Welcome to CTEK Q4 report 2022. For the first part of the conference call, the participants will be in listen-only mode. During the questions and answer session, participants are able to ask questions by dialing star five on their telephone keypad. Now I will hand the conference over to the speakers, CEO Ola Carlsson and CFO Thom Mathisen. Please go ahead.
Good morning, welcome to this year-end report presentation for CTEK. I'm Ola Carlsson, the acting CEO of the company, and with me I have Thom Mathisen, our CFO. We will take you through a little bit introduction to CTEK. Some of you know us better than others, but we'll have a little bit of an update on CTEK, then we will go through the financial results for Q4 and the full year. And that will be done by Thom, and then I will come back at the end and talk a little bit by my reflections about the results and some guidance around 2023. Let's get started. First an introduction, where are we active in CTEK? We divide it in two technologies. One would be EVSE or electrical car and other electrical vehicles.
We have our heritage, the low voltage, technical segment. If we look at it and you see some examples of products we have in the different segments of the market. We talk about home charger for private use at home. That's the new GM chargers that we developed together with GM. You see on the pictures, in the middle you see destination chargers, which we typically find in public destinations such as shopping malls or hotels or workplaces and so on. To the right you see a portable version of a home charger. If you have a power outlet with three phases, you can use this charger, and it is as powerful as a normal home charger.
If you have a second home somewhere, you can bring it with you. If we move over to low voltage, we have a little bit more segments. We have a consumer segment where we sell under our own brand in retail, both physical retail and online retail. We sell to many of the leading car manufacturers under their brand. We also sell professional charger to workshops, service centers and so on. They are still low voltage, they are very high current, up to 120 amps. In this segment or in low voltage segment, we have also launched a portable low voltage charger, where you actually can use it to charge your laptop or your mobile phone if you're off grid.
You can also charge a flat battery if you have one, because there's actually battery inside the charger. If you're stuck somewhere with a flat battery, you can use that to recharge your battery and get started and drive on. We have also another segment of the market where we are active. We sell solutions for vehicles that has a lot of equipment, you can say, that need charging. Typical example would be an ambulance or a service van or something like that. That's a little bit where we are active. If we move on, and this is now a little bit new, how we will report these technical segments going forward.
Before we just did it on a group level, but to increase transparency and understand both, how our business are performing, but also where the potential in the business are, we now will divide the different business units into EVSE and low voltage separately as well. If we start with Energy & Facilities, where we sell mainly destination chargers, but you can also sell home chargers in this to some of the clients that or customers that we have in this. A typical client could be Vattenfall, electrical wholesalers, property owners and so on. Some of these, like Vattenfall, they sell home chargers as well, so it's not only destination chargers. If we move over to Aftermarket or you could call it retail if you would like to, we sell to physical retail, online retail, to distributors.
Here you can also actually sell both type of products. You can sell low voltage products and you can sell EVSE or car, electric car chargers in this distribution as well. You see that we do it to some extent today, but of course we want to grow this share going forward. The last business unit we have is Original Equipment, where we already now are on 23% EVSE in 2022. Here a typical customer is all the leading car manufacturers, but also motorcycle companies, powersports, snowmobiles.
Also here you can sell both low voltage chargers and home chargers. The takeaway from this picture is, I mean, we are divided in three business units, which is divided by customer type, and then we have products, and some of the products can be sold in more than one business unit. You know this, but we are present around the world in more than 70 countries, which I would say is a unique position to CTEK. Our relation with the core manufacturers and the fact that we have global distribution is really one of the key benefits of CTEK. If we look a little bit about 2022 as an introduction to the result, we can look at these sales also for the group then.
For the full year of 2022, 2/4 of the revenue comes from low voltage, and 1/4 of the revenue comes from EVSE. This, you can see the split of the sales by division. You still Aftermarket is by far the biggest business unit we have, and Original Equipment and Energy & Facilities are equally big. You can see our split geographically to the right. That will change, I can say, rather a lot into next year. We'll come back to that in the end of the presentation. With that said, I hand over to our CFO, Thom, to take us through the year-end report.
Yes, good morning. To start, we have a reflection back to quarter three report, where we guided you over the quarter four, and we can say that we are above our guiding when it comes to top line net sales. We are on par with what we guided in quarter three when it comes to EBITDA, a little bit lower. With that said, a full summary of the company and the financial highlights for quarter four. Here you can see that the net sales are on par with quarter one 2024. On full year, we are SEK 30 million up from the SEK 920 million on 2021. We have managed to keep the gross margin on a increased level compared to last quarter last year.
