Schibsted ASA

OSE:SCHA

Earnings Call Transcript 2024-Q3

[Jann-Boje Meinecke, executive]

Good morning, and thank you for joining us for Schibsted Marketplaces' Q3 results presentation. As usual, Christian, our CEO; and PC, our CFO, will provide you with some color and key developments in the third quarter. [Operator Instructions]

So without further delay, Christian, pleased to hand over to you.

[Christian Halvorsen, executive]

Thank you so much, Jann-Boje, and good morning, and welcome, everyone, to this third quarter presentation. This was a quarter where we took another important step in our strategic transformation to becoming a pure-play marketplaces company. And we showed disciplined execution and commitment to long-term shareholder value creation.

Now following the sale of our media business and the Adevinta transaction, which together generated approximately NOK 24 billion, we have now returned the second tranche of our special cash dividend that amounted to NOK 2 billion. And we have also initiated the first tranche of our share buyback program amounting to another NOK 2 billion.

Operationally, the previously announced reorganization and cost measures, they are now on track and they are expected to be completed by November. Furthermore, we continue our efforts to simplify our operations. And we announced earlier this week that we plan to exit businesses that we no longer consider as core or where we neither have a winning position nor an opportunity or a clear path to get there. And PC will come back to this a little bit later in his part of the presentation.

When it comes to the financial performance, the group revenues for the third quarter ended just above NOK 2.6 billion. That represented a 9% year-on-year increase on a constant currency basis. The group EBITDA improved by 17% to NOK 670 million. And the primary drivers of this were Nordic Marketplaces, which achieved a 6% increase in revenues as well as the delivery segment that achieved quite astounding growth. Mobility, Real Estate and Recommerce continued to perform really well while the Jobs marketplace, particularly outside of Norway and Advertising had some headwinds in this quarter.

So let me then go a little bit deeper into the results, and we will focus on Nordic Marketplaces. Here, Nordic Marketplaces delivered a growth, as I said, of 6% in Q3 that was driven by solid growth in classifieds revenues. This, again, was primarily driven by increases in average revenue per ad in all verticals, together with an increase in transactional revenues. This growth was partially offset by market headwinds that affected volumes, particularly in Jobs, but also somewhat in Mobility and also affecting Advertising revenues.

I think it's good also to mention that the Advertising was influenced by the ongoing split from Schibsted Media, where we are splitting the platform and also transitioning some resources over to media. And during this transition, we anticipate that there will be more muted results in the advertising segment going forward in the short term.

On the cost side, total costs increased by 5% compared to last year. This was primarily driven by marketing campaigns, also investments in our new business models as well as the transition to a new technology and common technology platform.

It is worth mentioning that this marks a quite notable shift though in the drivers of the cost. Now it was largely attributable to marketing while personnel and consultants have actually decreased year-over-year, which is a big change and the first time in a quite considerable period.

And this indicates that we are now starting to see the results of the reorganization and cost measures that we are implementing. And as a result, the EBITDA was up 12% year-over-year and margin improved by 2 percentage points compared to last year.

So with that, let's deep dive into the verticals, and let's begin first with the underlying drivers for the classifieds revenue. Within Mobility, we continued ARPA growth in all markets. That was driven by both the professional and private segment in Sweden and the professional segment in Norway and Denmark. And this, again, was driven by harmonizing pricing structures as well as an underlying growth in the sale of upsell products.

And the strongest uplift was seen in Sweden. Here, we had both a good ARPA growth for the professionals as well as with the privates where we saw an uptick in sales of upsell products. And we also introduced this new C2C price segments in Sweden in end of August, where we had some promising early results.

In Norway, the ARPA growth for professionals continues to be strong. But if we look at the private area, it was lower due to a shift in the category mix with more ads in things like motorcycles and other subcategories that have a lower ARPA compared to cars.

