Letter to shareholders 2025

Dear shareholders,

the year 2025 was a year of significant progress. Thanks to the work of the great teams across Zalando, our strategy to accelerate growth and to deliver higher profitability, has started to bear fruit. We designed and launched innovative products and services across B2C and B2B, moved faster on improvements and innovations, and relentlessly executed our vision to embrace the immense opportunities before us.

Teaming up with ABOUT YOU to lead the way in European fashion and lifestyle e-commerce

To further accelerate our progress and enlarge our impact, we successfully completed the acquisition of the Hamburg-based e-commerce platform ABOUT YOU. Zalando and ABOUT YOU benefit from highly complementary capabilities and share a common culture and heritage. Both companies have grown from local start-ups to European success stories by understanding the diverse needs of customers across many markets, and both are driven by a relentless focus on quality and innovation.

The execution of our strategy and the inclusion of ABOUT YOU has significantly expanded Zalando’s reach, leading to a combined active customer base of more than 60 million. This showcases Zalando’s strong standing in Europe and broadens our market reach, giving us the opportunity to actively shape the European fashion and lifestyle industry together with our more than 7,000 partnering brands. Since closing in July 2025, we have already realised first synergies and are progressing well in executing our value creation plans. In the longer term, Zalando targets significant group EBIT synergies of around 100m EUR per annum.

We aim to be the leading technology platform for fashion and lifestyle in Europe

In B2C, our multi-app approach spanning Zalando, ABOUT YOU and Lounge by Zalando, has become a central driver of our growth. Built on the insight that different customers have different needs, this strategy allows us to offer everything from premium brand experiences to gamified deal-hunting, reaching an unmatched scale of 60 million unique customers. Importantly, all three apps share a joint data and infrastructure platform that turns a standard catalogue into a personalised discovery journey.

We rolled out our upgraded loyalty programme Zalando Plus to 17 markets, aiming to serve the majority of customers — of which there are now more than 16 million — increase their average order frequency and hence their share of wallet through the programme.

We also made strong progress in our Sports, Kids & Family, Designer and Beauty categories, as we continued to elevate these lifestyle areas through richer assortments, curated content and seamless customer experiences.

We also made the customer experience more inspiring and personalised with our new AI-driven discovery feed, boosting customer engagement. Central to our B2C equity story is the continued strength and evolution of our partner business, which serves as a vital engine for both selection and availability. In 2025, the partner business demonstrated its resilience and appeal by delivering a 7.5% year-on-year growth in GMV.

This growth is further bolstered by our Retail Media business; by providing partners with sophisticated advertising tools and high-visibility placements, we are creating a powerful dynamic where partner success and platform profitability go hand-in-hand. Welcoming two brands from the HM Group, & Other Stories and Arket, via our marketplace model has been a win for our customers and a testament to our strategy.

Another highlight in 2025 was the launch of our five-year strategic partnership with the German Football Association (DFB), making Zalando a main partner of the men’s, women’s and youth national teams until 2030. We expect the partnership to make significant contributions to our sales in Germany and to the Sports category as part of our lifestyle expansion strategy.

In B2B, we continued to expand our ZEOS e-commerce operating system, enabling brands and retailers to use our logistics, software and services to power their businesses both on and off the Zalando platform while reducing the complexities of cross-border e-commerce across Europe. ZEOS’ partnership with NEXT was pivotal in jointly adding additional capabilities for multi-channel fulfilment, resulting in ZEOS now being available in 24 markets and allowing us to serve a comprehensive 18 sales channels, including Zalando and major marketplaces (such as Happy Size or Limango) alongside brands’ own webshops.

Additionally, ZEOS expanded its collaboration with British retailer Marks & Spencer. The partnership now covers fulfilment for the brand’s entire continental European e-commerce business, complementing existing operations on Zalando, ABOUT YOU and Amazon.

The inclusion of ABOUT YOU’s subsidiary SCAYLE to the ZEOS software stack, providing Zalando with a leading enterprise shop system to support brands on their own e-commerce channels, also contributes to the strong traction in B2B. DEICHMANN, Europe’s leading shoe retailer, went live with SCAYLE in its home market of Germany in August.

