Vend Marketplaces ASA (VEND.OL) Q3 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Malin Ebenfelt: Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our Q3 results presentation. My name is Malin Ebenfelt, and I am Investor Relations Manager in Vend. As usual, our CEO, Christian, and our CFO, PC, will walk you through the key developments in the quarter. We will then finish with a Q&A session for financial analysts via Teams. Please use the raise hand function. Before I hand over to Christian, let me quickly take you through the disclaimer slide. This presentation contains forward-looking statements, so please refer to this disclaimer on this slide for more information. With this, please go ahead, Christian.

Christian Printzell Halvorsen: Thank you, Malin, and good morning, everyone. Big congratulations to Jan Boye, who became a father last night. That was why Malin was stepping in this morning. Our third quarter results show further progress for a simpler Vend. Revenue growth, a lower cost base, high margins, and continued capital returns. There are also areas that need further work, most notably the recovery of Blocket and continued improvement on cost efficiency. Over time, we see clear potential to keep growing revenues and increased margins. Group revenues in Q3 were NOK 1,641 million, up 3% year-on-year or 6% in constant currency. Our four verticals grew 11% in constant currency. That was partly then offset by the phase out of transition service agreement revenues from the Schibsted separation. Group EBITDA increased 11% to NOK 711 million, with the margin expanding around three percentage points to 43%. Our focus on cost is delivering ahead of what we indicated earlier in the year, and we now expect the 2026 cost base, OpEx excluding COGS, to decline by around NOK 250 million year-on-year, which is up from the NOK 150 million we indicated at Q2. This is why we retain flexibility to invest as we do in Recommerce. Year to date, our EBITDA margin is 40%. That is up from the 27% that we had in the same period in 2024. It is still below leading international marketplaces, and improving this remains a key priority for us. Our capital allocation remains focused on long-term value creation. We have returned excess capital consistently since 2024, and the first NOK 2 billion tranche of our current NOK 4 billion buyback program was completed in August, and the second tranche had reached around NOK 1.4 billion as of October 23rd. As we announced last night, we are now taking steps to enable continued share buybacks beyond the current program. Our 14% stake in Adevinta continues to develop well operationally. PC will come back to this a little bit later, and its valuation increased by NOK 3.9 billion in the quarter to NOK 11.1 billion. Our view on AI as a meaningful opportunity for marketplaces has not changed. If anything, we are more convinced, and I will come back to this, and our AI agenda and product updates a bit more in detail in a few pages. First, I want to give an update on Blocket, where we continue to see positive momentum following the platform transition. User satisfaction reached 3.5 in September. That is up from 3.3 that we had in June, and well above the post-transition low of 1.5. It is now approaching the pre-transition levels. Importantly, Blocket continues to benefit from significant scale. Strong market position. We attract on average 70 million visits and more than eight million visitors every month. We have a stable and strong brand position with 97% brand awareness in Sweden. In Mobility, Blocket continues to hold a strong competitive position. We have a significant advantage in both traffic to car listings, but also in available inventory. At the same time, private car listings continue to recover and the year-on-year decline is narrowing from 26% in Q1 to 8% in Q3, and further to 5% in September. This is in fact in line with the market. The C2C ownership changes declined by 5% in that month. Professional car listings increased by 1%, and this is actually outperforming the B2C market, which also declined by 5%. If you look at the demand side, both visits, leads per visit, and the share of ads generating leads within 14 days are all up year-on-year. At the end of August, we launched Tryggad Bilaffär. This is our transactional C2C solution, which is based on Smidig Bilhandel from FINN. I can say that our priorities remain strengthening the private car supply, driving traffic, and growth in the sub-vertical categories and increasing app traffic. We are still not where we want to be on these things. In Recommerce, transacted GMV grew 17%, and private listings are approaching last year's levels. In September, we launched our Seller Benefit program, which aims to increase volumes further. All of these developments increase our confidence in the progress towards bringing Blocket back to growth. Now over to AI. Of course, there's been a lot of debate whether AI agents will bypass marketplaces. When you look at how people across the Nordics actually use our platforms, I am confident that they won't. In fact, I think that AI makes our direct user relationships, our proprietary data, our transactional services, and our strong brand trust even more valuable. First, our core positions remain strong and robust. In a study we did in August 2026 with nearly 4,000 respondents across the Nordics, 70% had used an AI tool in the last month. 25% of these AI users had used it for something related to cars or Real Estate. Yet our user behavior remains unchanged. In fact, FINN grew in number of visits over the past year. 95% of our traffic is still owned. More than half of it comes through apps, and less than 0.5% of our traffic comes through external AI tools. Our brands lead the Nordics when it comes to awareness and also consistently ranks highest when it comes to trust, safety, and also being fun to use. You can say that people come to us to search, to decide, but quite many also come to us to browse for inspiration, dream about a cabin, a car, look for these interesting secondhand finds. This is an engaging habit-driven behavior that I think is very unlikely that AI will replace. Secondly, I believe that we will lead the agentic future with our unique data. The key here is that AI agents will only be as good as the data they rely on. They can, of course, pull open listings from multiple sources. That is not different from what Google has been able to do for years, but that does not mean that it will be the best experience. To get the best outcome for consumers, these agents need data that cannot be scraped. What is the right price for this exact car? Which models