Okay, everybody. Welcome to Alligo Q3 interim report. You will hear from our CFO, Irene Wisenborn Bellander, and myself, Clein Johansson Ullenvik, CEO. You know the drill. We will not repeat what's in the report. You probably read it or will read it. We will emphasize what we think is important to highlight, and then we will open up for questions. We have a few topics we will cover. A quick presentation of Alligo. A lot of companies are reporting these days, and you probably attend several presentations. Just a quick to set our minds on Alligo. Then Q3 in brief, then we'll come into. As you know, we'll try to make one theme each presentation, and we have covered already logistics and assortment.
Today you will hear from Irene presenting what we are doing briefly within the sustainability area. Then we'll come into financials, and then we'll wrap it up in a summary and an outlook. After that, we'll open up for questions. I hope you will enjoy our little session together. Just a quick to repeat what Alligo is: A leading player in workwear, personal protection, tools, supplies in the Nordic region. We believe in a common platform, Alligo is where we all belong. That's our core values, our strategies, our plans. Even if it says TOOLS for all, Univern or Grolls on the business cards, on our brilliant salespeople meeting customers, it's all, we all belong to Alligo. This is the structure of the business.
You know, we are quite Sweden-dependent, biggest business we have, and also from a profitability perspective, the most profitable business we have. Own brands is a little less than 20% of our turnover, and we have some 200+ shops. Eight customer segments. In these days, when we consume a lot of market outlooks, we try to look on that through the filter of our different customer segments, trying to identify where the market is heading. We have these eight different customer segments where manufacturing and construction are the two biggest one. We define the market, the way we define the market, it's a 50 billion SEK business in the Nordics. We want to be a fully integrated company that you know, and it's important for us to underline that time after time after time.
As time has been after the historic Monday or the brutal Monday, sometimes you could wonder how difficult it could be to strive for an integrated company with all the hassle that could be integrating the businesses like this. We believe in that model, and it works well for us. From a customer perspective, we want to be strong facing the end customer. That means that you will never find our own brands at our competitors' stores. That is giving us a competitive advantage. The offering, we believe in a product assortment, which is standardized in combination with a service offer is the strongest one. Then different ways of going to market, digitally, through shops, physical meetings, or wherever the customer wants to meet us.
If we skip to Q3 in brief, we are so happy to say that we have left these disturbances as we presented last report that we headed into, as could have been expected, doing so many things at the same time as we did in May. We head into some disturbances, which we were suffering from, and now we can tick off most boxes. Since before, we have a common strategy, we have our financial and non-financial targets, we have integrated the stores, and we have a legal structure in place. As you know, the three to the right, coordination of logistics, pricing system, and ERP launch of a new ERP system in Sweden, we did that in May this year, which led to some disturbances which we now can confirm we have behind us.
Coordination of logistics, we have done what we said in the integration project, but you also know that we have communicated that we will build a new central warehouse in Norway, which is not included in the integration project as such, but we have more to do. That's more operational efficiency that we will drive. ERP, the Jeeves implementation in Norway will be end 2024 or beginning 2025. From a business perspective, we tick them off and say that those parts of the integration project is ready, leaving only one left, which is implementation of the Nordic assortment, which has been rolling out since a while back.
It's not finished until we have a higher degree of implementation in all shops and in more of our customer contracts, and also until we have balance now. As you know, we have a period now where we have higher stock levels because we are phasing out products and brands and phasing in new ones, and we will not say that activity is in place until that is in balance. That's why this is more or less the only remaining thing. All other smaller things is included in the day-to-day operations of what we are doing.
Made two acquisitions in the quarter, two smaller ones, one in Norway and one in Sweden, adding up now so far this year to five acquisitions, one in Finland, three in Norway, and one in Sweden, so far this year. Revenue increase of 14%, 10% organic growth, but as you know, also a high impact from inflation, of course. We are reasonably happy with the EBITDA development, 21% growth with a 14% growth in top line. But if we were a fine-tuned business and everything in place, which we are not yet, we would have liked to see that ratio to be even better. But we are quite happy with the 21% EBITDA increase.
