Zinzino AB Class B

Zinzino AB Class B

13.74
USD
-0.08
(-0.61%)
1.13EPS
12.41P/E
570.72MMarket Cap
Nov 17Next Earn

Q4 FY2025 · Earnings Call TranscriptMarch 2, 2026

Niklas Elmhammer

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to this live video interview with Zinzino following the Q4 2025 report. My name is Niklas Elmhammer from Carlsquare Equity Research.

We're very pleased to be joined once again by the CEO, Dag Bergheim Pettersen. As usual, we welcome questions from the audience, don't hesitate to submit your questions on the chat function, and we will try to address as many as possible.

Let's turn to you, Dag. Welcome.

Great to have you with us.

Dag Bergheim Pettersen

Thank you. Thank you so much.

Niklas Elmhammer

You released your Q4 2025 report last week, we'll discuss some of the main points. Firstly, growth, 45%, almost as strong as the previous quarter, and well above your targets, solid contributions from acquisitions and organic growth.

Could you please comment on the organic growth in the quarter?

Dag Bergheim Pettersen

It's a good summary. Thank you for that.

I would say that the organic growth is much stronger than you might anticipate. Over the last years, we have done a lot of acquisitions.

I don't know if we have an exact number on how you're calculating the organic growth per se, but I am very pleased with a lot of markets, Germany is crazy good. That region has been super strong.

Although the Germany and Austria and Switzerland have done extremely well over the last years, we have significant growth in U.S., although that is probably the market that have had the highest amount of acquisitions that have contributed to the growth in U.S. It's the second-largest market, while I would say that Germany is more or less only organic growth.

Then if we move over to Europe in general, strong contribution, same in Latin America. Asia is more or less on its own growth structure, although we've acquired two companies that contributes in Japan and Korea.

Taiwan is the strongest market, and we acquired a company, I would say, 7 years ago, how can you evaluate? Is that organic growth or is it new growth?

That would be the hard thing to say. I feel it's organic growth.

Niklas Elmhammer

Okay. Thank you.

You mentioned Central Europe, it's one of your core markets and at least from the outside, it seemed to be one of the best performing with, I believe, 66% growth in the quarter. What are the success factors?

Dag Bergheim Pettersen

Oh, maybe a step back could be smart to do. All of the listeners here and the viewers who's watching this and knows Zinzino, for those of you, I apologize beforehand on explaining this.

Zinzino is a global brand. We're established in the Scandinavian.

We have our headquarter in Gothenburg, Sweden. You can find the reports from the last 10 years, or maybe more than that, at our web page.

We are more or less selling test-based nutrition, preventative health. Very often you can see that what we have done in the core markets like the Scandinavian markets are duplicated into the other markets.

There is a connection between the Scandinavians and the Europeans and what we're doing in the markets of U.S. None of the markets are standing alone, as you can say.

Of course, what we have done over the last years and the growth that we have done in Germany is not a surprise, because it's a little bit about what is the market potential. Germany has 80 million people.

You can combine with Switzerland and Austria, it's five times larger than the Scandinavian markets. We would probably be 10 times larger if we did the same revenue all over across the world in all our markets, if you times that with the percentage of sales that we have here in Scandinavia.

Extraordinarily happy with the results and the growth that we've had over the last years in Germany and the markets around Germany. It comes from our long-term ambition and the plans that we have created.

I'm not sure if I answer your question other than saying that we're really happy to see that kind of growth, and we will push through to do good growth all across the world.

Niklas Elmhammer

Okay. Thank you.

We have a question from the audience about subscription. Your model relies on recurring subscription revenue to a large extent, and how has the subscriber base developed in Q4, and what are the retention rates?

Dag Bergheim Pettersen

That's an important question to say. We are measuring our customer base, we have around 1 million customers who are buying frequently at this very moment.

What do I mean by that? Parts of that are on subscribing, or auto-orders, buying one or two products.

Part of that are customers who are buying half a year, or maybe even yearly. The point is that 80% of the revenue comes directly from customers that are buying within the last 6 to 12 months.

What do I do with those numbers? I'm steering the activity, the inventory, forecasts, how to spend money, and all that.

