Earnings call transcript: Rugvista Q3 2025 sees revenue growth, stock drops

RugVista Group AB reported its Q3 2025 earnings, showcasing significant revenue growth but experiencing a notable drop in stock value. The company achieved a net revenue of SEK 167 million, reflecting a 15.1% increase, while its stock plunged 11.41% to SEK 71.4 in pre-market trading. Despite positive financial performance, the stock movement suggests mixed investor sentiment.

Key Takeaways

• RugVista’s net revenue grew by 15.1% to SEK 167 million.
• The company’s stock price fell by 11.41% following the earnings release.
• Organic growth was reported at 18.4%, with a gross margin increase to 63.4%.
• The DACH region was the top performer, with a growth of 26%.

Company Performance

RugVista demonstrated robust performance in Q3 2025 with a 15.1% increase in net revenue, driven by an organic growth rate of 18.4%. The company managed to enhance its gross margin to 63.4%, up 1% year-over-year. The EBIT margin also improved, reaching 7.2%. The company continued to expand its product offerings, launching 45 new rug designs and personalizing customer journeys.

Financial Highlights

• Revenue: SEK 167 million, up 15.1% year-over-year
• Net income: Increased from SEK 9 million to SEK 12 million
• Gross margin: 63.4%, a 1% increase year-over-year
• EBIT margin: 7.2%, up 1 percentage point

Earnings vs. Forecast

RugVista’s Q3 2025 earnings showed a net revenue of SEK 167 million, slightly surpassing the revenue forecast of SEK 166.4 million. This indicates a positive surprise in revenue, although the stock’s negative reaction suggests other factors influenced investor sentiment.

Market Reaction

Despite the positive revenue results, RugVista’s stock fell by 11.41% in pre-market trading, indicating investor concerns. The stock’s decline contrasts with its 52-week high of SEK 82.2 and suggests that market participants may have anticipated stronger earnings or are reacting to external factors.

Outlook & Guidance

RugVista remains optimistic about its growth trajectory, expecting continued double-digit growth despite potential currency headwinds in Q4 2025. The company is focusing on personalization and expanding its customer base, with 70% of orders coming from new customers.

Executive Commentary

CEO Ebba Ljungerud emphasized the company’s brand solidification and focus on personalization, stating, "We have done so many changes to the company that are sort of solidifying who we are as a brand." CFO Joakim Tuvner highlighted the stabilization of average order values, noting, "Now that the average order is starting to stabilize, even up 3% in local currency, I think we have a sound foundation."

Risks and Challenges

• Currency headwinds could impact revenue in Q4 2025.
• Market saturation in key regions may slow growth.
• Supply chain disruptions could affect product availability.
• Macro-economic pressures might influence consumer spending.

Q&A

During the earnings call, analysts inquired about the efficiency of the new warehouse system and the impact of currency fluctuations on pricing. Executives also addressed growth potential for 2026 and opportunities in customer retention, providing insights into RugVista’s strategic priorities.

Full transcript - Rugvista Group AB (RUG) Q3 2025:

Conference Operator: Welcome to the RugVista Q3 2025 conference call. For the first part of the conference call, the participants will be in listen-only mode. During the Q&A session, participants are able to ask questions by dialing #5 on their telephone keypad. Now I will hand the conference over to the speakers. CEO Ebba Ljungerud and CFO Joakim Tuvner, please go ahead.

Ebba Ljungerud, CEO, RugVista: Hi, good morning everyone. Welcome to the Q3 earnings call. I am Ebba Ljungerud, and I’m CEO of the company, and I also have Joakim Tuvner, who is CFO, with me here today. I’d like to start by talking a little bit about the photos or the images in this presentation you will see. These images come from one of our four collections. We have four collections: Classic, Modern, Rustic, and Scandinavian. As I’m sure you can already see in this photo, this is the Classic collection. This is our heritage, is where we come from with the unique rugs. We have a lot of unique rugs that you will see here, but also new designs and some big sellers that we’ve had for many, many years. I hope you like them. The structure is as it always is.

