Rusta AB (publ) (RUSTA) Q2 2025 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good morning and welcome to the presentation of Rusta's second quarter. That is demands from August until October in our fiscal year that runs from 1st of May until end of April. Presenting will be myself, Göran Westerberg, CEO of Rusta, and our excellent CFO, Sofie Malmunger. The agenda today is short and sweet. We will start with the business update to bring you up to speed on what has happened during the quarter. We will then dive deeper into the financial performance with Sofie and then we'll summarize, talk a bit about current trading and finally open up for Q&A. Right, so moving on to the business update. First of all, I think, as usual, it's good to have a look at our store network. And we have, during the quarter, opened up five stores, plus another one after the end of the quarter, bringing the total up to six new stores since we last spoke. Three of them in Finland and another three in Sweden, bringing the total up to 231 stores as of now. At the same time, I can say that we have had a continued positive inflow of new stores, bringing the pipeline up to 48 new stores. This is a new all-time high, and I think this is on the back of a continued soft market for rental, making it possible for us to sign contracts on good commercial terms in areas that we've been looking for a long time. That also means in summary that in our guidance of openings in the coming three years, 50 to 80, we reiterate that we are very comfortable with the guidance that we will be somewhere in the upper end of that guidance span. Moving on to the numbers for Q2, we had a growth of 9.3% and a like-for-like comparable growth of 5.6%, both of those numbers excluding currency effects. We had a gross margin of 44.8% and an EBITDA margin of 6.7%. Looking at what kind of drove all of these nu...