Good afternoon, and welcome to this live video interview with Zinzino following the Q2 2026 report. My name is Niklas Elmhammer from Carlsquare Equity Research, and we are very pleased to be joined today by the CEO of Zinzino, Dag Bergheim Pettersen.

As usual, we welcome questions from the audience, please use the chat function and submit as many questions as you like, and we'll try to address them, as many of them as possible. Now, without further ado, welcome, Dag.

It's great to have you with us here again.

Thank you for having me, and thank you for being here.

You released the Q2 2026 report today. Why don't we just dive into that?

You showed 18% sales growth, 23% in local currencies. Despite somewhat slower growth compared to previous periods, the operating leverage seems to improve with reaching almost record margin to 16%, and the EBITDA itself doubled almost.

What are your general remarks about this quarter? It's kind of

the numbers is talking a little bit for themselves. You sum it up pretty well.

Last year, when we were having I call it the hypergrowth of approximately 50%, it's hard to sustain that kind of growth. We've slowed down this year a little bit on acquiring companies, we have done one real acquisition this year, and then another one came in late last year.

The last six months, we have consolidated and put a lot of effort into making sure that most of the functions internally and at Zinzino is working. I'm quite pleased with the growth in itself.

If you say 23% in local currencies, it's still kind of a high growth, and also remembering that we are coming from higher kind of targets to hit on. In itself, the growth, it's good.

It's going to be tougher and tougher to reach those kind of growth. All that said, we are positive when it comes to the next three years, we still believe that we will have an average growth of 20% over the next three years, and maybe pushing for even more.

That in itself is good. Then on the margins, of course, it's quite much above what we have talked to and promised the market.

That is a really, really good thing. We see that the cash flow is really strong.

We see that the margins are strong. We have cut some losses.

We had some losses in the last two quarters previous year, which we are comparing against. We've done some smart moves, I would say, and we have some scale advantages on top of that, which is really, really coming through here in the numbers.

I don't see a lot of dark or any dark clouds on our sky, but it's going to be tough to retain a growth margin. That's going to be a focus.

Then the margins will be following the growth patterns. If we do have a good cost control, which we are aiming to do and have, and then increasing the numbers of new customers and new partners, then I believe we're going to have a really good year ahead of us.

Very pleased, I would say, on most of the things. We've done a lot of investments, which I'm probably going to speak about a little bit later in this interview.

Thank you for that. The first half growth was 22%, in line with your target.

We have a question from the audience here. How confident are you about 20% growth in 2026?

I can't promise anything, but I will keep all my promises. I strongly believe in 20% growth.

We are in the high season for us when it comes to sales, August, September, and October. It's hard, because we compare the numbers from last years, we need to up it again, and that is always a little bit of tricky.

I strongly believe it's going to be a good, good year in total, and I strongly believe we're going to keep the 20% when the end of this year. I'm pretty confident in that.

If it's 19%, then it's 19%. If it's 22%, it's 22%.

We're going to be around that level, I'm pretty sure about that, when I'm calculating the numbers of clients and everything that we do, for sure.

A follow-up on that. In the short term, what are the sort of drivers that could help drive growth in the second half against the backdrop of, as you mentioned, the very strong comparison?

We have some I would say new markets coming up. I would say that with some of the acquisitions that we did last year, we have much higher numbers in the Latin American market.

Mexico is now probably the fifth largest market that we have within Zinzino. That floats over to the American border, you will see a growth both in U.S., in Mexico, which is super strong.

The American market are really definitely giving a lot of I would say it's a good trend. Then we are still very strong in Europe, led by Germany, with Austria and Switzerland around.

We have good growth in the French market and in the Spanish market. We have those, I would say, big markets that are leading towards growth.

Then we have some new markets that we didn't compare our numbers against last year. That is Korea, South Korea and Japan.

In Korea, we've just did a relaunch recently. Remember, we started up in South Korea in November last year.

This year, in July and in this next quarters, we see a good trend on those markets. My believe is that most of the markets will be really, really increasing their numbers, and then we have some addition to that, and that is new markets.

On top of that, I would say that our products, we are relaunching and we are launching a couple of new products that will be in addition to the growth of only the market grow in itself and new customers.

Okay. Thank you.

That's very helpful. Regarding Asia-Pacific, as you mentioned, that was down in Q2 and in the first half, but strong performance in July.

Could you please elaborate a little bit on the sort of up and down development we're seeing in this region?

Yeah. I think one of the things that we've seen, we've been around for 21 years, we've learned with the faces of every five-year, we learn something, and in between as well, for sure.

One of the things that we've learned is that it takes a little bit time to stabilize a market. We've been aggressive in opening a lot of markets, super aggressive.

If you look at the numbers of markets that we are in Asia, it's quite significant and good. The same in Latin America, we have opened two new markets, Peru and Colombia.

It takes a little bit time to stabilize those markets. Sometimes, you can have a little bit of a growth to begin with, and then maybe it could fall down a little bit.

We saw that in India, last year, we had a significant growth, but it was not sustainable. We even lost money on that revenue.

The reason for that is that the products were sold a little bit too on the low end. That is also basically one of the reasons why you have higher profitability today.

We have a better mix of where the growth comes in toward the margins. Asia are probably going to be the biggest region 5 years from now.

If I'm going to really, really think about where we're going to have a significant growth, Asia is going to be there: Japan, Korea. The e-commerce shopping in China is going to be significant.

We are very strong in Taiwan. Malaysia is a very good market on our products.

All of these markets will be really, really significant for Zinzino. We need to invest.

We need to be patient. We need to build it strongly and strong fundament over time.

