Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Alligo Full Year Report 2023 Call and Webcast. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question on the phone line, please press star one and one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, you can please press star one and one again. Alternatively, you may also submit your questions via the webcast at any time by typing them in the question box and click Submit. Please note that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your speaker, Clein Johansson Ullenvik, CEO. Please go ahead, sir.
Thank you, Raf. Welcome to Alligo Year-End Report 2023. We are super happy to spend some time with you guys today. Presenters today, as always, Irene Wisenborn Bellander, our CFO, and myself, Clein Johansson Ullenvik, the CEO. You know the drill. We will highlight a few things. We'll absolutely not go through the report in its entirety, so we will make some short stops. We also have a theme at each presentation. I shouldn't even list them all. We have so many different themes, but in the very beginning, we had one theme, which was logistics, which we intend to revisit this time and bring up some updates on what's happening on the logistics side.
So, this and the following one or two slides, we have done every presentation because we are a fairly new organism and a fairly new as a listed company, we will probably not show them this, these first slides going forward, but we did this last time, this time, so pay attention. A SEK 9.3 billion turnover business, a little shy of 2,500 employees, 210 stores. And the new things on this slide this time is that now it says TOOLS in Norway and Finland, and it says Swedol in Sweden. And as of yesterday, if you go into tools.se or swedol.se, you will be redirected to swedol.se on the web, or if you call any of our brilliant salespersons, they will answer Swedol.
So things are moving forward in the consolidation of our concept brands. The origin of Alligo should not take it all, of course, but dates back to 1832. Swedol founded in 1963, Tools around the millennium shift. And then we have this modern things happening where we have confused you guys with all our name changes and a spin-off Momentum Group. So this is our timeline with great history back to it. And at a glance, we are Sweden-dependent, as you know. A big chunk of our turnover comes from Sweden, an even bigger chunk of our result comes from Sweden.
A very important thing for us is to sell more of the defined assortment, as we talk a lot about, but also within that, our own brands, which are now at 19% as a group, whereas the old Swedol was at 35%. But combined, now we are at 19%, and it's increasing steadily. Our market, we have our eight different market segments, manufacturing, i.e., industry being the biggest one. The total market value is difficult to estimate, but somewhere between SEK 55 billion and SEK 60 billion. And we love all customers, but we focus very much on small and medium-sized customers. So we'd like to develop the larger ones we have, as at the same time, we increase the share of small and medium-sized customers in all our countries.
Yeah, and our competitors, I think they are quite obvious, different type of chains that we meet in the local market. It differs a little bit from country to country. So if I take some highlights, so the market situation, I think we are celebrating 1 year exactly when we started signaling that we could see that the market was not gonna grow heavily during 2023. And we are still on that line, which has been good for us because we've been able to counteract this slow development in the market. So it has been slow, and there was a little step, even worse in Q4. So it's just according to the line that we have predicted, and we have managed to take counteractive measures.
Norway, we can see lately, is fluctuating a bit up and down, but we foresee that the oil and gas sector will be steady going forward. We, as a fairly experienced management team and managers throughout the organization, have been able to adjust the cost base in relation to the change in the market. We worked a lot with price adjustments, not only increasing pricing, but also adjusting prices to be competitive in different very important product categories, and do acquisitions. We did 9 two years ago, we did 6 last year, and the situation as it is today, and with our balance sheet, we intend to do even more going forward.
So sales management and driving, that and directing that in the best possible way is, is a very important thing for us, and we've been focusing, as you know, on reducing inventories, or at least being more efficient in our inventories, related to sales. We have a good capacity, central warehouses works fine, and we have a product at home, potentially too many. And the macroeconomic factors, yeah, the market economy, you can, you can hear from everywhere where that market is and some geopolitical turbulence to that. Our freight costs and freight times has been, a little bit longer and higher due to the Red Sea, debacle.
