Hello and welcome to the CDON Group Q2 2026 earnings call. My name is Hjalmar Jernström and I'm an analyst, and I'm joined today by CEO Fredrik Norberg and CFO Carl Andersson.

Welcome gentlemen.

Thank you. Welcome everybody.

Together with me, as usual, we have our CFO Carl Andersson, who will join us in a bit. First, some background.

CDON Group operates two marketplaces, CDON and Fyndiq in the Nordics. We have 3 million active customers, 100 million annual visits, and 3,000 active merchants.

We operate an asset-light scalable business with an efficient working capital structure, and we are in a highly attractive market potential with the anomaly of how we shop online in the Nordics compared to the rest of the world, where you utilize marketplaces in much higher extent. We will also get back a little bit to the asset-light part since we now can also disclose that we are closing down our 1P business, from now on we are a pure 3P marketplace player.

To summarize this quarter, it's a quarter of top-line growth and front-loaded investments. We do have a volume expansion across both segments, 13% GMV growth, but with a reported GPAM of minus 10%, partly affected by non-recurring effects that we will dive deeper in later on.

We also have a reported negative EBITDA. This trickles down from the negative GPAM, but also due to our front-loaded growth investments, some non-recurring distortions, and our continued higher marketing cost, which yielded an EBITDA of -7.3 million SEK compared to last year of +0.4.

Happy to report that our large European merchants, as we call them the giants, continue to scale, and they now make up 6% of our total GMV, and our key growth initiatives are on track, and we expect to see the operational leverage to start by the end of this year. Looking at the numbers high level, GMV north of 500 million SEK with a growth of 13% compared to last year, our GPAM 44 million SEK, 10% lower than last year, and EBITDA -7.3 million SEK.

Let's dig a little bit deeper into this. First, really happy and proud to be able to report that we have five consecutive quarters of positive GMV growth.

Trying to summarize this quarter, it was a really eventful quarter containing both expected and unexpected items, and we will do our best to try to unfold all these different items. First up, we are executing on our growth initiatives that we have been talking about now for about six months.

It's according to plan, and according to plan also, we have front-loaded costs that will drive future returns. We also this quarter have some non-recurring distortions.

They are present both this year and last year, and they are hopefully clearly explained throughout this call. Then we have a consequence from our strategic supply focus.

On CDON, we have a focus on high volume, low take rate type of categories, such as home electronics, and merchants that deliver a good quality and a good customer experience. This translates into lower take rates on CDON.

Last but not least, as we have been talking about, I think for more than a year now, we have continued high marketing cost. Not necessarily that our paid marketing is more inefficient, but we still have this shift of our marketing mix from direct and organic traffic into paid traffic, and this increases our marketing cost over gross profit.

We are mitigating this, and the mitigation is to unleash the brand marketing later this fall, focus on better customer experience—to have happy customers returning is the best way of marketing—and improved SEO architecture in the platform that hopefully will be enabled later this year. I try to drill this down one level further and to bridge into our GPAM and EBITDA.

We have the baseline effects, investments, and product mix. Looking at the first row, we are talking about the non-recurring baseline effects.

For CDON, this includes the 1P face-out loss that I mentioned in the beginning. We have now exited the 1P business, and with that selling the last pieces in the warehouse that generated a loss, that's a one-off.

We still believe that long-term 1P is a strategic part of building a marketplace, but 1P business for us have for long time yielded a loss, and now we have said that let's focus first on 3P and let's optimize that the best way we can, and then we can maybe get back on focusing on 1P in the future. We also in the quarter had a positive contribution from merchant performance fees for CDON.

This was introduced last year, comparing to this quarter with last year, we did not have any merchant fees last year, which was introduced later last year. Moving over to Fyndiq, we had one-off merchant performance fees last year, which was higher than usual, and the net compared to last year was much higher last year, and this was also deliberate to purging non-performing merchants and increasing the quality of our supply.

On a group level, we have a one-off contribution from platform partner from last year that Carl will explain a little bit more on. On the next row, we have our growth investments we have been talking about for some time.

We are talking about the brand marketing cost for both CDON and Fyndiq. Now it's much more into creating our commercial films that we will release during the fall, only cost and no revenue from those investments.

On group level, we have our OPEX from our increased tech boost and retail media, which also have only cost and no revenue in this quarter. Then we have the underlying business, the third row.