And then in terms of volumes in Norway, we are still impacted by the headwinds in the market, particularly in the private segment, while professionals continue to be quite good, and we saw some improvement here. I can also mention that the new car sales in Norway was improving as well. That's a good driver for us. In Sweden, though, volumes are affected by strong comparables from last year.

In Jobs, Norway continued to see solid ARPA growth. That was driven by this new segmented price model that we introduced at the beginning of this year combined with upsell products. Volumes in Norway were down 8% in this quarter due to market headwinds.

And within Real Estate, we also see continued solid ARPA growth in Norway. This was primarily driven by the packages in leisure homes for sales, also upsells in residential for sale as well as the regular price index adjustments that we implemented in January. It is slightly lower in this quarter as we expected due to some of these package downgrades that we communicated in the last presentation.

In Finland, ARPA increased in this quarter. That was due to a change in mix between houses for sale and rentals combined with also some regular price adjustments. And on the volume side, in Norway, we saw a growth of 3%, while in Finland, there was a decline compared to last year, also here driven by this shift in category mix. It is worth mentioning, though, that houses for sale was up in Finland.

Now if we turn to Mobility and look at the financials, the Mobility vertical grew by 5% on a constant currency basis in Q3 and that was despite headwinds, both in volume as well as in advertising. Classified revenues grew 10% in this quarter, and that was primarily then driven by these ARPA increases that I just mentioned.

Additionally, we had NOK 104 million in transactional revenues in Mobility in this quarter and that was an increase of 10% compared to last year. And this growth is somewhat softer than what we have seen before. That's primarily driven by Nettbil seeing some effects of the macro headwinds as well as some more temporary internal capacity constraints that we've had in Nettbil.

And also Advertising revenues continue to be affected by the volatile market in Norway. And in this quarter, we saw a decline of 19% in Advertising. And also should then say again that this is partly driven by the dis-synergies from the split from media on the Advertising side.

Total costs increased year-on-year. This was driven by marketing campaigns and also the investments in the new initiatives such as Nettbil and Autovex and Wheelaway as well as the transition to a common technology platform. But as I mentioned initially, it is now primarily marketing campaigns that explains the increase in costs, while if you look at the personnel and consultants as an example, the costs are more in line with the last year.

And all in all, EBITDA increased by 11%, and that was then driven by the higher revenues and resulted in a margin of 54%. If we adjust for the transactional models, the margin in, let's say, core mobility was around 61% this quarter.

And one thing we did also in this quarter was to announce new packages that will come into effect from January 2025 for our dealers in Norway. And this marks a quite significant step forward in how we sell and how dealers buy and access our products and services in FINN.

And based on the feedback from customers, we are now trying to streamline the process for how our dealers can use all the unique marketplace data that we have on FINN, because that will allow them to optimize their business and efficiency. So these products and these packages, they are now tailored specifically to dealers, and they're specifically tailored to provide both tools, trust and safety badges as well as branding options to the dealers.

And we anticipate that these changes will have a double-digit ARPA impact for the professional car segment in 2025. And this, of course, is a good basis to continue to iterate on in the coming months and years and also think about scaling to the rest of the Nordics to drive a sustained value growth in this area.

If we then turn to real estate, here, we saw that the total revenues increased by 12% this quarter. Again, this revenue growth was primarily driven by ARPA increases as well as the expansion of the transactional model that we have in Sweden. In Norway, which is obviously the main part of our real estate business, the revenue increase was slowing somewhat to 7%. And this was driven by the package downgrades that we have previously mentioned.

Nevertheless, the volumes in Norway were up by 3% and FINN Real Estate achieved now for the second consecutive quarter, all-time high in traffic which clearly demonstrates the incredibly strong and solid position that we have within real estate in Norway.

In Sweden, we have the rental platform, Qasa, and that continues to show solid and strong growth, and that was now at 85% this quarter. And in Finland, we are extremely pleased to see that the increased marketing efforts that we have implemented actually drive strong development in the key metrics that we follow, things such as brand awareness and traffic. Both of those showed all-time highs in Q3, and we will continue these investments in Finland to really continue to strengthen our leading position, which we think is quite essential for our long-term revenue growth and financial goals in Finland.