are holding up in value, and which sellers replied within the hour? This is data that we have, that we have earned transaction after transaction over many years, and it compounds every day through these four layers of data that we are showing here. Real-time ads, aggregated outcomes, verified users and behavior, and transaction history. We are now building on this advantage, scaling native vertical agents across our platforms. In addition to that, we have set up what we call Team Aura. This is a small independent unit. In our portfolio of bets, they are tasked with thinking more radically, answering one question. If we were building a marketplace from scratch today with AI at the core, what would it look like? Thirdly, I would say we are very excited about the opportunities we see that our markets are getting bigger because we can serve needs beyond search. In fact, search is only small part of the deal that AI lets us do so much more. Think about all the things that a consumer needs as part of a deal. Valuation, comparison, financing, negotiation, and many more things. It is the same thing for the professionals. I think the logic here is quite simple. The more of the transaction that we coordinate, the more we can create trust for the two parties, and the more unique data we can capture, and in the end, also the more value that we can create. We are fortunate to have significant transactional services already, such as Fixvärde, Smidig Bilhandel, Nettbil, Qasa, and others, and we will continue to build services that help users beyond the search, so to speak. So in essence, you can say that our brand trust, our deep domain insight, our real-time transaction data, that is what gives us the best foundation in the Nordics to build native AI agents. We are certainly not sitting back, waiting to see how AI impacts our marketplaces. We are using actively all the things we have built over many years to make sure that Vend stays the best place also in the future to find your next car, your next home, your next jobs, or your next pair of sneakers. That is no matter where you come from, who does the search, or what start the search. Let me now take you through a few of our recent products and AI-powered features. In total, we now have around 30 AI-driven products and features, and these are some of them. In Mobility, AI is now working for both the car dealers and car makers. Dealer Hub gives dealers AI advice on price, on ad content, and on visibility. Usage of this tool doubled from August to September. With New Car, which is now live on Blocket, it is actually AI that builds the car makers' brand stores over a few hours, and that extends our marketplaces into the new car sales. In Real Estate, we have our AI tool we call Bytt stil, which lets users redecorate a home virtually and to see its potential. It is interesting to see that the users who try it are six times more likely to sign up for a viewing. We have also launched image-led discovery on [Inaudible], Meglerpromo on FINN. This latter feature is a new agent promotion feature, which is part of the large package. In Jobs, we have Agentic Apply. This is a feature that simplify how candidates apply to jobs. Here, we use an AI agent to fetch the recruiter's application form, and it fills it in with data from the candidate's profile on FINN. This is actually solving a significant pain point for many users. We are also piloting two AI-powered offerings for recruiters, FINN Partner for our largest customers, and Talent Search, which is a completely new business model, which I will come back to in just a moment. Finally, we have Recommerce. Here we are building the foundation for agentic item creation. AI already helps sellers through the whole listing flow with everything from photos, to titles, to description, to price. What we see is that these AI-generated ads, they actually have 42% higher liquidity in the market. As I mentioned before, we have also launched Seller Benefit program, which is a key source of the volume growth that you will see in Recommerce. All in all, we are excited about these things. These products and features make our marketplaces more valuable, and we are also monetizing these things through a number of measures, packages, upsell transactions. Talent Search actually takes it one step further with a new outcome-based business model. Let me just go a little bit more into this product. As you know, historically, our recruitment business has been built around visibility. Of course, recruiters and employers, they are not looking to buy clicks or applications. They want to hire the right people. This is where we see that AI and agentic technology actually opens up an entirely new space of opportunities for us. With Talent Search from FINN, instead of publishing an ad and waiting for applications, we have an AI-powered recruitment agent that helps employers find relevant candidates. It handpicks them, invites them directly through FINN, and our vision is to be able to serve interview-ready candidates in as little as three days. This builds on all the strengths and advantages that we have. A proprietary candidate database, unmatched reach in Norway, and of course, a trusted brand. I think we are still, of course, at a very early stage with this product, but the first pilots are showing some promising signals, and I think this product also signals something bigger for Vend as a whole, namely that we are focusing more on outcome-based revenue streams beyond the traditional ads. With that, let me now turn to the verticals. As usual, we will start with the Mobility. And this time, before we go into the numbers, I would highlight some of the progress that we are making on the product offering and go to market. One year ago, we announced the introduction of car dealer packages in Sweden that followed a successful launch in Norway the year before. Today, around 50% of dealer ads are on our higher-tier packages. Throughout the year, we have continued to introduce new features, strengthening our value proposition and improving the dealer performance. The results are reflected in the measures and the metrics you can see here. That includes higher traffic to ads, improved conversion rates, and most importantly, fewer standing days. We have also completed the rollout and migration of all customers to Dealer Hub. As I mentioned earlier, we are seeing encouraging performance and positive customer feedback on this product. Dealer Hub really strengthens our value proposition through AI-driven recommendations and ad optimization. They also add new lead management and integrated insights based on the unique insights that only we