I will start with a business update, then Joakim will go through the numbers in a little bit more detail, and then we will finish with a Q&A at the end. If we jump straight into the business update, we are very proud, I have to say, of this quarter. Once again, we had good growth. We landed the top line on almost SEK 167 million, so that’s up 15% from last year. Organic growth, that’s just north of 18% growth. By some margin, it’s actually our best Q3 ever. Very happy about that. If we look at the order count, we grew in orders. We did see a little bit lower order growth at the end of the quarter. I’ll come back to that. If we look here quarter by quarter, you see that it’s more than 19% growth in orders.

At the bottom there, you see the rolling 12, which also continues to grow over time. When we talk about new customers, almost, well, 57,000 new customers compared to 49,000 new customers last year. That is a 16% growth. I think here it is worth mentioning that over time we tend to be on around 70% new customers. Q4, where we are at right now, is normally a little bit higher, but over time it is around 30% returning customers and 70% new customers. Looking at the average order value, that was flat year on year, SEK 2,952. Looking at the development over time, if you take FX into account, it actually grew 3.1%. You can see here that it is stable quarter over quarter, which I am very happy about. September was the strongest month. Coming back to the orders, we see that.

When AOV grows, the order growth is a little bit lower. That is a very important balance, and you’ve heard me talk about it many times before. We, of course, continue to work on this, and it will always be a very important balance for us. Moving over to the profit, improved profitability, and that’s even including our moving costs. Gross margin ended up on 63.4%, 1% higher than last year. We think this is a good level, and the growth there comes from a lot of different things. We had lower discount rates in the quarter. We have continuous work on the freight costs, and we’ve also, earlier in the year, had some price adjustments through the nice price change that we did, which basically means that all currencies end in even numbers rather than just the exchange rate numbers.

Looking at the gross margin for the period, January to September. That also ended up on 63.4%, and compared to last year, it’s 1.2% higher than last year. Marketing spend, it’s almost flat, 29.9% versus 30.1%. It’s higher than we’ve seen earlier in the year, and as we pointed out before, it tends to be higher in the fall. Of course, now we’re moving into Q4 where the competition is much more fierce than in other quarters. It does fluctuate quarter to quarter. We see this year that there is a lot of competition already when it comes to the Black Friday. It used to be a day, then a week, and then a month, and now it’s almost a quarter. That period is definitely growing over time. Sessions on site increased by 39%. This is.

Partly due to the fact that we are marketing much higher in the funnel, which means that traffic comes in and the conversion is a little bit lower, but more people come in and get to know our brand and our products. This is, of course, still a big jump. We are now moving into more like-for-like comparables because we started with this more visual advertising about a year ago, but we’re still growing, so we’re very happy about that. Last but not least for this slide, Ebba ended up on SEK 12 million compared to SEK 9 million last year. That’s a margin of 7.2%, and that is including almost SEK 2 million in moving costs for the quarter. We’re happy with this solid result here as well. Looking a bit more on the market climate, we see that customer sentiment continues to fluctuate.

If we look here, we have three markets that we follow a bit more closely. You see that Sweden is moving up a little bit, while Germany is backing quite a bit, and France is stable, even down a tiny bit. For us, being in 30 markets, this is, of course, something that we need to look at, but also balance. We can’t really rely on just the big markets driving our growth, and you saw that in the report, and you’ve seen it before. For us, it really means that we need to optimize the spend and move quickly from one market to another. It also means that the small markets are also important to us to balance. Just as a couple of examples, in Q2, Germany grew by 10%, and now in Q3, it grew by 17%.

Sweden grew by 16% in Q2, and it grew by 6% in Q3. It does vary a lot from market to market. I also think it’s worth mentioning that our organic search continues to grow. We see both strong growth in branded search, which we think is very connected to that we are higher up in the funnel when we market and have much more visual ads. We actually also see very good growth in non-branded search. To us, it’s a sign that our big efforts in SEO are paying off. Now we are going into peak, or we’re actually already in peak. Just a couple of things from last quarter that have been important for this. First of all, the move has been finalized. Total CapEx, so that will land around SEK 45 million.

