Pierce Group AB

Pierce Group AB

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Q2 FY2026 · Earnings Call TranscriptAugust 21, 2026

Operator

Welcome to Pierce Group Q2 Report 2026 presentation. During the Q&A session, participants are able to ask questions by dialing pound key 5 on their telephone keypad.

Now, I will hand the conference over to the speaker, CEO Göran Dahlin and CFO Fredrik Kjellgren. Please go ahead.

Göran Dahlin

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Pierce Group's presentation over our results for the second quarter of 2026. I'm Göran Dahlin, CEO of Pierce Group, and I'm joined today by Fredrik Kjellgren, our CFO.

Thank you for joining us. Today we will begin with a brief recap of who we are and where we stand in the European market, followed by a summary of our financial performance in the quarter.

Then we will provide updates on our ongoing transformation and strategic initiatives, before we look ahead to our outlook and growth drivers for the coming quarters. We'll close with a Q&A session at the end.

Pierce Group, we are Europe's number one online destination for motorcycle gear and equipment. We were founded in 2008, and we are the leading European e-commerce platform for motorcycle and snowmobile gear, parts, and accessories.

We operate the online stores 24MX, XLmoto, and Sledstore. 60% of our turnover is done with off-road riders, 35% with on-road riders, and 5% is with snowmobile riders.

We today operate locally adapted websites in 29 European countries. We have the broadest and most differentiated product assortment in the market, including one of the highest shares of private brands.

We offer more than 200,000 articles to more than 1 million customers across Europe. We turn over 1.8 billion SEK and show 3.3% EBIT last 12 months.

We have approximately 295 employees, whereof 157 white-collars, spread over Stockholm, Szczecin, Poland, and Barcelona. We're listed on Nasdaq since 2021.

As I said, we have the broadest and most differentiated product assortment in the market, including one of the highest shares of private brands, and we offer more than 200,000 articles. We started in Sweden, but are now the only true pan-European company in the industry, with over 70% of our turnover being done outside the Nordics.

E-commerce penetration varies across Europe and remains higher in the Nordics and part of Western Europe, while still lower in Southern and Eastern regions, creating room for continued online shift. Within our category, e-commerce penetration is higher in off-road and lower in on-road, where the market is large, larger, but still more underpenetrated online.

Overall, the niche is well suited for e-commerce, where we can offer a superior selection and availability compared to physical stores. The rider bike base continues to grow, and electrification we believe will further broaden the customer base.

Our logistics setup is quite unique for the industry. Our warehouse is located in Northwest Poland and is 37,000 square meters.

We stock there more than 60,000 articles, and we have a deep buffer capacity. This means that we can serve our customers with thousands of orders per day that we pick and pack within 24 hours.

We also have a very efficient setup with Pierce dedicated long-distance haulers that both delivers to national injection points for last mileage, as well as pick up refill and cross-dock orders from our suppliers. The competitive landscape is fragmented and consists of five main segments.

I will not go through the segments now, but I will say that we are one of the largest retailers in our industry, and we have the, we are the only pan-European specialist with our local sites with local language, local payment options, local cust-, customer service, and local delivery partners across our markets. Most other players are strong local champions focused on their home markets, often primarily on-road, and generally with a relatively low private brand share.

Several are financially owned, which could facilitate future consolidation. Overall, the market structure creates a clear opportunity to build a significantly larger pan-European category leader, with the scale to stock a wider assortment, offer superior availability and delivery times, strengthen private brands, improve purchasing power with key suppliers, and unlock meaningful back-office synergies.

Turning to the second quarter results. In Q2, we continued to improve profitability despite the temporary operational challenges in, related to the introduction of our new warehouse management system.

The Q2 EBIT came in, adjusted EBIT came in at 32 million, 34 million SEK compared to 32 million last year. This corresponds to an adjusted EBIT margin of 6.4%, up from 6.2%.

This was achieved while still absorbing approximately 6 million SEK of transformation costs during the quarter. Looking at the last 12 months, adjusted EBIT has now reached 61 million, corresponding to a margin of 3.3%.

