H & M Hennes & Mauritz AB (publ) (HM_B) Q2 2025 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good morning and warm welcome everyone. Today we present the second quarter results for 2025 for the H&M Group. I'm Josef Ahlberg and I'm Head of Investor Relations. Before I hand over to our CEO, Daniel Revere, I'd like to share this morning's setup. Daniel will give you an overview of the results, followed by a more detailed financial presentation from our CFO, Adam Karlsson. And then Daniel will give you a key highlights from the quarter and an outlook going forward. As usual, we'll close with a Q&A session where Daniel, Adam and I are available to answer your questions. So please welcome Daniel. Thank you, Josef. And good morning to all of you. Warm welcome to those of you who join us here in the room and then also you joining us online. To start off today, we see that our plan with focus on an elevating product offering, an upgraded store experience and a strengthened brand is generating and creating important progress across our business. Our sales in the second quarter increased by 1% in local currencies. That should be seen in the context of that by the end of the quarter we had 4% fewer stores than last year and excluding those closures the sales increased by 3% in the quarter. Sales for the full month of June is expected to increase 3% as well. When it comes to profit, our operating profit amounted to SEK 5.9 billion compared to SEK 7.1 billion in the same quarter last year. And that corresponds to an operating margin of 10.4%. The result in the quarter was affected by unfavorable currency translation effects due to the strengthening Swedish crown, as well as the gross margin development that we spoke about in Q1. I will now hand over to you, Adam, to take us through a more depth view of the financial results, and then I will come back and present more abou...