So Q4 in brief, revenue, negative organic growth, 6.8%, but we still managed to increase EBITDA, the adjusted EBITDA, by 3% to SEK 308 million. Improved the cash flow quite significantly, so whatever actions we are doing in the inventory side is having an effect, the, the wanted effect. We made 3 acquisitions in December only, and whereof two was in, for us, very important area, which we are focusing a lot on, which is welding. We said that just before the call. We'll probably come back to that next quarterly report and describing why welding is so important for us. We've said that we commit to the Science Based Targets initiative, doing our part of reaching, the Paris Agreement and the consolidation of concept brands, as I said, initially.
The Norwegian logistics center, we will come back to, but it's moving along according to plan. And we, the board, proposes a dividend of SEK 3.5, up from 3 last year. 6 acquisitions, as I said, you can see that 3 of the 6 is within welding. We will continue to acquire well-run businesses that fits our strategy. We don't take over turnaround cases. We like to have them well-run and profitable. And we have a long list of companies we are working with, and we have the board that is supporting that, the management team, which is supporting that, and we have the balance sheet supporting that, i.e., we will continue to do acquisitions. This slide you remember from before.
If you go from the right to the left, you can see, from the top that the higher the store channel, and which we could relate to small customers. So the higher the share of small customers, the greater the profitability, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. And then at the bottom, same thing with their own brands, 10% in Finland, 17% in Norway, and 24% in Sweden. So the higher the share of own brands, the, the higher the profitability in that country. A short background, slide of the journey we made at Swedol, taking it from, some 3% EBITDA margin up to above 10%. Then we merged with TOOLS, and the journey started a little bit over again.
So from 2020, we are on the journey, and we were for 2023, 0.1% from 9% EBITDA margin. So we think that history proves that we know fairly well what we're doing. So logistics, I said, looking at the gray little dots, those are all gone, and the black dots are the ones that are left, still there. So in Finland, we have Kotka, in Sweden, we have Örebro, and in Norway, we are now starting up Vestby. So we have one central warehouse per country, and all those regional warehouses in Norway, they are all closed, except Stavanger, which was informed this week that we will close the regional warehouse, but of course, there will be a shop in Stavanger.
So this slide is, we are now at the end game where we wanted to be, and we are super happy that we built this structure. Vestby, a wonderful new built, purpose-built for us, 16,000 square meter house, perfectly situated in Vestby. That's the place to be, and we have capacity to expand for the future. We can increase automation, and we can also increase number of square meters. Skedsmokorset which is the old Univern, Swedol central warehouse, we start by emptying that, and then we take on Rosenholm, which was the TOOLS's, central warehouse, and it's starting up now. That project is running very nicely, so it's just according to time and budget.
And in Örebro, we have invested in increased automation, which has started up, taking away away different ways of doing things which is not so so good for your sh- you can hurt your shoulders, you can hurt your arms, you can hurt your legs. So it's automating some bad parts of our process. So that is in place. That will reduce cost, and it will increase the the willingness to work at our central warehouse in Örebro. But it's also in place and started up. So finally, financials, Irene?
Yes, thank you. As Clein mentioned, we have continued to increase profitability and strengthen our cash flow despite weaker demand. Revenue decreased by 6.8% in the quarter. Acquisitions had a positive impact of 3%, but were unable to compensate for negative organic growth in Sweden and Finland, negative currency effects, and one trading day left. The slowdown observed in Sweden already in the fourth quarter of 2022, and in Finland during the second quarter of 2023, has continued, and there was a clear slowdown in the manufacturing industry in Finland in Q4. EBITDA increased by 3% in the quarter, and Norway drives the improvements. EBITDA margin reached 12.1%, and the increased profitability is a result of our focus on maintaining slash improving gross margins and good cost control to mitigate weaker volumes.