Netto Marken-Discount, the German discount supermarket chain, is enhancing its digital shopping experience through its partnership with SCAYLE, announced in September. These partnerships show how SCAYLE can deliver modern retail concepts efficiently and at scale across different verticals.

Leveraging AI to power the platform

For us at Zalando, AI is more than a tool, it is a powerful catalyst for innovation that we have successfully applied for over 15 years. We are proud of all the great products and services we have built by applying AI to serve customers and partners, using the unparalleled amount of data we have collected about customer behaviour, assortment, size & fit, rich product content and supply chain data. That is unique data only Zalando has. Going forward we are even more excited about the rapid advancements of AI technology, allowing us to drive growth and efficiency across our business.

We are also seeing the emerging channel of agentic commerce as a great opportunity for us to increase our market share and relevancy. We do so by becoming the best in it, using our scale and tech capability to actively shape and lead in this channel. Our AI efforts also extend to brand partners, where AI-driven B2B solutions and multi-merchant shipments offer a significant cost advantage. Zalando is not just adapting to the future of e-commerce. Instead, we are actively building the next generation of AI-powered shopping, continuing to to win both on and off our platform.

Delivering strong financial performance

The successful execution of our strategy is clearly reflected in our performance for 2025, which was in line with our expectations and reached the upper end of our guidance. We reported GMV growth of 14.7% and revenue growth of 16.8%. These double-digit increases — both landing at the top end of our guidance ranges of 12–15% and 14–17% respectively — underscore the impact of the ABOUT YOU acquisition on our market position. Even when viewed on a pro-forma basis to account for consolidation since closing in summer 2025, our underlying growth remained robust at nearly 7%, demonstrating the sustained momentum of our combined group.

Parallel to this top-line momentum, we have remained disciplined in our path to increasing profitability. Our adjusted EBIT rose to 591m EUR (up from 511m EUR in 2024), landing at the upper end of our 550–600m EUR guidance. While our adjusted EBIT margin of 4.8% remained flat year-on-year due to the initial structural inclusion of ABOUT YOU, the absolute increase in earnings underscores the underlying health of our combined operations and our ability to expand margins as we realise further synergies.

We also recognise that our share price faced notable headwinds and does not yet fully reflect our progress in strategy execution and our acceleration in financial performance. While we believe that market valuation has been negatively impacted by macroeconomic pressures and general sector dynamics, we remain laser-focused on the levers within our own control: execution discipline, operational excellence, customer-centric innovation, and delivery of synergies from our recent transaction with ABOUT YOU. We are convinced that the market will eventually recognise our full potential as we stay focussed on executing our strategy and delivering long term value creation for customers, partners and shareholders.

Moving faster, delivering more

The achievements of 2025 demonstrate how speed, focus, and teamwork create value and additional opportunities for profitable growth. Initiatives like the AI-driven discovery feed — which will deliver even more personalised inspiration and boost organic customer engagement — and Zalando Plus enhancements were designed, implemented, and launched in just a few months, showing what is possible when we are united behind a clear goal.

In 2026, we aim to provide customers with products, services, and experiences they love, while helping our partners succeed with efficient operations and advanced tools to unlock value. Our culture of entrepreneurship, operational excellence, and high performance will remain the foundation of everything we do.

Building the future together

We want to thank all Zalandos — from more than 140 nations — whose talent, creativity, and dedication power our achievements. And to our shareholders, thank you for your trust and support.

We look forward to 2026 as a defining year, one in which we will accelerate execution, continue innovating, and expand our impact for customers, partners, and shareholders alike. The opportunities ahead are extraordinary. Very few companies in Europe have the chance to build something at this scale, to operate at a truly world-class level and to become the global benchmark for customer engagement and loyalty. We have that chance, and we are determined to seize it.

Berlin, 10 March 2026

Robert Gentz, David Schröder, Anna Dimitrova, David Schneider, Dr Astrid Arndt