You know, all about the higher cost for components during end of 2021 and the H1 of 2022. Now we have managed to raise prices in the markets and compensate for that and back to the levels we wish in our base business. As Ola mentioned, the EVSE portion of total sales has continued to grow. Now in quarter three, it's up to 30%. You can also see on this slide that we have SEK 10 million as an adjustment affecting the comparability of the result, and that is related to the first cost for the cost reduction program that we announced in quarter three. Something by division as well. Start with Aftermarket, the largest division.
We can see this is the division that is most affected by the current global situation with higher interest and higher inflation, thus meaning that end consumers has less cash to spend on our products. We have a, let's say, sell on 70%, quarter by quarter. Positive is as also on group level that in this division we have managed to push the prices and compensate it for the component cost increases. We keep the gross margins on a good level.
I then continue to Original Equipment, here is probably the division that you will see the biggest changes in the, in the side of the right-hand side, that picture there, you can see that already now in quarter four, almost 50% of the net sales are coming from EVSE products, and that is of course related to the GM business now picking up. We also had a very good quarter four when it comes to the low-voltage products into this division. All in all, an increased EBITDA in this division. Coming to Energy & Facilities, we are quite equal on par with quarter four, 2021 to 2022. We have, as also said back in the quarter three report, now more of a focus on profitable growth before top-line growth.
We also are a little bit hampered by the lower activity in the construction sector that meaning that we are not growing sales according to our plans, actually. We know that this division have a high, quite high share of fixed costs, so we are still on a negative EBITDA on this division, but we will continue the effort to improve that by both growing sales and have better cost control going forward. In this division, as Ola said before, here we only sell EVSE products. Now coming to the slide that also explained a little bit of the other press releases we had submitted this morning around the rights issue. Ola will come back on that.
you have all seen that we gradually have higher and higher net debt ratio the recent quarters. the cash flow after investment activities for this year was about SEK 160 million. It was close to SEK 100 million last year. obviously, The projects we have run, the component shortage, and the higher inventories has meaning that we have decreased the cash quite significantly in the business, and that is one thing we need to restore. If you look at the graph on the bottom half on the left-hand side, you can see the portion of capital expenditure in our product development during the recent years.
You can see that 2022 speaks out as an exceptional year with 12% of spending compared to net sales. Those as normal years are in the range of 7-8%. Of course, that has also had a negative impact on the cash situation. With that, I hand over back to you, Ola.
Thank you, Thom. As you probably have read and also in the interviews and so on, this is not the result that they are particularly happy about, even if there are some highlights that Thom alluded to, such as a stable gross margins. We in management and together with the board have decided to take actions to restore our profitability and to strengthen our balance sheet. Here you see some examples of the things we will implement, and some we have actually started to implement already. If we start with the workforce, which is our own employees, including our consultants, we were at year-end around 300 people. We are now going to reduce that down to 230 gradually through the year. That's a 25% reduction.
Some of that reduction is already done and some is we still will do. We also need to bring down our OpEx, our overheads. We had around SEK 100 million of OpEx in the Q4 last year. We will bring that down to SEK 80 million in the last quarter of this year. That's SEK 80 million annual effect or 20% down. Thom talked about development costs. You saw that was quite high in 2022, mainly related to GM project. Here we will go back to more normal levels. We are looking at SEK 80 million for 2023. That's more what we've been operating previous years with. We will turn a quite big negative cash flow of SEK 160 million into a positive cash flow for the full year of 2023.
I think that's what we need to say about that. You see some of the backgrounds that where we have deteriorating EBITDA margins over the quarters. We have increased inventories and intangible CapEx. Our leverage has been getting higher and higher. We have had in most of the quarters a negative cash flow over the last two years. I want to talk a little bit about General Motors as well. The reason being that this project has been a challenge for CTEK, but it's also gonna be a big part of our business going forward. Let me start by giving you some background first. We have a long relationship with GM, as we have in many of the leading car manufacturers in the world.
With GM, we started already in 2009 with supplying them with their branded low-voltage chargers. It was in 2020 we entered into discussions of a common project to develop a home charger for electric vehicles. We came to the table with + 10 years of experience through our acquisition of Chargestorm, and GM thought this would be a good fit. This started as a co-development between the companies. The reason that this has been a challenge for, I guess, both GM and us, is that we soon entered into the pandemic. All the development work that we were planning to do together has to be conducted remotely. We soon entered into component changes needed because of component shortage.