have. We will begin the rollout in Sweden in November, which then will benefit all the Swedish dealers with these capabilities. To align pricing with the value that we deliver, we have recently announced price increases for our car dealers. This will be effective from February 1st, 2027, 10% for Blocket in Sweden, 18% for FINN in Norway, 8% for Bilbasen in Denmark. These increases are then expected to support our financial growth in 2027 and beyond. With that, let me turn then to the financial performance. We start with Norway, where ARPA growth remained strong, up 17% for professionals, 10% for private. This was driven by the annual price increases and also for professionals, the basic package adjustment that we did in June. This comes alongside improved packaging and upselling. Car volumes grew in both segments, while private sub-vertical volumes declined. In Sweden, professional ARPA for cars grew 15% following the price increase from May 1. This was partly then offset by lower voluntary spend from dealers. Including sub-verticals, professional ARPA was up 12%. That is back then to double-digit growth. Private ARPA was flat, and I covered the volume development in my section of Blocket. If we then turn to Denmark, professional ARPA continued to improve. This was supported by the package split and renewals. Private ARPA declined. This was as expected because that reflects the reversal to a free to list model for cars below NOK 50,000 on DBA that we introduced last December. The professional segment in Denmark continues to face headwinds from market developments and also some structural shifts from the changes we have introduced. Private volumes increased 39% year-on-year. This was driven then by the same free to list model on DBA, but also 16% growth on Bilbasen. Turning then to the Mobility financials, revenues increased 8% in constant currency. Classified revenues grew 8% in currency as well. That was driven by all markets. Transactional revenues also increased 8%. Advertising revenues declined 2%, and that was mainly driven by Sweden. OpEx ex COGS decreased 2%. That follows the organizational changes we made at the end of the second quarter, while we have continued to invest in marketing and also in our C2B models. Overall, EBITDA increased 7% year-on-year to NOK 406 million, with the margin expanding two percentage points to 59%. Moving to Real Estate. Here, we've also focused on strengthening our package offering. This autumn, we launched several product enhancements. They are all included in the large package. Pristips, which is our price estimation tool, is now easier to find. Monthly price estimates have nearly doubled to 16,000 per month. Meglerpromo now generates 25% of agent profile leads, and together these two send agents a lot more sellers who are ready to act. The large package continues to outperform the medium package with 31% more clicks to bid, 24% more unique visitors in the first days after a listing goes live. We are also now changing how we prove our value to customers, moving from traffic and clicks to real buyer intent, and by tracking qualified leads like bid clicks and viewing sign-ups, we give agents and sellers clear proof of FINN's unmatched value in Norway. These were some of the key messages that we took out to customers when we announced our new packages and prices for 2027 this autumn. I think agents have received them very well, and we expect these changes to improve ARPA in line with our medium-term targets. in Norway then, total ARPA grew 16% year-on-year with residential for sale as the primary driver at 17%. On volumes, residential for sale declined 4%. This is against a very strong quarter last year, and total new approved ads were down 6%. In Finland, average revenue per office and the number of offices were stable quarter-on-quarter. That means that Real Estate delivered another strong quarter with revenues up 14% in constant currency. Classified revenues grew 12%, driven by the ARPA growth in residential for sale in Norway. Total revenues in Finland increased 13% or 22% in constant currency. This follows the move to the subscription-based model in Q1, but also growth in Qasa. If we look at our transactional rental business as a whole, Qasa and HomeQ grew their revenues 10%. OpEx, excluding COGS, increased 2%, driven by higher personnel costs. This means that EBITDA reached NOK 206 million, up 23% year-on-year, with the margin expanding to 53%. Moving to Jobs. Here, our work on product and pricing changes for 2027 is not final yet. The plan is to adjust prices in line with the index across our products, but also to continue to simplify the discount model and to refine our segment model. We continue to deliver strong ARPA growth in Jobs. That's up 11% year-on-year in Q3, driven by upsell products, but also this continued refinement of the volume discount model and the index increase. On volumes, new approved ads were down 3% year-on-year, and this is an improvement from the 6% decline that we had in the first half as a total. On the Jobs financials, revenues increased 8% year-on-year as ARPA growth of 11% more than offset the 3% decline in volumes. Here, OpEx, excluding COGS, increased 6%, driven by higher personnel and marketing costs. This led to an EBITDA growth of 7% year-on-year to NOK 146 million and a margin of 55%. Finally, let's continue with the Recommerce. Here in Q3, we stepped up marketing, shipping campaigns, and seller benefits in Norway to really accelerate our transaction growth. We see positive results. GMV growth accelerated in Norway to 28% from 17% in Q2. On Blocket, GMV grew 17%, which is a clear sign of traction of the transactional model in Sweden after the platform transition. Finland grew 33%, Denmark 52%, albeit from a smaller base. Take rates were stable in Sweden at 10%, Finland at 16%, Denmark at 14%. In Norway, the take rate declined 0.7 percentage points to 15%, which reflects the shipping campaigns we had in the quarter. Recommerce then grew revenues 16% in constant currency. Transactional revenues grew 19%, driven by the record volumes, but it was partly then offset by shipping campaigns. Classifieds revenues grew 5%, driven by the private segment, and advertising declined 3%, primarily in Finland. OpEx, excluding COGS, increased 11%, and that was driven by the aforementioned marketing investment in Norway. I just want to say that this is a deliberate choice that we have made. We are investing to strengthen our position to accelerate growth, and this investment has led to an EBITDA decline of NOK 8 million to minus NOK 43 million. With that, let me hand it over to PC for the financials. Thank you.

