Okay, it's time. Welcome to AQ Group Investor Presentation from quarter two 2024. Let's go. First, as usual, I'd like to show why we should invest in AQ Group. We have earnings per share CAGR of 15% over the past 10 years. We make profit every quarter since the foundation in 1994. We have exposure to industrial market segments with underlying growth. We will talk about Jit Mech, and Rockford today, which is our acquisitions, and then we will talk a little bit about electrification, railway, and marine as well. We have a long history of acquisitions, two-four factories per year, and currently this year we have added five factories, and we have a strong balance sheet.
Then AQ, in short, we are about 8,000 employees with SEK 9 billion in turnover, seven business area, 15+ market segments, and now manufacturing in 16 countries when adding UK. We have deliveries globally, and, we have made profit every quarter for 29 years. And as I said, 15% earnings per share CAGR, and, we buy some factories every year. And then we have our sustainability initiative, UN Global Compact, that we've been part of since 2012. Let's go into the quarter then. Net sales decreased by 4% to SEK 2.2 billion, and it is much lower than our target of 15%. We'll come to it later. We had an EBIT, which increased by 9% to SEK 222 million, and then we made profit after financial items, EBT.
It increased with 11% to SEK 280 million, with the profit margin before tax of 9.7%, which was much better than the same quarter last year. Our profit after tax was SEK 181 million, and then our cash flow from operating activities was record high at SEK 301 million in the quarter. Really good. The earnings per share was a little bit lower than the previous quarter at 1.97. We continue with the first six months, where net sales decreased 3% to SEK 4,479 million, and operating profit increased with 12%, and profit after financial items increased with 16%, and profit margin before tax was 9.8%. It is very much higher than our target of 8%.
Profit after tax was SEK 366 million, and cash flow from operating activity was at a record high of SEK 545 million for the first half year. Our earnings per share before dilution was 3.98 SEK per share, and our equity ratio is very much above our target of 40%. Earnings per share growth. We had a 6% earnings per share growth versus the same quarter in 2023, but a decline of 2% versus quarter one. Get back to it. Some comments regarding the sales. We have an organic growth or non-growth of 6%, whereas we acquired growth of 1.7%, and we had some positive currency gains in the quarter.
We have a high activity in our sales pipeline, you can say, but and we have many nice projects coming in, but it's not really, we're not really seeing it in the turnover just yet. A lot of it has to do with that we had a lot of these energy storage projects last year, but also that we see a decline in volumes from trucks and yellow machines as well as for drives or inductors for drives for transformers. So that is... It's a little bit mixed, a little bit more normal picture, I would say, than it was in the previous quarters, where we had an extreme growth in all market segments. So it's very, very much the same picture as we painted already in quarter one, I would say.
So the organic growth is disappointing at -6%, very much below our target. I've already commented on what is decreasing. A little bit, we see the increase still in electrification, in the defense industry, in railway and marine, and somewhat in vending machines as well, we see an increase, but it cannot compensate for the decrease in the other market segments. So therefore, we see an organic decline. And, the decline is, I would say, mostly, in Europe, actually. U.S., no, North America is doing fine, China is doing fine, India is okay, Europe is a little bit more down than the others. And acquired growth, happy to see a small bar there. It would have been a little bit more if we would have a full quarter with the Jit Mech acquisition.
Then, I will come back to the Rockford acquisition that we made now, two days ago. It will add another 1% from Q3 onwards, and, as I write in the report, we have more prospects in the pipeline, and I hope that we can finish or close some of the deals before the year end. The margins are really high. We're happy with the margins in the quarter. Our cost control is really good. So despite having one-off costs in India, where we wrote down some inventory of SEK 10 million in one of the plants there, we still have a really, really good margin. And, we see that there are still big opportunities to improve in this site in India, but also in one site in Sweden, we see big opportunities to improve going forward.
Inventory turnover, a little bit down compared to last, the top level last year. This really becomes a smiley mouth, but. We have a training program now that we are launching with, and we are very focusing on the sites where we see the biggest improvement potential. I think we can still release quite a lot of cash from the inventory going forward, despite a little bit lower volumes, which is good. And the balance sheet, I will almost not comment. I mean, we have, excluding IFRS 16, we have a net cash position, so it's looking really good, and we're able to withhold the good cash flow that we started already in Q4 in 2022. So it's really good. We have a fantastic cash position, I would say.
But, we want do more acquisitions, and we want to grow more with our customers, so we have to put the cash into use as well. Regarding delivery position, we see that we have capacity constraints in the acquired unit, Jit Mech, in both of their factories. So therefore, we have announced today also that we are buying machines for about 30 million SEK to accommodate the growth in electrification and in defense industry. One of the machines already in place, but it will take, I think, July also to get it started. The second machine will take roughly, I would say, a year before it's in place. This floor milling machine, which is a huge, huge milling machine that will be used for electrification and defense projects going forward that we have already won.
We also see a challenging delivery situation in Mexico and India towards some of our high-growth customers, but we have also some problems generally in inductive components, where we see a huge demand for railway components. So therefore, some of the sites have an issue to deliver on time. We are working on it, and it's better than the quarter last year, but still it's very disappointing with 92, to be honest. We will continue to work to improve this. And then quality is on an extremely good level, I would say. We're very happy with that. And we have a target of 100%, but 99.7% of the goods that we deliver is of good quality that the customer is happy with.
