Good morning, everybody.
Good morning.
Morning.
Good morning, everyone.
So I take it you can hear me okay?
Yes, we can hear you loud and clear.
Perfect, very good. Let's get started. Welcome to this Teleste's first quarter earnings call. We will do this in English this time, as we have some English-speaking people joining as well. Together with me here, I have Mervi Kerkelä-Hiltunen, our CFO, as usual. We will do so that I will kick us off with some highlights, and then Mervi will go a little bit more in detail regarding the financials. In the end, we will save some time for comments or questions from any of you. Let's get started. Just by way of brief introduction about the company, let me just get the slides running here. Teleste, we basically are reporting our numbers in two segments.
The first one of those relates to what we call broadband network segment, which is to do with access infrastructure products for cable-related fast broadband access networks. The second segment is called public safety and mobility, where we are providing. Sorry, did somebody say something?
I think we can hear pretty well on the line.
Okay, there was somebody commenting something on the line. If you can hear me okay, that's good. Let me know if there's any problem with the audio. As I was saying, the public safety and mobility is related to especially passenger information and safety systems for public transport, as well as security systems for other critical infrastructure and public spaces. These two businesses, in terms of customers, are shown here. For the broadband networks business, most of our customers are telecom operators. You probably noticed some of the European operator brands here, some of them from Scandinavia, Finland, some of them from Europe, like Liberty Global, Vodafone Ziggo, Vodafone. We also have one public reference from North America, which is Cox Communications. We have other North American customers as well, but we have not been able to yet disclose their names in public.
For public safety and mobility, we have then as main customer segment are European large train manufacturers. The biggest one there is Alstom, a French train manufacturer. Then we have Siemens from Germany, CAF from Spain, Stadler from Switzerland. We have some public transport operators here. Some are mentioned there, like [Baden Denmark] , SL from Stockholm. Also some other, especially for our video security business, other critical infrastructure providers. Finavia is mentioned here, Helsinki Airport, Swedavia in Sweden is our customer, Finntraffic, APRR is a motorway authority in France, and so on. A broad range of public transport as well as public infrastructure players who are our customers in this segment. This just by way of brief introduction of the company. I will go into the financials that we were releasing this morning.
The year started, I would say, quite positively. We had a decline as we expected ourselves in our revenue, but our profitability was increasing, in fact, quite significantly. The adjusted operating profit was on par with the comparison period, but the IFRS operating profit and the orders and earnings per share, they were improving year on year. Clearly, these cost-saving measures that we have been implementing and talking quite vocally about as well over the past 12 months to 18 months have given us now a leaner cost structure, which then means that even with lower revenue, we are able to deliver profit. Our cash flow was also positive, although it was not as positive as a year ago, and we will probably talk about that a bit later. Essentially, our ramp-up of activities in North America has been tying up working capital at the beginning of the year.
The order book is relatively stable in the year-on-year comparison, although the blend has been changing underneath. If I then look at this a little bit more in detail, our net sales, as I mentioned, it was declining. Here we show actually in this bar diagram two years back the quarterly revenues. I would like to highlight, however, that the geographical mix of this has been now starting to change. In fact, it is coming from both of these reporting segments. The green one you see here is what we call North America and other markets. Most of it is North America, and it has been growing quite significantly in a year-on-year comparison. Our deliveries in broadband networks to North America were on a much higher level than they were a year ago.
Also in public safety and mobility, we had some very sizable deliveries to North America, but also to the Middle East, which actually fits into this same category. When we go to the details, we will give you the kind of geographic breakdown of the revenue per reporting segment. This is the blended average of the two. The lower pie chart here is showing the kind of segment division of the revenue, so quite much in line with how it was also last year. Roughly 60% of the revenue coming from broadband networks, and 40% coming from public safety and mobility. In terms of the profitability, this is maybe a little bit complex slide now to follow, but here we are showing for the quarters the adjusted EBIT as well as the non-adjusted IFRS EBIT.