Very, very happy with how that move has progressed. We’ve done it in a very structured way, and we’ve had very little disturbances. I also think it actually would have been difficult for us to handle peak in our old setup. That is really great. We have a lot of new processes and automations, and we will continue to work on that. This will now be continuous improvement. The assortment, the base of what we do, all our beautiful rugs. We have launched around 45 new designs this season, and we’ve also adapted both on sizes and colors on our most popular big sellers. This rug that you see here is called Precious, and this is a hand-tufted rug from India that I really like. We know a lot of customers like it as well. We have finally really kicked off personalization and getting personalized customer journeys.

This is a big step for us, and we’re doing a lot of tests at the moment. This is, of course, also continuous improvement. For us, who have more or less always done one size fits all when it comes to marketing, no matter what the country or who the customer is, it is a big shift, and it’s really a way for us to utilize the new technology to communicate differently with different customers. It is very exciting for us. Last but of course not least on this slide is that we have stable and high Trustpilot scores, even though the move has happened. You can see here on this slide that we are continuously on 4.7 rolling 12, which we’re very happy about. This is something we track very diligently as we know that the customer is liking us.

It’s really the base for everything we do. With that, I hand over to you, Joakim.

Joakim Tuvner, CFO, RugVista: Thanks a lot, Ebba. I’ll start with the top line. As you already mentioned there, the top line grew, net revenue grew by 15.1%. In local currency, we grew by 18.4%. Looking at the region, we had good growth in all regions, DACH being the best, plus 26%, whereas Germany grew 17%. The Nordics growing 12% almost, out of which Sweden grew 6%. In rest of the world, which is rest of Europe basically, we grew by 13%. As you may recall from quarter two, the two biggest markets there, France and U.K., were flat. Now in this quarter, France is plus 23%, and U.K. is flat. Bear in mind then that over the past few years, not the last year, but over the past few years, U.K. has been a good source of growth for us.

All in all, a good growth in all regions. Moving on to cost ratios and the EBIT margin, the product expenses came down 1%. I’ve already mentioned a few reasons, the biggest one being that we had a lower discount rate average over this year compared to prior year. We also had this nice price increase that we did earlier in the year. Shipping and other selling expenses almost flat. That sums up to a gross margin increase of 1% due to the lower product expenses. Other external expenses, the biggest one there is marketing going down from 30.1% to 29.9%. That is a 0.2% decrease versus last year. The biggest negative variance versus prior year is the moving cost of SEK 1.8 million, which is 1.1 percentage points of net revenue.

Personnel expenses are going down 3.3 percentage points, and that’s mainly due to that we had non-recurring cost in last year, but also a bit on the positive side from the economies of scale we get. In other operating expenses, we record the revaluation of assets and liabilities that we carry in foreign currency. That’s the only thing we have in this line. As you can see, in prior year, this was an income of SEK 0.5, and this year it’s SEK 0.7. Cost. It’s a SEK 1.1 difference. You can see at the bottom of the page. We note that there are some rounding differences that may occur, and here is one example of that. Depreciation and amortization. Here we have three major things.

We have our lease agreements, we have the depreciation of the tangible assets, and we have the amortization of our intangible asset, that is our web shop. If we start with tangible assets, then like Ebba said, we have invested SEK 43 million. We have started depreciating those at the beginning of the quarter, so we almost have a full quarterly charge that we will carry going forward. That is SEK 1.2 million increase, which is equivalent to 0.7%. Also, we have the new lease that we have for Lodgatan, our new office premises that has been added. At the same time, we have the Limham costs still in here. That is about SEK 1.2 million. We have not included that in the moving cost. We were operating from that site, but as of 1st of October this year, we do not have that cost. We will not have that cost anymore.

All in all, it sums up to an EBIT margin of 7.2% and an increase of 1 percentage points. Moving on to inventory. We have increased inventory by SEK 14 million, which is normal during this period of the year. We build up for quarter four. If we look to the right, we see the share of the last 12 months of net revenue, where we are at 19.4%. It is in the middle of the target span that we have defined. It seems like we have decreased a lot versus prior year. We have, but we feel that we are well stocked up for the quarter four season that we are in. On to cash flow. Cash flow from operating activities increased, mainly due to the increased earnings, due to the increased EBITDA.

