VEND Marketplace: Migration Ends, Margin Expansion Accelerates, Buybacks Intensify
Q2 2026: Norwegian marketplace turns platform transition into profit growth while Sweden's Blocket recovers.
VEND.OL · Earnings Call · 2026-07-17
A Quarter of Accelerated Execution
VEND Marketplace's Q2 was never going to be about top-line fireworks. Group revenues were flat year-on-year (+2% constant currency), but the company's story remains one of operational leverage and strategic delivery. Group EBITDA rose 16% to NOK 674 million, with margin expanding ~5pp to 40%. The driver? A sharpened cost agenda. “We are actively capturing the savings that our simplification and platform transition make possible, we have now taken further steps ahead of plan.” — Christian Printzell Halvorsen, CEO · 2026-07-17 CFO Per Christian Mørland quantified the acceleration: OPEX excluding COGS is now guided to decline ~NOK 150 million for the year, up from the NOK 100 million flagged at Q1. The company also executed on its capital-allocation promise, repurchasing NOK 1.4 billion in the quarter as part of a NOK 4 billion buyback program — with the first tranche expected to complete during Q3.Sweden's Long Tail, But A Visible Recovery
Mobility remains the drag, with EBITDA down 4% and revenues up only 6% CC. Sweden continues to feel the aftermath of the Blocket platform migration, but the metrics are improving. Private car listings declined 9% year-on-year, a sharp improvement from the -26% seen in Q1 and -35% right after the transition. Professional ARPA in Sweden grew 3%, though voluntary dealer spend (e.g., "bump" add-ons) partially offset the May price increase. CEO Christian Printzell Halvorsen gave color on the competitive environment: “We still remain in a very strong position in Sweden... Tradera is of course there. They now have around 40,000 cars compared to 120,000, 130,000 cars for Blocket. We are still in a, let's say, 17 times larger traffic situation than them.” — Christian Printzell Halvorsen, CEO · 2026-07-17 The company also noted that dealer adaptation in Denmark, not market weakness, is driving the volume decline there, with a "two-for-one" listing product gaining traction. This patience with the dealer base echoes the CEO's earlier stance when VEND chose to delay price increases shortly after the migration: “we have worked a lot with our car dealers... it is better to have a long-term view on the partnership... this has been very positively received by the car dealers.” — Christian Halvorsen, Chief Executive Officer · 2026-02-05AI Moves From Experiment To Product
The real new energy this quarter came from AI-driven product innovation, most visibly in Dealer Hub. Christian walked through a live demo of "AI reviews" that gives Swedish and Norwegian dealers per-car recommendations — renew listings, add missing equipment, and benchmark against market data. "This is live in Norway with good feedback, and it is planned for Sweden in the second half," he said. Meanwhile, natural language search rolled out across all Recommerce markets, and Real Estate is trialing conversational search and virtual staging. Management emphasized these are not laboratory experiments: 86% of employees now use AI daily, and 42% report saving more than four hours per week. On the concern that LLM aggregators could disintermediate marketplaces, VEND echoes peers: referral traffic from LLMs remains below 0.5%. “We see the same picture as you referred that others are seeing. Very low referral traffic from the LLMs, still below 0.5% and hardly increasing.” — Christian Printzell Halvorsen, CEO · 2026-07-17What Changed, Precisely
VEND's narrative isn't a pivot — it's a disciplined execution on a platform transition that's now yielding demonstrable cost savings ahead of schedule. The company's platform transition has freed up resources: the June reorganization cut ~100 FTEs, and the effort has been "enabled by our solid progress on the company simplification." CFO Mørland clarified that the cost takeout is not just a one-off: “Other costs decreased 33%, driven by positive effects from our simplification and cost efficiency agenda.” — Per Christian Mørland, CFO · 2026-07-17 This acceleration is particularly notable because just five months ago management emphasized the bulk of these savings would land later: “most of the cost efficiency of it will come in '27.” — Christian Halvorsen, Chief Executive Officer · 2026-02-05 The ARPA growth in Jobs (15%) and Real Estate (13-16%) shows the core classifieds can drive pricing power even in a soft volume environment. But perhaps the most telling sign of confidence is the buyback. With net cash of ~NOK 2 billion at quarter-end, the company bought back NOK 1.4 billion in Q2 alone — a pace that, annualized, would retire over 5% of its market cap. The first tranche is nearly complete, and the board has already authorized a second NOK 2 billion tranche.That flexibility — to trade volume for margin in Recommerce, to invest in Blocket's recovery while cutting elsewhere, to fund buybacks from cash flow — is the through-line. VEND has moved from a company fixing its broken migration to one posting consistent margin expansion. The cost efficiency story is now backed by a visible product pipeline in AI, and the balance sheet is strong enough to return capital aggressively. For a large-cap marketplace that has cut its cost base, the question is whether the top line can catch up — but the direction of travel is clear. This quarter is not about a step change in growth. It's about a step change in execution — and the market may not have fully priced that in.We see that we are on a good trajectory to reach the medium-term guidance for Recommerce, I think we have flexibility as we see it within that to make the trade-offs necessary in volume and take rate.