is the supply performance, supply partnerships and supplier consolidations that we're working with. To start with, supplier partnerships. We aim to harmonize the assortment to be able also to consolidate the supplier base that will give us synergies and an important activity for this that we talked about in the previous Market Day was to conduct global tenders. And we did that in one of the categories, tires, and tires is actually one of our most important strategic categories. We see that for the future in the EV business. And the tender that we conducted gave us a very good ground to build from. The winner of the tender was Goodyear. And since the first quarter of 2025, they are a strategic partner to MEKO. It's not only favorable commercial agreements and terms, which, of course, is very crucial when you win a tender. We also see that we can run some strategic project with them. And we have launched a small -- in one of the warehouse in Malmö. We have a daily replenishment from Goodyear, which actually means that we can enable shipments to workshops several times per day. This partnership has also given us a good way to harmonize the assortment, but also to run educations across the group as well as driving marketing campaigns. We have a positive figure here of an increase of 4% across the group for the first half year and also coming from a quite tough market. We can definitely do better than that, and we'll do that. But almost all markets actually performed better compared to previous years. And supplier consolidation. Yes, we're working on that actively to reduce the complexity in the business. That will also give us a good power to negotiate. We have a good spend, a good purchasing power in MEKO coming back to the exclusive brands. We will talk about that, how to work on -- to reduce the complexity in the supplier base, and that is something that Henrik, my colleague will talk more about later. We see this as -- it's a mutual way to invest. We invest in our suppliers with good business, and they invest in us back with good commercial deals. And this is something that we are actually actively moving forward every year. But how to -- how we will survive all this, if we don't see that our suppliers are performing, so what is the supply performance. Yes? It's to ensure that our suppliers actually are delivering according to the commercial terms that we have agreed with them, and even more important that they deliver on time and that they deliver products that are according to European law, and that to a consistent quality level. And we have been working on that as well. As I said, it was a hectic year. We have improved the supplier service, which is actually the level of on-time deliveries from our suppliers from 74% to 80% since the previous Capital Market Day. So in summary, we are on track with this. We will do more. We have been harmonizing and working on that, and the share of group suppliers have actually increased with 10% compared to the previous -- since a year ago, and that is now representing 65% of our total spend. And we are also pleased from a risk perspective that our suppliers, 96% have signed the supplier code of conduct and it is actually above the 2025 target already.

Good. Okay. So we can see that we're on track. But I have 2 questions for you. The first is the EBIT effect. Can you say anything about that?

Yes. And no doubt that the work that we started in 2024 has got some effect for the 2024 result as well. And we also see that we are pleased that we have this in place already due to the challenging situations we see in the market. So it's good that we have started that work already.

Okay, we started. When you say that we are on track, and we have more work to do, what kind of work are we seeing in front of us? And then will the trend continue in -- or even become stronger? What is your view?

Yes. We will -- from a supplier harmonization consolidation side, we, of course, support the commercial vehicle side and also the work with exclusive brands and looking into the supply base.

Thank you, Jessica. So now we'll turn to another area that we have talked about the spring, commercial vehicles, an area where we have growth ambitions. And Nils Hollmann, you're the one leading this work. Welcome.

Yes. Thank you, Anders. Very happy to be here today.

So you have been in the commercial vehicles business for quite some time. It's not just anything you started yesterday. So what is it about this segment that is fascinating for you?

Yes. I've been working for the commercial vehicle segment and world for more than 20 years. I have been working with OEMs, suppliers, workshops, but as well fleet operators. I think what I like most about the industry is it feels like a family. We know each other. We trust each other, and we share a deep passion for heavy, heavy stuff, heavy commercial vehicles.

The family, okay, they like heavy stuff. So -- but if we look at the segment as such, and maybe not all of us in this room are perhaps experts in this field. So why don't we look at what we mean when we say commercial vehicles. So I'll leave the floor to you.

Thank you. At MEKO, when we're talking about commercial vehicles, we are mainly focusing on 3 segments. This is trucks above 7.5 tonnes. It is trailers. So basically everything that is being pulled by the truck and of course, the buses. And another additional area that is very interesting is the so-called off-highway segment, which we can divide between agriculture and construction machinery as well as light commercial vehicles, both very interesting adjacent systems. But for now, we have decided to focus first on trucks, trailers and buses. And with this definition in mind, why do we focus in -- why do we focus on commercial vehicles? And I think the easy answer is because it is a significant opportunity. So let's have a look at some of the numbers behind. When we're looking across the 8 markets, the commercial vehicle aftermarket potential lies around SEK 37 billion which is coming from around 1,001 million trucks, 1 million trailers and around 100,000 buses. So you see already a very big opportunity. As a next step, I would like to take you through some of the key unique features that the commercial vehicle market is about. And the first one I want to mention is the uptime. It is very uptime critical. What does that mean? You can say every truck is like a revenue machine. When it stands still, our customers are losing money. So keeping the truck running is one of the most important activities. And availability and delivery speed really drive every buying decision. As a second area is the vehicle diversity. The vehicle diversity, you can imagine there's no 2 fleets out there that are the same. From tankers to tippers, the variety is really huge. And that complexity requires a deep commercial vehicle know-how to understand our customers and their needs. As a third point, I want to go towards portfolio breadth that is really winning. Workshops expect a one-stop shop, the right part from a trusted source and just a click or a phone call away. As a fourth point, I would like to emphasize on trust and know-how. In this business, you can say trust is like a currency. Customers buy when they believe that you understand their business and you understand their urgency. So that's also why commercial vehicle expertise from sales to technical support is not only an option, it's a must. And finally, our local footprint and proximity. Our customers expect local availability and a high frequency of delivery because it's a key driver to be successful. So if you now compare these commercial vehicle demands and you compare them with the MEKO's strength, you can say we tick every box. So this is a perfect fit for us, and this is also exactly why we are going for it.

Okay. So that is a perfect fit to say. But what do we want to achieve then if this is a perfect fit with a significant market potential. What are our aim?

Yes. Our ambition is clear. We want to be the #1 independent commercial vehicle player across our 8 markets that we are active. Today, our commercial vehicle business is around SEK 0.3 billion. And as a next milestone, it is SEK 1.3 billion in 2028. So we are fully committed to achieving this. And to be frank, this is not only an ambition. Its plan is based on real opportunities. We are using our existing strengths, and we are adding the capabilities to grow in our existing and in our new markets.

Okay. So how is that going to happen, SEK 1.3 billion?

The SEK 1.3 billion is how are we getting there. In order to get there, we are building our strategy on 4 pillars. And together, they are forming a clear road map. Looking at the first pillar, it's people and expertise. We will be building dedicated commercial vehicle teams, strengthening our fleet competencies and making a full use of our local know-how already existing in the markets. As a second pillar, it will be product. It is focus on product and supply. We will be offering a full assortment, scale our volumes and differentiate with exclusive brands. And at the same time, it's also important to use digital tools to make the assortment, the pricing and the availability smarter. As the third area is logistic and presence. We will deliver fast and reliably and leveraging both our logistic edge that we have heard a lot today about, but as well our density of our network. And finally, it's partnership and trust. We support our customers in keeping their operations running, and we co-create services that add real value for them. So this is not about a short-term win. It's about building a leading position step by step. And to sum it up, the opportunity is there. We have a real plan and MEKO is here to stay.