Cash flow, as we have said many times, is of course suffering when we have built up stock just both to ensure the availability, but also launching the new Nordic assortment. That is that. Over to you, Irene.
Thank you. Alligo has a clear vision of becoming unbeatable as a leader for sustainable development in our industry. We have concrete strategies of how we will reduce the environmental impact of our own operations, but also how to work with our suppliers to ensure sustainability throughout our value chain and help our customers reduce their environmental impact. Based on our vision and material sustainability issues, we have set five non-financial targets related to our employees' health and leadership, customer satisfaction, supplier responsibility, and climate impact. During the autumn, our ambition is to have established a sound basis from which to set a common goal to reduce carbon emissions to guide our business forward. Around 80% of the carbon emissions in our value chain are generated by manufacturers, suppliers, and shipping companies. This is where we can make significant efforts to reduce our climate footprint.
This is also where we see the greatest sustainability risks in relation to human rights and working conditions. Maintaining close cooperation with our suppliers and stipulating clear requirement is an important focus for us. An active sustainability agenda is a prerequisite for serving many of our customers today, and we have several ongoing initiatives that aims to use resources more efficiently. One example is the product development and specification work of our own brands within personal protective equipment. Each component in, for example, a Univern workwear jacket has been analyzed in detail to fulfill all requirements before it has been chosen to be a part of our own brand products. Following this, the main part of our own brands is OEKO-TEX certified to ensure high quality, sustainable materials, and safe products. Moving on to the financials. We continue to benefit from increased revenue and improved margins in challenging times.
Total revenue increased 14.1% to reach SEK 2.1 billion, where 2.9% is related to positive currency impacts and primarily driven by the development of NOK. Organic growth in local currency in the quarter reached 10.2%, driven by positive sales development from larger industrial customers in Finland and Norway, but also small and mid-sized customers in Sweden. Thanks to larger industrial customers in Sweden, we're still negatively affected by disruptions resulting from the implementation of a common business system and the new logistic structure in the second quarter, even if the effects gradually diminished during this quarter. EBITDA increased by 21% to SEK 166 million in the quarter, corresponding to an EBITDA margin of 8.5%.
The improvement in profit can be seen across all countries and is a result of increased sales volumes, better margins, and synergies between Swedol and TOOLS. In addition, the somewhat increased proportion of own brands also contributes positively. However, we have a negative country mix that contracts since the sales share related to the Swedish business with a more favorable customer mix decreased. If we look into each market, we can see that the organic sales in the Swedish business reached about 9%, and there was continued good sales development in Q3 related to small and mid-sized companies after a general restraint in Q1. The sales and margin development within the industrial segment still suffered from disruptions in logistics and sales processes, although these have gradually diminished and sales began to pick up towards the end of the quarter.
The improvement in profit in Sweden is driven by increased volumes, synergies between Swedol and TOOLS, and margin improvements related to small and mid-sized companies, but somewhat contracted by lower margins in the industrial segment. After a weak start of the year in Norway, which stabilized during Q2, we had a positive development in the third quarter. The volumes are now ahead of pre-corona sales levels in local currency. The organic sales in Norway reached about 15%, driven by good market development in the oil and gas segment. The improvement in profit is driven by higher volumes and integration synergies. In Finland, we have a positive sales development, and there is a continued positive sales trend among larger industrial customers.
The organic sales reached about 9%, and the result was strengthened because of higher volumes but also increased margins, and our measures related to improved sales management have had an effect. Let's turn to cash flow. The third quarter is seasonally the weakest quarter from a cash flow perspective. Cash flow from operating activities in the third quarter amounted to -91 million SEK compared to 64 million SEK last year. Operating cash flow is negatively affected by increased working capital due to the continued buildup of inventories and prepayments to own brand suppliers. The inventory buildup is a result of the ongoing assortment merge and the rollout of own brands, but also higher purchase prices, including freight and unfavorable currency effects.