The gross margin improvement is mainly related to the increased share of sales of our own brands and SME customers, successful supplier negotiation, termination of unprofitable customer agreements, and renegotiation of low margin customer agreements. The operating profit was charged with items affecting comparability of SEK 16 million, where the main part is related to scrapping of COVID related products in stock, but also an effect of organizational changes. The deteriorated financial net of SEK 11 million, excluding IFRS 16, is related to higher STIBOR, but has to some extent been contracted by a lower interest market due to improved net debt to EBITDA ratio. Turning to next slide, we have a closer look at the development in each market. Sales in Sweden decreased by 7.8%. An organic growth was negative, but mitigated by acquisitions of 5 project media companies.
The previously observed slowdown continued in the quarter. Organic growth was approximately -11%, and the decrease relates to most customer segments. EBITDA ended at SEK 244 million, which is slightly behind Q4 last year, but the EBITDA margin was in line with last year, and the focus on improving margins and cost savings have mitigated lower volumes. After several months of positive sales trend in Norway in local currency, there was some hesitance in the market in Q4, except within the oil and gas segment. The organic sales reached about 1% in the quarter and 4% for the full year. In Finland, sales decreased by 1.8%. The organic growth was negative at -8%, and there was a clear slowdown in the manufacturing industry during the quarter.
Acquisitions favorable, FX effect mitigate that effect. The result in Finland was weaker due to lower volumes and store investments to better meet the needs of small medium-sized customers. When it comes to cash flow, the fourth quarter is typically the strongest quarter from a cash flow perspective. We improved operating cash flow by SEK 109 million in the quarter and SEK 486 million for the full year. The vast majority of improvement, both in the quarter and for the full year, is related to our focus on reducing our inventory levels and prepayments to our Far East own brand suppliers, but also, of course, an effect of improved EBITDA and lower tax.
The investing activities for the full year are related to M&A activities and consist of six completed acquisitions, but also investment in non-current assets of in total SEK 215 million. The ratio of CapEx to depreciation amounted to a multiple of 1.9, which is on a higher level than our long-term target level of having depreciation levels in line with CapEx. Finally, financing activities related to dividend paid, the purchase of shares to increase borrowings and amortization of leasing liabilities. The next steps amounted to SEK 1.4 billion, and that is a decrease compared to last year and driven by strong underlying cash flow.
The ratio of net debt to EBITDA amounted to a multiple of 1.6x, which also is a decrease compared to last year and well within the financial support range. Our covenants are related to interest coverage and equity asset ratios. These are fulfilled at the end of the period, and we had room before reaching the thresholds. And if we move on to the next slide and our performance in relation to our financial targets, you can see that the organic growth didn't reach target levels due to the slowdown in the market. However, we had a continued solid EBITDA margin improvement, driven by our focus on sales assortment management, efficiency measures, and cost savings. We have a strong financial position, and we will continue to invest in organic growth and take advantage of good M&A opportunities in our market.
When it comes to dividends, we propose a dividend for 2023 of SEK 3.5, which corresponds to 35% of net results compared to 31% last year. We've also progressed in several areas within our sustainability work, and the most important is that we have joined SBTi in Q4. We are thereby committed to set science-based targets for reducing scope one, two, and three emissions.
We move over to you, Clein?
Thank you, Irene. So if we go for summary and outlook, so as Irene said, a strong cash flow, SEK 7 million from SEK 1 billion in positive cash flow and increased profitability, 0.1% from 9% EBITDA margin. We have strengthened our competitiveness. We are becoming a better and better company day by day. We are adjusting our prices. We are partnering up with our suppliers. We just had our competence days, both in Sweden and in Finland, and Norway is to come. We constantly change and revise our assortment to be as competitive as possible, and you know, our brutal focus on the right customer mix. So, we will continue to grow the share of the defined assortment together with our partner suppliers and also our own brands.
We have a solid and clear strategy, which has been in place for quite a while, where we try to condense that into three overarching themes that we communicate and talk a lot about in the company. So I think people are getting bored with it soon, but the three of them make our people grow through training, through e-learnings. And we have these competence days, which is a huge investment, where we bring all salespeople and train them together with our partner suppliers. Improve collaboration and processes. I've said it many times, I'll say it again, we are far from a very efficient and effective company. We started this week, together with the management team, our journey to be a more process-oriented company. It's a fairly new organism. We've set the organization.