So MEKO is here to stay. Glad to hear. Thank you very much, Nils. Now we're turning to another important area. And that is exclusive brands, private label that many say and Henrik Pettersson, please, you are the one that are leading this work as well, and we have this autumn, I think it was in May, we communicated that we were creating a new division. I mean we haven't worked with exclusive brands before. now a division, what is the difference? Why do we do this?

Well, first of all, great to meet you all. And Anders, we need to get faster acceleration. That's pretty much the reason we're starting the division. We see a great potential and a great timing to increase our efforts in this area. And we see increasing demand in our own brands and like I said before, especially in the price fighting ranges. So -- and creating a division, a separate division means that we can get the focus necessary to really speed up our time to market, make sure we move forward.

So we'd like to hear our plans.

Thanks. So for those of you who attended last year's Capital Markets Day, you know that we are consolidating our brand and portfolio of roughly 8 brands today. And we're consolidating into these 4. And just to give you a quick walk through. ProMeister has been a hugely successful brand for us in Sweden and Norway and now also Denmark as we're phasing out previous brands. ProMeister covers everything from spare parts to gloves, hand tools, workshop equipment, lubricants and liquids. We have Carwise, which is a brand for DIY and accessories, mainly used in the markets where we target business to consumer customers, also a fantastic brand to run in our web shops like -- no, it's okay, thanks, in Mekster like Pehr told you about earlier, there's a huge demand for these types of products. Every Part Matters. Pehr showed you this shiny brake disc. Every Part Matter has been run in Poland for years. It's been the price fighter for Poland. We're going to consolidate our price fighting ranges into this brand, and it will be launched in all markets. Automec is another price fighting brand that we use for mainly liquids. So what I'm going to walk you through is firstly, why is this so important for us? Why is exclusive brands an important area where we need to strive forward? Secondly, how will we go about it? How will we create the needed growth? And thirdly, where does this take us? What are the goals we're setting? So why is it important? Well, obviously, profitability is key. It's no secret to the trade that having our own products, being able to buy straight from manufacturers gives us fantastic profitability. However, I want to extend the profitability not only for MEKO, but also for latter interests in the value chain. So for the workshop, having our own product means that they can offer a service to a customer who is price sensitive or has an older car at a lower price, but still keeping his or hers margin. Normally, if you have a price-sensitive customer, you have only one choice and the customer says, right, it's a bit too expensive. He'll either take a -- on this margin on the work or the product. But with our products, he can still get the job done and keep its margins. Thirdly, for the consumer or the car owner, the owner of an older car maybe does not have the same willingness to pay. He or she can still get the job done. They can get the job needed done without sacrificing too much money, meaning it's also profitable for the end consumer. So I would like to call it a win-win-win. So secondly, loyalty. Every day, we have hundreds of men and women in our sales forces visiting our customers in every market. This creates loyalty through relations. And that's most likely the most important way of building relationship and loyalty to your customers. We also have the workshop concept that Pehr mentioned earlier. This brings loyalty not only between us and the workshop, but also between the workshop and the consumer, the car owner. But having our own brands, obviously, brand products build loyalty as well as a customer gets to know our product range and know the brand, they know what to expect, what quality level, what price level. So this also brings a dimension of loyalty that we need. So that's also a key as a strategic pillar in creating these brands. And lastly, but definitely not least, market share. We do know from many examples that having our own brands creates market share. And we'll have a quick look at an example from Sweden. In 2022, beginning of '22, we did not have anything else than the brand leaders for CV-joints and driveshafts, important parts of our drivetrain in the car and a huge sellers for us. In mid-'22, we launched ProMeister, not the full range, but quite a limited range actually. It's been growing a bit since then. But we've had tremendous sales increases, as you can see. And this is organic sales. We wouldn't have had this sales if we didn't have the products. And I'll just give you a glimpse of the customers' reality, the car owner. So this is, let's say, it's me. I have a 15-year-old Renault Mégane. I love the car, but it's a French car. So it needs to be repaired once in a while, as you know. And it's worth about SEK 25,000. So it's not an expensive car. And the workshop tells me, you need to replace the front breaks. And it's the rotors, it's the pads and it;s the calibers. And going to a Mekonomen shop in Sweden, this example is from -- this is going to set me back about 30% of the car's value for the job. Just for the products alone. If you add labor to this, it's going to be 50%. So most likely the customer will say, can you do it any cheaper way? Can we just -- perhaps we'll just change the right break disc, I don't know, Pehr, but most likely, this customer will back out of the workshop and say, I'll solve it somewhere else or somehow. Having the good level, the price fighting level, this pretty much can cut the cost in half. You still get the job done, you still have parts that are tested, that are up to standard. But they're cheaper. It's a better price value. So this customer most likely will accept still a lot of money, 15% of the car, but if you want to keep driving it, you have to do it. So that's how we build the sales. How do we then go about to do this? Well, first of all, we're going to go with the well-proven and strategically easy, good, better, best setup in all of our markets. It doesn't look like this today, but that's where we're going. This brings us thus the opportunity to cover as many customer needs as possible because they differ. We will work with the range extensions, meaning you have 150 brake pads in ProMeister. You can cover 85% of the cars in that market, yet you increase it to 170, you cover 87%, meeting more customer demands, covering more cars, quite simply. Product line development, we are very proud how to release our newest product line in ProMeister clutches. We've been working on for quite some time, testing it in the lab, making sure we have the right quality, but we're now releasing it. So there are product lines still to be launched. And the focus for '25 will be on Every Part Matters, making sure we do the price fighting expansion as planned. So I'm saying this looks a bit different in every market. In Sweden, for instance. We do have the better level ProMeister. We do have the best. We have the branded options, but we do not have the good level. In Poland, on the other hand, it's another story. We have Every Part Matters, but we don't have ProMeister, and we have the best level. So the idea is simply to fill in the blanks in every market. So now I guess you all want to know where does this take us in terms of money, and we have set a firm goal. We are looking at about SEK 1.8 billion in turnover for '25 in exclusive brands, and we're aiming for -- we're going to reach the SEK 3 billion in 2028 by doing what I just told you. And that means an increased revenue share of exclusive brands. It will give us increased loyalty from our customers and an increased market share. That's it.

That's it. So thank you. But before we open up the Q&A session here, I just want to ask you. I mean, we have talked about exclusive brands before. It's not new. We wanted to increase our share of exclusive brands. How has that worked out?

It's worked great in the local markets, I would say. I've mentioned several very good initiatives haven't driven for many years. However, we haven't fully realized the potential as we still have gaps in the good, better, best setup. And we'll now make this as a group effort with the 4 brands going forward. And this will also help Jessica and her team making sure that we have 1 supplier for each product line or each product instead of maybe having 3.

Okay. So part of the acceleration basically.

Yes.

