Good morning, everyone.

CFO Miikka Tarna.

A very good morning to all.

We will first go through a presentation, and after that we are open to questions. Without further ado, Cyrille, please go ahead.

Thank you very much to all for attending our call today for our first half 2026 results. What I can say as an opening word is the implementation of our recovery plan is proceeding as planned.

I would say we are slightly ahead with North American replenishment demand that came out strong in the second quarter for our new items as well as existing range. In comparable currencies, North America grew 19% above previous year.

This has compensated a slower activity in other parts of the world where we have contrasted situations. I would say droughts in some key European countries, that you have seen in the news, have hit our sales, whereas we have had favorable developments in Northern Europe.

Overall, Rapala VMC Group growth landed at 11% in comparable currencies. Growth and continued cost control have flowed directly into EBITDA and comparable EBIT, which increased by almost €5 million from €8.6 million to €13.5 million.

Growth was led with controlled inventories and investments leading to above €16 million of cash flow for the first half compared to €6 million in the first half of 2025. Our innovation pipeline is strong, and our brand strategies are bringing clarity, focus, and long-term projections.

We will increase in the second half gradually our investments in marketing to support our brands to secure all our innovative products are well supported for the millions of passionate anglers we serve worldwide. We're still navigating in uncertain waters with fluctuating tariffs and an unfavorable geopolitical situation that everybody knows.

Nevertheless, as we indicated in our issued guidance last week, we expect today our comparable operating profit to be in the range of €12 to €14 million. Miikka will guide you now in more details in our sales and financial performance.

It gives me the opportunity in closing my opening words to thank the global Rapala VMC team for the great results of this first half. Miikka, floor is yours.

Thank you, Cyrille. Let's walk through the key points of the first half of the year.

Sales landed at €134.8 million for the first half of the year. In comparable currencies, we were up 11% from last year.

Foreign exchange rates had slight or actually even a significant negative impact, our reported sales were up by 7% from last year. Operating environment was affected continuously with this geopolitical instability and tariff volatility.

Despite these macroeconomic headwinds, we showed very good resilience in North American market. Consumer demand improved from last year, and the demand the pull was strong.

This, of course, then compensated for the rather slow European market. European market was a little bit subdued.

Consumer demand was dampened by the drought conditions in certain parts of Europe. If we move forward and look a little bit closer to the regions and markets, we can see here that North America is almost 60% of our global sales.

We have shown strong growth in the North American market for the last couple of years. We are up in comparable currencies 19% year-over-year in North America.

In Q2 Q1 and Q2 were rather similar growth, Q2 comparable sales increased by 18%. We had very good load in deliveries in Q1, and this continued with the consumer pull pulling the products out of the shelves.

Our replenishment sales remained very strong in Q2 of the of the year. Here, from the product categories and brands, it's noteworthy to say that the flagship Rapala brand led the sales growth, but we were happy to see that the growth remained very broad-based across all of our key brands.

In the European markets, we had a good start for the year. We were up in Q1.

We had good load in orders. The season looked to be better as as previous season, but then then the heat waves and the drought conditions came in, and actually in Q2 our sales decreased decreased by 4% in comparable FX.

Here, the Nordic countries were not that affected by the heat wave and the drought conditions. In Nordic countries, we were able to show a little bit better growth compared to the Continental European markets affected by the heat wave.

Here, as well, our strategy implementation continues, key Rapala and Okuma brands exceeded prior year level, while sales in some of some other brands which have greater exposure to the Continental European markets affected by the weather conditions showed a little bit decreased sales. In Rest of the World region, sales growth continued strong in Q2, Q2 comparable sales increase was 11%, and first half we are up 9%.

Currencies don't have a major impact didn't have a major impact in the sales of this region. Growth continues to be driven mainly by the Latin American markets where we have positive momentum continuing.

We have good consumer pull, and also growth there is supported by the new Okuma distributorship in Chile. In the Asian markets, those markets remain challenging for us with the global trade disputes continuing on consumer sentiment, fuel prices going up, less discretionary spending.

We are, of course, still experiencing that local strengthening local competition in those Asian markets. Then on profitability, which is showing a nice trend of improvement, we landed with comparable operating profit for H1 with €13.5 million or 10% of sales, 57% increase from last year.

This profitability was, of course, naturally primarily driven by the increased sales volumes in the open water markets. We were also able to secure our sales margin, which improved slightly from last year, and also we continued our focus on maintaining operating expense level and lowering the break-even point.

In the reported operating profit, which landed higher at €15.8 million, we have an impact of €2.5 million from the IEEPA tariff refunds in the US. With these results, we had slightly lower financial expenses, slightly higher tax expense, and net profit for the first half of the year landed at €8.5 million, which is €6.2 million higher compared to last year.