This is going to be one of those focus areas for Zinzino, and we put a lot of effort into them. Even though the quarter two and quarter one didn't give a increase, I can see the signs of greatness moving forward, for sure.

Okay. That sounds exciting.

Another market that has been perhaps a bit challenging is Eastern Europe, down again in this quarter. When do you expect stabilization in this region?

That's a good question. What I can say is that we are working hard to change a couple of things.

We have invested in some small tools. We have had some issues that we are solving.

Without going too deeply into that, we have some web shop sales and copies of our products a little bit, we are bandaging those negative things. I'm thinking that we are ready for a growth.

That said, it takes a little bit time to recover when you have a little bit of decline. We are on it, and we're working hard.

There's a lot of activity and a lot of customers that are super happy with our products, but yeah, I believe we're going to hit back again this year and next year.

Okay. A question about the margins.

You have 11% target, and in the first half, you are almost 16%. Do you expect any significant cost headwinds ahead?

A

little bit depending on what you mean. I think that when we are establishing our goals, we are a little bit cautious.

I had a board meeting yesterday, and we were talking about this. Then our long-term target would for sure be to be over 11%.

I think we have shown that we can have a higher margins, although We want to overdeliver on our promises, you can say that we are overdelivering on the margins levels. We also show that this is a kind of level that we can stabilize on.

If you look forward, we will do some investments. Depending on how big those investments will come, that might be buying some companies, M&As, that could be investing in some markets or in some products or in factories.

All of these things could cost some money, I would say. I think we need to stabilize ourselves and have high expectations on our margins moving forward.

I think that's an internal overview of this internally as well. If you balance growth and margins, we've been pretty good at this.

If I remind the audience or those who are listening here, we have been paying out dividend for 13 years. We can balance growth and margins pretty well and paying out dividend.

We would like to be a sustainable growth company, which are profitable and paying out dividend. Let's say that we have some struggles in the next half a year, maybe we need to put a little bit more gas on the pedal for keeping the growth on 20%, then the margins might go a little bit down, which will be okay.

If we don't need to put too much gas on the pedal and we keep a 20%, then the margins will be kept on this level. What we have shown now for some quarters is that we can keep up with pretty good numbers and margins.

I think also Q4, Q1, and Q2 just shows that.

Yes, thank you. A question related to that: the cash flow.

You have 800 million plus cash position. What is the plan for that cash?

We are we are paying back money to to the shareholders. We have a sentence in in our report, page 6, saying that the dividend policy shall be at least 50% of the group's net earnings as long as liquidity and equity ratio allow that, meaning that we are paying back to the shareholders.

We are doing a lot of investments. Yesterday, we just approved a new machinery to the factory.

One interesting detail: in July, I flew down to our factory in the north of Spain to look at our new facility on algae oil. This is in a locked system.

This is going to be the new era of how you're creating and making omega-3s. Today, you Most of the omega-3s in the world comes from fisheries, fish.

The future probably would be in creating and making omega-3s, and and and we do a lot of investments. We have invested quite heavily in that production facility as we speak.

Over the next years, lots of money will be used to that. The second area is that we are using a lot of money on technology.

We just launched a new technology system for all our support globally. The fantastic thing with that is that all the members who are working and helping out customers, they can answer now in writing on their own language, and it translates to the language that the person is connecting to us.

We're answering probably 35 different languages very easily globally. We have We are putting a lot of effort into AI.

I would say no coder in Zinzino do code anymore. We use Claude or Anthropic or other tools to to do coding, and then the coders are reviewing the code.

We are very up to date on technology. We are using AI tools as we speak on lots of different things, which will speed up the company and increase the speed of everything that we do.

Time to market is extremely slow. We've been ready for this for years, because we have a lot of talented people within within our company, I'm I'm super happy to see all of these things.

A note on this: every customer now 30% of all the customers' inquiries to the support system today is answered 30% is answered by machine learning, meaning AI, without and we monitoring it, which makes a huge difference on speed and also to help customers. There's a lot of investments.

We do a lot of investments in studies, in product development, and also in the ingredients in development. We need that money to make sure that we have enough goods in our storage and warehouses as well.

Great.

It was a long answer to the cash flow, but I hope everyone got what I said.

Absolutely, I think so too. Another part of growth investment is, of course, acquisitions.

You made a significant acquisition in January, but you mentioned also it's a continued focus area. Should we expect acquisitions for the rest of the year?

I think we have said quite vocally that we look into companies that could improve Zinzino, could help us with growing, product side or ingredient side. We will be searching for candidates that fits our culture.

It is a lot of effort bringing those companies into the system. What we are doing is that we are taking most of those companies and then we put them into our system.

That needs to be played a little bit for a while before it's really, really are playing the tunes that we want them to play. We've been using that time well.

We are having a lot of different other projects on tech side and product side that has been good for us to focus on. We are ready for more acquisitions, but it has to be the right ones.

Yes, and regarding this year's largest acquisition, It Works, do you have any updated target for the revenue you expect to this unit to contribute with?

This is a hard question to answer, because parts of that will be directly, and then you have indirectly organic growth. Maybe around 400 million Swedish kronor or something about that in total if you add everything to it.

Okay. Thank you.

That's very clear. On that note, I believe it's time to wrap things up.

Do you have any final remarks, Dag, that you would like us to have?

No, I'm not sure if I need to do that, but it's always a pleasure to be here. Thank you for listening, and I hope that if there is question, then please send them to you so I can be well-prepared for next time.

That's a good thing, and thank you for having me.

Okay. Thank you, Dag, for taking the time with us today, and thanks to all the viewers and all their questions coming in.

I hope to see you all soon again.

Thank you.