Okay. Great. So we enter the Q&A session. And I hope that you have questions to ask. We have some questions already in the Mentimeter app. So we will address them as well. And you will also be able to use the microphone that will be passed around by Jessica in just a bit. So well, let's start with -- we can start with one of the Mentimeter questions that has come in. So one is about Mekster maybe that is something for you, Pehr. So will you -- the e-commerce platform that we talked about, so will you start reporting Mekster development in the coming reports separately, aside from Sørensen og Balchen, [indiscernible] and so on. That is the first one. And you said that Mekster is growing, how big part in respective country does it have? Detailed questions.

Yes. And it is still too small to be reported separately. But ask me again in a couple of years, maybe it's a completely new division. That's, of course, what we hope for or aim for, it's still too small. And that also answered the other question that it will be more -- we will be more transparent when it has grown to some significant size.

But we can see -- I think you mentioned, we can see significant growth that we have had to take some sales numbers, and this is only for Sweden we have had in -- if we could take together June, July, August, I think it was an increase of 35% in revenue, still from small numbers, but it's definitely an increasing demand on. So any questions from the audience? Jessica has the microphone. Yes, please also state your name so everyone can hear at the recording.

Sure. Andreas Lundberg, SEB. Perhaps for Nils and commercial vehicles, which is an interesting area, could you share with us how the business model looks like there compared to the traditional MEKO business? And how is the split between independent and sort of branded aftermarket in -- well, some of the key markets, perhaps if you can talk about that.

Thank you for the question. I think as a first, I would like to mention that the business model can be quite similar to approaching also the automotive passenger car side. We are, of course, customers are looking for a wide selection of product range, but they are also looking for services that we are able to offer them such as technical support, trainings and other activities in order to bind them to us as a supplier, but also to help them solving the solution as fast as possible. When it comes to the second part of your question, if I understand correct, it is about the differences between branded products and exclusive brands products? Or are you focusing more on how much it is from the EIM market towards the OES market?

I mean the branded side or the, let's call them Scanias of the world, their own workshop system, how big is that compared to the independent side on heavy vehicles?

Well, you can say that the branded side of this potential is still more than 50%, especially influenced by the Nordic market environment. Now when you're looking at Poland and the politics, this is shifting. But you can say roughly it's more than 50% is on the OES side of the business from the branded side.

Yes. And how many workshops are you working with that offer solutions or services for these kind of customers?

I want to say when you take all 8 markets together, the workshop is almost balanced out 50-50. So we have around 50% independent workshops and 50% OES workshops, more on the OES side when it comes to the Nordic market and more on the -- side when it comes to the Baltics and Poland.

Okay. Another question? Just raise your hand, yes.

A question on exclusive brands. You are targeting SEK 1.8 billion sales this year. What was the figure for 2024?

We -- it's -- to be honest, it's too early to say. For 2024? I actually don't know, the '24 number. I only know what we've been doing so for this year. I do know if I recollect that we are right now quite flat, but also we are flat in many markets overall. So I would say that it's a small increase from last year '25, and -- but that is also connected to the sales picturing in general.

And on the same topic, you're talking about good and better offer. What's the price difference to the customers?

Very good question, which we've had many discussions of. And I think in general, we will have to try and establish some kind of price corridors where we launched these brands. ProMeister has been run at an approximate 85 to 80 index versus the branded. I would say if you're going to go for a price fighter, you need to be at least that in the 60, perhaps down even to index 50. So those are the ranges. But then again, if you look at a [indiscernible] brake disc in Poland, they will be priced in actual money differently from Sweden. But I think the relationship will look the same in the market. So 50 to 60 index, I would say.

And your margin?

The margin still, if you look at ProMeister, which I know our best from previous experience, even though we sell it cheaper, the margin, especially in percentages is way higher.

And if you compare to the lower price ones?

Sorry?

And if you compare it cheaper, even lower price?

Well, the tricky thing is when you go down to the lower quality spec, it actually doesn't make a huge impact on the actual purchasing price. So having a price fighter is going to mean you'll have to end up with a bit lower margin than you do on the premium. That's for sure. But it's still -- I mean, we can offer in the situation I showed you with the Renault, for instance. We can still offer a good solution and make very good money on it. But compared to say, ProMeister, the margins can be low lower, for sure.

Yes, when it comes to gross margin, but interesting is since this is growth initiatives later when you see the very efficient warehouse, even with the lower gross margin, that will create quite high and which will increase the EBIT margin when we increased the sales. So lower in the P&L, it's profitable.

I understand you want to attract more customers, but you don't see a risk that others will trade down between the -- your exclusive brands?

There is always the risk of trade down, obviously. I think it's very important that you actually introduce this to both salespeople and to workshop, the potential buyers in a way they can understand when do you actually produce the ProMeister option for the customer. If you have a Volvo V60, it has a completely different -- value than the Renault we just saw. You will always start from the top by introducing the best services and quality available then you'll go down. So I think , handled the right way, the cannibalization, if you so will, can be kept to a bare minimum. If we look at the example with the driveshafts. I've actually had a look at the -- how has -- the increase is huge, right? But did we have taken a loss of the branded products, and it's very little actually. So we've been able to create new sales, and that's the whole idea.

Okay. I think we will move on to a digital question before we go into the next session. So we have 1 here about gross margin. When entering a partnership like you did with Goodyear in tires, I guess, that is you, Jessica.

Yes. Of course, we will not enter partnerships like that if we didn't see improved commercial terms. We can see also much higher gross margins when we have our own warehouses. So that's also been driving the strategic project that we had in Malmö, which actually increased the margin for the that Swedish business with 10%.

Okay. Thank you very much for that. We will have another Q&A session further on. So you'll be having new chances to ask questions. So we will think move on to the next section in this part of the day.

We will look closer, as I said earlier on electric vehicles. We know that this trend is here to stay, but we don't know exactly how fast it is going. In Norway, it has gone, I would say, fast. And welcome Geir Hoff, you are Managing Director in Norway. And we will go into the EV transformation and what is happening in Norway because we have been present there for many years.

Yes.

But I'd like to still ask you about the market situation as this is obviously theme for this day. So how would you describe what is happening in Norway?

I think it's very much in line with what Pehr said earlier on today. I think we see a very cautious market with consumers holding back. In Norway now, we have 14 consecutive quarters of negative consumer confidence. But if you look to the 2 past quarters, especially the larger purchase part of the consumer confidence has really dropped. So on the back of kind of a more cautious consumer, of course, it's also a competition on price because that's the only tool left when the consumers are pulling back. So I think it's a combination. It's a perfect storm maybe.

Perfect storm, okay? So how are we navigating this perfect storm. What are we doing?

We're doing a lot. And I think we can't really sit and look on this. So what we are doing is, of course, that we are, first of all, you need to adapt your cost to your sales. It's very easy and hard to do. An example from last year is the merger of the MECA and the Mekonomen Networks in Norway. It took out more than SEK 60 million of cost, but it actually also made Mekonomen grow in Norway this year under the tough conditions by 10%. So it was kind of a cost and availability action. Then we need to add more product areas like we have been hearing about today. So tires, for example, coming from practically zero. We have sold 20,000 tires so far this year. So we're also growing that part of the business. As Pehr was mentioning, we are maybe one of the best in the market to also drive traffic to the workshop. So intensifying the booking system and the brands of the workshops are also a way of handling reduced traffic because there are traffic there, but they need to come to our workshops. And then last but not least, we need to work on the prices. We have had a set price list for many years. Now we're going to more dynamic pricing. And we're also investing margin in categories where we meet tougher competition. I think that's...