I guess the message that we're trying to deliver here is that although rather as a coincidence, our adjusted operating profit for the first quarter was exactly the same as it was a year ago. In fact, also a year earlier, the kind of non-adjusted IFRS EBIT was actually much, much healthier. We had quite sizable restructuring costs on one of the items reported in some of the previous quarters. Some of these adjusted items also include capitalized R&D impairment from our balance sheet, as we have reported earlier. Now when we are starting the year 2025, the adjusted and non-adjusted operating profit are in fact almost exactly the same. I guess one message with this one is that the big restructuring that we have done is largely now over. We will continue to remain very cost-conscious.
There will be areas where we are still streamlining our operations and activities. We are focusing very much on the kind of geographical presence that we have. We have an intention to increase our presence and footprint and also costs in North America. It may then, on the flip side, mean that depending on the market development here in Europe, we may then be still adjusting some of our structures downwards here. There may be deviation between the adjusted and unadjusted number as we move forward, but we are not expecting them to be of the same scale at all as they have been during the past 18 months of larger restructuring in the company. This actually shows the same now, so I will probably not stop here in any level of detail anymore.
For some reason, these are showing when they were supposed to be hidden. In terms of orders, our orders was a very positive development in the first quarter, particularly in our broadband networks business. Our orders from North America were growing very nicely, but also in Europe, we received quite significant new orders related to the next generation DOCSIS 4.0 investments, which we know now for a fact are starting in the second half of this year. They will probably start in the third quarter of this year already. We have a relatively good order book from our leading customer in Europe for the modern 8GHz amplifier and passive deployments in Europe, and the products are all ready for volume deployment, and those rollouts will start in the second half. That is showing in the order book in the first quarter as well.
However, on the public safety and mobility, this was a quieter quarter, I might say. We do have, depending on how the projects get awarded, we have fluctuation in the order intake for the public safety and mobility business. That's quite typical, but we have been during the past months, I would say, through the big project rollouts that we have been doing, we have been eating into the order book for the public safety and mobility. The blend of the actual order book has been changing a little bit, but nevertheless, I would say a very positive quarter in terms of the order intake, particularly in broadband networks, which gives us good confidence that this is going to be a good year of growth for that business.
In terms of the market outlook then, looking a little bit ahead into this year that has started, we are expecting the European market to remain pretty much on a full year level at the same level as 2024. However, there will be an increase in that market most likely in the second half due to the DOCSIS 4.0 investments now starting in Europe. In North America, we are expecting the ongoing deployments for the DOCSIS 4.0 technology to significantly increase the market demand. We actually, if some of you were watching the annual general meeting presentation that I gave, we were giving some more detail in the market development, market outlook for broadband networks. That presentation is in fact also available from our web pages if you are interested.
Clearly, we see that the North American DOCSIS 4.0 investments are going to be the growth driver in the market, and we are expecting and intending to get our share of that growth. The new U.S. administration, as we all know, has imposed these import tariffs, and it's a little bit uncertain now as to how things will continue after July. They are causing uncertainty, and they may have impact on our profitability in the short term. However, we are not expecting it to have major impact unless the world is kind of getting even more chaotic than it has been lately. We have taken many proactive measures to be ready for a certain level of import duties. We have started to establish our own final assembly capability in North America, which we will use as needed.
At the same time, our factories here in Finland are basically running at full capacity, and we are already using partners to kind of manage part of the manufacturing operations on our behalf. We are expecting that our share of the revenue from North America in broadband networks continues to grow this year and also the years after. In public safety and mobility, the market itself is growing, I would say, at a sort of a relatively stable mid-single digit level, 5%-6%, depending a little bit on the source and analysis. Our target there clearly is to grow faster than the market over the years. Our focus there will be particularly in the public transport information and security business, and we're expecting this kind of relatively steady trend to continue this year with some project timing-related fluctuation across the quarters.
We are basically looking to have profitable growth and increase in value creation in all the categories we have here. The first quarter in terms of profitability was in fact very strong in public safety and mobility, and we are very happy about that. Moving forward, just reiterating our financial outlook for the year. Basically, our guidance has not changed. We are keeping it as it was before. We are expecting to have growth both in terms of revenue as well as improved profitability compared to previous year. We are still expecting the result to be realizing more in the second half of the year, although the first quarter was a relatively okay quarter for us. We have slightly adjusted the disclaimer we have here for the import tariffs in the U.S.
