Kreate Group Oyj (HEL:KREATE)
Finland flag Finland · Delayed Price · Currency is EUR
18.15
-0.50 (-2.68%)
Apr 28, 2026, 6:24 PM EET
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Earnings Call: Q4 2024

Feb 5, 2025

Mikko Laine
CFO, Kreate Group

Hello everyone, I'm Mikko Laine, CFO in Kreate. Welcome to the walk through our 2024 results with me shortly, and I will highlight the both Q4 and the full year results. As the headline says, our profitability improved last year despite the revenue decreased about 14%. Good result in our opinion, taking into consideration the market situation and the overall global situation. A lot of turbulence overall. Some key highlights from this page. Let's start from Sweden, the second bullet point. Our full year revenue increased almost 50%, and Q4 was EUR 10 million. Strong growth there, and we are really happy with both the growth and the profitability level in Sweden. They are doing extremely well there.

The second one is the order backlog from this page that we turned the trend back upwards from Q3 levels, and also compared to last year, we are only 10% below the last year-end level. The profitability guidance dividend I will walk through later in the presentation. Some highlights, a few big projects we were able to close the projects before the estimated schedule, both in Helsinki and in Oulu region, two big projects. We celebrated our 10 years of Kreate journey in autumn.

All the personnel were invited to party with us, and although it's only 10 years if we calculate the companies that founded Kreate, we have almost 300 years together history. A lot of knowledge, a lot of understanding both from the market and customers, and long working history for some people over 40 years in company already. From the new projects, we got the Koskela tram depot into implementation phase and a nice swing upwards in our order backlog, over EUR 50 million from that project.

If we look at our strategic targets that we set in May 2024, we said that the profitability level we aim during the strategy period is about 5%. We improved 0.8% our profitability last year and now on level of 3.2%. Our guidance for this year was declining revenue. The result was minus 14%, which was in line with the guidance. From this year onwards, we aim to achieve 5-10% growth every year. The trend was downwards, but it was expected before we started the year. Indebtedness, our net debt to EBITDA ratio, we aim to set it below 2.5 level.

The full year 2024 was on 2.0, which is a good level thinking the industry we are working and the project business that we are operating in. Dividend, I will come back to this later, but the proposal from the board of directors is to give a dividend of 100% of last year's results. We are continuing the increasing dividend trend. Some operational highlights linked to strategy. We aim to be the best place for the best experts in this industry. Our employee satisfaction NPS was 49, and the number of employees is way beyond 500 already.

We are a lucrative employer in markets we operate, and people who work with us, the infra specialists and kind of professionals that are in this industry are happy to work with us. We want to be the most desirable partner in this industry. The customer satisfaction index measured again with NPS is extremely high, 82. One example of being a good partner for other companies in the industry is that we won, Vantaa tram project together with GRK, which is normally one of our competitors, but here we made a team and won a major project, which is now in development phase and not yet in our order backlog at the moment.

If I take the fourth one, it is the selectiveness and the being nimble and fast in what we do and reliable on what we do. We aim for high profitability and we must be agile and we must comply with our own risk policies and guidelines that we have set for ourselves. Market is a bit kind of on two sides. If we look at a bit longer perspective, it seems to be rather positive. I come back to this later on. If we look shorter term, there is still some kind of an increased competition in smaller projects, not that complex projects.

If we look at the businesses like Bridges and Foundation and Engineering Construction, green color on Q4, special foundation in KFS Finland side, also green there. Compared to the Q3 situation, it's a bit more positive view how we see it at the moment. To long-term outlook, which I mentioned shortly, there are kind of three topics that we see that will support our business in coming years. Military mobility, there are discussions on EU level, there are NATO requests or demands for Finnish infrastructure. Of course, we as a nation are highlighting certain areas and certain investments on that area, which requires infra construction in many cases. Urbanization continues.

We see our rail business is growing and there are potential big projects coming to our order backlog. Green transition, the estimation is that there will be several billions of investments only this year. If we look at the longer term, the potential that is there is huge. We see already, especially on data center side, that a lot of projects are already ongoing or in starting phases. Other industries most likely will follow in coming months and years.

Back to our numbers, order backlog trend is now changed. EUR 177 million is the order backlog in total, of which about EUR 120 million we estimate that will actualize during the year we have just started. This does not include yet the possible implementation phases of those big projects, which are Tampere passenger railway yard and Vantaa tram project. The best estimate is that the first one will turn into execution phase during the first half of the year and the second one during the second half of the year.