That said, we can see some results. We can see some results from that already.

Yes, we are. Okay, so we have 10,000 SKUs now under dynamic pricing. We see 8,000 SKUs that we have really invested to meet competition. And an interesting thing is to see that we have 45% uplift in digital bookings on fixed price. So the consumer really likes the fixed price option in the booking.

Okay. Great. So now let's turn to the EV theme, I guess. So why don't you share the latest insights from Norway?

The latest and what we have, I think.

Yes, exactly, right.

So my headline on this is that, yes, Norway is in the forefront on share of sales from electrical vehicles. We call it a unique test bench because it's quite novel. Everything that's happening is new for everyone. So it's easy to look on the sales figures in Norway and say that, well, Norway is beyond the point of no return. There is no way back from the EV in Norway. But we are locally big but globally extremely small. So what does that mean? Well, it means that if an independent manufacturer of parts look into this market, it's a niche in the bigger markets in Europe. It's huge in Norway, but there's a niche and they don't invest that much yet. They're kind of waiting a little bit for the market to develop to get bigger. It's immature. The cars entering the market is maybe not very ready and everyone is kind of learning. There's a lot of engineers out there, trying battery repair, trying fixing everything. There is no industry of scale in a lot of these businesses yet, but it's still to come. We are having knowledge. We're building knowledge every day, but there is still a lot of open questions, and I will try to address that a little bit later when you look into the car population of Norway to answer on that question. And of course, as I said, Norway has been hit with the car industry's version of the tech industry. You deliver a minimal viable product to the market and then you amend it. And if you go into some of the OEM or licensed workshops, they have spent 50% to 60% of their resources now on warranty jobs on cars that has maybe not been ready for the market when they enter into the market. So that's a little bit of the market how it looks like. And then everyone probably knows that if don't, it's all subsidized. The Norwegian government has really spent a lot of money on this, which could be interesting, given the fact that we are a quite wealthy oil nation, but we can leave that maybe for the dinner tonight. So what is the journey of EVs in Norway? On the left side of the slide, you will see one of the cars is actually upside down boat because the manufacturer was a boat producer which could mold boats, and you found out that you can also mold the chassis for cars. And the other one is a Danish producer that actually was bought by Norwegian. There is two ways of looking on why did the government subsidized this business, why did they do free tax, no tax on the car, no VAT, you can ride in the bus lanes, you had tolls in the cities was free, ferries was free. It was kind of thrown after you. One might say that it was just out of pity for the ones really driving these cars on the left-hand side. Or you can say that Norwegian government maybe was looking for a second leg to stand on when the oil was empty and thought that maybe we should be a car producer. I don't know. I was not in that discussion, but it's for me to theorize around it. Up to 2010, that was kind of the market in Norway on EVs, then came a little bit more serious players on the market. Nissan Leaf was one of the first moving in, 120 kilometers of range, not really a important car, but due to everything you got together with it, it was very -- moved it fast. And the fast movement kicked off when Elon Musk came and produced the Tesla Model S. And after Tesla Model S, no one looked back. So now in Norway, EV is a commodity. It is like Pehr said in his presentation we don't say that we buy a EV, we buy a car. So that's where Norway is. And if you look on the market development, even though the new sales of cars have been a little bit humpy bumpy in the past 5, 6 years in Norway due to interest rates, due to legislations, due to production problems, et cetera, the steep increase in the share of sales from EVs from 2017 and onwards has really been hitting us. And in July and August, we are touching above 97% of all new cars sold in Norway now is an EV. So we are beyond the point of no return. But that doesn't mean that all cars in Norway is -- are an EV. So then if you look on the population from an age perspective, the average EV is 4 years. Most EVs has warranty between 5 and 7 years, which means that also most of the EVs are still under the umbrella of the importers or the brand owners, which also says something about what we learn about how to maintain and service the cars. There are still holes in our knowledge. When you look on cars that are between 5 and 10 years, there's a little bit more spread out between the drivetrains. Then, of course, if you go beyond 10 years, it's gasoline and diesel that are the main drivers. And the gasoline cars is 13 -- no, 19.8 years old, and they are scrapped when they are 22. So they're kind of close to scrapping in average. The battery electric vehicles in Norway now is 28% of the total population. So what have we learned about repairing and maintaining so far? Well, what we see is that they have less regular workshop visits because it doesn't have the same strict routine on the service program. Some, for example, American producers don't even have a service program on the cars, they try to tell their customers that you can drive it forever, which is not true because brakes and brake fluid and et cetera, needs to be changed every now and then. But it's less frequent. It's more expensive when it come in. In 2021, Audi e-tron was the most sold model in Norway, which is crazy but it's a lot about low interest rate and the price point being almost around what the Passat was before the EV came in, so that's the explanation. When they come into the workshop and going to change the brake discs, they get a shock because it's almost twice as expensive as it was on the Passat because it's a bigger, heavier car and it has an higher weight and then higher torque. So the wear and tear of tires, the wear and tear of suspension, et cetera is higher on the EVs. So the repair is more costly, but less frequent. And then, of course, it's more complex due to tech. So also the roadworthiness tests now contains 11 drivers support systems that needed to be tested every second year on all cars. So it's coming on different sides. So how do we meet this? Of course, as mentioned by my colleagues, we need to increase the range. We need to be there on the range of the new cars. And we have invested in -- taking in products for EVs earlier than we normally would have done due to the development with [ warranty ] et cetera because we want to train the end user to we can fix the EV. So even though it's not that many of them in the workshops when they are 2, 3, 4 years, we still want them to come, so the worst thing for us is if the workshops says we can't fix it, going somewhere else, then it's hard to turn the car to consumers later. So we need to have the consumers entering into the workshops, and that we do with enhancing competence. We make the mechanics and the technicians in the workshops competent and confident on maintaining the cars. We add product areas, as we have said, with its tires, et cetera, that we have to add to get more out of the business. The digital customer journey is -- and of course, it's very interesting now also to own your own workshops because then you also get a share of the production revenue from the workshop as well. So how has -- how are we kind of performed if you look beyond the quarter that we have behind us? It was a little bit tough one? Well, even with this growth of EVs, we have had an annual growth of 5.2% in the past 5 years. So we are coping with the development so far, and we have good strong plans for continuing to cope with the introduction of the EVs in the market. And I think to sum up this point. Yes, we are building knowledge. We have knowledge, we know how to handle the EV transformation. And yes, we see clearly a revenue potential in an EV landscape. Thank you.