We continue to move step by step in the right direction towards our medium to long-term target of an adjusted EBIT margin of 5% to 8%. On the top line, we continue to grow despite the operational impact of the warehouse management system transition.

Q2 sales increased by 3 year, 3% year over year to an all-time high of 537 million. In local currencies, growth was 2%.

At the same time, the WMS implementation temporarily affected both sales and costs, all in a quite significant way. Ahead of the launch, lower campaign activity was forced because we needed to give the warehouse room to train the operators.

During the transition, fulfillment was paused, and post the transition, we had a lower warehouse productivity during the ramp-up period, and that created a significant backlog, both in outbound, but also in inbound. Moving to margins, profit after variable costs came in at 2 million SEK lower than last year, with a significant negative impact of high, of extra freight costs related to our WMS transition.

At the same time, improved performance marketing efficiency helped offset part of this impact. Our focus remains to maximize profit after variable costs in absolute terms, as our business model is extremely scalable.

Overhead costs amounted to 75 million, broadly unchanged from 74 million last year, while decreasing slightly as a share of sales to 14.0%. Q2 included approximately 6 million of transformation costs, primarily related to external consultants and temporary parallel systems during the transition to our new technology platform.

We expect these transition costs to gradually decline over the coming quarters as we stabilize the WMS and continue the rollout of the new e-commerce platform. As previously communicated, we continue to expect Pierce 2.0 to deliver further annual EBIT improvement of approximately 20 to 30 million as the transformation costs disappear.

Part of this has already been realized through lower depreciation and amortization. Finally, we have a very strong financial position with 390 million in cash, and in addition we have 150 million credit facility with no cash amounts drawn at the end of the quarter.

Inventory amounted to 505 million, down slightly from 522 million last year, and we believe inventory levels are well aligned with demand. Overall, this strong financial position gives us significant strategic flexibility.

Moving into some of our, of our KPIs. First, the private brand share.

Over the last 12 months, the private brand share was 35%, unchanged from previous quarter and compared to 37% a year ago. The decline over the year is mainly mix driven, reflecting a very strong growth in external brands as well as somewhat weaker development than targeted in the private brands.

In absolute terms, private brand sales was still strong at 638 million over the last 12 months, and we continue to invest strategically in private label while increasingly focusing our efforts on the brands and categories where we see the strongest potential. Our ambition absolutely remains to accelerate growth, but we're realistic about the time required to build successful new products and categories.

At the same time, we continue to unlock significant growth within our external brands portfolio by improving availability and assortment depth. This remains an important growth driver for us.

Customer satisfaction, this remains a clear strength. We have quite high Trustpilot scores compared to our peers in the industry, although we have during the WMS transition seen impact on our Net Promoter Score, and, but we believe that when we are out of this transition, this will return to the previously high levels, and our Trustpilot score will remain stable at a high level.

Continuing on some of our KPIs, we have an increased, customer base is steadily growing. This is very satisfying to see, and we have a stable AOV year over year.

With that, I hand over to our CFO, Fredrik Kjellgren.

Fredrik Kjellgren

Thank you, Göran. If we zoom in a little bit on the gross margin, you can see that gross profit increased slightly year over year to 231 million SEK, while the gross margin came in at 43.1% compared to 43.7% last year.

The somewhat lower gross margin was mainly driven by mix effects and our active pricing approach. During the quarter, we continued to position prices to support commercial activity and remain competitive in the market.

As before, our objective is to be price-competitive, but not necessarily the cheapest in the market, while carefully balancing growth and margin. Looking at the shipping costs, in-freight amounted to 21 million in the quarter, corresponding to 4.0% of revenues, which was unchanged compared with the same quarter last year, pretty stable.

That said, shipping rates from Asia continued to be very volatile, this is something that we monitor closely. Importantly, in-freight costs affect cash and working capital when inventory is purchased, while they're recognized in the P&L only when products are sold, there is a time lag here.

