Earnings Call: Q3 2024

Oct 17, 2024

Good morning, everyone. It's 8:59. Welcome to AQ Group's investor presentation for Q3 2024. Maybe since we've not started yet, I can talk a little bit about the picture on the presentation. This is the first AQ factory outside of Sweden. It's in Godech in Bulgaria, and here we manufacture inductors and components for railway industry and for electrochemical industry and power grids. Here we have installed recently a new solar part, as we present in the report, reduces CO2 footprint, but also to reduce cost because electricity in Bulgaria is expensive. Let's go into the presentation for the quarter. First, why invest in AQ? Normally, I have this in every presentation, so we still have an earnings per share CAGR of 15% over the past 10 years. We made profit every quarter since the foundation in 1994. We have exposure to industrial segments with underlying growth such as education, railway, marine, defense, and so on. We have a long history of acquisitions, 2-4 factories per year, and this year so far, we have acquired 5 factories, 1 engineering and a prototype office. We have an extremely strong balance sheet. On the graph to the right, you can see why you should invest in AQ. Some quick facts. We are actually now a little bit less than 8,000 employees. Last year, we had about SEK 9 billion in turnover. We have 7 different business areas with different products. We have 15+ market segments that we deliver to. We are manufacturing now in 16 countries with deliveries globally, and we made profit every quarter for now 30 years. We have, as I said before, 15% earnings per share CAGR for the last 10 years, we make acquisitions, we have been registered as a member and supporter of the United Nations Global Compact since 2012. The third quarter numbers, you have read them. We see net sales dropped 9% to SEK 1.9 billion. We have operating profit EBIT which has decreased with 6% compared to the same quarter last year. Our EBIT also decreases with 9% to SEK 177 million. Our profit margin before tax EBIT was 9.1%, which is exactly the same as last year. Profit after tax amounted to SEK 146 million versus SEK 172 million the previous year. Cash flow from operating activities is extremely good in the quarter, and it is normally like that when you decrease sales. Earnings per share before dilution was 1.6 krona per share, compared to 1.87 the year before. I will comment all of these things later on. The first nine months, net sales have decreased by about 5% to SEK 6.4 billion. Operating profit have increased by 6% to SEK 633 million. Profit after our financial items have increased by 7%. The profit margin before tax was 9.6% after the first nine months, which is extremely strong. Our profit after tax was SEK 511 million, also higher than the previous year. Cash flow from operating activities is a record high in AQ of SEK 908 million after nine months. Earnings per share before dilution was 5.58, and our equity ratio is extremely strong at 65%, 25 above our target. We go into earnings per share growth, which is the most important thing for any investor. You can see if we look at the rolling 12 months that it's almost flat versus 2023, which is, of course, not where we want to be. Considering the extreme growth in our earnings per share in 2023 versus 2022, maybe it is normal, even though we are not satisfied with this number. The earnings per share growth was minus 14% versus Q3 last year and minus 19% versus Q2 2024. There are of course some reasons. I mean, we have decreased volume, so with the same margin, meaning we decrease the profit in the quarter versus last same period last year. We have also, Well, there are higher taxes depending on where the profits are being made because there's different taxes in different countries. Nothing strange with that. Net sales, we can see in the quarterly growth. I'd like to comment a little bit, but the growth in net sales was -9%, and the minus 2% was then currency, and also the acquired growth was 3.5% in the quarter versus last year. Meaning the organic growth is actually lower, and it is 10.67%, I believe, but the decrease is in organic sales, I can say. I think we have a high activity in our sales teams working very hard to replace and increase the sale of existing products and new products. Then also to explain a little bit about half of the organic decrease in the quarter is related to these energy storage projects that we had in quarter 3 2023. It's an explanation. On the other hand, if we would have had that customer still, which we communicated in quarter four of last year that we lost, then maybe this picture would have been different. It's a failure from our side, I must say. We had, as I write in the report, a decrease in demand from construction equipment in Europe, trucks, buses, but also some other market segments that we're exposed to in and especially, I would say, German customers. We move to next slide. Here we see the same picture as I have told it. Organic growth was minus 11%, which is 21% below our target, which is not something that you can be happy about. Battery system business lost compared to same quarter last year is SEK 100 million, it explains 5%. We see a small decrease also in inductors, which was really in the peak for frequency drives last year. What I told you about before, trucks, buses, engine, Germany. We see however positive things in the quarter with increases in electrification. These type of customers, ABB, Danfoss, that type of customer, defense industry, railway, and marine is