We started to do our journey, but we need to fine-tune so many things. We started our journey to be more effective and efficient, and we did that this week. And get on track with growth and margins in all parts of our business. Of course, not all parts of our business will grow in the same pace or will not be exactly the same, on the same profitability level, but we never give up. We support and chase the potential underperformers, and we try to support the ones who are developing nicely. So these three overarching things we had for quite a while, which we think is a recipe of that they are the right ones. So outlook 2024, with the balance sheet Irene talked about, the stability we are.
We are so happy that the market downturn didn't come in 2020 or 2021, when we threw up all these different organizations up in the air and trying to form what today is Alligo. So the timing was perfect. If there were to be a market downturn, we are so happy it was now, and we are from a balance sheet perspective super strong. We know what we do, and we are focusing on driving sales, developing our offer. We'll come back to that as well with circular offers in clothing, workwear, and you know about the small service solutions and all those since before. We'll come back to that. Increase the share of small and medium-sized customer, try to be even more efficient on the inventory levels. We will continue.
We are now at plan B, and we are ready to do more things if the market were to continue downwards for a longer time. And we have, we will take the opportunities to do more acquisitions. We feel very ready to do acquisitions, and, we can do that for a while, and then hopefully we can, can have a full throttle also growing organically at one point. And the SBTi initiative, we have said that we are joining. So we are ready to hit the accelerator when the market turns up again. Very good. Handing it back to you, Ras, for a Q&A session.
Thank you, sir. As a reminder, to ask a question on the phone line, please press star one and one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star one and one again. Once again, please press star one and one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. If you wish to ask a question via the webcast, please type them in the question box and click submit. Thank you. Once again, ladies and gentlemen, please press star one and one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. If you wish to ask a question via the webcast, please type them in the question box and click submit. We are now going to proceed with our first question. The question comes from the line of Emanuel Jansson, from Danske Bank.
Please ask your question. Your line is opened.
So, good morning, Clein and Irene. I hope you can hear me. Thank you for a good presentation. I think you have answered pretty a good share of my questions already, actually. But if we're looking at the profit development, which has been really good during the quarter, and I know, Irene, you talked a bit on, yeah, elaborate a bit on the gross margin here, but really impressive development. Should we expect this development going forward as you continue to increase the share of private labels and also turning customers or your customer exposure more towards the SME going forward? And, also, could you maybe probably elaborate a bit on the price component here? And I assume as well, that you are saying no to quite a few customers when it comes to volumes, because you want to protect your margins here. Am I right?
Yes. Very good-
Sorry, a lot of, a lot of questions.
No, no, very good. And super interesting question. We could talk about that for hours, but if it comes to the gross margin, we are not the gross margin maximizing case. We like to have the gross margin on an okay level, and then based on that, as you know, we'd like to grow. And we are trying to fine-tune our offer in the best possible way, finding the best partnership with external suppliers and the good mix of our own brands. And as you also know, trying to increase the share of small and medium-sized customers. So of course, the higher degree of small to medium-sized customers, the better the development of the gross margin.
The more we manage to steer our sales organization towards selling what we call the F Assortment, our field assortment, the high share, the higher level of the gross margin. And as you also said, Mono, you know this very well, we are turning down some larger accounts or trying to develop them. We love to work with all customers, but some of them do not value the competence of our employees and our offer, and then they are probably better off elsewhere. So all this together should. We are fighting for keeping this at this level.
We would be happy if we were to be on this level, because we also face competition in the local market, where we have competitors who try to take market shares and try to do semi clever things in a bad market. So if we could keep the gross margin level at this level going forward, and then at one point, hopefully not too far in the future, start growing, then you know what the leverage you have in a company like this. So yeah, long answer. I don't know if I answered your question, but we'd like to keep it at this level.