And then we have the costs. Total costs increased for real estate year-on-year. That was driven then by the accelerated marketing efforts in Finland also investments that we're making in HomeQ as well as the transition to our common technology platform. It should be said that the cost increases were lower compared to previous quarters, and this also resulted in an improvement in the EBITDA margin by 3 percentage points compared to last year. And again here, if we correct or adjust for the transaction models, the margin in core Real Estate was 53%.

Similarly to Mobility, we are implementing changes to our product and package structure also in Real Estate. We are doing this to ensure that our pricing aligns with the value that we deliver to our customers. And we are introducing what we call dynamic pricing that is based on our regional structure that we have, but we're also introducing property value as a factor in this model. And this change ensures that we have fair pricing and also pricing that reflects the underlying value that we deliver.

In this package structure, we're also enhancing both the content and the value of our larger package. And that is really to create a much clearer distinction between the different tiers in our package structure. And then these changes are, of course, then reflected in the prices.

I can also say that we have revised our discount model really to make sure that it's advantageous for our customers to -- and also for the house sellers to buy these top-level packages. And also for real estate, we anticipate that these changes will have double-digit ARPA growth in the residential for sale segment into 2025. Yes. And this will be driven by the price adjustments of the packages, but also partly by the upsell products and some of the modifications that we're making to the discount structure.

Turning to Jobs. This is an area where we see the effect of the challenging market around us. It's primarily affecting jobs. If you look at Norway, we overall see stable revenues compared to last year, and that is despite a volume decrease of 8% compared to last year. And this is driven by a strong ARPA contribution from this segmented price model that we introduced in January this year together with increasing sales of upsell products.

But if we look at the total Jobs revenues, we had the market challenges and strong competition, particularly in Sweden and Finland. So in total, we saw a decline of 3% on the revenues this quarter. Total costs reduced -- were reduced by 2%, and that was after several quarters of cost increase, and this reduction was primarily then driven by personnel and consultants. So overall, this led to an EBITDA margin of 44% for Jobs. And that is in line with what we had last year.

And then finally, Recommerce. Here, revenues increased by 14% in this quarter. That was driven, of course, by the transactional business model. And if we take the growth in FINN and in Blocket and also with the continued strong momentum we have in Finland with Tori, we reached 1.1 million transactions in total for Recommerce this quarter, which was the first time that we have landed above 1 million transaction. We are very happy about that, obviously.

And Advertising revenues were also here affected by the market headwinds. Revenues declined by 11% and this was, again, partly driven by the dis-synergies that we see from the split from media and the effect that, that has to our advertising platform.

Total costs for Recommerce increased compared to last year, but if we exclude cost of goods sold, which are partly linked to the transactional revenues, then the operational expenses actually were reduced by 7% compared to last year. And in total, EBITDA then improved by 16% compared to last year, and the margin improved by 11 percentage points.

So with that, I'll hand it over to PC to go through the financials.

[Per Morland, executive]

Thank you, Christian, and good morning, everyone. And I will now like to give you some more details on the financials for the third quarter. In total, revenues for Schibsted Marketplaces ended 9% above Q3 last year. This development was driven by the mentioned 6% growth in Nordic Marketplaces combined with a 4% to 6% growth in delivery, partly offset by a 7% decline in growth and investments.

The total revenue growth in delivery also includes the newly acquired delivery business from Amedia, contributing with revenues of NOK 97 million in Q3. When excluding this, delivery revenues grew 23% in the quarter. This revenue growth was driven by strong volume growth in the parcel delivery service, Helthjem of 68% and from both growth in the B2C volumes combined with higher C2C volumes on the back of our progress on the FINN transactional product, Fiks ferdig in Norway. This growth was somewhat offset by continued declining volumes from printed newspapers.