Overall, our focus remains the same: to grow gross profit in absolute terms by balancing price and competitiveness, marketing efficiency, and margin discipline. Next slide, please.

Now, to give some context to the adjusted EBIT for the quarter. Q2 adjusted EBIT was 34 million, compared to 32 million last year.

This corresponds to 6.4% of the revenue. As in previous quarters, there are also some costs within the adjusted EBIT that are related to transformation, but not classified as items affecting comparability.

During Q2, these amounted to approximately 7 million in total. Around 1 million SEK was due to the accelerated amortization of trademarks, and approximately 6 million were related to transformation costs.

The transformation costs mainly relate to external consultants and overlapping license fees as we operate systems in parallel during the transition of our new tech platform. Excluding these two effects, adjusted EBIT would have been approximately 41 million for the quarter.

The 1 million SEK of accelerated trademark amortization in Q2 will be the final remaining impact from the consolidation of our private brand portfolio. Looking ahead, the transformation costs will continue for some time as we stabilize the new WMS and progress with the rollout of the new e-com platform.

However, we expect these costs to gradually decline over the coming quarters. As Göran mentioned earlier, part of the benefits from Pierce 2.0 have already been realized, mainly through lower depreciations and amortizations.

We continue to expect a further annual EBIT improvement of approximately 20 to 30 million SEK as transformation costs come down and the remaining systems are fully implemented. Next slide, please.

Going over to the overhead costs. Overhead costs remained broadly stable, in absolute terms at 75 million SEK compared to 74 million SEK last year.

As a share of revenue, however, overhead costs improved slightly from 14.1% last year, and this is despite the cost of transformation of about 6 million that we've absorbed in the quarter. These costs mainly relate to the external consultants and parallel license fees connected to the rollout of the tech stack, but they're also some costs related to more operational sort of consultants supporting the WMS rollout.

If we take a step back, look at the progress since the start of the Pierce 2.0, the change is significant. Going back to Q3 2023, we have reduced our white-collar workforce by approximately 100 FTEs, or 40%, from 256 FTEs to 157 FTEs today.

At the same time, the rolling 12 revenue has increased by 17%, and the sales per white-collar FTE, has thus increased by approximately 90, 9-0%, since the launch of Pierce 2.0. This clearly demonstrates the scalability of our business model and the efficiencies we have created through simplifying processes, reducing bureaucracy, and empowering teams to make faster decisions.

Importantly, we have achieved this while continuing to grow the business and carrying the temporary costs for the transformation. Next slide, please.

Heading over to the net working capital, we've seen a significant improvement compared to last year. The improvement is mainly the result of the continued progress in inventory management and our disciplined approach to working capital.

While working on the working capital, we are sort of keeping a close eye on the inventory, and I'm happy to say that the inventory remains well balanced. Going forward, we still see opportunities to strengthen part of the assortment and further improve availability.

Our ambition is to do this without significantly increasing the overall inventory levels. The focus is therefore to continuously improving our purchasing methodology and inventory quality, keeping the stock fresh, acting early on slow-moving products, and maintaining the right inventory in the right areas.

This should allow us to continue supporting growth while maintaining disciplined working capital management. With that, I hand back over to you, Göran.

Göran Dahlin

Thank you, Fredrik. I will finalize with looking forward.

Summarizing a little bit on Pierce 2.0. Since Pierce was started literally in a garage in 2008, it was a successful and fast-growing company.

Following the COVID period, however, the business entered a more challenging phase: the demand was declining, there was a pressure on margins, and the losses accumulated. I joined Pierce in Q2 2023.

Shortly thereafter, in Q3 2023, we launched Pierce 2.0, with clear priorities to return to profitability and get back to sustainable growth, while making the company more stable and scalable. We initiated a major organizational reset in Q3, Q4 2023, where we simplified the structure and significantly reduced the white-collar head count, and then continued to reduce over the years.

At the same time, we took a hard look at our technology platform, and we concluded that the existing tech stack was not fit for purpose. It was underperforming, unstable, and lacked the scalability required for us to expand into new markets and verticals.