You can also see that the working capital decreases less than it did in last year. In last year, we had more of an inventory buildup than we have had this year. At the bottom left, cash flow from investing activities. This is a bit unusual for us as a company. This is the biggest investments that we have done. We have invested SEK 33 million in cash going out for the tangible assets. The intangible assets, we stopped putting on the balance sheet on the 1st of July last year. Now we expense all those costs in the P&L. All in all, to the right in the picture, despite having then invested SEK 33 million in tangible assets, we end the period with a SEK 29 million higher cash balance than the year before.

If I then try to summarize a little bit, Ebba, good growth in all regions. You spoke about the positive average order value in local currency. It is plus 3%. It is flat in SEK. But in local currency, AOV is up 3%. On the balance sheet side, despite these investments in tangible assets, we have an even higher cash balance than Q3 of last year. We stand with a strong balance sheet. I hand it back over to you.

Ebba Ljungerud, CEO, RugVista: Thank you. Let’s see if I can flip. Oh yeah, there we go. To repeat what you said once again, a strong Q3 leading into peak with both top line and customer KPIs are all on all-time high levels. The fall assortment is here with lots of news, in primarily modern and classic styles. We’re actually already seeing some very nice signs of new best sellers in this group of rugs. Personalization is our focus. Of course, at the moment, peak is our main focus, but personalization will continue to be a focus going forward. Very excited that we have managed to kick this off finally. With that, let’s go over to the Q&A.

Conference Operator: If you wish to ask a question, please dial pound key five on your telephone keypad to enter the queue. If you wish to withdraw your question, please dial pound key six on your telephone keypad. The next question comes from Benjamin Walsted from ABG Sundal Collier. Please go ahead.

Good morning. First off, I’d like to ask about your comments regarding the end of the year. At the same time, both, I mean, it’s optimistic. You’re saying you have good momentum, but you also note that your growth in percentage terms might vary, something that I think will be interpreted as being basically a comment of softer growth currently. And my question is, could you clarify if that was the intended message?

Ebba Ljungerud, CEO, RugVista: Hi, Benjamin. I think that yes, we are going into tougher comparables, and we have had fairly soft comparables during Q2 and Q3. We are still seeing, we’re still happy with how we’re doing. It is more pointing that out. I do not know if you want to add anything, Joakim.

Joakim Tuvner, CFO, RugVista: No, I think we can just add that Q3 last year, we were detracting, we were minus. We had a start of a good growth period in quarter four of last year. We have had quite a good order growth throughout the year with 20%. And up 19% this quarter. As we have been fighting the average order value, it’s always, like you point out several times, Ebba, it’s a balance between average order value and order growth. The more we get the average order value up, of course, the harder it’ll get to drive the same order growth as we’ve been used to.

Perfect. Thank you. You notice well that your gross margin strengthened due to a lack of high discount campaigns. You should have a gross margin tailwind from FX by now, if I’m not mistaken, due to the soft dollar primarily. Is this correct? If yes, what is the magnitude of this tailwind?

It’s correct that we should over time have that. The US dollar started to depreciate about the beginning of quarter four, right? But it takes some time before we sell that through. We don’t do that in a quarter or two. So there’ll be an effect of that. However, we also have an impact on the top line. As you know, we have about three percentage points on the top line in negative effect. That will counter a part of that.

All right. The tailwind from FX is expected to be larger in quarters to come on flat FX rates, basically.

Correct.

Yep. I was wondering as well if you could give us some additional flavor on the D&A development, please. What portion of D&A is related to having, I guess, triple or quadruple rent in this quarter? I think you said a leasing depreciation of SEK 1.2 million from Limham in Q3 figures. That should be phased out. Could you say anything on sort of the run rate D&A with only the new warehouse and the buffer inventory in numbers?

Yeah, I mean, what we will leave out in quarter four is the SEK 1.2 million for Limham. So that’s SEK 0.7 million. And then we are basically at our run rates. So that’s the short story.