And then the price component you talked about also, there we have just made adjustments now, fifth of February, in all three countries, and there was very minimal price increases from our suppliers. And we need, of course, to compensate for our cost increases in, in, in the form of rent increases, which are quite heavy, salary increases, and so forth. So we have a very well-established process on how we do that. So, the price increases are minimal. Now, there are low single digit price increases in all countries, there, so but the process is the same.
Great, thank you. That's very clear. And, I don't know if it's possible, but, is it possible to somewhat say how much of the negative organic sales growth that stems from rebooking of orders or sales?
Well, how much is relating from? Then it was a strange sound.
Yeah, sorry, on how large portion of your negative organic sales growth stems from the, like, the rejected orders that-
Ah.
because you're protecting the margins?
Ah, good question. I shouldn't guess. Of course, that's a very good question. The largest account, as we've talked about before, they are now in if you compare Q4 last year with Q4 this year, most of that has rolled out. So, we will continue to challenge the profitability in each contract we have, but it should not be a big chunk. Then we now follow the market development, and you have seen also other companies that has reported, and I think we come out quite okay in our negative organic growth development.
Yeah, I totally agree on that. And perfect, and maybe a last question from my side here. It's heading down, further down to the EBITDA level, which also had an impressive development in this quarter. And if I may ask, when we see tailwind again in the market, and that we might see an increased focus from Alligo again on sales-
Mm.
Do you feel that you need to invest more on your, on your cost side, or are you pretty well set here?
That's also a very good and very complex question because we are now at plan B, and of course, we are taking away resources, which we didn't take away in plan B or C.
Yeah.
So at one point we have taken away some structures, but generally, no. The shops are there. Our brilliant salespersons in the shops, they can handle twice the sales we have today. The warehouses, it's only you need to have some more people just picking the orders, but besides that, the structure is there. So my answer would be minimal investment/extra cost to grow quite a lot.
Yeah. Perfect. Sorry, maybe a final question, and then I will step back into the line. But, also you have strong cash flow when you're talking about the M&A agenda here, and you have a really financial position that is stable in my view. At what level do you feel comfortable on adding to sales from acquisitions in 2024, you think?
Do you mean in leverage, or you mean in sales volumes, or what?
Yeah, sorry, in sales volumes.
We'd like to, w e made, I think, close to SEK 400 million turnover money two years ago and SEK 330 million last year. I'd like to be above both of them. We feel well positioned, despite the market situation, or perhaps thanks to the market situation, to actually do acquisitions now. I probably can come back to that, but there are some cases that has materialized... where competitors of ours has stepped away, because of their financial situation, where we have a very solid financial situation and good self-confidence. So we intend to do acquisitions at the highest speed. So I hope we could add what we've done the last year, SEK 300-500 million in turnover.
Perfect. It sounds promising. Thank you, Clein, for taking my questions, and good luck.
Very good. Thanks.
Thank you. We are now going to proceed with our next question. The question come from the line of Karl-Johan Bonnevier from DNB Markets. Please ask your question. Your line is opened.
Yes, good morning, Clein and Irene. Continuing on the same line as Emanuel here, looking at Q4 gross margin, I guess you must have had very good sale of what you call the field assortment. I guess that's the winter work wear and similar kind of things. Is that a big component in getting the margins up to this level?
Absolutely. The higher degree that you could have—we only share the slide. We show the slide with the store sales and own brands, but if we had shown the actual workwear part, it's also a very essential component because that's high-margin products, so shoes, gloves, and workwear, so of course. The more of winter gear, the better. As we are today, on the sixteenth of February, we don't have much use of snow anymore, but in Q4, we'd like to have it cold and snowy. As you said, I cannot complain about the weather in Q4. I can complain about the market, not the weather. The weather was perfect, and that has, of course, helped, absolutely.
Yeah, I think you alluded to at some stage that maybe the clients were coming in, buying the winter gear, but you didn't do a lot of extra sales for that. Is that how it turned out in Q4?