The right-hand graph shows the development in liquidity from January to September, where we positive cash flow from operations of in total SEK 19 million, including an inventory buildup of SEK 283 million. Most of the investments are M&A related, but SEK 96 million is related to store and central warehouse reductions and IT related investments. Finally, the financing activities are related to the amortization of leasing liabilities of SEK 280 million, dividend paid of SEK 88 million, and increased usage of the credit and revolving facility of in total SEK 239 million. In summary, our focus on product availability and investments in the new range have tied up more capital and temporarily reduced cash flow.
The group's net debt amounted to SEK 1.8 billion, and the increase compared to year-end is driven by integration investments, inventory buildup, shareholder distribution, and M&A activities. The ratio of net debt to EBITDA amounted to 2.2x, which is an increase compared to year-end but still within the financial target range. Our unutilized credit facilities at the end of the quarter amounted to SEK 907 million, and the maturity of the total credit facility is March 2025 and possible to prolong 2 years thereafter. In summary, our strong financial position means that we can continue to invest in organic growth and take advantage of potentially good M&A opportunities in our market.
Thank you. If we move to summary and outlook, five reasons to invest in Alligo. Attractive market growth and resilient customer segments. There we can say also within the customer segments we have, we believe that we have a reasonably well-positioned. If you take construction sector, for example, it's not so much the actual carpenter or the builder. It's more on the excavator side, building infrastructure and so forth. We believe we have an good position in interesting customer segments. Scalable platform, as we talked about before, is our belief. We think that's the most efficient way of running this type of business, and that's why we go through this type of hassle as we did in May, June, July.
Own brands is a very powerful weapon for us in the competition with our competitors, and also gives us a healthy contribution margin in combination with strong, of course, external brands with our partner suppliers. Sustainability as an integrated part of the business, you heard Irene just now describing a little bit what we're doing. For that, for us, that is, of course, a very, very important part. We want to be a leader in the consolidation in the Nordics. Now we can more focus on that, having left a lot of internally focused projects behind us. We can now start looking outwards more, also making acquisitions.
Outlook, the integration work, as we've said, we say that that is now a part of the daily operations, not a specific project. We have had four overarching themes to run our business, not having too many different focuses, everybody running around, confused. We have said, for 2022 so far, the focus has been make our people grow, focus on the integration work, ensure profitable growth, and fine-tune our business, improve collaboration and processes, that is. We have said just now that those four will be three. We will focus on developing our people, ensuring profitable growth, and fine-tune our business. We have a good availability now. There was some months back a lot of noise that we have shortages.
That is silent now. We have a good availability, a good possibility to deliver in time. We have more to do in sales and assortment management. Especially in Norway and Finland, we have still a customer mix which is heavily tilted towards large customers. We have initiatives now driving up that share. That's our sweet spot, the small and medium-sized businesses. It's a challenging environment at least ahead of us. We consume a lot of market outlooks. We talk to a lot of people, customers, suppliers, different institutes, and we spend hours trying to figure out where the market is heading. We are prepared for whatever the market could throw at us.
We also have reviewed how we have structured the sales organization in all three countries. Now the last two months of this year, we will implement from a sales management perspective. The stores as such, the external sales and the key account sales is not as such affected, but how we run the businesses and how we run the regions and districts, a new model will be implemented at the end of this year. As we said earlier, we hope to continue a healthy organic growth, and we will spice that up with acquisitions is our target. We open up for questions.
Thank you. If you wish to ask a question, please press zero one on your telephone keypad. Our first question comes from the line of Emanuel Jansson of Danske Bank. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Hi, Clein, and hi, Irene. Thank you for a good presentation. A couple of questions from my side and, regarding firstly the impressive organic revenue growth you had in the quarter of 10.2%. Can you please elaborate a bit on how we should think about how much is price and compared to volume, et cetera?