Thank you, Geir. So exciting. So at least I am quite curious about how this works in practice. So next item on this agenda is to head out this door where you came in, and we will go to our new workshop, where [ George ] is going to meet up, and he will guide us through what it's all about. So please go out that door and [ George ] will meet, and we will gather here again at 14:45. So in about half an hour. [Break]

So we are beginning the part 2 of this Capital Markets Day now. So please take your seats. So I hope it was a good lesson you got in the workshop that you have perhaps a glimpse of what this is all about, actually repairing batteries and EVs. So we are now entering the next part of this day, looking closer at what we have touched upon several times, our logistics capacity and how we are levering up. But before we do that with Jessica, I think we should look at the screen. [Presentation]

Yes, what a [ Sunshine ] movie, isn't it? I'm very proud to be here today, very proud to be here in Denmark, and I will not steal the thunder of Michael that will give his flavor of the warehouse just after here. So just to sum up the movie. Why is MEKO doing this? Why is -- why are we investing in this? Yes, we are improving our efficiencies, but we are also improving our customer service. And that, as we know, is very important for us. Why? Yes. If we look at this slide, strong and fast distribution throughout the value chain. We can actually reach all our national distribution centers within 24 hours. And then we have the setup with a regional distribution center in each market, local distribution center and then down to the workshops, where depending on the concepts you will have 4 to 8 deliveries every day. And we are actually delivering 50,000 spare parts every hour, which I think is quite impressive. So it is important with availability and fast deliveries. And going back to what Nils said, a spare part to a heavy vehicle cannot wait. Then we have heard from some comments from you before, aren't you doing a little bit too much at the same time. And yes, it's been a very hectic year, and I'll start to get some gray hair. We started out in Finland. It was the -- it's the same location as before, we did some adaptations, also followed by the warehouse in Poland, where we moved to a new -- completely new premises twice the size. And in Norway, a completely new warehouse. And on top of that, another completely new warehouse here in Rørup in Denmark. But I would like to take a step back because we actually already have one warehouse Strängnäs that has been serving Norway until now. And that is an automated warehouse that has been working on its efficiencies and productivities for many years, 32,000 square meters, and they're having a shuttle automation solution in the warehouse. And when we look at the KPIs across our markets, Sweden has always been best-in-class. Now I think they will get competition, and we kind of like that they will get competition. Yes, we start in Finland. We modernized the central warehouse, as we said. We had to do some repairs. It was no building. And we did consolidate but still in the same building with a modernized technology and automated inventory management. We have an outer store here in the Finnish warehouse. It's a very dense system that could be upscaled. It's the same size in the warehouse and will carry the same amount of stock keeping units. What we see here is that we can increase the productivity, and we will actually be able to reduce the amount of FTEs in the warehouse with 30% in the Finnish warehouse. That also will support, as you understand, what Pehr already have been talking about, building a stronger MEKO and realizing this efficiencies. And Poland next up. It's a new, it's a double-sized warehouse, 20,000 square meters. It's not -- it's a manual warehouse. It's not that big warehouse, but the structure of the warehouse in Poland is a little bit different compared to our other markets. They have 5 semi big regional warehouses that is supporting the business. It's the most SKU-intense, stock-keeping unit intense warehouse with 250,000 SKUs in the warehouses. And we know that the Polish business requires a little bit of different service to the customers. That's why the structure in the warehouses built according to that to support that need. And yes, we were not ready. Norway also had to go for a new warehouse, double the size compared to the previous warehouse. And we know that here we have consolidated different warehouses partly served by Strängnäs in Sweden earlier and from two other locations and then now strategically located outside Oslo in [indiscernible] and it's double the area. So now the area is 32,000 square meters. And we have -- it was said when it was -- when we opened in May that it was the largest new build installations in Norway. And of course, we are proud of that as well with 110,000 [ totes ] in the automation. We are also transitioning from a cardboard boxes to a more modern close-the-loop system with plastic crates to play on our -- the work we're doing with sustainability. Yes, I promised Michael, I will not steal thunder. So I will -- we will wait with Rørup and where we are now. But raising MEKO logistics to a new level. So to summarize this, we have moved from one automation before and now after the upgrade to four, we have, which is an increase with 300%. We see that the average productivity between these three warehouses has now increase of nearly 100%. It's doubling in Denmark and in Norway, Finland is taking it down, but that's due to the fact that it's a smaller automation compared to the other one. And of course, interesting when it comes related to cost, we will be reducing the FTEs in the warehouse , which is a reduction of 38% and it's also something that Christer will touch base on later. Also, to cater for the needs for the future, we have increased area, which means that we can put some exclusive brands in there in the new warehouses and some more commercial vehicles. I hope also that we can fix some tires which is -- that's also something that we see for the future, yes. And also the average SKU is from 105,000 to 158,000, which is an increase of 50% in average. So to wrap up, we have not only strengthened our logistic capacity. We have also built for the future. And we also -- we think that we now have state-of-the-art warehouses and an efficient distribution network. It's for our future growth, but we also see that is potential for cooperations with others. Thank you.

Cooperations with others. That sounds interesting. So thank you very much for that, Jessica. We will soon head out to the guided tour, so you will see more of this at this Danish business -- Danish warehouse. But first, we would like to talk about the Danish business. So Michael , please. You are the Managing Director here in Denmark. And well, before we go into to this warehouse, and you know, obviously, a lot about that, maybe we could just give a brief introduction of our business here because I am not sure everyone is aware of exactly what we're doing. So please.

Yes. And first of all, I have sincerely look forward to welcome you here to our new facilities. It's a state-of-the-art. And I look so much forward to guide you to the tour, so you can see it yourself. And that said, we are a market leader in Denmark. We are a market leader due to our strong brands being FTZ as a wholesaler, but we also have strong workshop brands like CarPeople, AutoMester, Din Bilpartner. Going back to 1962 where the original [ part ] of the wholesaler was found. And until now, we have had the position as the market leader. So approximately 28% of the market is obtained from FTZ business. We are 48 branches included 2 of the [indiscernible] Island and then we have approximately 900 affiliated workshops that we deal with every day. Affiliated means that they are a branded workshop among our own brands. On top of that, we actually serve around 5,000 customers in Denmark. So we have an aim and the aim is actually to be an ultimate partner that direct -- and around the workshop delivers professional and competitive solutions. And how can we do that? Well, we have more concepts that can actually back up this aim. For instance, you saw the Academy, so we offer trainings for owners and also for mechanics. And as said, approximately 2,000 participants every year is giving us the position as the second largest offer of these kind of educations. We want to do it because we want to improve the skills of the owner and the mechanics in order that they can be more productive and more efficient, gaining more revenue. That's an example. Also, we have the FTZ 360 which is actually covering what the workshop needs. For instance, marketing that could be online booking, it could be digital customer solutions, it could also be like skills in how they can be better in operating their daily business. Moreover, we're also acting towards retailers. And that we do because of our subsidiary, which is called Avant Denmark. So actually, we are covering quite a lot around the workshop.

Okay. So being the ultimate partner but it's also in this market, as in Norway and in other markets, more challenging situation. So Denmark is also suffering from this. We know that. So how would you describe the market situation now?

Yes. So it is a challenging situation and if we look at the whole value chain from car manufacturers to car users, we see a lot of changes with a power and a speed that we actually never have seen before. If we take that situation in Denmark, we, for instance, see that the licensed dealers become more independent dealers or they are actually consolidated from bigger players. Also the independent workshops, we see a lot of changes, smaller one closes or specialize or they are also consolidated. That means that the picture of the customer is changing. Next to this, we also see a quite fierce competition in Denmark. That's it. We see that we have a position. We are a market leader, and we have an aim being the ultimate partner. So we see that we have the solution to mitigate these changes. That said, we also see a pressure on prices, especially on service parts.