As a result, we made the tough decision to replace four of our core IT systems, including our warehouse management system and e-commerce platform. This was a difficult decision.

We knew it would be both costly and time-consuming, but also necessary. We simply had no alternative.

Alongside this, we evaluated our private label portfolio and concluded that sales were spread across too many brands, making it difficult to invest in brands in an efficient way. Some brands also suffered from weakened brand perception due to inconsistency in product quality and lack of clear assortment and brand identity.

We therefore simplified the portfolio from 7 to 3 brands, focusing on Raven in gear, expanding it into the large and highly competitive on-road segment, and ProWorks in parts and accessories, while keeping Course as a tactical brand. We migrated several thousands of products and replaced several thousands of products also.

We partnered with leading designers to strengthen the overall brand and product offering. This transition has been quite hard, to be frank, and this is the reason why the growth rate of the private label has been somewhat lower than we had hoped for.

We are absolutely convinced it has been the right decision, and long term, this is the right thing to do. With fewer brands, we can invest more efficiently in those brands and build real brands.

Then we spent several quarters cleaning up inventory through targeted sales activities for slow-moving goods and more restricted buying. We also made a very large one-time write-off, or write-down, of 40 million SEK of obsolete inventory.

Growth was initially held back as we cleared out slow-moving inventory, but began to recover once we rebuilt the assortment in Q4 2024. We aim to take this position as the true specialist in our industry by building a wider and deeper assortment than anyone else, combined with very competitive delivery lead times.

Since Q3 2024, sales has grown by 17% despite the challenging market, and we have clearly gained market share. Since Q4 2025, growth reported in SEK has slowed down due to currency headwind of 4% to 5% in Q4 and Q1, and this quarter we have been significantly affected by the WMS transition.

Underlying, the business is still growing in a healthy way, albeit slightly lower than the very high year-over-year growth rate with an average of 16% reported in the four quarters of Q4 to Q3 2025. This growth, combined with a 39% reduction in the white-collar head count, as Fredrik said, has resulted in a 90% increase in sales per white-collar employee, something that we are very proud of.

This has demonstrated the efficiency gains of Pierce 2.0 program in a very good way. Looking at the results, we reported an EBIT of -69 million SEK in 2023, and since then we have turned the business around and have been profitable in all quarters, except for a setback in Q1 2025.

Adjusted EBIT improved first to 25 million SEK in 2024, 45 million SEK in 2025, and on a last 12 months basis, we have reached now 61 million SEK despite transformation costs. At the same time, the underlying business has strengthened: the customer base has grown, customer satisfaction and retention has improved, and also employee Net Promoter Score has increased.

As we approach the end of this transformation, we are now gradually moving into the next phase, which we call expansion. With a stronger and more scalable platform, we are in a position to expand into new markets and categories and to explore the consolidation opportunities in a fragmented market.

What's left now in Pierce 2.0? The remaining activities is primarily the rollout of the e-com platform, apart from stabilizing our WMS, which will take the beginning of Q3 to do.

We are slightly later than we anticipated. We had hoped to be able to close everything during Q2; we were not able to do that.

This affects our launch plan of the e-com. In Q4 last year, we launched a beta version of our new e-com stack in four pilot markets where we had no localized sites before.

After a period of improvements, we launched the remaining markets to be localized, primarily in Eastern Europe. We therefore now operate local sites in 29 European countries.

We also migrated Spain and Belgium as pilot markets for the markets where we have had local sites for many years, which we in Pierce call established markets. We will now follow up by migrating the rest of the smaller established markets during August and September.

As we have experienced quite a significant reduction in sales post-launch, and this is expected that this happens normally when you make big changes to your sites, primarily due to the search engines that need to relearn the new structure of your sites, and this takes months to recover, and we have seen this in all the markets that we have launched. As we do that, and we are very keen on protecting the very strong sales period of the Black Friday sales period, we will wait with launching the larger markets, the larger established markets, until December and January.