Exactly. It's exactly that. You buy exactly what you need, and not only, if your feet are cold, you go in and you buy shoes, and in better market conditions, you buy a jacket and other things while you are visiting us. But in this type of market situation, and that we know since before, you buy exactly what you need. So I said somewhere that we can, we have not been able to capitalize on this brilliant weather as we would have been able to do if the market would have been better.
Good way of putting it. You mentioned the, the new KPI for me at least, the defined assortment a couple of times. How, how much of the, the revenues of SEK 9.3 billion in, in, in 2023 would you characterize as defined assortment?
We are above 50% at least. It differs a little bit from country to country, but I think in Sweden, we are high 60s, 60%. And it's a transformation process, and that also actually is burdening our gross margin because we are selling out and campaigning out products which is not in this assortment. We have small and medium and large assortment in the different type of shops, and the salespersons, we define when we launched this setup, we had 44,000 articles in our F assortment, but now we're down to 40. So of course, it costs a lot.
So we would love to come to a situation where we are more stable because you have to campaign away products which were in F Assortment and no longer, and were in small and medium and large size shop assortment. But we are in the normal Swedish shop, I would guess they are at 70% in line with the assortment or even higher.
When you look at your future target when maybe own brands is 25% of the mix, then another 50% should be, say, the defined assortment, and then the remaining 25%, that might be trading volumes or things that a local store finds a good need for storing or how would you-
Yeah, approximately, even higher, actually, on the defined assortment. And we say that it should be 70%, the same assortment, in all our countries. Then within the country, a local shop, if you take the shop assortment, can to 10%, have a local variation to their assortment, but it should be high, and it high. It's so wonderful and so important for us because then you partner up with the suppliers, they feel that we deliver on what we promised. We are not having any cooperation with others. We can ensure step sustainability objectives, that we only have suppliers which are in compliance with that, and we have the best conditions from those suppliers. So it's such a win-win-win situation to sell from this defined assortment. It's super important for us.
When you look at the narrowing of the assortment from the 44,000 to 40,000 that you now have done, what kind of further concentration would you see is in plan for the month? I guess you always need to reshake your assortment to some extent.
Yeah, yeah. It's a very good question. And as long as it's, to a certain extent, it's getting more narrow, as you say, it's good. We started off with more than I would have thought. I would have guessed 25, 27. We started at 44, but it's perhaps logical and best to be a bit kind in the beginning, and then from there, narrow it down. Not... Because we have customers who have been promised that we have a certain article of a certain brand. We need to have time to communicate with that customer and try to convince them that this product from the brand X instead of Y is similar, but you get it at a better price, and you get it more in line with the sustainability targets. So it takes a little bit of time.
So it should be more narrow, where the end game is. Yeah, I have no idea.
No, but the target below 30,000, I can see the clear advantage for you having volumes on more limited ranges and that kind of bargaining power you should have to your suppliers, so.
Yeah. No, that could be reasonable. Absolutely.
Excellent. And looking at the good move this year, obviously getting closer to the 10% margin target, not getting helped by the market. But if you're looking at 2024, not getting helped by the market, is there still a lot of what I would call self-help kind of opportunities left from the merger integration and the improvement of the structure to help you bridge, say, the gap even further during this year?
Now, from now on, I think it's more operational work, being more efficient and effective, working with managing sales more rather than from any synergies from back in the day. So I think we have a lot to do to manage and run the business more effectively is the biggest opportunity for us in a continuous declining market, as you said.
So more of an optimization and then-
Yeah
Actually then, I see you say, getting closer to that, putting the foot back on the accelerator, as you put it.
Yeah, exactly, exactly, exactly. We are looking forward to that greatly.
Then you, you alluded a little to coming back, talking about welding and you talked about acquisition opportunities for this year. But when I look at those welding acquisitions, and all of them looks to be very profitable operations, so I can understand the attraction for you.
Yeah.