Yes, so I ask Geir about Norway. I ask you about Denmark, what kind of -- how do we handle this?

Yes. So we have looked thoroughly into our data. We have looked into customer behavior. And we have taken decisions on data that we have adjusted prices in some categories. And we see that this adjustment leads to positive development in the net sales of these categories. Next to this, we also see that these categories drives more sales from other kind of categories. So I will say that we have find right and efficient tools to mitigate the price pressure.

So can we have a look -- closer look at actually what actions we are taking, if we go to the next slide then.

Yes. Because one thing is to mitigate some of the prices, but it's also to mitigate the whole challenge and the changes in the value chain. So let me give you some example. Last year, we actually separated the sales and logistics organization in order to come closer to the customers, in order to become more efficient and more productive. And that meant that we actually saved cost for SEK 28 million. And same time, we also, let's say, improved the way we served our customers. Then we have now also started up a new way of let's say, having deals with our customers. So we have invented a chat service, digital, of course. And the chat service is a significant increase in how many customers we actually can serve per day, per hour. 20,000 chats were handled in '24. And until now, we have already reached 60,000 chats. And the best thing with this is actually that the time of answering is only 90 seconds. So it's a quite value-added service for the customers. Moreover, we have also talked about the strategic pricing enhancement. And what we have done is actually data-driven decisions. And as I said, we have now seen positive results of these changes, strengthen sales leadership. So we onboarded a new sales director. And we took one from outside the business, but he's coming from a wholesale business, and he knows the drills about this price pressure. So we use his skills in another industry. Next to that, we have implemented sales training. We have now also implemented CRM, sales force. So we have empowered the sales force, I will state. That means, for instance, from Q1 to Q2, we have actually increased the sales visits per 29% due to the fact that we can control, but we can also advise the sales rep what to do.

Okay. So clear actions then, clear actions. And this warehouse, if we bridge over, this has also an important part of the strategy. So I will let you continue and talk more about that.

Yes. So this logistics center, which I actually call it is a link to the MEKO strategy in order to power up and be more productive, be more efficient and at a lower cost. And as we say here, it's in the center. It's in the heart of Denmark on [indiscernible] and we have a fully automated storage and a retrieval systems, a capacity of approximately 34,000 square meters, which I'm looking forward to show you. Next to this, we see that the new logistics center has increased the speed. It has also increased the accuracy due to the automatization. And last not least, it is prepared for scalability, meaning that we can also step up and take the growth journey that we look forward to. Approximately 250,000 articles can be stored right now, but there is more capacity, which I will show you. So this is what's in for us, but what about the customers. So what we see here is that the customer can expect and will have more availability higher. They will also have faster delivery even in the same day. And they will have more reliable service and last not least, they can focus on their business. So that is examples on how we have improved our value offering. Looking into what does that mean? It means that we have a solid foundation of expertise. We also have a strategic position in the market, and we are ready to navigate the changes. We are not only dreaming it. We are doing it. And then last not least, elevated logistics strengthen us further. That's it. This is an inside-out perspective, right? So what is it when we look from the outside in, what does the customer says. And that I would like to share with you. [Presentation]

Yes. Thank you, Michael, and thanks for the Danish customers sharing their experience with us. So that was -- well, we've covered a lot of ground today. We've talked about what we do in exclusive brands, commercial vehicles, the logistic work that we are doing, levering up that and much more. So the question is, of course, Christer Johansson, our CFO, what financial effects can we expect from this? So I'll leave it over to you.