Revenues in the Growth & Investments segment declined by 7%, as mentioned, impacted by macroeconomic conditions, mostly then from the lender revenues declining 17% in the quarter, while preset revenues increased slightly with 1% growth in the quarter. Revenues from our skilled trade marketplaces also increased 1% in Q3.

Total EBITDA for Schibsted Marketplaces ended at NOK 670 million, up 17% from last year, and this was driven by the mentioned EBITDA improvement in Nordic Marketplaces of 12%. Delivery EBITDA improved from a breakeven level last year to plus NOK 35 million on the back of increased volume, improved efficiencies, but also a NOK 10 million effect from Amedia.

Despite the revenue pressure, Growth & Investments portfolio. EBITDA increased 17%, driven by cost-saving initiatives in both Lendo and Prisjakt. Other NHQ had an EBITDA of minus NOK 39 million in the quarter. This is slightly down year-on-year, but an improvement from the previous quarter, mainly driven due to seasonality year-on-year.

Before we go into more details on Q3, I want to give some color on the current outlook for Q4. Overall, we expect the strong underlying ARPA development in all key verticals to continue, however, we do expect total revenue growth to be somewhat muted in Q4 compared to the growth rates we now report in Q3.

This is driven by 3 key factors. First, as Christian alluded to, advertising revenues are expected to temporarily be under pressure from a combination of market headwinds, but also effects from the separation from News Media. This is mostly impacting mobility and the Recommerce vertical.

The second driver is that we expect to see some negative effects from an announced portfolio simplification, our transition to a common tech platform. And also, we expect to see a bit more impact from the full quarterly impact of the downgrades that we have seen in Real Estate vertical in Norway. The last dimension is volumes continue to be a bit challenging in both Mobility and Jobs, and we also have a quite strong comparables in Mobility in Sweden in Q4.

And with that, let's move into the income statement. Our operating profit for the quarter ended at NOK 345 million, down from NOK 378 million last year. EBITDA is improved by NOK 96 million, while other expenses increased NOK 93 million, mainly due to increased restructuring cost of NOK 64 million related to the organizational changes and costs related to the media separation of NOK 28 million.

Financial income is impacted by the fair value adjustments of Adevinta. The value of our 14% stake in Adevinta has increased from NOK 15.6 billion in Q2 this year to NOK 20.7 billion in Q3. The value increase of NOK 5 billion is due to several factors. First, the value in Q2 this year was based on the pricing of the transaction, given that we have just closed the transaction a few weeks before the quarter.

As of Q3 this year, the valuation is based on reported financials and expectations from Adevinta in a private company setting, reflecting normalized earnings and reported net debt. In addition, the valuation is based on peer multiples from a selected listed European online classified peers. If you're looking at the increase, around half of the increase is driven by increased earning expectations in Adevinta, and the other half is related to multiple expansion in the industry.

Financial expenses are impacted by loss of fair value adjustments of equity insurance, primarily related to Tibber. A purchase price adjustment of NOK 71 million for media was received in Q3. Total proceeds from the media transactions now amount to around NOK 4.6 billion. In totality then, net profit for the group ended around NOK 5.1 billion in Q3.

Let's move to cash flow. Cash flow from operating activities for continued operations ended in Q3 at NOK 724 million, up NOK 210 million compared to Q3 last year. The increase is mainly related to the mentioned EBITDA increase of almost NOK 100 million, but also positive effects from interest paid and received due to the stronger balance sheet this year. This is combined with positive effects on working capital and also increased provisions. CapEx in Q3 ended at NOK 145 million, up 9% versus last year. And this slight increase is driven by development of the new shared technical platform, which is -- the majority of our investments in our core business now is directed towards.

If we move forward, during Q3, the second tranche of the special dividend was paid in total, NOK 2 billion. This comes in addition to the special dividend of NOK 18 billion that we paid out in June. On September 9, a share buyback program was announced and launched. We plan to buy back shares of around NOK 2 billion by second of May 2025.