PC Mørland: Thank you, Christian, and good morning, everyone. Let's move to the financials for Q3. In total, revenues on a constant currency basis increased 6% compared to Q3 last year. Vertical revenues, that's a better read on the underlying performance, grew 11% in constant currency, driven by double-digit growth in both Real Estate and Recommerce, and 8% growth in both Mobility and Jobs. Revenues in Other HQ declined 58%, as expected, mainly due to the lost revenues from exiting the TSAs with Schibsted Media. Total EBITDA ended at NOK 711 million, up 11% from the same period last year. The EBITDA growth was mainly driven by Real Estate and Mobility. Christian has covered the vertical performance already, but let me give you some comments on the Other HQ segment. Despite the significant revenue drop, Other HQ EBITDA improved to minus NOK 8 million from last year to minus NOK 4 million this year. Lower personnel and consultancy costs following the reorganization and optimization efforts after the Schibsted Media separation more than offset the lower revenues. The low loss in the quarter also reflects seasonality, as it also did in Q3 last year. The personnel costs are lower during the summer months, but the allocation that we do from Other HQ to the verticals are stable throughout the year. Now, let us look closer into the cost development in the quarter. As before, this slide shows OpEx excluding COGS. In total, OpEx excluding COGS in the quarter declined by 6% compared to last year. Personnel costs declined by 2%, where the lower FTE base were partly offset by salary inflation. Total FTEs ended at 1,565, down 83 from Q3 and down 119 from Q3 last year. This is mainly driven by the reorganization processes that we executed on during the second quarter. During the last two years, we have reduced the total workforce with around 500 FTEs. At the same time, we have invested into key capabilities, but also supporting the growth in our scaling units in Mobility and Real Estate. As Christian has commented on, we have invested into marketing in the quarter, so marketing cost is up 15% compared to last year, driven by the mentioned increase in e-commerce. Other operating costs declined 18%, following lower consultancy costs and the exit of the Schibsted TSAs. Overall, despite limited revenue growth on a reported level on the group, the cost reduction resulted in another four percentage point improvement in OpEx ex COGS over revenue. The ratio has improved from 58% in Q3 2024 to 51% Q3 last year and to 47% in Q3 2026. Working towards an OpEx to sales ratio around 40%, as stated in our last Capital Markets Day, continue to be a key priority for us. Let me also say a few words on Adevinta. The carrying value of our 14% stake has been revised to 11.1 billion NOK, up 3.9 billion NOK in Q3. The main driver was a multiple expansion of around 4 billion. Around 3 billion of this comes from removing the 15% discount to the peer group, and around 1 billion comes from rolling the valuation model into 2026 and 2027, similar as we also did in Q3 last year. The 15% discount was originally introduced mainly due to two reasons. First, Adevinta has a higher share of Mobility revenues that had a structurally lower multiple compared to the peer group that had a higher share of Real Estate revenues. Second, the Adevinta performance at the time was expected to grow less than the peer group. But as we have seen over the last two years, the actual performance has been very strong, and also the expected performance of Adevinta is in line or actually better than what is expected by the peer group. Therefore, we cannot really justify any discount on this stake. I cannot comment more on forward-looking performance, but the financial for the first half of 2026 shows that Adevinta's performance remains strong. Total revenues grew 11% year-on-year. The three key position that in totality constitute more than 80% of the revenues grew more than the total 11%. Adjusted EBITDA grew 22% with the EBITDA margin of 50%, up five percentage points from last year. Adevinta's net debt as of end of Q2 was around EUR 5.9 billion, slightly down from Q4 2025 due to underlying cash generation. On the income statement, our operating profit for the quarter increased 26% to 555 million NOK, compared to 440 million NOK in Q3 last year. The positive development in operating profit reflects improved EBITDA, lower depreciation amortization costs, but also lower net other expenses. The other expenses reported in the quarter is mainly related to headcount reductions. The 3.9 billion NOK gain related to the increased value of Adevinta that I mentioned before, is included here under financial income. In totality then, net profits for the group ended at almost 4.4 billion NOK. Now let's move to cash flow from continuing operations. Cash flow from operating activities ended at 590 million NOK, an increase of around 33% compared to last year. The increase is mainly driven by improved earnings, reduced cash flow outflows related to separation and transaction costs. Cash flow from investment activities ended at minus 73 million, where the main driver is the capitalization of our own workforce in totality of 81 million, down 25% compared to Q3 last year. Finally, cash flow from financing activities ended at minus 1.5 billion, but this is all driven by the share buybacks around the 1.5 billion number. In accordance with our capital allocation principles, we continue to return excess cash to our shareholders. The first 2 billion tranche of our 4 billion share buyback program was completed in August. The second 2 billion tranche was also started in August, and as of the end of the quarter, we have bought back shares of around 0.8 billion. As of 23rd of October, we have bought back 1.4 billion of our own share, and we expect the program to complete during Q4. We ended Q3 with a strong balance sheet and a net cash position around 1 billion NOK, despite buying back 1.5 billion NOK of shares during the quarter. As announced last evening, the board has resolved to call an EGM of 23rd of November to renew the authority to buy back shares and to delete 14.4 million treasury shares. This gives us the flexibility to initiate a new share buyback after the second tranche is completed during the fourth quarter. Wrapping up, I'd like to reiterate that our strategy, our medium-term targets, and our capital allocation principles as we introduced in our Capital Markets Day in 2024 remain unchanged. For 2026, we expect Real Estate, Jobs, and Recommerce to perform in line with the respective medium-term targets. Based on the results for the first nine months of 2026, the current market conditions, but also evaluating the effects of our mitigation activities, full year Mobility revenue growth is expected to grow in the lower end of a mid to high single-digit percent range. Our medium-term targets for Mobility remain unchanged. We now expect our full year 2026 OpEx excluding COGS to decline by around 250 million compared to last year. This is revised from around 150 million that we communicated in Q2 this year. This reflects an accelerated cost and efficiency measures across the whole group. At our CMD, almost two years ago, we communicated an ambition to improve OpEx to sales from the current level at that time of 65% to around 40% in the medium term. Despite the good progress, I have to say, on this metric over the last few years, more work is needed to deliver on this promise, and this remains a key priority for us. With that, I'll now hand over to Malin to guide us through the Q&A. Thank you.