Earnings per share landed at 19 cents per share. Then next, let's look at our cash flow.

Starting from inventory levels, inventory landed €2.1 million lower compared to last year at €80 million. Here, the currencies play against us, currency exchange rates increased our inventory value by €1 million.

Organic decrease in inventory was €0.8 million, and we had a net realizable value allowance which the allowance increased and decreased our inventory value by €2.3 million. Then on the right side, if we look at our cash flow, our cash flow from operations increased by €10.5 million year-over-year in H1, landed at €16.7 million.

We had less capital tied in net working capital, which brought a €3 million benefit in our cash flow. If we look at the cash flow excluding the working capital impact, our cash flow landed at €18.5 million, which is €7.5 million higher than last year.

Capital expenditure remains roughly at last year level, again, the same same same capital expenditure targets here: manufacturing capacity maintenance investments and also investments in new products, which is, of course, a key investment for us to maintain the new product excitement in market. Last year, we had a disposal of €1.1 million from the sale of real estate in Finland.

This year, the disposals were very minimal. Let's move on to the last slide of my presentation.

Our deleveraging is progressing. Net interest-bearing debt landed at €60 million, which is it is higher, €1.4 million higher compared to last year, but here the comparison is a little bit flawed.

We have to take into account that we have hybrid. Last year, we had €30 million hybrid.

Now, we have €25 million hybrid, and the hybrid is considered as part of equity. Here more meaningful comparison is looking at 2025 Q4 and comparing that to Q2 where we show an almost €13 million decrease in our indebtedness.

Leverage covenant landed at 2.28, the improvement that we've been working towards is now showing results. Gearing there on the right side of the slide is slightly higher, and this is again explained by the lower hybrid capital as hybrid is considered as part of equity in the IFRS statement.

Our IFRS equity decreased by some €3 million, but here we have to recall the hybrid impact.

That concludes the presentation part. If we have any questions now on the phone lines, we would like to have those first, and then let's see if we have any other questions.

Yes, hi. Good morning, it's Joonas Häyhä from OP.

Can you hear me?

Yes, good morning.

Yes, good morning, Joonas. Good,

good. A couple of questions.

Firstly, regarding the updated guidance, could you walk us through your thinking around demand and cost development in the second half? What are the key uncertainties and moving pieces in the second half, and what are the things that you have a fairly good visibility into?

One of the key uncertainties was the the July change in in the in the in the tariffs, US tariffs. The new Section 301 tariffs that we now are have been published are not as unfavorable as we had expected.

That's quite a quite a was important. There are still more news to come after Labor Day in September, but we feel more confident that it will not have as an adverse effect as we had expected.

That's that's a quite impacting point. It's our latest sales development.

We are in a replenishment mode. We don't have a very strong visibility of our sales, and and the larger part of our year now in our open water season is is behind us.

As we had already mentioned in Q1, we had a good winter for us follows a good winter. The the winter item pipeline is clean due to a strong winter last year for mainly our US operations, and so the the presales have been have been positive for our latter part of the year.

Thank you. If I can just continue, you mentioned the clean winter pipeline.

Do you refer to winter fishing? Could you comment on what are the dealer inventory levels in winter sports in the Nordics?

The winter I mentioned is winter fishing, which is much more significant for us than our winter sports activity. The winter sport activity for us is now at a controllable, reasonable low level.

We have had improved inventory levels in the winter sports. It's been much slower than the absorption of our other COVID overstocks because we had a very high peak COVID, and a much harder slowdown, and the opportunities to sell these inventories are much more limited because the conditions to, as as a Finn, the conditions to exercise that leisure need really very specific environment.

Honestly, it's improved every year, but it's not, I would say, optimal yet.

Thank you.

It's my overall impression, but then it's still not a super exciting environment.

That's good color. Then moving on to the cost side, you had quite good cost control in the first half.

Maybe a question about the second half. Do you foresee any cost pressures in the second half?

You mentioned the increasing brand investments, that is one thing obviously, but could you comment on the magnitude and perhaps other costs as well, including raw materials which will probably increase because of the oil price and that moving on to plastics and things like that?

On the raw materials, our philosophy is we secure our margins. That's a strict guideline from We are a very large global group, not quite with a big regional reach.

Here the instructions are very clear: we safeguard our margins. If it affects top line, then it will affect top line, but margins first.

That has been our approach with all the, as you mentioned, the price pressure on the raw materials and the plastics. On the overall fixed cost, what concerns our infrastructure cost or admin, we are very strict and will continue to find efficiencies.