At the end of September, Schibsted has bought back 758,000 shares or 0.5% of the total outstanding shares at a cost of NOK 243 million. There has not been any refinancing activities during Q3, but as a part of the temporary cash balance, some of this, we have deposited at short-term liquidity funds with low risk to obtain a somewhat better return than bank deposits.

Then finally, as we announced earlier this week that we plan to exit businesses that are not considered core where we're not having a winning position or we don't see a feasible path to get there. This means that we will initiate processes to exit our comparison service lender group, our Recommerce -- e-commerce price comparison service, Prisjakt, but also our skilled trades marketplaces. During the transition period, these businesses will be classified as held for sale and presented as discontinued operation.

Within the Jobs verticals, we will have full focus to strengthen our leading position in Norway. And as a part of this, we will close down Blocket jobs and JobbSafari in Sweden. And we're also exploring options by exiting our position in the Finnish job marketplace, Oikotie Jobs.

We also plan to divest the majority of our venture portfolio. These actions will significantly contribute to our ongoing journey to streamline our organization and company. We have a tremendous opportunity to build on our strong market positions, and these steps should really enable us to concentrate our efforts around the 4 verticals where we see the greater potential for growth and value creation. We expect to initiate these sales processes for these entities within the next 9 months.

And with that, I will hand over to you, Jann-Boje.

[Jann-Boje Meinecke, executive]

Thanks, PC. And I think that's a good transition also to remind you about the Capital Markets Day in a couple of weeks on the 19th of November in Barcelona. So the focus on that day will be on outlining the strategic direction for Schibsted Marketplaces, really transforming into a pure-play marketplaces company.

And we have a great speaker lineup from the management team, and we really hope that many of you would like to join us on that the Day in Barcelona. So if you would like to do so, please see the information here, how you can sign up to participate in person on that day.

Alternatively, you can, of course, also be on the webcast, but we really look forward to outline the direction for the new company. And yes, I think I'll leave it with this. And then we can start with the Q&A for today.

[Jann-Boje Meinecke, executive]

So starting here in Teams. I think first up in line is Yulia from UBS.

[Yulia Kazakovtseva, analyst]

So I have a couple, if I may. So you talked about the potential exits from the assets you consider noncore -- you don't consider core. The question is if you could please share some color of how you plan to use the proceeds. Is there opportunity for special dividend or you plan to invest? So any color would be helpful.

Then the next question is on the cost side. So you announced that you're planning to complete the reorganization and the cost measures by the end of November. So 2 questions on that. With completion of the program so soon, to what degree does Q3 performance reflect the terminal impact of the savings? And secondly, do you expect any further cost savings beyond November? Or is that a complete conclusion?

[Per Morland, executive]

I think I'll...

[Christian Halvorsen, executive]

You can take both. Yes.

[Per Morland, executive]

So on the first question, we will not give any color on how we will treat the potential proceeds from these transactions. We will, of course, come back in the Capital Market Day outlining the entire financial framework, including also capital allocation. But I think you should look at how we have dealt with these type of situations in the past year as a good starting point.

Then in terms of cost, yes, you are right. We are on path towards reducing number of roles for 250. By closing Q3, we have around 100 roles impacted or people impacted, and we expect another 100 to be impacted now during November.

In addition, as mentioned, we also have canceled some open positions that wasn't filled when we started this process. So your question in terms of -- yes, as Christian also mentioned, there is impact in Q3 that really helps us now, I think, for the first time in a very -- in many quarters to actually see a net reduction in our personnel costs and consultancy costs.

And of course, we will get a further impact on this in Q4. And then you have sort of some effects from the additional 100 million in Q4, but the full effect, you will only see in Q1 next year.

[Jann-Boje Meinecke, executive]

Okay. The next up in line is Silvia from Deutsche Bank. So Silvia, please go ahead.