I have already talked about the lower take rate, which is a part for CDON and a consequence of our strategy going for high volume, low take rate type of categories such as home electronics. For the group, we also have the increased marketing cost that I just talked about.

Trying to quantify the impact from this bridge, summarizing these two first rows, we see that this had a baseline distortion with a negative impact of -6.3 million SEK on GPAM and -11 million SEK on EBITDA compared to last year. You really need to be focused here because we are both adding and deducting both this year and last year, we're trying our best to give you a clear explanation.

Looking into our giants, we're happy to show that we continue to increase. Now the giants make up 6.3% of our total GMV.

As a marketplace nerd, it's really lovely to see this graph showcasing the beauty of a marketplace. The bars are showing the GMV and the line is showing the supply.

Here you see the classic correlation between increased supply and increased sales, which we can see here in front of us. A very good continuous progress from our big European giants.

A short update on our growth initiatives before we continue deeper into the numbers. As I mentioned, retail media is live on CDON for our merchants to promote their products on site.

We are now live with a beta test on Fyndiq as well. However, no revenue has been reported in this quarter yet.

Looking at the Nordic growth, we see a quite strong expansion in this area for CDON. Our Nordic countries have grown with 12% versus last year's of 2% growth, and Fyndiq grew with 51% compared to 38% last year.

This was maybe a little bit of an anomaly. We shouldn't expect this powerful growth in the Fyndiq Nordic countries, but we saw a quite strong growth now correlated to seasonal sales on Fyndiq.

Looking into brand marketing, as I mentioned, we have created and focused on the creative concept and also producing the commercial films, generating mainly costs. We have done some small tests on CDON in late June, but still this is a slow-moving target and we can see now that the brand consideration compared to August last year when we started to measure this is going down.

We have a brand consideration of 39% for CDON and 27% for Fyndiq. Tech boost is according to plan, and we have personnel and consultants in place according to plan.

All right, let's continue to unfold this quarter with the financial performance.

Thank you very much Fredrik, and let's start with the financial performance from a reported perspective. As mentioned, GMV grew by 13% as momentum carried over from previous quarters and in both segments.

Net sales is up 3% as we phased out 1P, which had an adverse effect on net sales compared to the 3P part of the business, and we also saw a larger share of Fyndiq as part of group GMV. GPAM decreased 10%, but I will explain and dive into the effects on the next page.

GPAM amounted to 43.5 million. Reported EBITDA of -7.3 compared to +0.4 last year.

This page is important to understand the underlying performance of our business in the quarter, let's spend a bit of time here. To be clear, this is not an adjustment to the figures, it's us trying to make the two periods comparable.

Starting with 2025, there are two items that we need to look into. It's the merchant fees that were high last year.

There was a one-off component to it on Fyndiq, and we also didn't have any merchant performance fees on CDON last year. Net effect of that, 2.1.

We also had a one-off platform partner contribution, which reduced our OPEX last year. A comparable GPAM of 46 million and a comparable EBITDA of -4.7.

Moving into '26, there are three effects that we need to look into. It's the incremental loss from our 1P business, -1.3 million this year.

That drag that has been there for some time is now permanently gone. We invested 2.9 million in brand marketing, which we did not do last year.

As mentioned, it's once again front-loaded, it's developing of the assets and not really media runs or media that is running sales to the business. Lastly, it's the growth OPEX.

There are costs associated with the tech resources, retail media, for example, that we did not have last year. On a comparable basis, GPAM of 47.7 this year and a comparable EBITDA of -1.4.

On a comparable basis, EBITDA is growing by around 3 million, underlying a positive direction. Taking a look at our segments, starting with volume, both segments grew, happy about that, and Fyndiq really stood out on the positive side.

In the CDON segment, we grew 7% versus last year as we saw the European merchants continue to scale, and we also saw continued strong performance in focus categories such as electronics, but also recently mobility. Fyndiq, a very strong quarter, up 30% versus last year.

We had strong seasonal sales in Sport & Outdoor and Kids & Baby, and on top of that we saw very high growth in markets outside of Sweden. Underlying, very happy to see that it's not one category nor one market that is driving this.

This is a broad-based GMV growth that we continue to build our business on. Take rate did decline for the group to 17.6% compared to 18.4% a year ago, but it is all part of the strategic direction that we are running.