CTEK, a lot of the development resources in CTEK, the last, I would say, almost two years, 1.5 years, has been either working on changing components in this development project for GM or changing components in existing CTEK products just to maintain supplies. This has driven many redesigns, recertifications during the project, causing delays and driving costs, both the development cost of the project, but also the product cost has gone up during the project. In addition to that, we are operating in a immature market where things are changing during the project, both from GM side, customer needs, but also from the certification bodies such as UL, where we have to certify the product. Those requirements were not the same when we started this project as they are today.
This has been a challenge. On a positive note, we have now started to deliver. We should have delivered in March, we delivered in August. We have ramped up good through the end of last year. The product is well received on the market. You heard from my interview, we have 3,000-4,000 units out on the market already. The last thing that is on the positive side is, of course, when we entered into this project, volumes that was anticipated or forecasted by GM was substantially lower than they are forecasting today. Hence, that will be a big share of CTEK. It also illustrates the potential in CTEK's unique position with the leading core manufacturers.
There's trust in CTEK that we can do these kind of products, and this is just one customer. This is customer we have, but there are many potential customers out there. However, we start these deliveries with low gross margins, well below the group average, and we have identified ways to reduce the cost of the product. Those measures will be implemented in, mainly in the second half of this year, so we can restore our profitability. On a midterm basis, this will be a good and profitable business for CTEK. We are also launching the second variant of the GM home chargers here in Q2 of 2023.
That was a little bit background on General Motors, but it's growing quickly, and it becoming a substantial share of our net sales over this year and going forward. Some guidance on how we look at 2023. We talked about 27%, I think, in 2022 of EV sales share of total net sales. We estimate it to be almost 50% by end of this year, and we expect a double-digit total growth for the company. If we look at the different business unit, we still think that the Aftermarket will decline slightly, driven by the same core reasons as Thom were alluding to, a weaker consumer purchasing power, driven by high interest rate and inflation. Original Equipment will grow substantially, driven mostly by GM.
We still feel confident that we can grow Energy & Facilities on a good rate for this year, driven by the change in purchase of electrical cars. EVSE as a technical segment across all the business units will also grow substantially also. This will also lead to We will keep the margins we have in the different business units, but we will have a negative effect of almost 10% or around 10% decline of gross margin on group level. That is driven by a shift in between the business units and the growth of GM. That's the two main reasons. Of course, we decline the most profitable area and the other ones are growing.
Adjusted EBITDA, we will see a further decrease in Q1, followed by a gradual improvement during the year towards a high, single-digit margin for the whole year. We anticipate a double-digit margin in Q4. CapEx, we already talked about. We will come back to normal levels, materially lower than what we spent in 2022. Cash flow for the full year, we estimate to be positive, mainly due to lower CapEx and other actions to reduce our net working capital, as well as the robust cost reduction activities that we just talked about. Net debt, we anticipate to be in line with our financial target after the completed rights issue. We come over to the rights issue as I think the last slide we have.
The board of director has resolved SEK 350 million rights issue. Of course, subject to EGM approval. The purpose of this is to strengthen our balance sheet, lower our leverage, and also create financial flexibility to execute on strategic initiatives, I would say especially related to EVSE possibilities. This rights issue is fully guaranteed by CTEK's largest shareholders, Investment AB Latour, with more than 30% of the capital and the votes. We have additional commitments from big shareholders like AP4, Skirner, AMF Tjänstepension, Swedbank Robur, and SEB Funds, who together owns 27% of the capital and votes of CTEK.
In connection with this, all the things we have talked about, the board of director has also reviewed our financial targets and made the following revision to reflect the company's updated product mix. Our new target is adjusted EBITDA margin target revised to 20% in medium term, and that was previously about 25% in medium term. The other financial targets are unchanged. I think with that, we are ready with the presentation, and we welcome questions.
If you wish to ask a question, please dial star five on your telephone keypad to enter the queue. If you wish to withdraw your question, please dial star five again on your telephone keypad. The next question comes from Kenneth Toll Johansson from Carnegie. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Thank you. Two questions. Do you think there will be more costs in the coming quarter for this cost reduction program?
