Dellia Group AS

Dellia Group AS

17.30
NOK
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1.24EPS
18.44P/E
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Nov 19Next Earn

Q3 FY2025 · Earnings Call TranscriptNovember 20, 2025

Operator

Welcome to this third quarter presentation, Delia. Today we have the CEO, Jan; we have the CFO, Magne; and we have the CEO in Norway, Dag, also with us.

The way we will do this is that Jan will go through the presentation, and later we will have the Q&A. Then you can submit your questions in the Teams function or send me an email directly.

With that, over to you, Jan.

Jan Storli Eriksen

Thank you. Good morning, and welcome to Delia Group ASA third quarter results.

Revenue this quarter, 205 million, up from 80 million last quarter. Year-to-date Q3, 485 million, up from 185.9 million same period last year.

Delia are recognizing revenue when delivering our products to the grocery store. However, the underlying factor driving the long-term growth and revenue in Delia are when consumers are buying the products out of the stores.

The reason for the increase in revenue this quarter relates to mainly three factors. The main factor is ROS, rate of sales out of the stores.

We had increased rate of sales on all the products, meaning that our consumers buy [more of the units?] from the existing stores.

We added on around 20% more new stores in the quarter, also adding to increased revenue. However, the percentage of adding more stores is much less than the 156% increase in revenue.

We also listed new products in the quarter, adding to the increase in revenue. Adjusted EBIT, and here we have adjusted primary for IPO expenses around 10 million.

Adjusted EBIT 40.3 million versus 7 million last quarter. Year-to-date, we have 81.5 million adjusted EBIT versus 8.8 million last quarter.

The reason for the increase in EBIT relates to first we improved our gross margin from 34% to 36%, caused by optimized logistics. We increased number of bags per display, number of display per carton, you can reduce number of container, which is part of Delia's ongoing environmental focus.

Then it's scaled more volume, higher ROS and scaling volume on a better gross margin, simultaneously while we are focusing on controlling the increase in operational expenses as a result of higher activity, leading to the increase in EBIT. Let's look further on ROS, as I mentioned, as an important factor for understanding Delia's growth.

We have NielsenIQ data here for Norway and Sweden, meaning the data for how many units the stores are selling. Here we have data for five major grocery chains: Coop in both countries, NorgesGruppen, REMA 1000 in Norway, and Axfood and ICA in Sweden.

We sold 3.2 million units out of the stores in this quarter versus only 1.6 million units out of the same stores last quarter. And 8.7 million units were sold out of the stores versus 4.1 same period nine months last year.

This is showing that we have a great product loyalty and a lot of repeat purchasing of the product. Another important observation is that Delia products are often among the top 10 in the snack category in grocery retail stores.

We belong to the dried fruit category, and the dried fruit category is a subcategory under snack. If you're looking on the whole snack category, we are often among top 10 in that category.

That show Delia's ability to compete in traditional snack category and explaining why we are more than doubling units sold in Norway and Sweden year-to-date. This is our market share data, and first we can look on the market share in Norway in the category named other dried fruit and dates.

In that category in the quarter, Delia had a market share of 51.8%, up from 33% same period last year. In Sweden, we can look at the category dried fruit.

In this quarter in Sweden, we had 23.9% market share versus 14%, and similar results looking on nine months year-to-date September in both countries. I think it's important to look on the category itself, and Delia has a 50% market share in Norway.

Let's look on the category other dried fruit and dates, what happened with its category this quarter and year-to-date this quarter. From year-to-date quarter 24, it was 298 million in this category.

It increased to 393 million year-to-date Q3 25, where Delia represents 74% of the growth in the category. Delia driving the whole category of dried fruit and dates in Norway.

The same trend we see in Sweden. Here the category is named dried fruit, and the category was year-to-date Q3 24, 706 million, and it grew to 882 million year-to-date Q3 25, where Delia in Sweden represented 69% of the growth in the category.

We are driving the category. We can say that Delia went into a low-interest category as dried fruit, converted and changed the category into an indulgence category.

I think it's fair to say we're expanding the category on dried fruit category, and I want to show a little bit more why we are thinking so. In 2022, we made market research asking why people are buying our products.