It is not an underlying commission erosion, it's a mix effect that we're now seeing. The CDON take rate fell to 12.8% compared to 13.7% last year.

Adjusting or considering the effects that we spoke about before, we argue that 13.1% would have been the take rate this year and 14% a year ago. Fyndiq has returned to the long-term average take rate of around 29%.

The 31.5% last year was high due to the inflated merchant performance fees, but as we can see for a long period of time, 29%, 30% has been a reasonable level for Fyndiq segment. Looking at our marketing costs, there are two things that we need to bear in mind here.

Yes, marketing cost as percentage of GMV increased to 9.3% compared to 8% a year ago, but we also spent 2.9 million in marketing expenses related to brand marketing. Breaking that down into our two segments, a adjusted marketing cost for CDON would have reached 6.7% compared to 6.5%, not too big of an increase, and in the case of Fyndiq, 13.5% versus 12%, that is a larger increase.

That's why it's so important that we continue to focus on customer experience and returning customers, on our SEO structure of the site to continue to drive organic traffic, and in addition, of course, to the brand marketing investments that we are doing. Those are our best bet to counter this development.

Pulling together take rate and marketing cost, we arrive at GPAM. Reported, down 10% versus last year, but on a comparable basis, up 4% versus last year.

CDON was down 17% reported, but when we consider the effects that we have spoken about, it would have been an adjusted decline of 7%. In the case of Fyndiq, the reported decline was 2%, but when adjusting for or considering the adjustments to Fyndiq, that would have been a growth of 17%.

Underlying a strong quarter for Fyndiq and a positive momentum that we can continue to build upon. Looking at our operational expenses and OPEX excluding marketing costs and D&A, it did increase from 48 to 51 million this year.

That includes the 1.7 million of growth OPEX related to our initiatives. However, last year's numbers were flattered by the 3 million of partner contribution.

Actually, on a comparable basis, OPEX is down from 51 to 49. We are actually deploying costs to support our strategic initiatives, yet controlling OPEX.

All of this trickles down to EBITDA. EBITDA reported of -7.3, but that also carries the sort of non-comparable effects that we have spoken about.

Focusing a bit on the right-hand side and where I want you to focus, we continue to see a underlying positive EBITDA, and also the trajectory of our EBITDA is positive, even including the H1 items that we've just spoken about. We expect to see operational leverage on our initiatives towards the end of this year and would be looking forward to further positive EBITDA growth.

Lastly, a few words on our cash and balance sheet. Operating cash flows, cash flow before changes in working capital was -6 million, connected with the investments that we have been doing during the quarter.

A higher end of period cash balance of 141 million compared to 82 million last year. Since last year, we have done the share issue, but this is also a consequence of the improved commercial momentum.

Merchant debt increased to 168 compared to 134 million last year, once again connected with the commercial performance, and it also shows, all in all, this really shows the beauty of our sort of from a working capital perspective, the beauty of the marketplace model. All in all, our balance sheet supports the continued investments in our growth initiatives.

With that, back to you, Fredrik.

Yes. Some key takeaways.

We are building a resilient platform for 2027. We have a top-line growth of 13% that then demonstrates a solid underlying market traction.

We have the 1P retail drag that now is permanently eliminated, leaving us a clean 3P business marketplace footprint. Our front-loaded growth initiatives are on track with operational leverage sitting ahead of us.

With that ending, we are opening up for some Q&A.

That's great. Thank you so much for this presentation.

I figure let's start at the GMV. Of course, like you mentioned, it's a solid growth here.

If we stay at the CDON segment, and of course the onboarding of the giants here, is it possible to speak about these giants in terms of sort of maturity? Do you feel that they are at a level where we could speak of sort of a steady state or is the growth with the giants that you currently have onboarded, do they have a momentum going forward as well?

The latter part. They are not close to being mature.

I'm not sure if they are even halfway through, maybe one of them could be halfway through, something like that. No, it's far away from maturity level.

It's also something for them to understand what's working and what's not working, also to understand all the operational flows with customer service, delivery, and so on. This is something that we emphasize a lot and coach them on, also to understand that it's better to maybe underpromise and overdeliver when it comes to Nordic consumers compared to maybe the European consumers.