increasing sales, but it's not able to compensate for the decreases elsewhere. I'd like to present some new customer wins that we have. I write a little bit about it in the report that we have won a number of new things. We have won a new contract from our newly established or newly acquired business in U.K. We won a big contract in Norway for a defense customer there, which we are very happy about. It will increase their sales 2025 and onwards. We have also won contracts for wire harnesses and sheet metal parts to defense customers in Sweden, Czech Republic, and Slovakia, which will come in in Q4. We have also secured more orders for mechanical enclosures for a big inverter, German inverter company. I am also very happy to see that we are starting to win a new contract in our master controller and footrest business that we do in Västerås in Sweden. We have a new bus customer in North America. It is very good. It will replace some of the volume that was lost when we, when Nova Bus stopped to produce their buses in Plattsburgh. We have a big order for inductive components for renewable hydrogen plant in Germany, which is fun. We don't deliver to the plant directly. We deliver in this case to one of our existing, it's Danfoss. We deliver to them, they will install this. It's fun to be part of the hydrogen movement as well. We see double volume for about three years for gas turbine parts from our factory in Hungary to a big German gas turbine manufacturer. Acquired growth. We see that we are written. We have acquired a number of companies this year, and it is starting to move a little bit. We're still quite far from our target, but I believe we will get closer to our target going forward. Of course, we have many projects in the pipeline that we want to do, so that's fun. A little bit update on mdexx. We see still strong growth in all the market segments where they operate, and the profitability is in line with expectations. The integration is going in at a good pace, we believe, and we like the people, we like the company, and we like the customers that are operating there. We have bought recently a new five-axis machine. It was installed during the summer to increase capacity because this factory has a bit of delivery issues because they have grown about 100% versus last year. We have also bought a new big machine. We already talked about last quarter, this will increase the capacity even further. This is mostly for power grid and defense customers that we have. Very happy with this acquisition. It's going well. People agree. Yeah, that's fun. We acquired AQ Rockford. We've been working together with them almost feels like since 2016 or something like this. It has been a long journey before we managed to agree with Peter that you can see on the picture on the right, the man closest who was the owner of this beautiful company. We are surprised actually because we didn't believe that this was going to be so high profit as it has been the first couple of months, and also the volume has been much higher than we anticipated. It's really fun. You can see also on the photo there we are on a military exhibition in U.K., or a defense industry exhibition, I should say. With some people from our old AQ team, so to speak, and all the people from the new AQ team doing sales towards our new customers. I believe integration is going very well. As I said, we have won a new large contract with Norwegian defense customer for different parts. I'm surprisingly happy, this acquisition feels great. We see huge opportunities to sell more into the U.K. defense market from our factories in Europe and also from the factories that we now have in the U.K. It's fun. We also announced now that we have signed the agreement with the owners of TechROi AB to acquire two of their subsidiaries in Trollhättan, Sweden. It is sort of a bolt-on acquisition with AQ Engineering, and it is our engineering company in Sweden, where we do design and development for demanding industrial customers in Sweden. This gives us access to a number of nice customers that TechROi used to have, but also an extremely nice prototype workshop. It is actually Saab's own prototype workshop. We have a lot of nice equipment and skilled people that do prototype both for car industry, but mostly for other type of industries, actually. The skill to make prototypes is not so easy because you normally use different production methods than when you do serial production. We of course, hope that after we make nice prototypes, we can do it in series then in our factories in Europe. We think that this will be a great acquisition. However, this company had been a little bit caught in this COVID tax issues also. They have had liquidity problems, and we are not able to take them over yet due to Swedish bureaucracy, this new FDI rule. I think hopefully we can take them into AQ now in quarter four and solve their liquidity problems and start to work together with them because it will be great. After the acquisition, we will be more than 100 engineers in Sweden working directly with demanding industrial customers. That's really fun. We believe it will be a great asset in terms of adding more technical to our value proposition in Sweden. I mean, margins, I think it's an okay margin in the quarter. It is same margin as last year, despite that we have lost a lot of sales on the top line. I think our cost control is really good. I think this shows that our decentralized model works. We, we have decreased approximately 1,000 headcount, including, and it's mostly temps, since