All right. So down SEK 1.2 million, and that’s a good estimate for a run rate quarterly DNA.

Yes.

Finally, for me then, could you give us any indication as well whether or not the new warehouse is working fully as intended now, or if there are still any sort of quirks that remain to be ironed out?

Ebba Ljungerud, CEO, RugVista: It’s working fully as intended. When I said before that it’s continuous improvement, it’s more about, I mean, you’ve seen the automation that we have launched now, and of course, there’s more potential automation in the future. It’s more that we will continue to develop this over time. It’s up and running the way it was intended when we sort of projected the whole project, so to speak.

Perfect. That’s all I had for now. Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Joakim Tuvner, CFO, RugVista: Thanks.

Conference Operator: The next question comes from Johan Fred from SEB. Please go ahead.

Yes, good morning, guys. Thank you for taking my questions. Building on Benjamin’s question earlier. As mentioned, you stated that you had a strong end to the quarter. Could you just remind us how sales developed in September last year? I.e., should we interpret this comment as sort of if you’re seeing good momentum into Q4, or is this solely a result of easier year-on-year comparisons?

Ebba Ljungerud, CEO, RugVista: We had a moderately strong end of Q3 last year, right? The quarter was fairly weak last year. It did not end weaker, at least. Yeah, it was okay last year.

Okay. So sort of a mix between the two.

Yeah.

Cool, cool. Secondly, sort of a more high-level question. On your guidance for volatile sales growth between quarters. You’ve now delivered several quarters of improvement across your key KPIs, and especially so in Q3. As we look into 2026, how confident are you that RugVista can sustain sort of double-digit growth, or are you moving towards more the mid-single-digit trajectory based on what you’re seeing across your markets and key KPIs and metrics?

Shall I start, and you can add on?

Joakim Tuvner, CFO, RugVista: Yeah.

Ebba Ljungerud, CEO, RugVista: I think we’ve done so many changes to the company that are sort of solidifying who we are as a brand and strengthening who finds us and where they find us. I think that we have good trajectory going forward as well. It’s very hard to put that into a number here, but I’m confident that we are on a good road, if I put it that way.

Joakim Tuvner, CFO, RugVista: If we look back like two years, in the second half of 2023, we had an extremely high order growth, and we could afford, so to say, to drop in average order value. We also had some tailwind on the currency. We entered into a period where we had still a very good order growth, but we dropped the same on average order value. That was, of course, a very tough environment to be in. Dropping all the benefits you got out from the higher volume, we dropped on average order value. Now that the average order is starting to stabilize, even up 3% in local currency, I think we have a sound foundation that somehow the order growth we can get can be at least that on the top line. That is a good foundation moving forward.

You’re confident that you can grow orders at a double-digit rate in 2026?

Ebba Ljungerud, CEO, RugVista: It’s very hard to give you a number like that.

Fair enough, fair enough. Those were all my questions for now. Thank you so much.

Thank you. All right, then we have.

Conference Operator: As a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, please dial pound key five on your telephone keypad.

Ebba Ljungerud, CEO, RugVista: All right. Then we have some written questions. I don’t know, is this the top here?

Joakim Tuvner, CFO, RugVista: Yeah. So no, let’s.

Ebba Ljungerud, CEO, RugVista: Okay. Let’s start with the first question. Can you quantify the expected annual efficiency gains from the new warehouse and WMS implementation in terms of reduced fulfillment costs, lower error rates, or labor savings? The system is fully ramped up since the system is fully ramped up. We’ve always said that this has not been a saving money exercise. It’s much more been a case of ensuring that we can deliver on all our orders. We have very high expectations on ourselves on how quickly we deliver an order. It’s much more connected to that than the—so we haven’t actually communicated any sort of savings of this sort that you’re mentioning here. Do you want to add anything?

Joakim Tuvner, CFO, RugVista: No, no, that’s fine.

Ebba Ljungerud, CEO, RugVista: All right. Alexander writes, "I was late in the call, but can you say something about an annualized level of depreciation going forward?" Yes, you mentioned that now, but maybe you want to repeat it.