The original guidance was talking about potential tariffs, but now we all know that they are a reality. They may and in fact are impacting our operations as to what extent they are impacting our profitability. It's a little bit difficult to quantify at the moment, but we are not expecting it to be significant at this point in time. You may have noted that we also announced longer-term strategic growth targets for our company over the next five years. This was done just prior to our annual general meeting. In short, we are aiming to have profitable growth, first of all, in both of our business segments, in public safety and mobility, as well as broadband networks, and average annual revenue growth of about 10% until 2030. It is an ambitious target, but we have an action plan and strategy that is supporting this growth.
There may be variations between the individual years, but across the five-year CAGR, we are expecting to be growing at this rate. We are expecting also to improve our operating profit margin from where we are today to still a relatively broad bracket from 7%-12% by 2030. We have certain alternative paths in our strategy, which then have various degrees of investments that may be impacting the timeline. Clearly, the target is to improve our profit margin from the current levels where we are. This is not any kind of an official market guidance, but it is clearly a target we have set up on ourselves, which we have now wanted to communicate openly. We will be obviously measuring our annual kind of progress over the next years against this target.
I would stop here for now, and I would hand over to Mervi then to go more deeply into the numbers. Would we do, Mervi, so that I will stop sharing here, and you can then take over? You are muted still, so you need to unmute yourself.
Okay, thank you so much for notifying that one. Let's then have a look on financials in a more deeper level. When we look at this quarter and compare it to last quarter, as Esa mentioned, he went through already quite a lot about net sales and order book, what happened there. I will be here a bit briefing about how do we still came up to a similar level of adjusted EBIT. As mentioned, we have been doing a very good kind of cost-saving program during last year.
In addition to that one, we have been working intensively also to improve our gross margins. Naturally, working on this product mix as well, we have improved all in that sense, cost level, cost base. When we look at then on EBIT level, as Esa mentioned, we have been recording last year already quite some adjusted items. Now on that level, we can see EUR 1.5 million compared to previous year, EUR 0.4 million negative loss on that level. Of course, then our earnings per share has been improving to EUR 0.03 compared to negative EUR 0.02. When we think about kind of more from also what has happened from personal point of view, we have been reducing our headcount almost 9% year on year. That is actually one of those things which have been taking the cost level clearly downwards.
On other expenses, we have been also saving almost about a bit over 8%, so it has been having quite a big impact. When we look at, let's look at then on the next slide, I have been pulling here into the graph mode, the same which we already kind of presented in our interim report. And here we can see, especially when we look at this cumulative adjusted EBIT, which Esa didn't yet spoke so much. So we are able to see here that even we have been kind of now saying that our guidance is from EUR 4 million-EUR 7 million on adjusted EBIT level. So we can see that we are starting actually from the level where we ended last year. So we think that kind of our guidance on adjusted EBIT level is pretty solid from that point of view.
As said, we have the situation where we do not know yet everything what's going to happen with the U.S. tariffs, but nevertheless will be then going and mitigating those impacts as we go. When we go to the next slide, we can see from our segments perspective a bit more. This is kind of now showing how broadband networks numbers as standalone and public safety and mobility numbers are standing. Here are a bit different dynamics in these segments as we see. Broadband networks, there is very, very, very solid improvement in the orders received, and there's over 50% increase compared to last year at the same time. We see that this shift and growth in North America is clearly here visible in the numbers, but we have also received a bit more orders from Europe.
We can see that we are getting kind of from that point of view to the right kind of moment to start next quarters. When we look at also public safety and mobility, here we had, even though there was a decline in net sales, we can see that our adjusted EBIT and adjusted EBIT were improving significantly. There was a question about different product mix as well as then savings which have been pushed during last year. There was a quite nice improvement in profitability for public safety and mobility. On the next slide, we want to also provide a bit more insight into segments. Here we can see the performance from broadband networks since we started the report and provided comparison here from 2023.