Malin Ebenfelt: Thank you, PC. I see quite a few raised hands already, and first in line is Andrew from Barclays. Please unmute yourself and go ahead.

Andrew Ross: Hi, guys. Morning. I have a couple, please. First one is on the extra OpEx savings you have announced now up to NOK 250 million this year. PC, can you help us understand how much of that fell in Q3, how much will come in Q4, and then how we think about the annualization of that into 2027? Then when we think about the OpEx ex COGS into 2027, appreciating you are not guiding at this point, but what do you think is a likely direction? Can that continue to be down year-on-year as we think into 2027? Then my other question is to get a bit more color as to the investment that is going into Recommerce in Norway and to better understand the timing of that. Is it in reaction to something that has changed in the competitive environment? Just trying to understand why now. The third question builds on the first two, which is, are you assuming that Recommerce investment will continue in Q4 and therefore we should think about these extra OpEx savings as a cushion to that extra investment in Q4? Or should we think about the extra OpEx savings as being something that is incremental to how consensus was thinking about EBITDA previously? Thank you.

PC Mørland: Thank you. I will start on the first one, and then maybe Christian can start on the second, and I can fill in if needed. I think year to date, nine months in 2026, we are a bit, let us say, higher than NOK 250 million a year-on-year cost reduction. That implies that Q4 will be broadly stable year-on-year. Remember that during last year, we winded down both the revenue and the cost significantly from the TSAs. Some of that happened in Q4, but you got full effect in Q3 and then full effect in Q4. Looking into 2027, I am not going to give a cost outlook for 2027, but I think what you can read into our message, both the actual development as you have seen over the last two years and also now in the first nine months of this year and also including the whole year, will continue into next year. Combined with the midterm ambition to work towards 40% OpEx to sales, that will require us to continue to work on cost and efficiencies also going forward.

Christian Printzell Halvorsen: Yeah. On the Recommerce side, I think it is important to remember that Recommerce is a scale game, where in the end it will be volume that will be driving success. We have done a lot in the past year or so to improve our unit economics, and we now saw the opportunity to further strengthen our position, further grow volume by investing in marketing, but also in the Seller Benefit program and campaigns and such. We have seen great success with that, and I think you should expect that to continue also going forward.

Malin Ebenfelt: Okay. Next in line is Julia from UBS. Please go ahead.

Julia Lagrange: Hi. Good morning, and thank you for taking my questions. I have a couple, if that is okay. On Adevinta, I believe previously your plan was to disclose revenues and EBITDA once a year, whilst now we have this 1H update. What is your plan going forward? Are you planning to give us this update two times a year, or that would be helpful to understand. Also in the beginning of the presentation, you mentioned that you continued to see a lower voluntary spend in Swedish Mobility in Q3 in the professional division. Can you please elaborate on this and what is driving these dynamics? Why is it still not recovered at this stage? Thank you.

PC Mørland: I can start on that, Christian.

Christian Printzell Halvorsen: Yes.

PC Mørland: Yes, you are right. We disclosed the full year 2025 numbers when we reported Q4. I think what Q1, sorry. What you see now, we intend to also report on a quarterly basis going forward.

Christian Printzell Halvorsen: Yes. On the voluntary spend in Sweden, you are absolutely right. What we are seeing is that the price changes that we implemented in May, they are holding up, while the bumps, they are somewhat reduced. That is also something we have seen at the earlier price changes and something that tends to come back over time. This is also what we expect here. There is also an added element of electric vehicles selling very quickly in Sweden, so that you do not need to bump your ad as often because they will sell quickly anyway. It is both those two things. We think it will be a gradual recovery of that over time.