When it comes to the second question of that question, that was the retention, it differs a lot depending if it's on an old market or a new market. Zinzino is 20 years old, of course, in Scandinavia, we have a very loyal customer base.

In Europe in general, we have a good and loyal customer base. Then in U.S., I would say, since we've been there for 10 years, we have a pretty good and loyal customer base.

Then in all new markets, it takes a little bit time for the subscription model to really breathe in into the culture of how people are buying.

Niklas Elmhammer

Okay. We have one more question regarding numbers, to speak.

What is the total number of distributors globally? Yeah.

Dag Bergheim Pettersen

We define them in active and non-active. I think it's around 40,000, more or less, active distributors or field members who are selling the products all across the world.

Niklas Elmhammer

Okay. Thank you.

Regarding M&A, you have been active in 2025 and 2026. You acquired It Works!

recently. What does the integration timeline look like?

What are the sort of key synergies you expect?

Dag Bergheim Pettersen

I have a lot of internal questions in regards to this. I hope my staff is watching as well.

They are sometimes tired of me and us acquiring a lot of companies. You said that we have been buying some.

If you look at the last year, it has been a crazy development on that. I will repeat myself in general terms before I'm going into It Works!, and this is more like a reminder for everyone who's watching, who understands Zinzino, but also the new ones.

We have an ambition of being the number one direct sales company on this planet, which is crazy ambitious. We strongly believe that we're going to grow and do extraordinary good over the next years.

A part of our strategy is acquiring companies. Why do we do that?

It is to have increased distribution base. It's also maybe turning into new markets.

It could be because we want to have new products or ingredients, or it could be all of those above. Then, of course, in many of the cases that we are going into, we find synergies on the tech side.

More or less, the Mexican company is now implemented totally into Zinzino. We established ourselves in Peru, and are soon going to go into Colombia as well.

We got new products. All of the customer base and their partner base are on our technical system, meaning that what they spent on money on IT is now not a part of our cost structure.

Then secondly, they had customer care, we are saving money on that; marketing and branding, we are saving money on that; and then the scale of the business is also somewhere where we are saving a lot of, I would say, money, which is more or less, in financial terms, synergies. You can see the same thing for It Works!.

In It Works!, we are now, this week, next week, putting all the customers and the partners into our system, meaning that we will close down It Works! system in the end of March, more or less, maybe April, let's see.

We have a lot of synergies on the financial part, customer care, marketing, branding, logistics, there's a lot of good synergies in that acquisition as well. Then in another point, there's scale of the business.

Why do we have the profits in quarter four and quarter three as we had? It's because we are scaling the business, meaning that we get more revenue per use of costs.

That is kind of the bottom line of why we are doing acquisitions, and also how we look at this acquisition in itself. Although it's not easy to do these kind of acquisitions, but we've been pulling that through pretty well over the last years.

Niklas Elmhammer

Okay. Thank you.

In regarding margins, as you mentioned, the gross margin was increased in a nice way in the quarter

Dag Bergheim Pettersen

and

Niklas Elmhammer

from a weaker U.S. dollar and lower input costs, for example.

How sustainable is that going forward? How is the gross margin being affected by the spree of acquisitions?

Dag Bergheim Pettersen

I'm not sure if we have calculated that, and it's a little bit You need to do some definitions on where are you going to say that this was an acquisition But what we have seen in many of the acquisitions is that when they come into our system, they are able to grow a business from where we acquired them. That has been a great synergy in itself.

On the gross side, you were asking, could we sustain a 45% growth? Is that the question?

Niklas Elmhammer

Actually, the question was about the gross margin, which has fluctuated over years. Is this level sustainable now?

Dag Bergheim Pettersen

I think I'm going to answer the same way I did a year ago, and that is that if we wanted to sustain that and just focusing on that, it wouldn't be too hard. Remember, we are investing in new technology, in products, in new markets, and in people and systems and technologies.

We are having what we call sustainable growth as one of those and profitable growth as one of those leads. What we have, you can say, lowballing goal is that we're going to increase the margins a little bit.