Specifically, we asked the question, if you were to eat more dried fruit, which product will you buy less of? The answer we got that time in 2022 was chocolate, potato chips, and sweets.

We did another research this year with more than 3,000 participants, also with Norstat, who did the first research. The answer are the same, that Delia are capture volume from the Nordic confectionery and snack market.

This is a massive market of 66 billion, and we are taking a step driving and going into that category. If we capture 1% of that category, it's 660 million turnover.

If we take 2%, it's 1.3 billion. I want to take a step deeper into understanding the company so you as investor can better track our company and understand our company going forward.

We have now seen that we have increased revenue. We have taken a large market share.

We are driving a category. It's fair to maybe look at Delia as a category innovator and a category challenger into snack.

What pillars are Delia standing on succeeding doing so? I think that we can see there's a new category in the grocery market in making.

We are calling that category a better choice snacking category, and there are four pillars that we are standing on in creating that. One is taste.

Everything is about taste of the product, and all consumer survey shows that taste is number one. Two, long-term strategic partnership with Kierum, our main supplier, and capacity.

Three, product development and innovation. Last, developing good partnership with retailers and establish efficient marketing.

Let's first look on pillar number one, which is taste. For us to deliver an indulgence and a taste experience to our consumer, we need access to high-quality, fully ripened fruit.

On this picture on the left here, you can see a dried mango. When they're working on dried fruit, we are working on drying it to perfection, meaning that our aim that our dried fruit products shall taste the same as fresh fruit.

On the right side, you can see our Dippis product, where we are working to create a perfect taste balance between chocolate and dried fruit. In this case, we are using real chocolate, and the most healthy part of chocolate is cacao, and here we are using 60% cacao.

Then we look on quality. We have an office in Shanghai with about 20 people fully linked and integrated monitoring our supply chain, and all the batches we are exporting are being tested by third-party lab Eurofins.

Then we come to pillar number two, where I mentioned that we are relying on having access to ripe fruit. The way we can do that is we're working long-term planning with, in this example here, Kierum.

We are planning long-term ahead and enabling the factory to set up contract farming. This contract farm supports with a stable year-round and fair pricing and gives us access to high-quality, ripened fruit.

Then we come to the capacity, and you can see from the picture in 2022 how the factory looked like when Delia signed agreement and started cooperation with Kierum, and how we now today have, together in partnership with Kierum and our team in China, developed the factory, as you can see from the picture here in Q3 2025. We have expanded the factory now into 40,000 square meter, employing 3,000 local people in the harvest season and 600 people year-round.

Furthermore, we keep expanding the factory on the right, where you can see we have made space for the factory. Around the red circle, you can see the original building.

On the back of that, we're also now building another new building, and all of that capacity and increase will come up to 50,000 square meter of buildings. Here we are producing our dried mango.

We also having the production line for our dates and pitting, automatically pitting of the dates, removing the stone with equipment, machinery automatically, as well as our new facility for flavored dates will be available end of this year. We are also doing the flavored mango here in addition to that, and we also have our Dippis production facility.

The factory has certifications like GlobalG.A.P. for the farming, Sedex, SMETA, BRC Food, and IFS.

This strong partnership is not only ensuring supply for growth, but it's also through responsible and sustainable sourcing practices. This is a picture of our headquarter here in Oslo Science Park, where we have our food innovation lab.

On the left side, you can see our new product innovation called Fruit Fusion, where we use mango as a base and adding some flavors, for example, freeze-dried strawberry powder on the mango. The last pillar is the partnership with grocery stores and retailers.

Delia is taking a holistic view on the whole value chain, starting with contract farming and fair trade and fair pricing, leading up to a factory where we have capacity and technology development, integrating with our team in China supplying equipment and machinery and ingredients, as well as we have our food innovation lab here in Oslo making innovation and taste panels for improving taste and developing new taste, and enabling also have product innovation. The volume and innovation and sustainable sourcing, all of this leading up to the base for having strong partnership with retailers, and that again giving us wide retail coverage and good placing in the stores.

Finally, we can look a little bit on the numbers again. We went through revenue and adjusted EBIT.

Here we have also the EBIT margin, we saw the gross margin as I explained previously, and you can see that our EBIT without adjustment for this quarter is 29 29.1 million and year-to-date 65.3 million. That's profit after tax this quarter, 19.6 million, and year-to-date Q3 25 profit after tax, 42.5 42.4 million if you did not adjust.