That was the question I was fearing the most today. Which is almost impossible to analyze, at least in details. Of course, you have a high, as I said earlier, high impact of the inflation. But we have grown a lot with larger customers. Those were the customers where we at the very latest stage could implement price increases and also perhaps not the same level of price increase as to other customer categories. It's for sure a number of percentages, of course, is an inflation factor in this. That's for sure. Just as we were hoping that now, the inflation speed would slow down, now then the Swedish Krona of course worsened quickly.
We foresee inflation also going forward. Our next price increase time is beginning of February next year. Suppliers should now inform us about what they want to have done. It's obvious that we will see inflation also in the beginning of next year.
Perfect. Thank you. That, that's very, very clear. Sorry if I missed out on the private label and on how much revenue that stems from private label. It decreased year-over-year. Is that an effect of changing the assortment and also the divestment of Gigant? Or how should we view it?
The latter one that we divested, Gigant, that's the drop in what is being defined as private label. We still sell that assortment, but it's not statistically an own brand anymore.
Okay. Perfect. Good. Thank you. Regarding the supply chain, have you experienced any, like, improvements during the quarter? Or, how is the supply chain situation?
Absolutely
at the moment?
Yeah, absolutely. As many companies who has reported so far this quarter, it's much, much better. The container price has gone down a lot. During my years, I've experienced $1,500 per 40-foot container up to $22,000-$24,000 per container. Now they're down again to I think around $6,000. It has gone from a decent level up to incredible level, down to just normal high level. The freight cost is better. The actual supply chain as such is working. There are no ships stuck in the Suez Canal, and the Shanghai port is okay.
The disruptions we are noticing today is energy shortages in some of the countries where we produce our own brands. It's more on that sector and than actually the freight part as such. Actually, just a fun fact. I had a meeting this week with a supplier from Pakistan and to counteract that part, he opened his own power generation business. He's supplying his own production by his own power generation business, which is incredible when you think of it.
Yeah. It really is. Perfect. Thank you. If we move over to the working capital and obviously the inventory build-up that we have seen as a consequence of the new assortment and also the TOOLS with all the. How should we expect it to look like going forward? Should we expect the inventory to slightly reduce in the coming quarters or still an up-build?
No, no. From now on, it should only go one way. It's not fine-tuned yet, and we said we will not tick that box that says that we have managed to roll out the Nordic assortment, standard assortment, until we have balanced the stock levels. If we are helped on the turnover by inflation, we are also punished in the stock level by inflation. If you take the ratio of inventory growth in relation to sales growth, we are not so far off. Having said that, we have a lot to do in inventory management, and we will do.
Perfect. Heading into Q4, we know that from last year you're coming from quite kind of tough comparables given the weather condition that was kind of beneficial last year when you sold a lot of working clothes, et cetera.
Yeah.
How should we view Q4 this year you believe?
That's a very good question, and thank you for bringing it up. I should have reminded everybody about Q4 last year. We had a board meeting last night, and we could conclude that in Stockholm it was 15 degrees yesterday. The quarter is still not over. On the one hand, we would like to see colder weather, of course. On the other hand, we are a totally different company Q4 this year than we were Q4 last year, i.e., better company this Q4 than last Q4. If you could fix a little bit colder weather and a little bit of snow, that would help.
There's no like change in demand from customers.
No
Q3 entering Q4?
No. Oh, no, nothing on that side. It's a bit boring being a weatherman, but we are weather affected, of course. We'd love to see a November and the beginning of December which is cold. That would help.
Yeah. A last question from my side, and as I guess many other have heard about and that we and obviously all also are fearing or trying to estimate the period going forward next year, where we probably are entering a kind of messy period or environment with weaker demand within construction and maybe in the industrial segment as well. Can you please elaborate or explain your view on how Alligo will handle a tougher period with weaker demands, and maybe give us some history from your Swedol days and
Yeah
How you handled weaker demands before?
Yeah. No, I'm so happy that this potential downturn or potential, which will be obvious, will happen, when we are a much more stable business than we were the last two years. We are in a position where we now can focus on the sales and operational efficiency, so to take measures for whatever development the market can take. But we have internally, we have somewhat of a crisis attitude since months back, and we work with scenarios where we discuss with the management team and with the board what happens if it turns down by 5% or 10%. And then we have a high level of readiness to take whatever measures needs to be taken.