No, we have a lot of untapped potential in those giants, and also for the coming ones.

Yeah. Can you say something or give some details on the upcoming ones, maybe something what is in the current pipeline in terms of giants looking forward?

No,

I think last quarter spelled out that it was five giants. This time we didn't spell out the number of them.

It's more than five and more than last time, so that's good. I think we have learned internally a lot on onboarding these first few giants.

We are picking up speed. We learned how to close them faster.

We learned how to onboard them faster. I think what we see now is also that we throughout last year have focused a lot on this, we have quite an impressive backlog of giants that we're now starting to onboard more and more.

It's more to come in that area.

All right. I assume it's safe to say that onboarding going forward will be more efficient and faster while there is a pipeline as well.

Correct.

This is also relating to the growth initiatives, but you mentioned maybe some single-country merchants onboarding looking outside of Sweden. Can you give us an update on this and your maybe sort of investments towards growth outside of Sweden?

Yes,

mainly we see two areas. We're talking about the aggregators.

We have integrated with those aggregators. We talked about that already last quarter.

The next lever there is to really start to attract merchants and onboard. This is something we're doing in partnership with these aggregators to reach out to their merchants and to educate them on why they should sell at our marketplaces and so on.

That's one part of it. The second part is that you mentioned these single-country merchants that we do have mainly focused in the Swedish market, that we now really want to expand and are pushing to expand into the other countries.

There we see that it's quite easy for them to expand, especially into Denmark and also Finland. It's a little bit harder into Norway due to them being outside EU.

Both of these two levers are working quite good for us. They are very cost-efficient obviously, and we see also that we are yielding some returns already in this quarter, which you could see in the growth numbers for the Nordic countries.

All right. Thank you.

Yeah. Staying on the GMV growth, you also mentioned the return of Prisjakt.

Did this have any meaningful impact, maybe if you relate this maybe to an underlying consumer sentiment? Is Prisjakt an impactful item that you returned to this in the quarter?

We will probably not return to Prisjakt as a separate marketing channel if that's what you meant.

Yeah.

Yeah. We are constantly overlooking our different channels, the channel mix, and so on.

Prisjakt was reintroduced now in June. What we can see is that they are very good at these high volume, low take rate type of categories that I mentioned in the beginning of the call, home electronics.

That's really the crown jewel of Prisjakt. We have seen an acceleration in those categories thanks to the introduction of Prisjakt.

At the same time, we have lower take rates in those categories. Also, this is highly competitive products and categories, the marketing cost also increases from this.

We see lower take rate, higher marketing cost, at the same time we increase volume. All in all, what we really need to understand and analyze is that, okay, how much of this trickles down into GPAM and EBITDA that's good for a long-term business as us?

Thank you. Then moving on then to the marketing investments, you already spoke of it, but could you go into a bit more detail, maybe highlighting the traffic investments versus the brand building and the level that we saw now in Q2?

Are you satisfied with the current level of investments and what can we expect going forward?

From brand marketing?

Brand marketing, maybe. Yeah.

Really looking forward to that. I am highly involved myself into this area, especially now since we don't have a new CCO in place.

Still waiting for that. Due to that, I'm very involved in this matter.

Probably even though a CCO in place, I would have been involved because I like this, this is very important for the company. Anyways, we are now doing everything when it comes to the strategic buildup of our brand position, brand messaging, and so on for both segments.

We're also after that creating the creatives and also creating the commercial films. This is what we have been doing during the spring up until now, and only bringing costs to the table.

This will then be pushed to the market later this fall. I will be able to come back with more details on that, maybe not next quarter, but especially the quarter after that.

Okay.

Thank you. Then if we disregard the brand building and look at the remaining part of marketing spend, can you elaborate a bit on the yield that you currently see?

We know some other players in the market are mentioning challenges right now with the yield on ad spend. How do you currently perceive the yield on ad spend and the sort of efficiency in terms of marketing spend?

I can start and then you can fill in, Carl. For us, it's two different stories.

As you can see, for CDON, it's not that big of a challenge. We continue to see the increased marketing cost, but that continues to be as a consequence from the shift, not that the Google Shopping ads or so per se is increasing in cost.

We are actually increasing the efficiency when it comes to the paid marketing channels, but we continue to see the shift from direct traffic and organic traffic into the paid channels. We see that pattern even more when it comes to Fyndiq, and we have clear mitigations for that.