The transformation costs are connected both to the WMS and the new e-com stack, and as we stabilize the WMS and roll out the e-com stack, the transformation costs will gradually be reduced over the coming quarters. Looking ahead, we are now finalizing the 2.0 transformation, and with a scalable platform, we're entering a new expansion phase.

Apart from defending and growing in our established markets, the rollout of 13 localized markets and continued growth in mountain bike and scooter/moped categories, this will broaden our addressable market, create cross-selling opportunities, and add new streams over time. It will take time to scale, but it will be important contributor to our long-term growth, and I must say that the start of the new markets and the new verticals has been very promising, even if it's a short timeframe.

Finally, the European motorcycle e-commerce market remains fragmented and ripe for consolidation. As the largest and only pan-European listed player with a scalable platform already in place, Pierce is uniquely positioned to participate and potentially lead the next phase of industry consolidation.

This ends our presentation for today, and with that, I hand over for Q&A.

Operator

If you wish to ask a question, please dial pound key 5 on your telephone keypad to enter the queue. If you wish to withdraw your question, please dial pound key 6 on your telephone keypad.

The next question comes from Adrian Elmlund from Nordea. Please go ahead.

Adrian Elmlund

Hi, Göran and Fredrik. Good morning to you.

I think I have three main questions. I'll take them one by one.

Firstly, you're kind of guiding here for continued negative effects from the warehouse management system during Q3, right? I think you said that you expect it to be solved end of the quarter.

Could you perhaps give us some more details on sort of why you expect this and sort of what is more to be done during the quarter, if you will?

Göran Dahlin

Hi, Adrian. Good morning to you.

Good question, thank you for that. There are two different things.

One is the productivity and functionality of the WMS and the operators. It takes time to ramp up a system.

Bitlog that we had before we've had for 10 years, more than 10 years, and been adapting that, improving that. When you launch something completely new like this, it takes some months before you are back to normal productivity.

Then it's also, as we mentioned in the call now, that we've had a big backlog in outbound and inbound, and that takes time to work down. Even if the outbound is almost gone now, we still have a backlog in inbound, which affects availability and hence our sales, because, yeah, we have a lot of stockouts at the moment.

That will take some time to get rid of.

Adrian Elmlund

Fair enough. Second question here, regards to the new localized websites, the scooter and bike categories as well.

Could you that these are sort of the main growth drivers in, let's say, the coming 12 months, or are they still too small? If not, then what is kind of the main growth driver for the upcoming expansion phase that you mentioned during the presentation?

Göran Dahlin

Number one is of course to defend and grow the current business that we have in the established markets. We hope that the market will recover a little bit and that we start seeing good signs in, primarily in some of the markets in Europe, but far from all.

We also have inflation, of course, that will naturally be driving underlying growth, and also we see that the rider base continues to expand, which is promising. The established markets will for sure be, and the online penetration will continue to increase, the established markets will be an important contributor to growth.

If we fail to grow in the established markets, it will be difficult to show very strong growth. I must say that new markets and verticals have shown very promising results to start, we have good hopes that that will be an important contributor to the growth.

Adrian Elmlund

Okay. Last question from my part.

Could you give us some guidance on, or at least thoughts on the private label products here? Could we see growth maybe this year, or is it more to be done?

Göran Dahlin

We target to get back to or reach our targets when it comes to growth rates on private label during next year, and from Q1, Q2 next year. It will take some time.

The primary thing here is that we have two things. Hindsight, we've been a little bit too aggressive taking out products.

We also experience quite large challenges when introducing new products and replacing old products that have been selling quite well. Even if we're just changing the brand, it's still a new product and it's treated like a new product by all the search engines and also our customers sometimes has difficulties understanding that even if we try to guide them, that it's basically the same product.

That has impacted our growth rate quite a lot. We see this for the products that we did early.

We see that they have now recovered, but it will take some time before we get back to the growth that we should have in private label.

Adrian Elmlund

All right. Thank you, Göran.

Göran Dahlin

Thanks.