Q3 last year. As you can see there, we are quite used with doing this. This is normal course of business for AQ. We are scaling up fast, and we are scaling down fast when we need to. Prices versus the same quarter last year, almost flat. I think, they are roughly 2% increased year-over-year, mostly to compensate for increased costs than in terms of material and labor cost increases. We still see that we have opportunities to improve operationally in one site in India, where we have done a lot of kaizen activities, and it's getting better, but it's still not as we want it to be. The margin is really quite okay. I mean, quarter three normally is our worst quarter. I think this is quite okay. Inventory value and inventory turnover here, not really super happy. We see it going back a little bit from 3.1 to 3 in the quarter. Our target for this year is 3.5. You can say we are a little bit affected, but we add, of course, inventory when we buy companies and the calculation model we are using, and we are not, will hit us a little bit for that, but it's not the reason. I think we need to work harder in turning our material faster. It's of course harder when the volumes are going down, but we need to be better. We have an improvement program. We think it's going maybe a little bit too slow. We need to be faster and do more activities here. We still see a big improvement opportunity, but I believe that we are better than most of our stock list peers in this area, which is fun, of course, but we want to get even better. Net cash from operating activities is, of course, extremely well, like good because working capital is decreasing when sales are going down. It is natural, you can say. Anyhow, I think we are quite skilled at maintaining, I mean, getting paid from our customers and also turning the material. Then again, we have a good margin that also helps, of course. Now we have a very big negative net debt, excluding IFRS 16, about over SEK 400 million. Of course, this gives us a very good situation to be in. If you see that market segments that you're in are going down a little bit, then you know that peers that don't have this good financial situation will maybe have some problems, and then you can really take market share, but also it gives an opportunity to acquire companies. Well, I can say price level and competition for the acquisitions we are looking for is much lower now than it was like in 2021 when everybody was buying everything. It is nice situation to be in. As I write in the report, we have a history of buying a lot of things when markets are bad. We like to be contrarian here and, for instance, I mentioned as some market segments that are going down, then of course we look in those market segments because then there are companies with temporary problems there, and also maybe geographical markets, with the same. Some investments that we made, I mentioned it in the report. It might be very hard for an investor to understand what the hell I am talking about in the report because I write something about electromagnetic pulse crimping machines, but it is a new technology to crimp, contact to a cable. The main reason why you would choose this technology is that you get a super good crimp around the cable, well, around the copper of the cable. The biggest problem you can find in high voltage application is that you get corrosion between the contact and the copper wires, and this will can cause serious problems in a vehicle, and it can even cause fire eventually. This is a great advancement, and we have bought our first machines. Very expensive, but it is of course a demand from one of our customer that we need this type of crimps. We have already started to produce and prototypes for vehicles in the construction, truck and bus industry. We are very proud that we are one of the first that have this type of equipment in our factory in Panevėžys in Lithuania. We believe that this will win us new business going forward, that we have this type of equipment already now and get the chance to learn it. Then, as I wrote in the report and on the first slide, we've invested in a small solar plant in Gorna Dzhumaya, Bulgaria. It is a little bit funny because we've had a solar plant here many years, but it's much smaller. First, we bought, I think, four solar panels. Then, on the top left of the solar panel field there, you see a light gray solar panel. That is the second solar park that we built, very small one. We try a little bit, and then we learn, and then we buy a bigger one. Now we buy a bigger one, and it covers around 10% of the energy consumption of this factory that produce inductors and transformers, mostly for railway industry. I would say it's one of the top three in Europe to manufacture these type of components for the railway industry. If you travel in the subway in Paris or in Stockholm, you are indirectly using our components. It's funny because it's a small village in Bulgaria with almost no people and they can be world-class at something. It's really funny. We're very proud of this factory. Also it's good of course, that we reduce the greenhouse gas emissions, but also we reduce cost because energy in Bulgaria is very expensive. Something about quality and delivery precision. With the trend in delivery precision is going the right way. It doesn't help that we buy companies that have struggled to deliver on time. Both Utmece and Rockford are pulling down our performance. Despite that, the trend is going upwards, and we are not happy. We still have some issues in several sites