Here we can see how the orders have been developing and net sales as well as this geographic split. When we look at especially this geographic mix for broadband networks, there is a very large growth happening in North America and the rest of the world compared to last year. Actually, if it's not easily visible from the slide, we can see that this green piece of the pie chart is showing this North America and other countries where the last year share was 3% and now we were actually on 27%. There is quite large growth on that area. When we look at this cumulative adjusted EBIT for broadband networks, we can see how each of the quarters have been compiling to the full year adjusted EBIT level. That's where we are going with broadband networks.
I think that here when we look at also public safety and mobility, we see similarly the breakdown of different quarters for orders received, net sales, as well as then net sales by geography and cumulative adjusted EBIT development. Here I would like to also emphasize that when we are talking about public safety and mobility business, there are these fluctuations to this project dynamics. It means that kind of it's not always good to just take this one quarter number and then multiply that one when thinking about the full year number. Let's then keep in mind that there are fluctuations in both net sales as well as then adjusted EBIT level, how these are developing, especially in this project business. When we go to the next slide, we can see go to the balance sheet.
When we look at our balance sheet and changes there, we are having now a bit lower total balance sheet. We have been kind of there compared to last year. We had this R&D impairment, which was then taking a bit down our intangible assets as well as equity. At the same time, when we look at our networking capital, it is actually on the same level compared to last year at the same time. We have been now kind of improving actually in certain efficiencies when we have been working on our inventories as well as when we have been working on our trade payables. We have been now preparing for the growth as well when we look at this next quarters coming, especially for the U.S.
What I would also like to emphasize from our balance sheet point of view is that when we look at our interest-bearing debt, we have been decreasing it by EUR 4.3 million. This is because of our refinancing arrangements. We are also all the time naturally kind of looking at the efficient use of our RCFs and how to kind of make sure that our financing costs are also optimized. Our interest-bearing net debt has been also decreasing to the EUR 26 million compared to last year. Looking at our cash and unused credit facilities, we are now standing at about EUR 20 million. We think that that's kind of a solid level when we are starting this next quarter. I had also a few words about this operative cash flow.
When we look at this year, this quarter, we were having about EUR 1.5 million, which was then kind of when we look at our quarters, we are now also continuing these deliveries to North America, in broadband network site especially. Of course, it's tying up our networking capital a bit more due to these a bit longer distances which we need to carry our supply chain.
I also want to emphasize that if you look at last year's numbers and you can see that we were on EUR 7.3 million, it was clearly part of a certain very specific kind of moment when we have been then going downwards a bit on our net sales, which was then causing that we were able to collect more receivables during that particular quarter while then kind of not having so high kind of net sales in the rest of the year. Anyway, now we are preparing for this and we have been starting well this North America deliveries. From this overall cash flow point of view here, I would like to emphasize that kind of when we speak about comparison to the last year end. Now comparison point is the year end.
Since that one, we have been already then paying back our loan of EUR 800,000 according to our agreement. Also, we have been balancing with the RCFs about EUR 2 million downwards. Showing EUR 2.8 million bank loans which we have been paid out. In that sense, no major changes to what we have been a bit earlier reporting. What I also would see interesting is to look at our return on capital employed. In the end of March 2025, we were actually showing 6.1% and improving clearly from past two years quarter ends. That was pretty well actually improving along with our improvements in profitability. Our equity ratio was pretty much on a par compared to last year. At the same time, we need to remember that there were also changes in the total balance sheet.
A bit improvement in profitability, but at the same time also slightly lower balance sheet. Net carrying was standing on 46.3% at the end of the quarter. When we look at also this interest-bearing net debt of adjusted EBIT, it was improving and it was 2.9 times. Our capability to pay our loans back has been improving quite well from last two years. We need to naturally then continue on the same way. I think that that was pretty much the key topics what I wanted to run through from financial point of view. If you have any questions for Esa or me, of course, we are happy to answer. I'll now hand over back to Esa.
Thank you, Mervi. Yes, as usual, the floor is open now. We can probably even stop the sharing of the material.