That's our promise. We're saying that we're going to have 20% growth over the next sequence of the next 3 years, and then we are promising that the EBITDA margin would be above 11%.

It wouldn't be a problem for us to have those profits if we wanted to, but we are having a bigger goal, and over the next years, we would like to grow the markets, invest and building a much, much more bigger company than what we have today, and then that needs investments. We are going to have profit, we're going to have sustainable profitable growth, we are promising everyone what we're promising on page 6, and that is above 20% and above 11% EBITDA.

Niklas Elmhammer

Okay. That was actually my question regarding the margin target, given that you already achieved it for 2025.

Dag Bergheim Pettersen

I do understand the question, because it's much lower than what we accomplished 2025. It's a little bit boring, maybe, and lowballing or what you can call it whatever you like, but we are investing.

My thinking is like this: this is what we promise, this is what we would like to really overdeliver on. That's where we have our aims.

Niklas Elmhammer

Okay. The 20% growth target could also perhaps be a bit conservative given that you already have made acquisitions, for example, including It Works!.

Dag Bergheim Pettersen

You're right. It might be on the low end, but you cannot take anything for granted.

It's just to see what is happening now in Iran, and it impacts us shortly. You have a lot of outstanding things that could happen to us as a company.

I am pretty sure that we will be above 20% with It Works!, but it's a lot of work implementing a company like that, and it's the largest acquisitions that we've done by far. My hope is that we will be on 25 or even 30% growth this year, but let's see.

It's a little bit early to say.

Niklas Elmhammer

Okay. Do you have any comments on trading so far in 2026?

You released your January sales report at 20%, I believe, growth.

Dag Bergheim Pettersen

It's one of those things that you shouldn't do too much of a comment on our stock trading, and all that. I think one of the things that were hit by last year was short-sellers.

I'm thinking like this: that we will always get the right kind of price and the right kind of trading when we're performing well. My idea is to concentrate our work on doing our job perfectly, improvement constantly, and expanding, growing, showing positive return on all the investments that we are doing, scaling the business, and be a very consistent growth player for every shareholder.

What I'm extremely happy about is that we've had 13 years of paying out dividend and at the same time being able to build the business like we are doing, despite that we are giving out a lot of the money and working capital. We've never had a better financial situation than what we are in at the moment.

I am quite pleased with what's happening. I think that we will get the fair trading and fair amount of trading as well.

Niklas Elmhammer

Okay. Another question regarding expansion, acquisition.

With acquisition largely funded through share issuance, can you commit that future M&A will be consistently EPS accretive?

Dag Bergheim Pettersen

What does that mean?

Niklas Elmhammer

That you will be able to increase EPS even though you issue new shares to sellers of

Dag Bergheim Pettersen

Guarantees, well, that's a difficult word maybe, but it's quite brilliant. It's quite geniusly what we're doing, because what we are buying the companies for, if you look at how we're doing the acquisitions and you look at what growth you can see, it's brilliant for us to have a tool like that.

We are buying the companies with our shares. Most of those companies have a much lower price per sales than Zinzino.

If we are succeeding with It Works!, we bought them for $30 million, we are expecting $60 million in revenue. If you just take a very easy math on that, that's going to be price per sales 0.5, while Zinzino is trading on 1.5.

If you look at those kind of ways of how we're building and doing the acquisitions, I'm almost surprised that people are not asking us for advice on how to acquire companies through issues of shares. If I'm going to give you a guarantee here, well, I'm guaranteeing you that I would say every one of the 13, 14 acquisitions that we've done, I would say that 90% of them have been really successful, and they have been really, really good for Zinzino business.

If we're going to have that kind of hit rate moving forward, who knows? We put a lot of effort in evaluating and doing due diligence before we are acquiring companies.

Niklas Elmhammer

Okay. Thank you.

That's a good answer, I believe. Also

Dag Bergheim Pettersen

It's a long answer.

Niklas Elmhammer

Unfortunately, I think we have to wrap it up. We're running out of time.

Thank you, Dag, for a terrific interview, as always.

Dag Bergheim Pettersen

Thank you. It's a pleasure being here, and thank you all for listening.