Yes. It will be during the first quarter, predominantly, maybe a little bit into quarter two. We expect something in the range of SEK 15 million-SEK 20 million more for finalizing our cost-cutting program, including the shifting of the MD for the company, CEO for the company.
Okay. With the GM chargers, you said that you had delivered quite many now. Can you say anything about the take rate? I mean, if GM sells 100 electric vehicles, how many of them buy their electric vehicle chargers or is it too early?
No. It's not the kind of information we will share with the markets.
Okay. you said that, in general, both GM and its customers seem happy with the product.
That's correct. That's correct.
Mm-hmm. Okay. Good. Yeah. That's all for me. Thank you.
The next question comes from Johan Eliason from Kepler Cheuvreux. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Hi, it's Johan at Kepler Cheuvreux here. Just a question on your gross margin. Obviously, you have a lower gross margin on the EVSE products than on your traditional products, and that will have an impact when those grow. You also have the situation that you've been forced to design, redesign your product because of component issues. Firstly, I just wanted to sort of understand a little bit here. You are cutting costs on internal staff and consultants, but at the same time, you want to lower the gross margin, or improve the gross margin and lower the component cost sort of. I guess that's once again redesign cost that needs to be taken, or am I wrong here?
It's Ola here. I can answer that question. When it comes to our margins, we have been able to compensate for increased costs of components. If you exclude our GM business, we are on quite normal margins in all the business divisions and businesses. When I was referring to further need of reduction or redesign of products, it's specifically on the GM charger. The rest of the products has normal margins, and we have been able, by price increases, to compensate for any of the increased costs of components.
On the GM chargers, I mean, this redesign, it will not carry significantly extra cost, you mean, because it's a one product sort of setup or how are you thinking about it?
No. As in the CapEx, and what we have indicated, we have taken room for that development work. The way you do it, we have identified real cost, reductions possibilities that we are quite confident that we can do. We also need to bear in mind that when we start changing the products, we to some extent, we might need to do a recertification of the product, and we need to go through the GM testing again. In discussions with GM, they have said that they will be very supportive for us to do those changes to restore our margins.
This is also part of the guidance we have done for 2023 that we have included this kind of CapEx.
Good. Then this issue about declining gross margins. Is this sort of a hard gross margin or is it also an issue that you've had to capitalize the much more R&D than you initially anticipated? Will this capitalized R&D depreciation hit the gross margin, or is that actually lower in the P&L?
It's below EBITDA. That is more depreciation, you're fully right, but that is not impacting the gross margin.
Okay, excellent. Otherwise, this medium-term targets, do you have any new information on what medium term implies? Is it 2025, 2026, 2027, 2028, 2030?
No. Let's say something, around four to six years is a reasonable expectation for medium term.
Okay, excellent. Many thanks.
The next question comes from Johan Skoglund from DNB Markets. Please go ahead.
Thank you, Ola and Thom. I have two questions to follow up on the earlier ones. A shortage of critical components for EV chargers, that has been a theme in the sector during the year. How does this affect your EV charging area right now? Where do you expect this to go during the next few quarters? I mean, judging by the earlier question here, it seems like it's pretty much sorted now, is it?
I can say the situation today is much, much better than it used to be. We are not totally out of issues, but it's on a much, much lower level today than it were, six months, just six months ago. We don't foresee any problems to supply. Components costs, though, are still on a high level in the market. That's our view. Does it answer your question, or?
Yes, very good. Thank you so much for that. For my second question, it's good to see that your partnership with GM is progressing. How do you think about customer concentration here, and could we expect collaborations with other OEMs in the near future?
I wouldn't dare to say in the near future, but I mean, we are active in the markets and we normally get invited to all these kind of projects as a potential partner. We don't have, you know, we don't have a new one to announce next week, if I say so. We are currently actively working with many car manufacturers. We are in discussions, but it takes a bit of a time. We have a strong position with the car manufacturers. That's quite a strength for CTEK.
Well, that's very good to hear. Thank you so much, and good luck with the Q1.
Thank you.
As a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, please dial star five on your telephone keypad.
Yeah. Again, Thom here, just correcting myself. medium term in our perspective is more the two-four years, not what I indicated before. two-four year for medium term. Sorry for that.
There are no more questions at this time. I hand the conference back to the speakers for any closing comments.
Ola here. Really thankful for participating today. If you have any further questions, don't hesitate to reach out to me or Thom or Niklas here on IR. I hope we have answered your questions in a good way. Thank you.