All the support functions, where we are accelerating is in product development, in marketing, also internal resources for future growth.

Yeah. Thank you.

Then maybe a question regarding H1 sales, and specifically the sales mix between consumables and durable goods in the North American and European market. What kind of demand have you seen towards the more expensive durable goods?

Has the consumer sentiment improved in these categories?

Our exposure in North America to durables is still limited. We had last year strong introductions in 13 Fishing, which is our durables brands for North America.

In 2025, we had really successful combo introductions. This year, we didn't have such a pipeline of new products, the sales have been living on past year introductions.

You always have second year after strong new products a natural slowdown for us as suppliers. Our exposure was very limited.

In Europe, So, our main brand is Okuma, which is in the very good value for money segment, which is actually well-positioned in today's market environment.

Yeah. Thank you.

Then finally, a question related to the inventory level. You had the change in the provision or allowance, whatever you want to call it.

Could you elaborate what was this related to, more specifically?

Yes. It was slightly higher, If I go back a little bit with our inventory management and our supply chain, as we have put a lot of focus on this and the demand planning.

It's part of that overall process that we also review the inventories for obsolescence allowance. It's part of the overall assessment making sure that our inventory stays healthy and being very proactive in identifying where we have inventory risk, making sure that we have the provisions in place.

Also kind of it's a little bit tied to also internal processes, we call it NRV, net realizable value provision so that we are proactive with the NRV provisions so that internally we also then incentivize all the markets and the sales teams to then improve inventory turn by clearing the obsolete and slow-moving items.

Good. Understood.

Thank you very much, that's all I have at the moment.

Thank you.

We have a couple of questions also on chat. First questions about the increased marketing spend on the H2, and the question is that what are the main focus areas where we see opportunities in, and how quickly do we expect this expenditure to affect our top line?

We are working on streamlining our brand portfolio. That's been our main strategic focus in last 12 months, which we've been working on to increase the visibility of all our identified top-tier brands: so Rapala, VMC, Sufix, Okuma.

Rapala being our flagship, and so the opportunities will be in multiple areas around Rapala. You'll see when it comes, I think.

I won't spoil all that we are working on for our consumers. How do you expect this expenditure to affect your top line?

How quickly? It will support the growth plan we have in our strategic planning.

It's a necessity. The exact relationship is very difficult to assess.

The second question, shall I continue?

Then we have a question on the pick-up of product development and marketing expenditures and how these will affect the inventory levels. Does the current levels give enough room to operate toward the growth investments?

Here our key guideline is improving turns. Yes, we are going into new product categories with our flagship Rapala brand, with exciting innovative products.

If extending that portfolio will have inventory impacts, at the same time we are cutting other items, really maintaining and overall reducing our number of stock keeping units. The main guideline is we need to improve our turns gradually: sustained growth, free cash, and improve our turns without breaking the growth.

It's a fine line. That's the way that you've seen in the past year and reporting that we are improving our turns.

We see a lot of opportunities to continue improving these turns with better forecasting tools, lower minimum order quantities, faster supply chain, and etc. All the usual tools that we have, It's a lot of small streams that we are working on.

Okay. Then we have a question about if there's extraordinary things behind the high H1 tax rate?

I can pick up that question. We do have some withholding taxes that we have recorded in H1.

I believe they were actually in the Q2. Those are related to internal repatriation of profit, internal dividends, which incur those withholding taxes.

That did increase our effective tax rate. I would say, without this withholding tax payments, our effective tax rate would be below the 30% level.

Okay. Then we have one more question that what kind of net working capital impact and cash flow you're expecting for Q3 and Q4?

Yes, that's an excellent question. For Q3, as we have showed now higher EBITDA and higher volumes, we expect to have slightly better cash flow compared to last year, of course, driven by the higher volumes.

We are still getting cash in from the summer fishing season, and the season is still continuing in many parts of the world. Q3, we do see it in a positive manner.

Then what happens, at the same time we start preparing for the winter fishing season, we start to have cash outflows for the winter fishing season. Now, as Cyrille also mentioned, a good season is followed by another good season, we expect the cash flow roughly to be on the same level as last year in regard of the winter fishing season.

Then in Q4, the cash flow is quite dependent on the load in orders for the subsequent year. We start building working capital for 2027, and then the Q4 cash flow is very dependent on how the load in orders and how the planning goes for 2027.

We have a good product pipeline for '27 as well. We have lots of new product introductions, but more information on that would follow then when we have better visibility on the subsequent year.

Usually, the Q4 cash flow is negative.

I think that there was no more questions, and as there are no more questions, we conclude this call. I wish everyone good fall season, and keep on fishing and tight lines.