Welcome to Glaston Corporation Q3 2022 financial results audio cast. My name is Pia Posio. I will be hosting this session together with the colleagues of mine. You can share questions already during the sessions, and I will be taking those when we have time reserved for questions and answers towards the end of the session.
Highlight of the Q3 was the record high order intake, and you will hear more about that with the highlights that will be presented by our CEO, Anders Dahlblom. Following that, our CFO, Päivi Lindqvist, will guide us through the financial developments, and we will close the session with the outlook towards the end of this year. With this, I would like to invite Anders to go through the highlights for this quarter. Please, Anders.
Thank you, Pia, and welcome to Glaston Q3 presentation. Let me start with the Q3 2022 highlights. The first highlight is our order intake. We are super proud about order intake increasing by 90%. This is the all-time record order intake in one quarter. In the quarter, we had one big project of around EUR 30 million that contributed to this. Despite this good big project, the order intake would have increased north of 30%.
We also saw some highlights in one of our strategic area in Solar in Asia. If you look at the order intake on a business area, Insulating Glass improved 185%, and Heat Treatment business improved orders by 30%, and Automotive was close to flat with a small minus of 4%. The net sales grew 3%. This is somewhat shy given our strong order book and order intake. If we divide it into the business areas, the Insulating Glass growth was 14.3%. The Automotive & Display grew most by 32.8%. In Heat Treatment, we had a decline of 14.8%.
The service business overall globally grew 8%. If we take these to different levels, the spare part business improved 12% and the daily service work improved as much as 23% with a very strong improvement in the Asia APAC region. The upgrade sales were somewhat lower than previous quarters, while total service growth was 8%. I will come back to this later on a business area level, to explain the top line development more in detail.
Given the slight growth on the top line, the EBITDA also was affected by that. The outcome was a EUR 2.5 million EBITDA compared to EUR 3.2 million previous year in Q3. Thus also the margin somewhat decreased from 6.9% to 5.1%.
The backlog increased significantly from EUR 86.1 million to EUR 142.3 million. If you compare the increase from Q2 this year, it increased from EUR 106 million. Let me run through some of the highlights in the orders that are important and strategic wins for us. The first one is the big order of EUR 31 million in Europe.
This is a customer who has been our customer in heat treatment business, who also now wanted to expand and let us in the offerings of the IG business. This is a great strategic achievement given also our multi-areas, our new product development that is included here. This is a clear proof that our strategy with cross-products and focusing on the new development and innovations are paying off.
Secondly, in automotive, we were able to achieve orders which are important for us for the reason that we are in the process of moving or starting up Automotive & Display production in China, middle of next year. Now we have got orders already that we are planning to produce as the first ones in China next year.
The third one is a strategic focus area for us, which is Solar. We received the first deal in Solar, which is in Asia, a deal that was close to EUR 5 million, which is strategically very important for us. Those were the highlights, thereby I would jump to the architectural market in the Q3. In a general note, overall market activity remained at a good level. The continuous challenges being the supply chain and inflation and also the pressure on especially energy prices that are affecting our customers' operations significantly.
If we go to the EMEA, Europe being the strongest part here, the strongest order intake was in Europe of 157%, a significant improvement. The biggest success we saw in the Insulating Glass business, but also the heat treatment business performed well in terms of new business in Europe. The service business coming to our spare part and daily service business developed very positively.
Thus our upgrade business, especially for the heat treatment and automotive, has been slow in the Q3, but at the same time, building up an upgrade business in the Insulating Glass business that has improved very well. If we then look at the Americas business. In the Americas, we have strong year-to-date growth in order intake.
The Q3 was slightly down by 13%, but we see strong expectations for the Q4 in the US as well. The strong demand continued for the heat treatment business, where we have seen very good growth throughout the whole year. The insulating business has been slightly lower than previous year. We see good potential there, and we are strengthening our focus and portfolio to be able to take more gains in US going forward.
The same note on the service business here, spare part business developing very well d aily business was very strong, even stronger than in Europe. Here again, the upgrade business has been at least in the past two months, somewhat slower than previous months. Moving to APAC. China architectural market is currently rather slow. It has been slow for already a couple of quarters, and this is continuing.