Is there, is there any more white spots outside that? And maybe allude a little to what the opportunity you see in welding as well, what you can get that, too.
Absolutely. We have other areas we are pursuing. We always communicated, organically or through acquisitions, that we'd like to be better in, in fasteners, welding, cutting, grinding, and anything that has to do with more being closer to the customer's, process and more of competence sales. I was actually, in one of the booths, we had, what was it? 160 presentations in Jönköping with all the sales personnel, and I went into the, to the presentation on welding, and I heard the persons there saying, "This is not a product assortment, it's a competence area." It was just a, a reminder that, wow, that's why we actually do this. So we'd like to-
Sales pitch
More of a partner to our customers, helping them with their problems and solutions, because it's difficult to be on the profitable profit levels we would like to be by only competing on having the exactly same product as our competitors have. So our own brands and more of competence sales will help us going forward.
Excellent. Well, thank you very much, and all the best for 2024 and out there.
Thank you, K-J.
Thank you. Thank you. We have no further questions on the phone lines. I'll hand back to you for the webcast questions. Thank you.
Thank you. I'm trying to read at the same. You have previously mentioned that sellers are still in 2021 or 2022 in terms of price of their shops. Are you starting to meet the buyers? Okay, I guess it's an acquisition question. Looking into 2024, do you see any improvements in the market in the first half, or it will be tougher before it becomes easier? If I interpret that as an M&A question, I should say yes. And we made 3 acquisitions in December, which I think is a little sign that it's actually b ecause we have communicated that we, when the market turns down, and I think that's what this question is relating to, then we have a period where we don't meet each other.
That the seller has thought that the value of their company was at a certain level, and then their volumes and result comes down a bit, and we cannot do the math necessary to be able to agree, and then time goes, and my answer would be yes. We feel that we are now back at the table again with some cases where we left the table, potentially both of us, both the seller and us. We couldn't agree on price levels. So expectations has come down a bit. We have developed as a company because we look a lot at the post-synergy multiple, which is super important. So if that is really low, then it's an attractive acquisition for us to do.
So the answer would be, yes, we are back at the table. We hope to do quite a few acquisitions during 2024. Then we have another question. The winter has been long and pretty harsh throughout the Nordics relative to recent years. You usually talk about boost when the winter arrives, but being so drawn out, this has helped you through Q4 and also Q1, which is drawn out winter. Exactly. The question is, if we had, and I think we touched upon that during the discussion with Koye just now. We had great help of the bad weather in Q4. Unfortunately, the underlying market was not so good, so we could fully capitalize on that. But in Q1, it's less necessary.
I was down in the shop in Tyresö just the other day, talked to a customer, and he said, "Now what? Like, just like the cold weather goes, I can start digging." From now on, we are not helped by any more snow. Our customers, generally, they have the winter gear they need. So from now on, that's actually not good, if we continue to talk about weather. So now we'd like it to be a bit better, so our customers could start doing their job and working outdoors and doing the digging in the ground and all those things. So it's a very good question. Very good. Was that all on account? Yes. Thank you very much. So what do you say, Raph? Should I go straightly to the closing remarks?
Yes, please, sir. Please go ahead. We have no further questions on the phone lines. Thank you.
Very good. So thank you very much, everybody, for listening in. We are navigating through a tough market. We have foreseen it for quite a while. We were able to mitigate it so far. I'm super proud of our wonderful colleagues fighting every day, winning orders, taking orders. It's a super tough job. We are proud that we were 1% from 9.9% EBITDA margin. We were SEK 7 million from SEK 1 billion second positive cash flow. Our direction, our strategy is super, super clear. We have our overarching themes. Now it's time to start prepare for growth. We expect that the first step on that journey would be to make acquisitions.
Then after that, after a certain period, if it's six months or seven months or whenever, when the market shapes up again, we are ready to go for growth again. So we can continue to prepare ourselves for that and do acquisitions. So the journey continues. Thank you very much for listening in.
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect your lines. Thank you.