Julia Lagrange: Okay. Thank you very much.

Malin Ebenfelt: Next in line we have Olav from Pareto. Please go ahead.

Olav Chen: Hey, thanks for taking my questions. I was just wondering if you could give some color on the development of IT expenses year to date, as it was a big part of your other operating costs in 2025. I was just wondering if IT costs have come down year to date given the platform migrations, or if that's a potential lever for 2027. Then I'll ask my second question afterwards.

PC Mørland: Yeah. On IT expenses, that goes in the bucket other costs. As you have seen, we have a quite big reduction in that. Part of that is coming from we can reduce IT expenses as well when we exit the Schibsted TSAs. Then we have a set of initiatives within the IT domain addressing that cost as well, because we carry with us quite a lot of complexity from our own Schibsted days that we are working quite proactively to address. When it comes to the platform transition, that will also help us to address IT expenses going forward. But the biggest effect on that will come more on the resourcing side. So number of people needed to operate, maintain, and develop, and a little bit less on the IT expenses. The exception of that is on cloud cost, where we will see a reduction in cloud cost as we migrate into one common IT stack.

Olav Chen: All right. Thanks. Secondly, I was just wondering if you could give an update on how Swedish dealers are now distributed across the different package tiers and how this has developed into Q3. Then just some commentary on how this is tracking compared to Norway at the same time when launching the similar packages. Thanks.

Christian Printzell Halvorsen: I do not have the exact split between the packages. I am not sure if you do, Malin, but I think in general, they are tracking in a positive way. I do not believe we are still at the place where we are in Norway, so there is still room to grow and improve, let us say, the package distribution.

Olav Chen: Yeah.

Malin Ebenfelt: Let us come back to the package distribution.

PC Mørland: Yeah. Just remember that the market dynamics is a bit different in Norway and Sweden, so I do not think you should expect the exact same distribution in the two markets. In Norway, we have a lot of customers on the higher tier, while in Sweden, it is more around the mid-tier. We also have a higher degree of voluntary spend that Christian commented on in the previous question.

Olav Chen: All right. Thanks.

Malin Ebenfelt: Next up, we have Ole Martin from DNB Carnegie. Please go ahead.

Ole Martin: Thank you for taking my questions. I will start just a follow-up on the professional ARPA in Sweden. It was up 12%. Can you give any comment on how it evolved during the quarter? How was the exit rate in September? Would be interesting. Also on the price changes they are implementing, have you made any comments with regards to private for next year in Sweden?

Christian Printzell Halvorsen: I do not have any comments on the development in the quarter on the pro ARPA. I think on the private side, we are still focusing on the, let us say, the Blocket back to growth and the Blocket recovery. As we have said before, we want to be very confident in that before we start thinking about price increases in the private segment.

Ole Martin: But when you make this-

Christian Printzell Halvorsen: Volume is more important for the time being.

Ole Martin: But if you were to, where is the voluntary spend now compared to what is a normal level? Are we at 20%, 50%? Where are we?

Christian Printzell Halvorsen: I don't think I will go into detail of where we are on the voluntary spend. We are at a lower level than what we have been before. As I said, it's partly driven by, let's say, the price increases that we introduced. That's a pattern we've seen before. But it is also partly driven by the market situation, where EVs are selling very quickly.

PC Mørland: But just to comment on it. This was a big topic in Q2, when we saw quite a big hit on ARPA compared to expectations, given the price increase in 1st of May. I think what you see now in Q3 is exactly what we expected and also guided at that point in time. So, we are very much in line with the recovery momentum that we have outlined before.

Ole Martin: Then a second question. There is this press focus on this new potential entrant in Norway, supported by Polaris Media, Amedia, and Schibsted. Were you aware of this, and what do you know about this initiative, considering that one of your largest shareholders looks to back this new entrant?

Christian Printzell Halvorsen: We were not aware of this before it was announced. It does not have any connection with us at all. We do not know much about it either. Also I would say that we are concentrating all our efforts on, let us say, the agentic future and the opportunities that come with that, and less on this specific competitor.

Ole Martin: Okay. On that note, when do you plan to launch your own agents?

Christian Printzell Halvorsen: Well, we already have agents. Many of the services that I went through before are agents working on behalf of both pro customers and private people. So we do have them. If you are talking about having a chatbot on the site, that is another question. That is just another incarnation of an agent that is also coming, and we have a team working on that.

Malin Ebenfelt: Okay.

Ole Martin: Okay. Thank you.

Malin Ebenfelt: Let's move to Giles. Please go ahead.

Giles Thorne: Thank you. I wanted to come back to Recommerce and get a better understanding, please, Christian, of what your long-term plan is for solving the operating leverage problem that you've got in that segment. You mentioned scale earlier, but if you wanted to expand on that. The second question was on the two senior leadership appointments to the AI ventures unit. I think you called it, Christian, the AI Aura unit during the presentation. It would be interesting to hear what you think success would look like for that unit over the next two years.