Despite that, we saw reasonable success for our high-end IG machines. The rest of APAC was somewhat slow, but the big success for us here is the Solar business t his is a great area for Solar. And here we had the success of a deal of close to EUR 5 million that will now start soon going into production.
When it comes to the service business growth, the strongest growth was seen in APAC region w e had our service growth that was above 20%, and this is clearly a sign that the restrictions that have been tougher in APAC are opening up, and we are now able to continue and grow our service business also in APAC. In general, focus is in this architectural area on the energy efficiency, renewable energy, climate focus elements are clear there. These are all good drivers and solutions for our products going forward.
Let me talk some words about our automotive market. Automotive market, our order intake was 4% down, but the quarter started somewhat slow, but it picked up quite clearly towards the end of the quarter. We see an expectation also to continue well into Q4. When it comes to our customer's customer, the automotive producers, they are still faced with some challenge with the supply chain shortages. This is visible and also has some effect on postponement of some deals.
The service business is continuing well, and it's steadily improving and growing. There are long delivery times for control systems, and this has had some impact also on upgrade potential with some postponements in there. If you look at the automotive on a regional basis, so EMEA, which is the smallest automotive market globally, has been still somewhat slow. We see some improvements t hey are visible there.
A s said, that this is the smallest area for us when it comes to the market potential. If you look at Americas continues pretty well, and especially in the recreational and the heavy vehicles, there was a continuous growth in Americas. The APAC business, APAC being the biggest potential when it comes to automotive market. Market continued positively.
The success for us in projects that we are planning to produce locally in 2023 has been a proof that our strategy to establish our local footprint for automotive business there is the right thing to do. I would like to switch gears to the business areas and look at the business area segments. Let me start with the heat treatment business. The heat treatment business, we saw a growth in orders of 30%. This has been a steady good growth throughout the year, continuing in Q3.
The net sales is worth opening up a bit, and Päivi will come more into details here. The net sales is declining by 14.8%, and there are two main reasons in here. One being that we have strategic investments that are ongoing and much focused on Q3, and this has consumed some of our available capacity, temporarily.
Thus, the top line and the machines going out has been lower than previous quarters. Also, some impact we see from the components. There is especially electrical and automation components that continue to be challenging in terms of availability and price t hus, we see other materials actually easing up when it comes to the availability.
We also have seen focus on more automation, and we also launched a product here which comes out with new features. We have been able to do deals in this area, which has been a great success for our R&D development here.
The Insulating Glass business here we had a very strong order intake growth of 185%, biggest growth ever. The top line growth was 14.3%. This is not reflecting our real potential here. We have here some supply chain electrical components and automation that have delayed some full deliveries, which therefore are seen as less top line than the potential.
Also, the China business has the biggest impact on Insulating Glass. China business, as said, is continuing on a rather challenging level. Here, getting out the product to the customer installation with this situation has been also somewhat challenging, and the full potential of the top line there has not been materialized.
Also some investment costs relating to strategic initiatives are upfront loaded before we see the full potential going into the top line. And that is one other point here. The upgrade business, though, is an area that is growing well in Insulating Glass, and we see a further potential to continue this growth as we have seen in our other BAs. This is a positive note that is continuing and visible.
Going to the Automotive & Display business o rder intake being rather flat with a small decline of 4%. It's picking up, and we actually expect a continuous now positive note going into the Q4. When it comes to operations here, we saw the biggest growth from top line is 32.8%, so this is a significant growth in the business here.
We also have a good project mix, and service has been continuously growing through in the automotive business t hereby, we saw a strong EBITDA margin of up to 9% in the Q3. That's briefly about the markets and the business areas. With those words, I would like to hand over to the financials to Päivi Lindqvist.
Thank you, Anders. My pleasure to go through the numbers in a little bit more detail. Let's start with the order intake. As said, this is really the cornerstone, in a way, positive highlight of the quarter. Over EUR 86 million of new orders received, and 90% higher than the year before and this is is beating our earlier quarterly order intake record of EUR 64.5 million in Q2 2021 with a pretty wide margin.
Of course, one big reason for this record high order intake is that one single individual order of about EUR 31 million e ven if we would exclude that, the order intake growth was very healthy for the quarter t he market has stayed positive.
If we take a look at the different product areas and nine months' orders received, we can also there see that our Insulating Glass Technologies business is kind of dominating the growth year to date with 66% growth in new orders. Of course, in the latest quarter, the growth in this business was extremely strong.