That's Delia paid for all the IPO costs over the company. Here we are looking at revenue per operating segment, and we have made a structure now for this quarter report, we also made a structure for this presentation, and we will keep that exact structure going forward so you can track our operating segments, you can track our performance parameters and benchmark.

This is again for enabling all our shareholders, our partners to look and understand our company. The performance parameters we are working on are presenting here the same performance parameters our team are working on improving every day in the company.

Operating segment here, we have the operating segment is per country, and you can see that Sweden is our biggest market this quarter with 62.1 million, followed by Norway and Denmark and Finland and then pan-Europe. Year-to-date this quarter, we have around 163 million turnover in Sweden, 136 turnover in Denmark, and 130 million in Denmark sorry, 136 million in Norway, 130 million in Denmark, and we have pan-Europe at 10 million, which is the first year where we have income outside the Nordics.

Asia so far this year is 31.1 million, and Asia is an interesting segment for us because, first of all, our office in Shanghai is, first of all, operational hub looking after the quality and supply chain development. We also have direct export of private label of food dietary supplements out of China leading to 31.1 million so far this year, which is a new business segment for the company that we started with in February this year.

In addition to that, as we're writing in the quarter report, we have now successfully registered our brand of Sun Shine Delight in the Chinese market, and we are evaluating now how we can also look at utilizing the office for setting up sales on an e-commerce in the Chinese market. This is going through gross profit, and both gross profit and EBIT, we are then going to look at this at reporting segments.

Here we are aggregating our operational segments into reporting segment. Our company has chosen three reporting segments, which are Nordics, which we look at as our home market, which is the profitable segment, and then we have pan-Europe, which is our new market development, which is currently losing money, and then we have Asia, which, as I just described, is our operational hub, direct export of private label of food nutritions and dietary food supplements, as well as potentially in the future very soon launching e-commerce and selling our brand in the Chinese market as well.

This is our adjusted EBIT per segment, and we've went through that on the first slide, but you can see Nordics, as I mentioned, is contributing, of course, to the EBIT with 66.7 million in the Nordics, where we are investing 7.7 million so far this year in developing markets in Europe. Asia contributed with 16 million also in EBIT.

This is our balance sheet, where we this quarter year-to-date have assets of 363 million. Mainly we have current assets, which are composed of three items: it's cash in the bank, it's inventories, and receivables.

We are quite simple and easy company to understand. We have also non-current assets, which relates to our right of use of the office in Oslo Science Park, including our food innovation lab.

We are financing these assets by mainly equity, which now is 181 million this quarter, as well as short-term interest-bearing current liabilities, mainly through payables to factories, letter of credits, which we are issuing more and more, as well as some overdrafts in the bank. This is our cash flow.

We have a free cash flow from operating activities, 10.5 million this quarter. We're not converting the whole EBIT to free cash, meaning that part of the EBIT is still tied up in inventories and receivable.

Here we are working on a new banking structure now, which we will come back to once we have completed that, and where we are working on having a larger part of letter of credit financing our inventories at long credit times, and then we are planning to sell those invoices and the products, and sell the invoices by factoring so we can get paid before the LOCs financing the inventories are due. If we succeed with that model in a good planning and good structure, we can aim for having a very high or try to have almost 100% conversion of EBIT into cash, meaning that our company get cash and we can invest further for growing the company, as well as for maintaining our planned dividend policy, where we're planning to pay 50% of net profits out in dividends twice a year.

Then we're back here to the summary of the presentation, and it will repeat a little bit what I just have said that we are taking a very holistic view on this ecosystem, where we're starting with the farmer on contract farming, and setting up good agreements and good planning so they can make money as well and invest in their farm, for example, irrigation, planting new trees when the new trees need to be maintained, and so on. We are working on capacity with the factory where the factory itself has a healthy, good business, as well as then supplying up to the brand, where we are developing that.

Our aim here is, of course, delivering the taste experience and indulgence to our consumer. By doing so, lifting up contract farming, lifting up capacity, working on developing the brand, we are aiming for making a global brand expanding into Europe and China and the world.

Thank you very much, and now we will look on Q&A. I haven't seen the Q&A, I'm quite curious what it will be, but...