[Silvia Cuneo, analyst]

Also a few questions from my side. The first on competition, I wanted to ask if you could share your latest views on the evolution of the competitive landscape, in particular in the Real Estate segment. How long do you expect packages downgrade to last? And how has this informed your proposed new package structure that would be introduced in 2025?

And then also on competition, more broadly in the Jobs segment, particularly in Sweden and Finland, as you mentioned, can you share more color on the timing for the decision to potentially divest this business, it's competition, what prompted this, and what changed? And then finally, if you could comment a little bit on the macro environment, given that earlier this year, you already started highlighting macro challenges as a reason for posing the guidance.

I wanted to ask if you could share your thoughts about how macro has evolved today compared to where it was earlier in 2024.

[Christian Halvorsen, executive]

Right. I think PC can take the exit of the jobs and the macro, and I can talk about the competition. So when it comes to competition in real estate in Norway, I mean, I also said this in my statement, that we actually see record strong traffic in our real estate asset in Norway. So we are really confident about our position and that our packages deliver by far the most value to users and customers.

So it's kind of based on that assumption that we have now worked through this package structures to create a good structure that delivers solid value to the agents in Norway and that they have the option to choose between these different packages.

And as we said, yes, we expected that there will be some downgrades. There have been some downgrades this quarter. Overall, we think that this will probably be temporary and short term in nature, but exactly the timing of that is, of course, not up to us, but our customers in the end to decide on.

[Per Morland, executive]

Yes. And then on some of your other questions, I don't think we will give more color on potential both related to the Job situation in Finland. We have just said we're exploring options. We have communicated that we intend to exit, so that will happen. How, we need to come back to.

Then on the Real Estate, I mean, we are in this for the long term, and we will continue to invest in building that position and don't have any plan to exit our Real Estate position in Finland, if that was a question.

Then on macro, we entered this year expecting some kind of rebound in the second half. And then when we started out during Q1, we couldn't -- we sort of -- we couldn't any more kind of base our plans and assumptions on that. And that was also one of the reasons why we paused our external ambitions at the time.

I think what we see currently is very much in line with that. It's still a quite tough macro. It hasn't gotten worse but it also hasn't really sort of improved in broad sense. And we see some of this in our Advertising revenue. Still, we see that the Jobs volumes are still down. We see also Mobility private in Norway is under pressure. So we are still in a quite tough situation, and we have stopped giving any outlook on when and if that will improve. But at some point, I guess we will see a more normalized situation.

[Jann-Boje Meinecke, executive]

Okay. Then we can move on to you, Hakon from Kepler Cheuvreux.

[Hakon Nelson, analyst]

Regarding Adevinta and your new valuation. Can you talk about how organic growth in Adevinta has been year-to-date and overall for us to get a feeling on the developments? And also, have there been any cost programs at Adevinta or in any other countries? And is there any part of the company that would be up for sale?

[Per Morland, executive]

Yes, I'll cover that. In general, we will not disclose or give a lot of perspectives on Adevinta. So -- but as I mentioned, half of the value increase is associated to improved financial performance, both in actual numbers, also on expectations for this and next year. And this is driven by an improved business across most of the business lines. I think we can say that the main driver is the Mobility side of the Adevinta portfolio that is performing really well.

And I think I'll leave it with that. And I will not go into any further comments around the portfolio and such related to Adevinta.

[Jann-Boje Meinecke, executive]

Thanks for the question, Hakon. And then we can move over to you, Will, at BNP Paribas.

[William Packer, analyst]

Sorry, my camera is on the fritz today. Apologies. I have 3 questions. So firstly, back on Adevinta, you've increased the value by 20%, and you've kind of taken us through the reasoning which was very helpful.

Could you confirm what list of peers you're using? Was I right in hearing that you said European peers, not American or U.S. -- or sorry, Australian peers? And I note that I think the REA bid for Rightmove was rejected on the first day of Q4. So should we therefore expect a little bit of a normalization on the multiples because Rightmove -- the day afterwards and that could have an impact on the cost? So what's the list of peers? And is it right to think the multiples on the last day of the quarter?