If we move to Heat Treatment Technologies, there we've recorded 9% growth in nine months with a clear pickup in the Q1, where we had 55% growth in new orders. The smallest of our machine businesses, Automotive & Display Technologies, has 28% growth in nine months. There we saw some decline compared to the year before in Q3.
This business has been a little bit volatile when it comes to new orders and because it is also quite small, some kind of individual deals and where they actually then take place has quite big impact on the growth figures. Finally, of course, definitely not the least, the services business, which is having 7% growth in orders in nine months. Q3 was flat and there this slowdown in order intake in heat treatment and automotive upgrades is kind of dragging down the kind of positive development in some other areas of this business, like the spare parts and field service. If we move to net sales.
As I said, the net sales growth clearly slowed down from the previous quarters. I will come to the business-specific reasoning a little bit later. One reason, of course, is the fact that the comparison period starts to be a little bit stronger already for Q3. For the earlier quarters, the comparisons were still quite a bit impacted by the COVID time and the fact that we had kind of less order intake, especially in 2020, then impacting the net sales in 2021.
By product area, and again, kind of commenting first the nine-month figures. We have 8% growth in Insulating Glass Technologies, and the net sales growth picked up to 14% in Q3. Considering the very strong order intake in this area, you know, the growth could have been quite a bit higher as well. This is also the business where we have the most impact from the situation in China.
If we look at Heat Treatment Technologies, 27% growth in nine months, so a very strong growth area. Like mentioned at Q3, in the machines area had quite a bit of decline, over 20%, and I'll come to those reasons later. Automotive & Display, small business growing strongly, and also in Q3 we experienced nice growth in that area.
Services business nine months growth of 12% and then Q3 growth of 8%, kind of partly explained by the upgrades net sales not meeting the very high comparison figure within heat treatment. All right so i think we can move on to the regional view of our net sales development.
EMEA is clearly our biggest region and has actually increased its share to 54% in the nine months and has definitely been the growth driver for our business this year. Both nine months and Q3 regional net sales growth was 24%.
Then we have Americas region with 3% growth, and in the first six months, Americas region had very nice growth, but then in Q3 there was a decline. This is mainly dependent on the fact that there was clearly less US projects in revenue recognition in Q3. The order intake in the first half especially has been very strong from the Americas region, so this is kind of from a regional perspective, mainly a timing issue and the fact that there just, you know, happened to be less of those US projects approaching delivery when most of the revenue recognition is taking place.
APAC region with 26% growth for nine months, Q3 clearly slower growth of 11%. This is coming from China. China share of our net sales in nine months was 16% and declined to 11% in Q3. The net sales from region China was flat compared to year ago.
There we have to separate a little bit what is happening in the business locally, where we saw a decline in net sales compared to Q3 last year. On the other hand, there is some growth from deliveries that are happening from our European factories to China, and the outcome for the whole region was flat development for Q3. Clearly, we can see that in China, especially for the local business, we see customers kind of not ready to receive machines. That was the reason why quite a bit of the revenue that we were expecting for the quarter actually is then moving to Q4.
Moving on to profitability and EBITDA margin, which both declined in Q3 compared to year before. This is mainly volume-driven. As explained earlier, the net growth, net sales growth slowed down quite a bit. If we compare the cost base with what we had a year ago, we are clearly at the higher level. Margins, kind of gross margins developed well. There is kind of no negative impact coming from gross margins, but the profitability is kind of suffering from the fact that the costs are higher and the revenue growth could not compensate for this cost increase.
We have increased kind of resources w e are executing the strategy, and we especially see now marketing and traveling type of costs returning to kind of more normal levels. We also had this main glass industry event, glasstec, in the Q3, increasing fixed costs. We'll get to this segment level kind of profit and growth drivers a little bit later on.
Actually can move to heat treatment next already. Within heat treatment, market continued strong, nice order intake growth of over 30% for the business. That is definitely the kind of good news within our heat treatment business. Net sales, as we mentioned, down about 15%. Reasons, I would say, are threefold. Component situation is definitely one thing, kind of, delaying revenue recognition.