Operator

The next question comes from Kristian Smolle from Pareto Securities. Please go ahead.

Kristian Smolle

Good morning, Göran and Fredrik, and thank you for taking my questions. A couple of ones from me here.

Firstly, on the WMS drag here, would it be possible to maybe quantify the impact of this? Considering that I guess you have quite good visibility in the backlog here since you refer to two days early.

Would it be possible to quantify this backlog here?

Fredrik Kjellgren

The impact sort of in Q2, I think the primary impact that was on the top line, what we have quantified in the report is that we have a backlog of about two days worth of sales. That impacts the revenue recognition.

We didn't manage to ship all the products that were sort of ordered in Q2. That is what we've sort of come out with in terms of quantification sort of of the impact.

In addition to that, we did have some impact on availability in Q2 and also some extra costs, and the extra cost was partly included in the transformation costs that we've absorbed in Q2, and also part of it impacted the productivity sort of in the warehouse. That is part of the variable cost that you find sort of in Q2.

Kristian Smolle

That's clear. You don't have any sort of estimate on how much these two days would have made you in terms of revenue recognition here?

Fredrik Kjellgren

No, no. That is it, my advice basically just sort of going with the run rate sort of for the cutoff effect between the quarters.

Kristian Smolle

Further

Fredrik Kjellgren

guidance than so.

Kristian Smolle

That's clear. Then on your guidance in terms of the e-com rollout here, just to clarify that the guidance here, we should rather expect this to be fully rolled out in Q1 '27 then, I guess?

Göran Dahlin

Yes. That's correct.

Kristian Smolle

Yeah. Understood.

Then you refer to a couple of large markets with the rolling out the e-com stack here in preparation for the high season. Which markets are you referring to here in specifically?

Are these markets where you're delaying [unclear] one quarter with?

Göran Dahlin

We're not specifying that, but it's the largest markets that we have.

Kristian Smolle

Okay. That's clear.

Then finally, on follow-up on the mountain bike and scooter vertical here, could you give some indication on either how much this vertical is growing year over year or maybe in terms of absolutes, how much sales do you

Göran Dahlin

see here? In Q2, the new markets and the new verticals were quite young, to speak, babies.

It looks very promising, but we're not giving specific quantifications of it. I think it's a little bit too early to do that.

It's so young still, so. As we said, we're very satisfied with the beginning.

Kristian Smolle

That's clear. I think you've previously talked about that you are looking to hire new people to make this vertical grow even more.

How is that progressing with expanding both in terms of personnel in that vertical, and so on? Yeah.

Göran Dahlin

Sorry, Kristian, I could not catch you. Could you repeat the question,

Kristian Smolle

please? All right.

Within the mountain bike call, I think you've guided for previously that you're looking to hire new employees in this vertical to do more. How's that looking right now?

Göran Dahlin

It's not necessary for us to hire any new personnel for this. We have the people we need, and this is one of the how should I say, beauties with our business model or operating model, that it requires very little resources for us to add a thing like mountain bike.

Actually, on mountain bike, we have a half a person that's dedicated to that, category manager, and then we have 20% of a purchaser and 20% of product data manager, and for them and for the rest of the marketing team, etc., we're talking percentages of their working time. It's the same when we add new markets, it is very little extra efforts required from us, especially since we are utilizing AI translations completely.

With the new tech stack that we have, previously it was impossible for us to enter new market. The tech stack was so unstable that we could not risk meddling with the databases, etc.

Now when we have the new stack, we are able to launch these markets, and we hope to be able to launch even more markets going forward. Right now we are on 29 European markets, which we're very glad that we have been able to take that step.

Kristian Smolle

Perfect. That was all for me.

Thank you, guys.

Göran Dahlin

Thanks, Kristian.

Fredrik Kjellgren

Thank you.

Operator

There are no more questions at this time, I hand the conference back to the speakers for any closing comments.

Göran Dahlin

Thank you. Fredrik and I would like to say thank you for listening, and we wish you a great Friday.