And then the second question is regarding your transition to a common tech platform, which I think you cited as a factor in the slowdown in Q4 revenue growth. Could you expand on that a little bit? What are the factors? How does that flow through to revenue? And what gives you confidence to improve next year?

If we think of the history of classifieds in the last 10 years, these common platform transitions can be headwinds for years rather than months. So I know this is different because you're transitioning to FINN or a new platform, but any color there would be helpful.

And then just lastly, I think you mentioned 3 factors that would lead to a slowdown in revenue growth in Q4. Could you just give us some kind of sense for the scale of volume -- sorry, of revenue growth slowdown within the Nordic Marketplaces segment?

[Christian Halvorsen, executive]

You take Adevinta, and I'll take the tech platform, and you take the Q4.

[Per Morland, executive]

Yes. So just on Adevinta, we will not disclose anything more than what is in the report and what we have said that we're using a set of listed peers, which is comparable to Adevinta and operate in the region where Adevinta is operating. The market is not super big, so I think you can come quite close by just looking at the natural peers to include in a group like that.

I'm not going to give more sort of details and colors around the assumptions around the multiples used. And then in terms of the outlook for Q4, I think I'm not going to give exact numbers of -- it's not that dramatic. It's just that we want to sort of indicate that we see some challenges going into Q4 on the total top line.

But this is a balance that the underlying sort of ARPA drivers is performing very well. But we expect a quite tough advertising, partly linked to the market, partly linked to the separation with News Media and also that we had some quite tough comparisons from last year and some effects that will build up a little bit from Q3 into Q4. Exactly where it ends up, we would need to come back to.

[Christian Halvorsen, executive]

Yes. On the tech platform part, what is the situation is that the tech platform drives cost. That is kind of the primary effect we see of that and CapEx. So it's not correct that we said that this platform transition is now impacting revenues. But what we did say is that in Advertising, we are actually having to do a quite big shift in our Advertising stack as part of the split from media.

So that is both a technical project, so to speak, and it's also rebuilding part of the organization that we have previously shared with media. So that is kind of muting the results within Advertising for, let's say, the short term.

[Per Morland, executive]

And then just build on what I said. So there is -- when we now prepare new parts of our businesses to onboard a new common tech platform, we are adjusting and making changes to our commercial propositions and the products. And in some areas, there will be some impact on the revenue lines. Not material, but there will be some effect in Q4.

[Jann-Boje Meinecke, executive]

Then we can go over to you, Markus from SEB.

[Markus Heiberg, analyst]

So on the cost program, what is the share of the 200 employees that you will scale down in its first step? What's the share related to growth and investment? And what's the share as of Q3 related to growth and investment, which is, of course now, noncore as opposed to what you consider core? That's the first one.

And the second one is on the real estate in Finland. If you can clarify how much the increase was in core Real Estate listing year-over-year.

[Christian Halvorsen, executive]

I can first comment on Finland. We are not disclosing numbers at that level of detail as it stands now, also due to competitive reasons.

[Per Morland, executive]

And's then on the first one, that's quite easy. The answer is 0 because the 250 is not focused on growth and investment at all. So when we talk about 100 positions in Q3, another 100, all of that is in what we define as our core business. And then as you can see in the results, we're also working on efficiency programs within Prisjakt and Lendo and so on, but that comes in addition.

[Jann-Boje Meinecke, executive]

Okay. The next line is Eirik from Carnegie.

[Eirik Rafdal, analyst]

I've got 2. If we can start kind of a bit big picture-wise and kind of based on the learnings you've had so far with the process of the first 250 FTEs and also as a point to Christian, on some of the consulting costs as well, like how has this affected your thinking around potential future FTE adjustments and other OpEx adjustments? And I appreciate that the CMD is coming up, but just some thoughts there. And if you kind of see that scope evolving now that, yes, that you're building in the organization.