There is also a specific comparison issue within heat treatment that the quarters in this year are quite different from what they were last year. Last year, we had exceptionally good net sales and also margin for Q3, whereas that kind of peak happened in the Q2 this year. Earlier, kind of the previous quarter for heat treatment was extremely good and the same kind of extremely good quarter was in Q3 last year.
Finally, the third reason is the kind of capacity constraint coming from the kind of R&D project and the fact that kind of building R&D machine within the production is taking some capacity out from customer projects. Mainly, kind of revenue driven profitability declined, and of course, here also we do see some of these fixed costs increase, especially marketing, travel, and external services.
On the other hand, the positive drivers, positive impact for profitability development was on the margin side and also from the fact that the mix was better services with a higher share and some positive impact from other operating income as well.
If we move to Insulating Glass, this is, of course, you know, the area where we have extremely good order intake development, a really kind of excellent level and order backlog starting to be kind of dramatically higher than year before.
Like i said, this one individual deal boosting the orders further in addition to strong general development. Net sales increased for the whole segment 14%, and component shortages, lockdowns having an impact w ithout these, the growth had been clearly higher. Profitability and margins softened. Here we see some margin pressure from the fact that the supply chain issues, component shortages are kind of creating inefficiency and putting some pressure on costs, not dramatically, but some impact, yes.
More importantly, I think the development is based on the fact that the operation is geared for higher net sales levels, and we have increased personnel and external services in order to cope with the increased order backlog w hen the revenue was a little bit softer, this is hitting profitability. In addition, increase in some kind of other fixed costs like marketing.
The final segment, Automotive & Display, which where we see very delightful development compared to a year ago, especially on the P&L side. If we look at the order intake, we had low machine orders. Like i said earlier, this seemed to vary quite a bit from one quarter to another.
Services order intake grew slightly, so that was kind of softening the impact. Our net sales increased 33% and based on growth in the earlier quarters in machines' order intake. Also, the services net sales had a very nice growth of 17% in the quarter.
The EBITDA improvement, profitability improvement is mainly coming from volume growth and also the fact that in the machines area, the gross margin is higher due to kind of better geographical mix, so higher margin projects in the revenue recognition t his is now changing from the first half, where we've had more kind of challenging profitability situation and there the geographical mix was not that good.
All right. Moving on to the kind of cash flow and net debt, I think we can end, you know, this financial part with the well, positive highlight. Very good working capital development in the quarter, positive operating cash flow. This also led to lower net debt, and thus gearing coming down to 27% at the same level that we actually had at the end of last year. End of year is usually the lowest point of the year. Nice development for cash and balance sheet. This ends my part, so Pia, I guess we are ready for questions.
Let's have a look at the outlook first.
Okay.
We are there w hile mentioning questions, please use the chat function to share those, so we have time to discuss. In a minute. Anders, please.
Outlook for 2022, we have specified outlook from the range of being EUR 12 to 15 million w e have narrowed it to EUR 12 to 14 million. We also expect the net sales to increase from the 2020 to 2021 level. I think just a couple of words on the outlook here. Obviously, the Q3, we were slightly short on the top line when it comes to getting our machineries out.
I think we could say we have roughly a EUR 3 to 4 million impact of the electrical components in terms of the top line. Hence, we have the shortfall for the Q3. We don't expect a significant upside while we will keep the upper range up to EUR 15 million as we had in the previous outlook. Still, the market looks very good.
We have a good outlook for the new businesses for the Q4, and we are also expecting to come with a better quarter than Q3 and Q4 t hat is the expectations. The situation as such is somewhat of a temporary, especially the decline in the top line, the heat treatment, the Q3, which we expect it to be different in the next one. Outlook is specified EUR 12 to 14 million t hat's the range that we expect to come out. Thank you.
Yes. Thank you. Now we have the opportunity to move into questions. Let's start with the capacity discussion that was here. How long do you see the capacity and the other issues suppressing the revenue generation, especially in A&D and IG?
I think this comes back to the component situation. What we see currently is the electrical and automation components being the ones where the situation looks to continue, what comes to the availability. What comes to other raw materials, other components, we see an improvement there w e get availability starts to improve significantly, which obviously will ease up a bit but s till, this is a challenge that is going forward a lso, we are learning to cope internally better and better, and that's where we believe to be able to deliver more on a quarterly basis.