Thanks, Anders, and thanks to all of you for coming. So I think as you can tell a lot of things are changing within MEKO. But there are also some things which are actually unchanged. And that includes the financial targets. So I would like to spend a little bit of time to explain why they make sense and perhaps even more importantly how we will deliver on those targets. So to remind ourselves then, we have defined four targets. On the operational side, we target sales growth of 5%. So this should be largely organic and profit growth of 10% per year. On the capital side of things, we target net debt to EBITDA to be in the range of 2 to 3 while also on average then paying out 50% of profits in dividends. So starting with sales growth. This is an area where we have a strong track record. So on average, we have been delivering around 12% growth per year over the last 10 years. So pretty strong track record. There is a big contribution from acquisitions. And in fact, without it, we would not be meeting here in Rørup today, but there is also organic growth here. So for these 10 years, we've averaged around 4% in organic growth. But of course, that's all history. So instead, let's look into the future. And our focus now is to lay the foundation for growth in the years ahead. And it happens to be so that we operate in a market with limited underlying growth. So we expect to see 1%, maybe 2%. It's probably going to be more in Poland. It may be a bit less in the Nordics, but on average, 1% to 2% of underlying growth. I believe, Nils, where are you? Gave quite a fuller picture on what we are planning to do in commercial vehicle. And if you take those numbers and you kind of translate it, you could see that this -- with the targets that we mentioned would correspond to around 2% in annual growth. I believe also Nils -- sorry, Henrik, sorry, made a strong case around the exclusive brands, the private label business and how that can unlock further revenue potential. So that's going into the second bucket there or the third from the left, together with all the other things we're doing. And I think here, Michael and Jessica gave you a flavor of maybe how we think that the logistical upgrade can actually strengthen our competitiveness in this market. So in short, if you add all of this up, I would say there is a clear plan to get to 5% in organic growth. These are not moonshot projects. And in fact, in terms of knowledge, it's very much within the [ walls ] of MEKO already. So it's not something completely new to us. Now moving on to the next targets area, profitability, I would say our track record is mixed. And indeed, if you look at the last few quarters, it's been a few challenging quarters. So if you were to look, for example, at the first half of 2025, you took that x2, you would see that we've been operating at around SEK 800 million in adjusted EBIT, 4.4% in adjusted EBIT margin, this is not where we want to be. It's far from where we need to be. And in reality, I think if you look at that level, if you take that as your starting point, you would say, well, 10% profit growth. It's not what we're expecting, right? But it happens to be so, and let me give you a little bit of flavor on this. It happens to be so that, of course, we are in a bit of uncertain times. I think Pehr gave some of the kind of descriptions here. So we've seen negative organic growth. It's coming from a few directions of cautious consumers. And some things have been delayed, what could not be delayed maybe went for a cheaper part instead. And it's also so that in this shrinking market, the competition has been fierce. And as if that was not enough, we've also spent some of our time and energy on the transitions that we have been undergoing. So when you add all of that up, you will understand that, okay, maybe in the first half of 2025 is not kind of the full picture, if you will. Now I said earlier that we're not counting on the market to be very strong, so clearly the main avenue to get back on track is to go for the things that we can control, which is cost. And when it comes to the first part here, payroll reduction from automated warehouse. So I think Jessica, you mentioned 170 FTEs. Those are not all in Denmark, but across the projects that we're running. That is the efficiency gain that we are planning to take out. And here, if you don't trust me, then when you go out for the tour in a few minutes, you can talk to Kim, you can talk to Michael and they will give you a full picture of how this automation enables a more lean staffing. And it's actually so that we've been building these facilities for some time. But if you look at the financials for the first half of 2025, we've been operating from the old premises. So the run rate for the first half of 2025 reflects the old setup with old staffing levels and all of that. So no benefits in there. Now to be a bit more specific, I brought a snapshot of our internal plans. I think if you look at this, you will understand why we're quite excited to be in September now because, in fact, now we've done a lot of the moving, which is both hard work and costly. And we have also done a lot of work to wrap up operations in the old premises so that we can hand back the keys and that we can come to an end of this period with double rent. You can see here that over the last, well, I would say, 6, 9 months, we've basically been running with a duplicate set of operations in Norway, in Denmark, in Poland to some extent, actually. Now double rent is not maybe our biggest concern because, in fact, the cost associated with the FTE is a big -- much bigger item. So getting the efficiency out on the FTE side is key, of course, and we are now entering into the phase where we can realize these benefits. It's not instant, but neither is it years away. So we're talking about quarters here. Now going back to the overview. Completely separate from the automation, we are running a cost improvement program with a target to reduce cost by SEK 100 million on a run rate basis. And we've spoken about this in connection with the Q2 report, for example, and I would almost call it like a rightsizing given the lower revenue development. So in this sense, it's widespread, and we're not leaving any part out. To just give you a sense, we think that the SEK 100 million will come from primarily staff costs, so around 75% will be there. And these are mostly role which are not customer-facing. So think of it as finance, admin, back office, you name it. We've now been detailing these plans for some time. And we are now in implementation phase. So I know for a fact that there were discussions with unions taking place as recently as yesterday. So we are acting on this front for sure. Those two things are the most consequential kind of work streams, if you will. It's not everything we do so. We also do a few other things. One of those things, for example, is to complete the integration of the acquisition of Elit, and this is an acquisition that was done in 2024. We're roughly halfway in, meaning that if you look at the numbers for the first half of '25, you're not seeing kind of the end state of that work. You're seeing a snapshot of where we are right now. So there is benefits coming out of that, which goes into the SEK 50 million there. So then, of course, what you could do, if you wanted to, you could say, okay, let's add this up and so let's take SEK 800 million plus SEK 100 million plus SEK 100 million plus SEK 50 million to get to SEK 1050 million, what is that? Is that a new target? No, it's not. So this is -- I would think of it as a 0 growth pro-forma level. And from this level, we can grow both in terms of sales and profit, of course, but more of a pro-forma figure than really. Now with all that talk about adjusted EBIT, I also want to say something about the adjustments. And we often refer to these items as items affecting comparability. And it happens to be that they are quite sizable. So if you look at the 6 months of 2025 here, it added up to SEK 150 million. So on a, call it, a full year basis, it will be SEK 300 million, which is a lot. And this is not what you should expect going forward because, in fact, part of it is warehouse project costs. So moving cost, project management, stuff like that, which will come to an end. Part of it is the ERP program cost. And this is something we decide the pace in and the pace that you see here is above the pace that we have been guiding on. So this should also come down a bit. And then -- well, actually, the last part here, that's a combination of a few items, I would expect it to stay on this level. But all-in-all, the outlook on these items affecting comparabilities is one of moderation, which I think is quite reasonable. Now having spoken about the first two targets, I want to go for the second part here. And this is about the capital allocation, you could say. So -- this, of course, can vary quite a bit from year-to-year. The cash flow coming in is from the operations, but where it goes can differ. So what we've done here is we've taken an aggregated view over 10 years to see, okay, how did this kind of add up over this pretty long period. So on the incoming side to your left, we have cash flow from operating activities, adding up to circa SEK 10 billion over this period. There was also a share issue in 2018, if I remember correctly, SEK 1.6 billion. So you can say that's basically what's coming in here. And on the outgoing side, we have incremental working capital, CapEx, financing [indiscernible] debt repayment, dividend, of course, and acquisitions. So those -- that's kind of the 10-year story, if you will. Now if we add this up then, you could say in simple terms that 20% of cash flow has gone to support organic growth. So working capital and CapEx. 35% has gone back to stakeholders, so be it through debt repayment or dividends. And a full 45% has gone to acquisitions. So I got a question yesterday to say, well, SEK 5.3 billion, Christer, what did that really give us? And now to start with, I would want to say that in the cash flow from operations, SEK 2 billion came from those acquisitions. So were it not for the acquisitions, the SEK 2 billion would also not be there, right? Now secondly, I would say that we have also built a much stronger platform for organic growth. Nils got a question about the commercial vehicle market. And is it big in the Nordics, where is it big? It actually turns out, it's big in Poland. And we now have the platform to go after that organic growth as well. Thirdly, and that's not so easy to see here. Being a bigger actor means that you get better prices and better prices support the gross margin. And that goes for all markets. In a sense, it's benefiting the Swedish business to be in the other markets. Now nevertheless, I would say our perspective going forward is different. So in the coming 5 years, we expect the nonorganic growth component at the bottom there to be much smaller. So we've indicated it to 10% here. So this would clearly be a much less dominant part of our capital allocation. Consequently, a bigger share of the cash flow can go back to lenders and owners. So this would go from 35% to 60%. And last but not least, we believe that organic growth is quite important, getting to those 5% will require some allocation of capital, probably not so much in CapEx, but there will, for example, be working capital components to a broader assortment of exclusive brands or commercial vehicle products. So that's why we believe that there should be a bigger allocation to that to make sure that we deliver on the 5% growth target. Now on this last note with the supporting of the organic growth, I do just want to kind of briefly touch on how that has looked. So there's two components to it, right. Here, we've chosen to show net working capital in relation to sales, which, as you can see, has been inching down a little bit whereas, on the other hand, CapEx has actually been running pretty high over the last couple of quarters here. So I would expect CapEx in relation to sales to come back, but on the working capital side on the margin of things maybe a little bit more. Now I think with that, I would finally also want to say something about funding. But I will keep this short because I think you will find the [indiscernible] more interesting. But on the funding side, we've done a lot of work in 2025. We are now in a place where we're quite happy with the mix. We think this is a well-financed balance sheet for the kind of business that we're doing and the size that we have. The maturity profile is also in a good place. So maybe on this front, there will be a little bit less work now in the coming quarters. So with that, Anders, I'm only going to add one more picture, and it's my summary. So what are we doing on the financial side? We have targeted efforts to return to organic growth. And I think we've covered it fairly well today. We are addressing profitability through cost and those actions have progressed well. You can touch it, and you can feel it later on. And on the capital allocation refresh, if you will, lenders and owners are in focus. So that's the summary.

That is the summary. Thank you very much for that, Christer. So we have been getting more questions, and we will open a new Q&A session also with you, Pehr, please. And if you want to use the microphone, just raise your hand. Yes, we have a question, Andreas, over there. So, yes, over there.

Andreas Lundberg, SEB here again. First of all, I think, you're taking some right measures now. We have seen some proof that Sweden, Norway has improved, if you go back 1, 2 years, I think you succeeded well with a Polish deal. While the problem seems to be Denmark and Finland, which has come down quite a bit since the time of acquisition, I hope you can maybe share some light on those different businesses and what has happened and, where do we go from here?