Joakim Tuvner, CFO, RugVista: What you see in the quarter is more or less the annualized level. The part of the depreciation that comes from the leasehold, we have also mentioned it’s the Limham property that we will leave on the 1st of October or left on the 1st of October. There is SEK 1.2 million of costs that we will not have in Q4. Also, the CapEx, the depreciation that we have on the tangible assets is almost the full depreciation you see in Q3. It’s a little bit, a tad more in Q4. On the software part, on the intangible assets, we have about the same. We have the same depreciation every quarter.

Ebba Ljungerud, CEO, RugVista: Good. Do you expect any currency tailwind going into Q4? Can you elaborate on when you purchase the rugs you are currently selling? Is there a lag in the SEK-USD development? Yes, you mentioned that as well just now.

Joakim Tuvner, CFO, RugVista: Yeah, I did. I can maybe repeat it. I mean, currency tailwind, I mean, we do expect a currency headwind in Q4 on the top line. We had 3% headwind now in Q3. That will probably be at least that. It depends on how it moves, of course, but it’ll probably be more like 4%-5% headwind in quarter four. As I guess you are referring to, we get a lower purchase cost now that the US dollar has depreciated. That’s correct, but it’ll take some time before we see that coming into the P&L, and it’s likely to come then in Q4.

Ebba Ljungerud, CEO, RugVista: Maybe even a little bit later, I suppose.

Joakim Tuvner, CFO, RugVista: Yeah, exactly.

Ebba Ljungerud, CEO, RugVista: Yeah. The next question is sort of on the same topic. The Indian rupee has lost almost 20% in value this year. When and how will this show up in your numbers? We do not really buy in rupees. So that we do not see so much of. Do you want to?

Joakim Tuvner, CFO, RugVista: No. I mean, that’s a negotiation, of course, with the suppliers where we have to look at the labor, inflation cost, and the raw cost, etc. When we look at the purchase price that we have mostly in EUR in India. It is more part of the negotiation. It is not something we directly see in our results. Then we have a question from Victor Hansen at DNB Carnegie. Other external costs are up significantly year over year, SEK 62 million in quarter three. What is driving this? What I would say, I mean, the top line increase, of course, drives the marketing costs up a lot, about SEK 6 million, a little bit more than SEK 6 million. Then we have the moving cost of SEK 1.8 million. That is the main explanation to that. Congratulations on your appointment as permanent CEO, Ebba. Will you be relocating from Stockholm to Malmö?

Ebba Ljungerud, CEO, RugVista: That’s actually not decided, but I will most likely continue to go back and forth. I spend most of my week in Malmö anyway, so it will probably be the same as before. You know that when you have this type of job, you also have a lot of work in other locations than in the office. It is a bit of traveling here and there, but it’s nice. Thank you.

Joakim Tuvner, CFO, RugVista: What are the biggest opportunities RugVista is currently missing, and why are these being missed? That was a good question.

Ebba Ljungerud, CEO, RugVista: Very good question. I think that we have been a little bit weak on our brand. I think that there is still work to be done there. I mentioned in the call that almost 70% of our orders are coming from new customers every quarter. A person, on average, buys a new rug every three to four years. You could argue that a customer is always to be seen as a new customer. Of course, there is still work to be done with our huge database and the people who have already purchased a rug from us. Personalization I talked about, I think we have a lot of work to do there. Really, the foundation, I think, is that we are increasingly good at designing beautiful rugs that people will want to buy.

I think it’s the biggest opportunity. It’s the same question, actually. The biggest opportunities that RugVista is missing now and why.

Joakim Tuvner, CFO, RugVista: Okay. And then last, we have another question, but I think we have already answered that. So that was the last question we got there, Ebba.

Ebba Ljungerud, CEO, RugVista: Yes. Thank you, everyone, for dialing in. We are now going to go back to working with Peak. We will see you for the Q4 report, which I believe is on the 5th of February.

Joakim Tuvner, CFO, RugVista: Yeah.

Ebba Ljungerud, CEO, RugVista: Thank you. Goodbye.

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