Thank you. On a group level, how much of the deliveries and sales were postponed from Q3 and Q4, and on what? Due to component shortage and COVID restrictions.
Well, I think what we see in general, due to the component shortages, we see that the potential we would otherwise have is a EUR 3 to 4 million shortage on the top line. That is what we can see is due to the component challenges.
I would say that in addition, EUR a couple of million from these COVID restrictions in China. Partially already there, but any rough estimate on how much postponed revenue that was during the quarter that could have been otherwise recognized, in absence of component shortage and, on the other hand, the customers not being able to receive the products.
Well, I think this is pretty much the same question a t least I understand it now quite as the same question as the earlier. If we put those together, I think we are about EUR 5 million of the impact of both components and then also the COVID restrictions in China.
Related to costs and inflation, how much has there been cost inflation, and what do you expect for the future?
Yeah. The components have very different patterns when it comes to cost increases. On average, we see cost increases being between 5% to 10%. Going forward, I think we see this, well, component raw material costs going to decrease a bit. As said, for certain components, especially the electrical and automation components, we will still see pressures going forward.
Looking at our margins, and as Päivi said, so if you look at the cost increases and we look at it in the margin, we can clearly see that we are offsetting and we are able to get this equation healthy, so the Q3 softness in the EBITA is really due to the fact that the top line was short compared to previous quarters.
With the strong component shortage, specifying still, what's your current view of how long we see this issue ongoing and having the impact generally in the business?
I think a component of what comes to the electrical components and automation components, that will continue into Q1, potentially Q2 next year. What comes to many other raw materials, many other components, it is very likely to improve going forward now. That would mean that we will see some light in the tunnel, but there will still be some part of the components will continue to be on a challenging note.
Speaking of prices, how much have you increased prices?
Well, I think that goes back to the cost inflation that we just talked about. If we look at our gross margin, we have been able to compensate for the general cost increases. The margin in EBITDA is mainly due to the fact that we have a temporary lower growth in the Q3 than in the previous two quarters.
Right. Moving to currencies. What's the currency impact in sales in Q3?
Well, if we look at net sales and the FX impact that is coming from the consolidation of the group companies, that is three percentage points positive. It is quite small for us because, for example, the US business is mainly kind of sold from the European companies.
Also for this reason, for order intake, it's not really possible for us to kind of measure that because we are taking the orders at the European factory companies, and then this FX impact is only one ingredient in the pricing. Making any kind of calculations based on the changes in Forex exchange rates compared to a year ago also doesn't really make sense.
Thank you, Päivi. Speaking of China still, what is the overall demand situation that you see happening over there?
Well, it's clear that the architectural market, especially in China, it's slow. I think, however, we are seeing and we are doing deals, we are expecting to receive new deals going forward w e also received the Solar deal, which is related to a Chinese customer, which is super strong and super big. There is ongoing parts and we expect that we will continue on a flattish note there.
I think the challenge has been then more in the operations, the COVID zero-COVID policy, and there are cities being in lockdowns, which makes the day-to-day operations, installations and customer readiness to cope with the deals is challenging. I think it's continuing on a challenging note, but we actually have order book that we are working with through the Q4 and also goes into clearly Q1 and part of Q2 next year.
Then moving from China to overall market sentiment, there has been a lot of discussion about the energy costs, the cost for the float glass, and of course, supported by the inflation. How would you describe the overall market sentiment? How is the customer base seeing the challenges in the market at the moment?
Well, I think for the customers, focus goes to efficiencies, it goes to automation, it goes to focus on renewable energy and really how they can find efficient ways forward. That's exactly what we have on our agenda. Sustainability and energy efficiency and renewables and the Solar business is purely something we are developing w e also do development together with the customers because that's the best way to mutually see the most important solutions that we can provide to the customers.
I would also like to emphasize this, even a little bit shorter term kind of demand for energy efficiency upgrades, for example, that you know there are certain upgrades that can be done both in heat treatment and IG area where we can reduce the electricity consumption of the line. This is, of course, something that customers are interested in when considering now in Europe the electricity prices.
Thank you, Anders. Thank you, Päivi s eems like that was the conclusion of our Q&A session. As a reminder, 2023 is the next year that we're going to face, and we already have scheduled the financial reports for that. We look forward to seeing and hearing you again. This concludes Glaston Corporation Q3 2022 financial results report. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.