Christian Printzell Halvorsen: All right. It was a little bit difficult to hear you, Giles, but let me try. The first one was about Recommerce and the long-term plan and how we think about scale and leverage. I think what we have seen with Recommerce in the past year is a strong improvement in profitability, 10 percentage points improvement in EBITDA. We are really seeing that scale kicking in. I also think that it's important to build a robust, strong position in the market, and this is what we are now seeing the opportunity to invest in with the Seller Benefit program, with campaigns, and with marketing. That we are doing, but we are balancing these investments with the goal that we have clearly communicated before to reach profitability in the medium term. On AI, and this separate independent team, Team Aura, as I said, this is one bet out of many in our AI portfolio. We have set this team up to operate outside of the line organization to have more freedom to innovate radically. I think we will see over time what comes out of this, but I hope it will be user experiences that are well-received by many people in the Nordics. It is primarily looking at that part of the space, the consumer adoption.

Giles Thorne: Thank you. Just to follow up on the first question, do you feel like you have got the right type of partnerships or the right type of partnership ethos in all your markets, but primarily Norway, around the delivery side of the Recommerce business?

Christian Printzell Halvorsen: Yes, I think we have good partnerships.

Giles Thorne: You sit down with them and say, "We are going to invest.

Christian Printzell Halvorsen: Yeah, we have good partnerships. We have multiple providers that provide a competitive environment for shipping, which is important to keep prices low. As you know, we are selling our delivery business. But we think that we can uphold this competition in the market also with an arm's length agreement with Helthjem.

Giles Thorne: Okay. Thank you.

Malin Ebenfelt: Thank you, Giles. Next up is Marcus from SEB. Please go ahead.

Marcus Widén: Thank you. I have two questions. The first one is on the classifieds growth in Mobility Denmark, up 5% year-over-year. It seems like that's a slight slowdown year-over-year since Q2. Can you elaborate on how much of that is an actual deceleration, or how much is due to revenue recognition under your new revenue model? That's the first one.

Christian Printzell Halvorsen: The technicalities, you have to

PC Mørland: As you might recall, when we changed our business model in Denmark, we were benefiting in the first half from some legacy revenues on top of the new one. So it was reported a bit better than the actual underlying. That revenue is fading out, and it is quite small now in the third quarter. The underlying business performs in line or better than what we saw in Q2. Christian mentioned that there is a quite weak market in Q3 in Denmark, so that is holding us back. There are no changes in the commercial offering. There is underlying momentum of that, and we are quite happy with where we are.

Marcus Widén: That is good. Then my final question is on the outcome-based pricing models that you are alluding to here, and you illustrated in Jobs that you are adding AI tools that can potentially be monetized per lead or per outcome. Maybe you can elaborate how you see this more of a broader journey for Vend as you move to this outcome-based pricing and leads-based pricing. Will it be additive, or will it be a transition period where it could impact your monetization and be some lumpiness as you transition to these models? How do you see that transition?

Christian Printzell Halvorsen: Well, that is a great question. I think we have said before that for quite some time, we have seen that the long-term direction of our business models is towards more performance-based, outcome-based, transaction-based models. That has been the direction of travel for a long time. I think now with AI, this becomes even more important and even more possible. So I think we will see more of this. We will, of course, use the opportunity that when we do these changes to also capture value in the market that we see is on the table. So I think it is an opportunity. Of course, it will also be hard at times to do this transition, but I think generally it is an opportunity.

Marcus Widén: Thank you.

Malin Ebenfelt: Thank you, Marcus. Next up is Petter from ABG. Please go ahead.

Petter Nystrøm: Thanks, Malin. Two questions from me. I will take one at a time. On Blocket first, you say car listings improved 5% or down 5% in September. Are other private mobility categories recovering too? How do you see your market shares within car listings versus the other platforms? Thanks.

Christian Printzell Halvorsen: Yeah, we saw an improvement both from Q1 and to Q3, and then further in September. I would say in other categories, like the sub-verticals, we still have a tough situation with significant declines. That is a priority going forward to address that. I think in general, we uphold our strong position in Sweden, both in terms of the number of cars listed on our sites. We are three times bigger than Tradera, but also in terms of traffic to our site, we are many times larger than them. We do not see a significant shift in that position.

Petter Nystrøm: Okay, perfect. Thanks. Then a question for PC on costs. You raised your cost-savings target three times for 2026 from a flat cost base to now down to NOK 150 million. What has proven better than expected, and why has the guidance been what you can call relatively conservative? Thanks.

PC Mørland: Yeah, good question. I think when we give an absolute guiding for the year that we chose to do, you need to keep some flexibility because you don't want to lock yourself in because you don't know how our product launches will come in time and how we want to fuel that with marketing. We don't know how the competitive situation develops. That means that when you are a year in front, you will be more conservative, and as you progress throughout the year, you can gradually become more in line with the actual development than what you expect. That's what we have seen happening. What we also have seen happening is that throughout the year, we have accelerated initiatives that has been planned in the future to do them earlier. We see that we're able to get bigger effects on initiatives that we have done, both towards our own workforce, consultants, IT cost, and so on. We are also progressing well on the platform transition. I think you need to see all of these in combination, why we've been able both to deliver but also then to raise the guidance for a full year.