that have delivery issues still, depending on different reasons. I think we are improving in this area, and we will continue to improve. It is actually very tightly connected to our inventory turnover because if you have good inventory turnover, normally you have also good on-time delivery. It's more about order and management in the factory than anything else. Quality level is very high and stable, and I believe we are very good at delivering high quality products to our customers. This I talked about. I go over to Q&A. Please raise your hand if you want to ask a question, we will open the microphone for you. We have Carl. See if we can open. I think now. Can you hear me? Yes, we can hear you. Good. Good morning. Good morning. I have some couple of questions. If we start on the demand side, I mean, organic growth now down double digits. I guess some, as you mentioned, related to the Wärtsilä battery systems. On the other side, the rest of the business, have you seen organic growth being weaker towards the end of the quarter, or has it been quite stable after the summer, or how would you phrase it? No, I think July, which is always a shitty month for us, was even more shitty this year. It has been quite stable, I would say, the rest of the two months of the quarter. Yeah, it is. I mean, we are quite used to this. I mean, everything doesn't go up and in our existing business. What we can, we try to focus on what we can affect, and that, I mean, is to sell more. As I write in the report, I'm not satisfied with my own performance in getting this new. There is a lot of opportunities out there, and we are not getting them into the factories quickly as quickly as I want. We need to work harder, as I write. The general volumes are, yeah, they are quite okay. I think if we would compare, I think maybe we are a little bit better than our peers. If you remove this energy storage projects, then it's maybe quite okay, but still we like to grow every year. We have only had one year where we haven't had growth and, that was 2020. We are disappointed. Yeah. Yeah. Just on the growth engines, I mean, electrification, marine and railway, which you mentioned, for example, and defense. Yeah. Is it possible to quantify what is the growth rate in Q3 approximately? I guess they differ a little bit, we're just interested to hear. Yeah. I can say one of the big power grid customers that we have in north of Sweden really had a huge problem because they implemented SAP during the summer. They couldn't place orders, and they couldn't do anything, really. They have had a huge issue during the summer. I mean, they have an order book, which is several years in the future. The orders are coming and now and because they've sorted their problems, sometimes I wonder why companies implement SAP, honestly, because I've never heard a company writing. We've implemented SAP, now we make a lot more profit. Anyway, I can understand sometimes why they have it. To try to answer your questions, I would say, I still see the power grid segment is growing and will grow for us about 20% per year. I think the defense segment will grow for us, but this is percent on a number maybe that we don't publish. It's maybe hard to say, but I still see the defense segment is growing very fast, so it's more about our ability to catch the orders and make business of it. I mean, some of the defense projects we're in, our customers are using, I mean, retired people that used to do these type of products in the 1970s because there is no knowledge. The projects are quite challenging for our customers and for us actually, because we haven't done them in a huge, very long time, and some of them we haven't done at all because we're building new things as well. I believe that they will continue to grow. I think marine that has been growing very good for us will flatten out now. I think railway, I mean, all the railway companies in Europe, at least they are completely booked now. There's a lot of volume there, a lot of growth there. It's a project business, so it can be a bit bumpy between the quarters, when the volume comes for us as well, because they will postpone, and then they will take out more, and then they will postpone and so on, based on their deliveries. We like to be in railway because we believe it's a good business, very demanding and hard to deliver it. Yeah. Sorry. Sorry for this. It is a good question to ask really. Yeah. It's okay. Then just a question on the battery storage. Is it possible to quantify how much sales you had towards the customer that you have lost in Q4 last year? Yes. It was roughly SEK 50 million last year in Q4. Okay. A little bit better in the comparison base going forward. Yeah. Just the last question. I just noted in your segment reporting, if you look at the unallocated costs, it seems like that segment came in with a positive EBIT of SEK 80 million, which usually is a bit negative. I guess it's a Christina question. It doesn't look as it used to look, so I'm just wondering if there's anything there that one should be aware of. No, I wouldn't say so. It's related to. I mean, there are a lot of unallocated costs. We have had some warranty provisions also on group level. That might explain the effect in this quarter. Okay. That's clear. Thank you. Have a good day. Thanks, Carl. Do we have anyone else who want to ask a question? We will open the mic for you. Seems there was not so many questions. Maybe I answered everything in my my blurry presentation. I wish you all a great day, and thank you all so much for listening.