Operator

Thanks, Jan. We also have now Dag on stage, CEO in Norway.

We received some questions. I think we can start with one regarding the distribution channel.

In the report, you write that there is further upside in the Nordics through a wider distribution. Is it possible to share some insight on what you mean by that?

Jan Storli Eriksen

Jan... is that Dag or me?

Operator

Wider distribution...

Jan Storli Eriksen

I can explain that. I think what we're saying there is when we starting partnership with a retailer, it takes time to reach the potential with the retailer.

Maybe in the beginning you maybe get a listing. For example, if you look on Europe, for example, you can take Morrisons as an example.

That's outside Nordics, of course. We started listing this year, but we are in one position in one shelf with one placement.

There's a lot of opportunity to grow within Morrisons. For example, they have smaller stores that you might not be present in.

They also have maybe potential for secondary placements in the store. That goes with almost every retailer we work with.

We can work with them in a strategic way to work with them to make the most profitable square meter in the store. That's the target what we're aiming for.

We want them to make the most profitable square meter in the store. Maybe you start in one position, you can change a position, you can add positions, and so on.

That is a year-long work of improvement. That's what we mean by wider distribution, more potential.

We don't see that we have reached the full potential in the Nordics even in our coverage, all the stores.

Operator

Perfect. Then, is it possible to give some insight on sales per category?

The split between Sun Shine Delight, Dippis, and Dates. How you see a little bit on the growth, whether or not some of the categories are more exposed to sellout situation given your capacity constraints?

Thanks.

Jan Storli Eriksen

We can also comment on that. Sun Shine Delight, first of all, now we're doing a rebranding, as I write in the quarter report.

We're doing a rebranding. We're making Sun Shine Delight on all the product range.

The classical Sun Shine Delight range is, of course, as it was when we also did the IPO, the biggest line. Dippis is a line which is accounting for maybe, I would say 20% of company turnover now, but it takes time to develop the capacity of Dippis.

Dippis is where we work with dried fruit and chocolate for making a perfect taste balance, and using real chocolate, 60% cacao. We see great potential in that segment, and launching more products in that segment, and we are working on that, and that's why we are doing a lot of expansion on the factory.

We have capacity constraints, as I write in the quarter report, both in Q3 and Q4, there's not more capacity available for us neither this quarter or next quarter. I'm writing in the report that we will have ease of capacity from January next year, meaning we have much more upside.

As we also wrote in the report, we see a very positive outlook and a strong momentum for all the brands. The date-based product has not been successful for our company.

It was only a few percentages of revenue. We have to work and relaunch that under our new brand, Sun Shine Delight, and we will do that with a new way of producing the product, with new dates, new flavors.

We are working very hard on that right now. We are setting up a new production capacity for that in Kierum, where we have bought a lot of equipment and make a new factory production line for that.

We will come back to that with a relaunch in the market and go back to the root where we look on real taste, high quality, and then go back and conquer also in that area. Then

Operator

we have one questions on the capacity increase that you just mentioned. Is there any risk related to delays, ramp-up of that production capacity?

That's also something we're working on every day, right?

Jan Storli Eriksen

Of course it's risk. It's not complete straightforward.

I want actually mention that when you can see the picture on the presentation, how the factory looked like in 2022, and then you can see how the factory look like now in the third quarter. To go from that small building, expanding from that building to 40,000, and now up to 50,000 in February with 3,000 employees, it's a massive step forward.

You need technology and equipment. It is engineering.

You need training, and we're working very hard with our team in China to transfer technology, transfer training, transfer equipment from Chinese manufacturers into Kierum, together with their engineering team, learning and growing. You have to train workers.

For example, for what we are now aiming for here is having 300 workers permanently working only on Dippis, fixed, right? The training of that work staff, recruiting and training workers to do that in parallel with we are building capacity and expansion.

It's a complex process, and a lot of parameters needs to fit. Yes, there's risk involved, but I think that we are good ahead now, and I'm very positive that what we are writing here is that this will ease from January onwards.

Operator

Perfect. I think that was the final question.

If you have any closing remarks before we finish off?

Jan Storli Eriksen

No, I think that's fine. Okay.

Thank you very much, everybody, for logging in.