Looking back, I've said it several times now. I think I wrote it in the CEO part of the report. Historically it has also given us opportunities because with our own brands, it's high quality at a little lower price point. That historically has tended to be attractive when established relations between the previous supplier and the customer suddenly need to look around a little bit and we can come with our offer. Historically that has opened opportunities for us. Of course, if the whole market goes down, we will be affected as well. It also presents some opportunities for us in a good time when we are now ready to drive sales in a better way than we are today.
Perfect. Thank you, Clein. That's very helpful. Well, that's all my questions. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Our next question comes from the line of Karl-Johan Bonnevier of DNB Markets. Please go ahead.
Yes, hello, Clein and everyone. Just to continue on the previous, it's good to see that you're at least alluding to, if you're not able to fully disclose what kind of price impact you have seen in the organic growth, that you are talking about volume growth again. Do you feel what's. If you compare that to the market environment you see out there, are you keeping your market share or taking market share at this stage?
At least now we are throughout the company at least keeping our market shares. I wouldn't say that we are taking dramatically market shares now. It's so incredibly nice. We have these competence days where we gather all salespeople in all countries and we launch our messages, and we have training from our partner suppliers. The message there was very clear. Now this internal hassle is over. Now we point all our efforts and energy outwards to the market. That journey starts now. I wouldn't say.
We have actually intentionally left a couple of big customers because the price level was too low and they weren't ready to negotiate at all. We've said, "Let's not cooperate anymore." We also changed the customer structure, which could hurt a little bit short term because there could be a number of employees working solely with that customer. That's a transformation we need to do. At least we're not losing market shares is the short answer.
Oh, that's good. I think, given what you went through with the black or the difficult Monday, what we should call it.
Yeah
as you alluded to, I guess that's another sign though that you came through that in a good way.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yet I need to pick up on the margin development. I see EBIT margin is up 50 basis points year-over-year, and I know we're comparing with the messy quarter last year as that's when you say started a lot of the programs. But when I look at gross margins, they are down 90 basis points year-over-year. It suggests that you are getting it through a lot on the OPEX side but struggling on the pricing side or how should we see? Because I notice also that Q3 last year had say exceptionally high gross margins.
You see the details. Exactly. We had a very good level last year, but if you look at customer segments and you look at product areas, we have stable or increasing margins more or less everywhere, i.e., we have a mix effect, which we said. We have larger customers taking a proportionally bigger part of our sales. So to the greatest extent, we are not so worried because that is a mix effect to a great extent.
How do you see that mix effects, say, swinging back and forth? How can you drive it?
We have in all our countries a strong focus on increasing sales towards smaller customers. You know, historically, we both in Finland and Norway have a high share of really large customers, and we'd like to keep them, of course, and develop our cooperation, but we also need. We also talked about that at the last management team meeting. We have a good growth now, totally and organically, but that should not by any means mean that we should stop focusing on small and medium-sized customers. We need to keep strong focus on developing those customers because they are our future and our future profitability, and that's what we've built the business for.
We have a strong focus on small and medium-sized customers, and by that share should increase.
You indicated further price increases to come due to the FX environment in looking coming up to February.
Yeah.
How do you see when you're looking at the gross margin, the balance you have so from pricing initiatives and the cost you are getting in for the moment? Is there a big gap there that also explains part of the gross margin, say, erosion?
I think we now have a very, very good pricing process in place in all countries actually. We have everybody's attention, I can promise you. We are driving a hard management attitude internally. We, I mean, when we're talking about price increases on this magnitude you have to be into the details, and you have to push it really, really hard. Everybody has done a tremendous job. It can be contractually impossible to increase the prices at certain points with a larger customer. Of course then we do it when the opportunity present itself. I think we have done it in a very good way.