Yes. If we start with Denmark, where we are at the moment, it has been -- we started -- we increased the profitability in the first 2 years after the acquisitions, then it has been stable and then a little bit up and down. I believe strongly and I think that Michael agree that there is definitely room for improvement. We have seen a lot of actions, which we are doing now and the efficiency with the warehouse. So to get back on better profitability in Denmark is, I wouldn't say it easy, but we have the plan, clear plan. Finland is a little bit more complicated, I wouldn't say difficult but a little bit more complicated because in Finland, we have done much, much more of cost savings and an improvement. We have changed the management completely. We have changed the sales organization, we have sales -- the product department, all these things in the normal situation would have led to quite a good profitability at the moment. But at the same time, we have had an extremely headwind from the market in Finland as well as our colleagues and competitors in Finland. So it's kind of -- you can't -- all the improvements which we have done in Finland is not shown yet, but there is a lot of, let's say, good things done. And we are doing more now. And now during this autumn, we will have the full efficiency from the warehouse project. We will have also the full effect of the new sales organization. So to get back on the super high level of profitability in Finland short term, maybe not because there's still very, let's say, low demand in that market, but the potential is there, definitely. So just give it a time and then with all our actions, we will be back on track in Finland as well.

Okay, more questions? Okay. So let's take one from the [ Mats Liss, ] so it seems like you are entering a period now of less M&As.

Correct. More questions? No. I mean I think -- like I said, I think -- I mean the business we have here in Denmark, great business. I'm sure we will do great. But that doesn't mean that we should continue down that path as if that's the only option. I think organic growth is quite important and to invest behind that is as important, more important for the coming 5 years.

Okay. Another question here. Old Mekonomen has increased margins significantly last 3 years. What are the main reasons and lessons learned from this?

A couple of things. If you remember what Geir said about Norway, we did a very substantial downsizing in the number of branches from 50 to 32 that -- which decreased the cost with approximately SEK 60 million, so that is one part. We have had a stable revenue. We have had a little bit change in the market situation. We had actually a competitor went bankruptcy 1.5 year ago, which always helps the rest of us, so to say. So that will be the main reasons. And we look into Sweden, it's a little bit similar, has been mostly cost cutting, cost cutting and cost cutting. Also a lot of mergers of branches in Sweden. It's not that you can't do exactly what we have done in Norway but we do it in a little bit another way. So that has also reduced cost quite a lot. So I think -- and with keeping the sales quite stable. So I will say the -- from the common view, it is cost savings, which is the main driver in the improvement.

Okay. So another question here is about price pressure. What reasons can there be that some can pressure price considering how large you are and the high price level?

Different reasons. I mean we all have a different expectation of what profitability is. We have competitors, smaller ones in Finland, family owned. Their view of good profitability somewhere between 0% and 1%, then they are happy. We have much higher ambitions. So there is very different models. But we also have -- if you look at the Polish exporters, they base their business and the profitability on domestic and then they use the export in order to gain some extra supplier bonuses. So they sell very cheap just to gain some extra bonuses. So -- and there is other examples also. So it's -- I don't think it's one answer on that question. But of course, in these times, as we have seen this year, when the demand kind of gets lower than, call it, desperation to reach the volumes gets higher because some of the suppliers also have levels that if you reach this, then you get an extra percentage. And then it becomes very profitable, you have to fight for that extra volume in order to get that bonus on top of everything. So there are many answers on that question.

Okay. No single answer. So do we have a -- yes, please, Stefan?

[ Stefan Henning, ] Handelsbanken. Regarding your EBIT target, if I remember right, of the CMD last year, you had the same target under the baseline of 2022 and expectation or target that's reaching SEK 1.5 billion to SEK 1.6 billion in EBIT 2027. How should we view that? What's the baseline? And do you have a target for 2027?

So maybe I can start and you can add on. So what we did on the Capital Markets Day last year, as we said that this is where we stand. If you take 10%, which is our financial target, we should get to this point. Then, of course, in the time that has passed, I would say some things have played out in ways we did not expect. For example, market as such has been very slow. And that, of course, goes beyond what we can control and we can kind of just mitigate and keep doing what we're -- the actions that we think are right. So I would say SEK 1.6 billion by 2027 was not one of the official financial targets. Those were the 4 ones I said. Now if you go back to where we stand now, I did sort of a little bit of a pro-forma calculation here. That's where we are without growth. Clearly, we're not aiming to be a 0 growth company. And I think we explained how we intend to get there. So if you add growth to this, this business is quite scalable, both up and down, and that's kind of with that jump off point, the higher jump-off point, we should get back to very healthy levels within that kind of time frame. Will it be SEK 1.6 billion by 2027, we've not kind of given that kind of target.

Okay. Thank you for that. Here's a question about CV, so you have garage concepts MECA, for example, for passenger cars, will we see similar set of a concept rollout for CVs?

Yes. And we actually already have. We're using MECA as a brand in Sweden, Norway and Finland in a concept called MECA Truck. So that is a clear workshop concept for the commercial vehicles. If we will use that brand for the next markets or something more local, let's see. That's a little bit in planning. But we believe that, that industry, all the knowledge which we have from the passenger cars when it comes to digitalization, online booking, fleet sales and how to improve efficiency within workshops and so on, all that knowledge is quite in the forefront when we compare to the workshop for commercial vehicles. So we can utilize on that and actually make very strong concept in the commercial vehicles area also. But we first need to be able to walk before we run. That means that in short term, it is about building up the availability, the pricing and that part to be a good supplier. When we have that, then we can add also the concept.

Okay. So a bit further ahead then. Another question regarding EVs. So renovated batteries lead acid was business many years ago. Do you expect that charge of battery cells to become new business for garages?

That is a ten thousand dollar question because we -- I don't think we thought a couple of years ago that battery repair, that will be the new revenue stream for workshops. And we did a lot of different projects, especially in Norway. We have workshops in Norway who do this as specialized and changing modules, changing cells very -- on an entrepreneur engineering point of view. That was also based on the what is the lifetime of the battery and how soon will the battery lose the capacity, so we want to get it back on track. What -- from what we know now, I don't -- I wouldn't expect too much of that business because what we see is that the battery technology has improved a lot, has a longer lifetime. The capacity doesn't, let's say, decrease so fast. So maybe for the batteries that has been produced in the last 10 years, it could be a market for specialized workshops. But then in the long time -- long term, I think, that batteries will over-survive the car actually. So that will not be a big business in the future.

Okay. Thanks for that. Any more questions? Please raise your hands. In such case, we just -- I think there were no further questions then. So you will have plenty of time to ask questions to the management team, of course, later on as well. But we are entering now the next item, and that is the guided tour. And if we go to the next slide, we can see our guides. And they are Kim Storbank, our COO here in Denmark and Michael , as you've seen. So you will be guided in two groups. And Michael would take -- if you go to the next slide, the names that you can see under his -- that is Group 1 and Group 2 is -- sorry, Kim Group 1; Michael, Group 2. So if you just -- as we did a couple of minutes ago, go at that door, they will guide you and take you out to the warehouse, and it will take around 45 minutes, and then we'll gather here again for a brief summary and end the program. So thanks, see you then.