[Christian Halvorsen, executive]

I think you have to save and have a little bit of patience until Capital Markets Day. But in general, I mean, we are now executing on this reorganization, and that is a big change to our organization. I think it's fair to say that.

And now we have come quite far in that. And we still maintain what we have said before, that this is kind of the first step of a longer journey where we will, over time, optimize many things about our business, the portfolio, of course, our organization, but it can be things like systems. There are many things that we will optimize going forward. So that will be something that we will come back to more in detail when it comes to Capital Market Days.

[Eirik Rafdal, analyst]

Okay. Perfect. And just another question for me, and I'll jump back in the queue. Could you go a bit through the technicalities of closure of Blocket Jobs and JobbSafari and how you plan to kind of sell Oikotie Jobs while still retaining potentially the brand Oikotie for Real Estate and also why you're seemingly not considering to sell the Jobs business in Sweden like you're doing in Finland?

[Per Morland, executive]

Yes, I can comment on that. So we will not sell the brand, to start from there, in any situation. We don't -- we, of course, have tested this a little bit, and we don't believe there is a feasible path for a structural solution in Sweden, and that's why we are entering into a sort of a close down of that business.

We have interested parties for our position, not the brand, but the position in Finland, and that's why we are exploring that. I think we will know more in a few weeks, whether that's a feasible path or whether we will do the same as we now are planning to do in Sweden.

[Jann-Boje Meinecke, executive]

Thanks, Eirik. Before we continue with the QM team, so I'll just look at the written questions. PC, I think there are 2 for you. One is, looking HQ costs in Q4, how should we think given Q3 was significantly down? So how to think about seasonality for HQ losses coming into Q4?

And then second question, looking at the buyback, which you started. Why are you buying both A and B shares and not just B, which are trading lower than Asia is, looking at the price as such?

[Per Morland, executive]

Yes. So on the first one, as you also have seen earlier years, Q3 is relatively lower, and this is due to seasonality on how holiday pay hits the numbers. So you should expect in Q4 that the deficit will go into a similar level as you saw in the first half.

Then on the share buyback, I mean, as we -- when we announced the program, we are buying back 50-50 of our A and B. I think that's what we have to say about that.

[Jann-Boje Meinecke, executive]

Okay. Thanks, PC. Then going back to teams. I think Yulia, you're back in the queue. So please go ahead.

[Yulia Kazakovtseva, analyst]

Yes. I have one follow-up, if I may, please. So I wanted to ask about Amedia's distribution business, which you've acquired recently. So you've articulated and executed a streamlining of Schibsted towards your core businesses. This is very clear. But at the same time, you completed this acquisition of Amedia's distribution business, which I understand mostly deliver newspapers and magazines. So can you talk us through the strategic logic and your thought process behind this deal?

[Per Morland, executive]

Yes. So I think it's a very fair question given that we are so, let's say, aggressive of slimming down our portfolio. On one side, delivery is in a little bit special situation. I mean we'll be quite clear that it serves a purpose for now because it really supports our transactional project in the Norwegian market. And then over time, we don't see ourselves as a long-term owner of a delivery business in Norway or any market.

When we then go into -- we have acquired -- we actually have just taken over and incorporated the Amedia business. The reason to do that is because we are now on a path to consolidate and streamline and actually make this a profitable stand-alone parcel delivery service business. And by doing that, we think it creates shareholder value when we are ready to do a transaction.

[Jann-Boje Meinecke, executive]

Thanks, PC. I think, Ed, you had your hand up, but now it's down. So not sure if you still have the question.

[Unknown Analyst]

My question was on delivery, which has been well answered.

[Jann-Boje Meinecke, executive]

Perfect. Then I currently don't see more questions on the webcast or no hands here, so I think we can close for today.

[Christian Halvorsen, executive]

All right. Thank you.