Any questions or comments related to the first quarter?
It's Atte Riikola from Inderes. Maybe I can start with the questions.
Good morning, Atte.
Good morning. First, about the profitability in public safety and mobility. It was like pretty impressive improvement compared to last year and also on the previous quarters. Still a little bit open up. What was happening? Or is this like the new profitability level for the business? Or was there some one-off deliveries that were very high margin? What's happening there?
Yeah, it's a good question. I think, thanks Atte, I think we have been working, I would say, quite consistently on improving the kind of all the components that make up for the profitability in that project-based business. It's related to our sourcing activities.
It's basically related to kind of ensuring that our project margin already at the outset of the projects is at a healthy level. Then tighter project management as we are implementing the projects, as well as kind of negotiating the prices upwards whenever we have a profit possibility to do so. The clear intent, as we have discussed in the past, has been to kind of gradually improve the profitability of public safety and mobility. We are expecting that kind of a longer-term trend to continue. Now, in Q1, we had a project mix, and I would say specifically kind of business line mix that was more favorable. Usually our video security projects, as they are mostly software-related business, have higher gross margin. That shows in the Q1 result of the public safety and mobility.
We had some video security-related deliveries. Hence, the kind of gross margin for that segment in Q1 was, I would say, a little bit higher than usual. Do not take that as a new trend. I think there is an underlying positive trend at the same time.
All right. Last year, when you landed the Siemens Mobility, it is a new client for you. Is there already orders coming in from Siemens?
Not yet. Anything that we would have been able to publicize. I think usually when you sign up for a frame agreement with a large train manufacturer, the sales cycle is after that still pretty long. We are in active discussions about projects, but we have not yet kicked off any project.
All right. About the tariffs. We know that there is uncertainty what is going to happen at the end.
Let's say that there is going to be some kind of tariffs and it's going to increase your cost. How do you think you're going to be able to pass those costs to your customers?
We've done a lot of parallel activity preparing for different kinds of future scenarios, you might say. We have been assuming that there will be some level of tariff going forward. We have mainly done two things in order to be able to manage that. One is that we have been building so-called product final assembly capability next to our logistics center in the U.S., on the East Coast of the U.S. We are able to do part of the manufacturing already now in North America, specifically within the U.S. borders, which helps us then to transfer some of the value add into the U.S.
We have certain mitigation against the tariff levels. The second thing, which I think is the kind of very important part of this, is that we have been, as soon as the tariffs were informed, we gave formal notice to all our customers that we need to improve and increase our prices. With some of the customers, we already have an agreement on it. With some, we are still in the negotiation. The clear kind of trend in North America now is that part of the tariffs will cascade to customer prices. The customers will have to pay a higher price for the products because practically everybody is manufacturing these products outside of the U.S. borders today.
Even if companies like us are moving the final assembly into the U.S., it does not mitigate the tariffs fully because still the majority of the components, when you go down to the component level of the products, those components you have to import into the country. There will still be some tariffs, even though they may not be quite as high because you do not kind of import the full ready product into the country, but you kind of import some components or subparts of the product. Long answer, but it is clearly our expectation that the tariffs will continue at some level. If they would then, through some actions of the EU or otherwise, go away, obviously we would be very happy. These are the main two actions that we are taking at the moment.
Have you seen any, in your, especially in North America, let's say, Cox Communications has this tariff thing, has any impact on their demand outlook for this year? Has there been any changes in their buying behavior for now?
No change in the buying behavior. Obviously, many of these operators, they have their own annual CapEx budgets. Time will show if the volume, kind of unit volumes, will then be impacted a little bit this year because of the tariffs, just simply because of the budget levels they have. At the same time, usually these operators make their CapEx budgets on a very broad scale of spend. There can be then transition from one category to another. So far, we have not seen any indication that the volumes would go down either.
All right.
Your overall earnings guidance is still saying that the profits will be weighted towards H2. Now the Q1 was already pretty good. Are you expecting something bad to happen in Q2? Is there some extra cost?