What we describe as a new pricing system is also helping us reducing an incredible amount of net prices to our customers, trying to connect the prices to the gross price list, making price adjustments much easier in the future. In the price system we have been talking about, that also includes a more efficient way of dealing with price adjustments going forward. We're in much better position now than we've ever been.
I guess knowledge also creates the opportunity to implement things.
Absolutely.
Just finally, Clein, looking at the same kind of topic from another other way, you alluded to the say that you are past the extreme point on the inventory. If we are not getting into say some sort of dramatic recession downturn that hits overnight, so to say, and how long time do you think it will take you to say get back to the inventory level you want to be at?
We have in the old structure, we knew exactly when to take which measures and which effect it will take. We are a little bit of a different organism these days. Let's say, what do we say? 35% of our stock is own brands. 65% is external brands. Many of our partner suppliers, we can even send back things with no deduction, no fee, no cost. We have intentionally not done that just now because we are having these famous Swedol days just now, which is a huge sales campaign. Twice a year we have this huge sales campaign, which is running just now. We have said we don't do it right now. We know exactly which measures to take. We are taking them gradually.
Will everything be extremely efficient and optimized by year-end? No, I wouldn't promise that, but the processes are in place and over the coming months, we will see a much better situation.
Excellent. It's that quick. My final question was really on the Swedol days.
Yeah.
What kind of feedbacks and what kind of customer interaction do you get to? Is this the same kind of traction that you used to get in the old-
Yeah
Swedol Days, if you put it like that?
Yeah. It's not that we have planned that it should be a bigger and bigger and bigger event. I mean, of course, we'd like to have our customers coming to our shops every day and not waiting weeks and then come when it's a Swedol day. But it's a fun new customer activity. We'd like to attract both, of course, old customers, but also attract new customers. So it's an event which everybody loves. Our wonderful employees in the stores love it, and our customer love it, so it's an event, but we try to keep it on the level we always had. It's not a strategic focus to increase sales dramatically on the Swedol days. It's a fun event. It should be.
Yeah, it must be a perfect way to interact with the clients, if nothing else, so.
Absolutely.
Well, perfect. Thank you very much and all the best out there.
Thank you very much, everyone.
Just to remind everyone, if you would like to ask a question, please press zero one on your telephone keypads.
We have received a number of questions through mail, if it's possible to do that now. Let's read and try to talk at the same time. One question was, we indicated last time that we were not the best partner to our customers. If we have lost any customers is a question. As I said earlier, yes, perhaps not due to that problem as much as we having said that, "Let's not cooperate anymore because you obviously is not the partner to us." So a couple of bigger ones we have actively stopped working with. I'm not aware of any customers that we lost due to the hassle, even if we were a lousy partner in over the summer.
Will we be able to protect the margin going forward with the weakening SEK? That we also touched a little bit on that. Absolutely, that's our. I think we've proven so far that we have some sort of pricing power we managed to carry forward the increases we have in. What we are discussing a lot in the management team is we should also be careful. Of course, we could maximize the margins a quarter or two, but we also have a little bit of a responsibility to the old Swedol concept, which was a high-quality product at an attractive price point. We try to balance that.
We could make a brilliant quarter and increase the margins like crazy, but then perhaps we will lose customers over the long run. We try to do that in a very balanced way, still being competitive and not disrupting the Swedol brand, which our shops are called, at least in Sweden. Container prices, that we've answered. I skip to another one. Someone asked what you asked, Emanuel, about how big a share is inflation. It's difficult to say, but it's a high number of percentages, of course. Q4, given a brilliant Q4 last year, we covered. Personal cost.
Yes, we addressed that we will do a new sales management organization, and we have a big readiness to take whatever measures needed to counteract a slower market. I feel confident there. Low-stock levels. Let's see. I think that was all the questions we've got from mail.
There are no further questions on the telephone lines at this time.
Very good. We say thank you for everybody to everybody listening in. We feel we are in a much better place now than we've been before. We can leave the integration efforts behind us. We can focus on sales and improving the business going forward. Thank you very much, and have a nice week.