Petter Nystrøm: Thanks. I'll jump back in the queue.

Malin Ebenfelt: Next up is Julia.

Julia Lagrange: Hi. Yes, thank you for the opportunity. I have two, actually, if that's okay. I just wanted to come back to the OpEx ex COGS target of 40%. At the CMD, you indicated that the largest benefit from the platform consolidation would be realized from 2027 onwards. I believe at that time, the expectation was that medium-term targets would cover a period until 2027. I appreciate you've commented already and confirmed that the 40% ratio remains your priority, but do you still view the 40% target as achievable in 2027? Alternatively, if the timing of the benefits have shifted, should we view the 40% target as a longer-term ambition rather than a 2027 target? My second follow-up question would be on buybacks. With regards to the potential size of the new buyback program, what is your current thinking? Thank you.

PC Mørland: Yeah, I guess that's two for me. On the cost side, yeah, so you're right. We said in November 2024 that the 40% was for the medium term. We didn't say exactly a time frame for that, but when asked whether it was like 2025 or 2030, we said around 2027. But we're not locking ourselves to a calendar year. But that gives you some indication on the timeline that we are working towards. But I'm not going to give you any guiding for 2027 as a whole. Then in terms of the effects, I think we have communicated and shown that we've been able to take our cost faster than what we expected at the CMD, and we are quite happy with that. That doesn't stop us. We will continue on that journey going forward. We have had some headwinds that we've been growing less than we expected, as we also have discussed earlier in this call. So, the combination of that, but we have not given up. We are working hard towards delivering on that promise. On the share buyback, I do not have any information around. We have now created the flexibility to continue buying back shares even after this current program is finished, and we will come back to you in due time with more information about the future.

Julia Lagrange: Understood. This is very helpful. Thank you.

Malin Ebenfelt: Then we have a last question from Martine Nordea. Please go ahead.

Martine Kverne: Hi. Thank you for taking my questions. Martine from Nordea Markets. I have four questions, two very specifics. The first is just on the other HQ personal costs. That was NOK 194 million, down from NOK 222 million. Is that run rate now stable after the July reorganization? Or how should I think about that?

PC Mørland: If you look at other HQ, compared to last year and also what we have been executing this year, the big elements of that is part of resetting the cost base after separating for Schibsted Media. That doesn't mean that we are done, and we see more potential going forward, but I think you need to calibrate a bit of the expectations in terms of further reductions, because we are now closing in a bit on what we can call is a relevant baseline. But we will continue across all our verticals and segments to optimize the cost.

Martine Kverne: Okay. Thank you. The other one is just on the gross margins in Recommerce, which was a bit down relative to the two previous quarters. Is it possible to have any view on your expectation now going into Q4 and 2027?

Christian Printzell Halvorsen: Well, the reduction in take rate and gross margins is due to the shipping campaigns. As I said before, we expect to continue to invest in Recommerce to strengthen and grow the position at a faster pace. I think that should give you some guidance.

Martine Kverne: Perfect. Also, on volumes in Blocket Sweden, how confident are you for them to return in 2027? When you say you are taking specific measures, what are you exactly doing to get those volumes to return?

Christian Printzell Halvorsen: Well, first of all, if you look at Mobility, the volumes are back, right? Compared to the market, we are where we should be on the private side. We are actually ahead when it comes to the professional side. The real challenge now lies with the sub-verticals. That is where we are going to focus going forward. There is also more to do on the private side, of course. I mentioned this Tryggad bilaffär, which is one way to improve the offering in the Swedish private market to get even more of the volume to Blocket. I think we will continue this journey going forward.

Martine Kverne: Perfect. One last question on AI. When you say that less than 0.5% comes through AI tools, that is, of course, not so weird still because it is still in the early phases. When you track the actual data in nominal terms, it seems to have more than tripled over only the last two and a half months. That implies that this number might look a little bit different, if you look next 12 months forward. Also, with the Muse AI now being launched in the Nordics over Christmas, that way of working is that they will redirect you, for example, directly to the Facebook Marketplace, which might challenge, especially Recommerce at first. While FINN, of course, they have a strong position in Norway. How do you think this specific competition and development will look like in Denmark and Sweden?

Christian Printzell Halvorsen: Well, first of all, we are not surprised at all by, let us say, Meta, Muse, Instinct, other agents that are coming to the market. This is very much in line with how we predicted this would develop even a year, a year and a half ago. All the actions we have taken are to be prepared for that. What we do see, and as I indicated, is that the maturity of AI is quite good already in the Nordics, but we do not see this translate into a changed user behavior on our sites. It is incredibly small that comes through these tools. It is growing, as you indicate, but it is growing quite slowly, in my view. The way I see it is that I do not think the search is actually the biggest problem to be solved by these AI tools, but it is rather to understand the car, understand the house, and those kind of user needs around it.

Martine Kverne: Okay. Thank you for your answers.

Malin Ebenfelt: Thanks, everyone. It looks like there is no further questions. That concludes today's call. Thank you for joining us today.

PC Mørland: Thank you.

Christian Printzell Halvorsen: Thank you so much.