You do the math. I was guessing you would do the math. Clearly in Q1, let me put it this way. In Q1, we did not yet see any tariff impact because there were no tariffs in place. In Q2, there will be some tariff impact. It may be that in the coming months, Q2 for sure, there will be some impact on the profitability. We still are maintaining that the bigger part of the profit would come in the second half of the year.
All right.
Maybe then about the outlook in Europe for broadband networks compared to the situation at the start of the year, has there been any changes?
We started to see that the market decline was stopping towards the end of last year. Even though in terms of revenue, this start of the year, the first quarter was still relatively kind of soft, I would say. The order intake in Europe was quite encouraging. It was coming, kind of the added element was coming in particular from the DOCSIS 4.0 deployments that are starting in Central Europe now. I think we expect that to start to kind of bring the market. If you're looking at some kind of a quarterly development of the market, I would say that the first half will still be a little bit quieter.
But the second half, then we'll be seeing the first deployments of the DOCSIS 4.0 starting to kick in. They are not happening certainly in all countries. They are happening in a couple of countries in Central Europe. If you read some of the public announcements of some of the large European operators from the recent days, you can see direct references to DOCSIS 4.0 there. If you check a little bit the Liberty Global or Vodafone or some of these big ones, their own public announcements, you can find references there. That's basically what we are kind of expecting to start to materialize. We have evidence in terms of order book already.
All right. Let's go then to your new financial targets. If we start from the growth targets, so on average, annual 10% growth. How is it divided between the business units?
Yeah. I understand that there's a temptation to try to drill into how we have come into these numbers. I think we see in both businesses, we see an opportunity to have profitable growth. We've said that many times. For broadband networks, clearly the growth engine is North America. If you look at the annual general meeting presentation that is in our investor pages, we are showing there our own analysis of how the market is growing. The European market is not growing despite this kind of short-term DOCSIS 4.0 investments. The North American market is growing roughly at about 10% rate. We're expecting to get our fair share of that growth. In Europe, clearly we are expected to get market share. In public safety and mobility, I mentioned that the market itself is growing roughly mid-single digit level.
Clearly there our target is to increase our market share. Both businesses have the same target. We are not kind of breaking it down any more than that at this point in time. We clearly have intention now to kind of start to accelerate on our growth again. It applies to both businesses.
Okay. Then about that pretty wide operating margin range. You mentioned there is possibly some strategic investments that can affect the margin. If you can a little bit open up the situation because it is actually pretty wide margin range.
Yeah. Five years is a long time. I think the clear message we wanted to deliver with that range, however, is that we are expecting to have improvements, step improvements from where we are currently with our operating profit.
We have some alternative paths in our strategy, which may then require certain investments before the yield outcome. Depending on the timing of those decisions, it may then have an impact on how the next five years are looking at. I cannot say more than that. 2030 is quite far away still. I think we will be able to specify that as we take those decisions and as we then are kind of getting better clarity even ourselves as to which paths we will follow. The range we have now looked and where we will land within that range, some of those decisions are yet to be made.
Okay. Maybe last question from me. If you think about the competitive situation in North America, has there been any changes or any news, especially the broadband network side?
No major news. I think clearly everybody is now trying to figure out how the tariffs are going to be landing. Different competitors have manufacturing activities in different places. Some have it in Mexico, some have it in Canada, some have it in Taiwan, some in China, some in Malaysia, Vietnam. Everybody is now trying to figure out how this tariff discussion will eventually land. It is very difficult to take any longer-term decisions when you do not have any stable ground under your feet at the moment. For that reason, we are also keeping many options open in terms of how our production and logistics setup will going to evolve going forward. Has anybody become more competitive than somebody else because of the tariffs? I would not think so. I do not think this has really kind of favored anybody more than any other. I think no casualties.
None of the competitors have disappeared. There has been no mergers or acquisitions or exits. The landscape is still pretty much as it was last year.
All right. Thank you for all of these answers.
Thank you, Atte. We still have a few moments' time if there are any other comments or questions from anybody else. If not, I think we thank you for your time this morning and look forward to talking to you all soon again.
Thank you.
Bye-bye.
Thank you.
Bye-bye. Thank you.