I would say no, we don't see an increased cost for us. At the same time, Google is based on auction and competition, so that could be very specific for different industries or segments in the industry as well.

All right.

Also in the case of Fyndiq, right towards the end of the quarter and actually starting July 1st, the new fee on direct import from outside of EU had an effect on us. We saw consumer prices being increased to sort of offset that increased cost for the merchants.

That had a natural consequence on the fees that we sent to Google, it affected the conversion rate on products. It just shows how delicate our business is, that changes to the conversion rate can instantly throw off kind of the efficiency.

That's typically temporary before the algorithm settles again, but it can sort of have an adverse effect on shorter periods of time.

Okay. Thank you.

Maybe if we stay on the subject of tariffs, because like you mentioned, we saw it towards the end of the quarter. Would you say it's sufficient of a time period to see the full impact of this or in terms of GMV growth or what can we expect?

Have you drawn any conclusions from what you've seen so far?

No, we are 14 days in with this live, no, it's too early. What we've seen is, as Carl mentioned, from mid-June roughly, the merchants started to adjust their prices, effectively adding €3 to the prices of the products.

This had the effect that Google all of a sudden saw that some of these really low price products maybe had a decreased conversion rate due to them getting out of price point, and that all of a sudden pushed Google to re-optimize the algorithm for all of our inventory. Probably we see the worst negative effect from this now.

What we see over time is two things that will happen. Number one is that Google learn what works and not works, we are doing this re-optimization and then have a new base to start from.

That's number one, and that will increase efficiency. Number two is also that we will enable the competition between the merchants.

All the merchants are now just letting this tariffs added on the price, and over time, we saw when this happened when Wish entered into the Nordics, that all the merchants added the tariffs into the prices, but then over time with competition, you see how they start to lower their prices. That's really the beauty of the marketplace, that we have many merchants selling about the same products, especially in the Fyndiq case, and then we have this internal competition that decreases the prices, increases demand, with increased demand, they can decrease the prices even more, and there we have the flywheel effect that you're talking about.

Yeah. Considering the average order value and maybe your price point on Fyndiq as well, do you feel that you will be better off than competitors in terms of this is a fixed fee that is added, I guess?

Definitely. Fyndiq is bargain prices, low-price items, but not that low that Temu.

Temu has a lot of very, very low prices, yeah, it's going to be interesting to see. One theory could be that this is going to hit them harder on those type of products, but at the same time, we have big respect for them being a very agile company as well.

The jury is still out there.

All right, thank you. Then moving on to the growth initiatives, you highlighted where you're currently at in terms of those.

One thing interesting I feel you mentioned, the retail media infrastructure live testing. What type of conclusions can we draw from the live testing right now in terms of the timeline going forward?

Is there anything new to say regarding this?

I would say that the main conclusion is that it works. We have it deployed on site.

We are currently looking into expanding it into other parts of our site. We are currently focused on certain listing pages, we want to expand that to search, we want to experiment with it on the product page, we want to work with banners on our first page and sort of on subsections to the site.

We can see high positive return for merchants that do this well, and we expect that to scale when we add further infrastructure to the site where we could be pushing retail media. Still early stages, we're excited and we're happy to see that it works, and we now look forward to scaling it across both of our platforms.

All right, thank you. Then one question I guess, we saw some solid working capital release now.

Could you elaborate just sort of high level on the cash position right now and how they relate to your ambitions going forward?

I think the overall conclusion is clear that we now have the balance sheet and the cash position to continue to fund the growth initiatives that we set out to do. Cash balance and merchant debt naturally flows and connected with the commercial performance.

When we move into the important second half of the year with even higher GMV and then higher cash flows connected with that, well-balanced and well-positioned for the future, I would say.

All right. Thank you.

Then maybe one final question would be very interesting to hear sort of your perception of the consumer sentiment right now, how they relate to maybe your main markets?

We have been surprised for a couple of quarters now to be honest. We have 13% volume growth.

For us, it's quite strong. Looking at Fyndiq, it has been super strong.

We still see that there are signals that it is a weak consumer market out there, but we don't really see that.

All right. Perfect.

Thank you so much for coming in today and answering our questions.

Thank you.

Thank you.