This is more important than the delivery performance because if you deliver something on time but the quality is bad, then still the delivery time is crap. So this is a really important metric for us. Let's talk a little bit about our acquisitions. I write about it in the report. So Jit Mech, we see a very strong growth there, and last year they had a turnover of SEK 130 million. This year, the target for the first six months is around SEK 200 million per year. Therefore, we have then bought a number of new machines, and you can see on the bottom right there, this Juaristi floor milling machine that we will be very happy with when it's installed in Örviken.
It will support our customers to continue to build more products that they need. So I'm very happy with that one. We want to get now in place as soon as possible. But in general, Jit Mech acquisition running better than expected, both on the turnover and on the profit side. Then we have our newly announced acquisition, Rockford. It is a s—I would say, quite. It's not a huge acquisition, but they have three manufacturing sites, or some of them are design and prototyping, but the main manufacturing site is in Worksop, which is in Nottinghamshire. It is quite close to Sheffield, you can say. And then in the south, we have a customer site which do prototypes and worked very closely with some customers in Salisbury.
And then there is what you could call a head office in Rendlesham on the east coast. They are extremely well-positioned with customers that we really appreciate, some of the customers we have in other parts of the world, but some of the customers are also brand new for us. They have a lot of customers within the defense vehicle industry, on land and mainly on land and air. And we believe that we can bring a lot of production knowledge to this company, improving their production equipment, but also to finance their working capital needs in order to facilitate the growth going forward.
As we write in the report, we put one of our managing directors that has been with us in China and India for several years, and he will be managing this company, and we believe that they will have a strong growth going forward. I think I have mentioned most of it, but, I mean, I will not mention anything more. It's better that we can go to the questions instead. With AQ Group, we have had, so let's go into the Q&A. So please, raise your hand, and we will open the microphones for you. We have a call. Christina, can you open the microphones or you think... I hope it's possible.
Hello, can you hear me now?
Yeah.
Good. Good morning, James and Christina. I, some questions from my side. First one is just related to the energy storage.
Yes.
The delta year- over- year, is that, as you said, around SEK 100 million in lost revenues?
In the quarter, yes.
In the quarter, yeah. If we adjust for that organic growth should be like -2% then?
Yes.
Something like that. Okay. And then I just have one question on the trucks and the construction equipment, which you mentioned are seeing continued weaknesses. Would you say that this even more weakness compared to Q1, or is it similar levels?
I would say that it is similar levels to Q1, but I would expect it to become weaker going forward.
Okay. And then a question on the newly acquired Rockford acquisition. I mean, Jit Mech is looking to be tracking quite good, in the books here.
Yeah.
Just a little bit on what you expect there going forward. You said that the margins should be in line with the AQ Group in one year.
Yeah.
On the top line side, do you expect similar kind of growth in Rockford as in Jit Mech or what?
No, I think it will take a little bit longer time to get into growth. This company is, they have had, I would say, they haven't had enough money to facilitate their growth for quite some time. So we will need to put in the resources to support them in growing. We, I think we have a good opportunity to support them with growth from our factories in Poland and Lithuania and Sweden and Estonia. But the main rationale here is that we get a lot of competent people, and we get access to these customers that we don't have today.
We will be able to deliver a lot of products to them going forward, but it will take some longer time than for Jit Mech, which had a lot more in the pipeline already when we acquired them.
Yeah. And then, on the margin topic, I mean, you're now two quarters in a row where you're doing 10% around. I mean, if you adjust for the SEK 10 million inventory write-down, you're doing a better quarter now than in Q1. I don't know if you should adjust for it, but still, I'm just wondering a little bit on how you, how you view your margins here, if you see them as sustainable or... Yeah, you're doing very good margins compared to your historical margins,
That is correct. I mean, of course, we will try to maintain these margins, but we don't really do forward-looking statements. But on the other hand, I mean, we are trying to move up so that we can be more stable above 8%, consistently above 8% in margin and being between 8% and 10%, in the long term. So I would say that we will do everything that we can to maintain this profitability. That is for sure.
Yeah. That is good. I think that was all of my questions I have right now, so thank you, and good luck.
Thanks, Carl.
Have a good summer.
Yeah, same to you. Any other questions on the call? Please raise your hand in that case, and we will open the mic for you.
Maybe, Carl, here again, if I can take one more on pricing.
Sure.
I'm just on price increases, et cetera.
Yeah.
If you are still seeing that your selling prices are still up year- over- year, is that-
Yeah
... correct? And that is like 2-3% or?
I would say it's around that.
Yeah. Would you give us any kind of your purchasing prices?
Yeah.
Are they down, you would say, year- over- year?
It's very-
Material, mainly.
It is very mixed. I would not say, no, I wouldn't say. I mean, we-
More stable?
Yeah, I would say they are quite stable. There are still some increases going on in some commodities, but I would say they're quite stable, neither going up or down.
Yeah, that's good. Thank you.
Thanks. Anyone else who want to have a question? We have plenty of time, so... I know it's a very busy, busy reporting day for many of you, so maybe we should leave it there. Please raise your hand if you have a question. three, two, one. Okay. Then I thank everybody for listening, and I wish everybody a good summer. We will continue to work to increase our earnings per share. That's all from AQ side. Thank you. Bye.
Thank you. Have a nice summer. Thank you.