Hello all, InderesTV viewers and listeners. Rapala published their Q1 report earlier today and we have here the company's CEO Cyrille Viellard for a management interview. Welcome Cyrille.

Thank you very much, Thomas. It's always good to be here and have the opportunity to share to our audience and our shareholders where we're going.

It's always a pleasure to host you here. But starting off, Q1, how was it from a CEO's point of view for you guys?

Very satisfying. Satisfying to see that all the efforts, everything that we've been working on is giving results. We have a good Q1. It's always good to have a good start in the year. And we had a very well-working supply chain. We have a complex supply chain with a wide range of products, and when everything fits in and customers are delivered on time and customers are happy, it provides good results, and then we see that all the efforts we're putting into our brand strategy and our brand focus extending our brands to other categories is also bringing results, with a very large share of the new product introductions bringing successful sales.

And really managed to grow very strongly during Q1. And you mentioned new product categories or products driving this growth. So what are these new products more specifically.

So this year we had on the hard bait side, which is our core category, we had very smart introductions with one A leading product, the clap tail, which I mentioned also last year, was elected best of show at ICAST for freshwater hard baits, and it's a commercial success. It's also for us a smart extension in all our hard bait offering. And then we had two very interesting lures, high-volume lures, the snare and the harvest shad as price points that also complemented our offering quite well, and what is really continuing to be a success after three years is our soft bait. Penetration, market penetration, and mooch minnow has been exceptional, and the overall CrushCity category is further very well accepted by the market.

So despite you guys launching the crush city category already a couple of years ago, it still seems to be driving quite a bit of revenue growth.

Correct. The soft bait market is a very significant one compared to hard bait. It has other applications, The softbait market is a very significant one compared to the hardbait, its other applications, and we had been present in the past under storm, and really the CrushCity introduction has better answered some market expectations under the Rapala brand than we had been doing in the past with our previous offering.

Yeah. But considering the fact that Rapala is rather sensitive to timing of orders, which can easily affect performance when it comes to H1 or H2 or Q1 and Q2. So to what extent would you attribute a strong Q1 to Well, orders being timed more during Q1 this year compared to last year and to what extent is there like this organic growth in demand?

So what I can say is that we complied with the expectations. of our customers to prepare the stores for the open water season on time. So there is a timing issue. What we see is in the United States, we have quite accurate point-of-sales data. So it's quite a mature market, and we have the possibility to have, daily for our major customers, their daily sales. And what we see there is The market is healthy. There are good customer pulls. So it gives us today some good confidence for the season. In Europe we've had very strong Q1, same scenario, state-of-the-art execution of our operations. The market is starting slower but that's only what we see. From the word of mouth and here the market, we don't have concrete data from how the sales are occurring. So there is a timing issue in the performance of our Q1 versus what we can also achieve in Q2. Okay.

Got it. And you already mentioned the strong performance in the United States, and I was actually, it was a positive surprise for me considering all the tariff volatility that's been going on in the market. But how do you currently see the tariff situation there? As the 15 percent tariffs were deemed illegal, are you guys expecting to get these refunded from last year, and going forward how does the reclassification of the aluminum tariffs affecting your products affect Rapala?

So we, well, the previous tariffs have been now replaced by a new set of tariffs. What we want for the whole supply chain, that for our customers and our suppliers, that everything is tariff neutral. So we had tariff impacts in our purchases and we passed them on to our customers who passed them on to the end consumer. We did get a hit ourselves. If things are right now, we are still in the expectation because there might be some tariffs replacing the one that were just put in place for 150 days, and whatever happens then, I think we've been very transparent. I think the acceptance of price increases related to tariffs worked well because you have to be very transparent.

Yep.

And that will work both ways if tariffs are taken back. We are a small player overall in this whole tariff story for consumer goods in the United States. And um we will uh follow what what others uh have been doing. What concerns the repayment of the initial tariffs, we have submitted our request Huh. and uh we hear different positions, that it might go relatively quick. I don't know what relatively quick means, or actually take a lot of time. So we've done everything that needs to be done and then we will We will act accordingly once it has been paid back.

That's what makes it such an interesting topic, because there seems to be quite a lot of uncertainty around the topic still.

Yes, very time consuming, and for us we try to make it as transparent as possible for our customers and our partners so that it's fair. It's fair.

How about, you already mentioned when it came to the development of the United States and Europe, but how about the rest of the world? Because it seems like it was still rather volatile with APAC being difficult and Southern America developing very strongly during the quarter.

So being present everywhere in the world with Rapala is a big asset. Our relative market share, where we are strong in market shares in Europe, Canada, USA, and we have a presence with a lower market share in other parts of the world, but there's a lot of potential and it's a great asset to be present. And we've seen, I have a specific focus on China. I've studied Chinese in my youth. It's a country that I think is fascinating for many. And there's a lot of potential. The fishing market is quite booming. We are very small, but we have a fantastic team and we have a focused strategy on China for the Rapala brand. And it's picking up, it's picking up. So we've had good signs in Q1 in China, Japan, Korea remain tricky. We're on hold, we have a strong team. And once the market picks up again, then we'll have the advantage of having our own team on site. Australia. has really good potential and we just started with Okuma, so that's really a positive and it will have an effect on all the brands. And Latin America is very positive for us, so that's to give you a, small streams make big rivers, and

Yep

when we have for these smaller units Just simple strategies with core actions, I believe it will deliver.

Maybe during the interview Jacob Wheeler won the Redcrest competition earlier this year and of course he represented Rapala there. What kind of an impact has this had on the demand for Rapala products and just overall the brand visibility you guys are associated with?

Jacob Wheeler is an exceptional angler, a beautiful person, and having him on the team, on board, is a great chance, and that win was a blast, you know, by such a difference to second place. It had a massive effect on our, we've never had such a reach in all our posts, so the brand presence during that competition was massive, massive, and he's been instrumental in developing the clap tail and the CrushCity range, and clearly there's a connection in our sales success as well as our other pro staff in the team, that's been There's been great dynamics.

I feel like that's a good high note to end on. Thank you, Cyril, for that.

Thank you, Thomas.

And have a nice rest of this spring.

Thank you very much. You too.