When it will happen, we cannot estimate in detail because we are not the deciding part on that. If we see what changes in general there are ongoing on economy and market, we see that both inflation and interest rates are declining and we are more or less on the long-term normal levels on both. We see that that will feed on investment side, that it is a more predictable and more normal situation. We hope that the final investment decisions will take place in coming months and will support the private side demand on infra construction.

If we see the government side, the investments that the government is setting to transportation is several billions, and this we see to actualize during the second half of this year and implementation phases mainly 2026 and onwards, but positive demand impact on market overall. We see that even though it's a bit foggy, still there is light and many different drivers that support the business development. EBITA increased 0.8% and last quartile was 3.7%.

This is quite a predicted result if I see it that way, that the net sales revenue declined a bit and we continue to improve the profitability of the project and keep our cost level in shape. All those together supported the improved EBITA. Revenue side decreased. The last quartile decrease was 6% and full year 14%. We are starting to stabilize and turn ourselves to our guidance to turn it back to growth path. If we see the revenue distribution for the full year, a bit more than one third is coming from the private sector and two thirds from the public sector.

The private sector side will be supported if the investment starts and the share has been quite stable, a bit larger maybe earlier years, but this is rather stable overall in Kreate. If we see our sustainability targets that we have followed now full year, we have set the target for 2025 for our occupational safety and accident frequency. We aim to improve from this year to be below 11, including our own and subcontractors who are working for us. We focus on observations that we get them and analyze them, and that is the tool to get the frequency down.

If I take the footprint reducing part, we have set the greenhouse gas emission targets for ourselves. We aim to cut Scope 1 and 2 emissions to half from the comparison year of 2023. We have set the actions and targets more detailed on that one. Our customer NPS, as I said, the target is to be over 50 over time and we are now on level 82. In some areas, good development, some areas we have still a lot to do.

On this one, I like to highlight that about a month from now we will come out with the annual result. That is including also the sustainability report according to CSRD standards. There are more details on this topic. Key figures, I will run through some balance sheet ratios and liquidity topics, but here is the summary.

Let's go further on cash flow and net working capital. Cash flow was close to zero in 2024. Main reason for that was extremely good 2023 when we had EUR 26 million cash flow. The key driver in our cash flow on top of the profitability or the result we make is of course the investments. We had some divestments this year. We sold the properties in Tuusula because we need some more space and we are now tenants on that one and will move to another location in coming years.

The second one on top of the investment is net working capital, where we are more or less on normal level, around zero level. Because it was a much better situation and one could say exceptional level at the end of 2023, that tied some capital, which of course reflected to our free cash flow. Our liquidity position is good. We have kind of a good plan onwards and there is no dramatic or any special items behind the lower cash flow this year.

If we look at our interest-bearing debt, net debt level is around EUR 30 million, up from last year due to the net working capital and less cash in hand at the year end. Net debt to EBITDA was 2.0 level, which is below the target level of 2.5, which is a good thing. Equity ratio is 32.2%. We have gradually coming up with the equity ratio all the time. If we look at the loan portfolio more in detail, the average interest rate is 6.1% at the moment. If we look at the repayment schedule, we have about EUR 3 million ordinary loan repayments, and then w e have commercial papers for net working capital purposes, which we utilize every now and then when needed.

The big package that we have for the loan side is maturing in 2026, but this year still the repayments are about EUR 3 million-EUR 3.5 million. For guidance for 2025, as said earlier, we estimate that our revenue will grow and the range will be between EUR 290 million-EUR 310 million, which is approximately on the level of what we said in our strategy targets, between 5%-10% compared to this year. Our profitability on absolute terms will increase and we estimate it to be in the range of EUR 9 million-EUR 11 million compared to this year's EUR 8.8 million.

The reasoning or justification behind this is that we know what we have in order backlog, we know the projects that are on development phase, we can estimate the revenue levels from there. We continue to be picky and selective on project side and we continue our growth in Sweden. All these we calculate and estimate that will improve our profitability compared to last year. Finally, the board's proposal of dividend. Our board proposes for the annual general meeting that Kreate will pay EUR 0.50 per share dividend paid in two installments, one in April and one in October.

This EUR 0.50 is actually the same as our earnings per share from last year, so it will be 100% of the result that will be paid as a dividend if approved in annual general meeting. If we compare this to our year-end stock price, it means that it's approximately 7% dividend yield. This is now the fourth time when we increased since the listing our dividend. We have been really stable on this in our listing history. That was all from my side. Thank you for following and see you again in April when we come out with the first quartile results.

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