Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Dometic Q2 report 2018. Today, I'm pleased to present Juan Vargues, President and CEO, Per-Arne Blomquist, CFO, and Johan Lundin, Head of Investor Relations and Communications. For the first part of this call, all participants will be in listen-only mode. Afterwards, there will be a question and answer session. Speakers, please begin.
Hi, good morning. This is Juan Vargues speaking. Welcome to this web conference from a very sunny and hot Stockholm, which doesn't happen very often. If we start with highlights for Q2, I have to say that we had a very solid performance with a very good organic growth, starting with Americas, over two digits. Also very good growth in the EMEA region and APAC. Aftermarkets did show a positive growth of 7%-8%, especially in the RV and CPV areas. We have to keep in mind here that we had a weak April, that we compensated by strong months in May and June. RV. The RV demand remains positive in most key markets and is strong in North American markets.
We have been, as you all know, we have been investing in building up our segments, especially in North America, in the areas of retail and CPV. We saw very strong results there as well. I'm also very happy to see EBIT improvements in all the regions as a consequence of pricing activities. Also higher efficiency in most organizations. I'm especially happy to see, obviously, the strong results in the EMEA region since we have to remember that we had a weaker first half of last year that we have now kind of developed into the positive. We have seen a solid development during the last two quarters. Strong operating cash flow as well. Very important for us in the future is that we appointed a new head of group operations that will be joining us later this fall.
If we move over to the financial summary. Strong total growth of 33%, with 9% organic growth, three percentage points of FX influence. Then 21% of M&A. EBIT improved by 41% to SEK 991 million, with an EBIT margin of 17.5%, which is 100 basis points higher than what we were showing one year ago. I mentioned before, efficiency improvements. As you all know, we introduced an efficiency program in EMEA, which is kicking in. We are also working very hard in the rest of the regions to keep up, obviously, with the headwinds that we have seen, especially on raw material prices. Operational cash flow, 65% up in the quarter, ending up at SEK 943 million. A good evolution on the EPS, improving by 33% to SEK 2.13.
If we look at the first half-year results, is approximately the same trend, 31% in total growth with exactly the same organic growth, 9%, a slightly lower FX effect of 1% and 21% coming from acquisitions. In this case, we are talking specifically on the SeaStar acquisition. Same positive trend on EBIT, showing +46% and passing the SEK 1.5 billion, or 16% in EBIT margin, which is 160 basis points better than what we were showing one year ago. As a result, obviously, of the activities that I mentioned previously as well. Very good operational cash flow as well, +74% after six months, ending up at SEK 916. As a consequence, a very strong EPS development, 30% up, ending up at SEK 3.39.
If we look on a medium-term perspective of what happened since Q2 2016, we have been showing a solid organic growth, giving us a quarterly average of 10%, which I think is a very good number considering the market situation. Strong market indeed. If we look at the EBIT evolution over time, we have also seen in the last four quarters a pretty good development. We have improved, in rolling 12 months, 160 basis points. We have 100 basis points improvements in the quarter and 160 basis points year-to-date. All in all, I'm very pleased with evolution during the last six months. Moving over to the market situation, and specifically the RV market, that obviously we are very much aware is a point of concern for the markets.
The reality is that Dometic has continued to see a good growth in RV OEM, especially in the U.S., where we showed 15% growth. When looking at 12 months running numbers, shipments are up 16% in the U.S., registrations are up 11% in the EMEA region, and production is up 3% in Australia. When looking at the latest three months, we saw, though, a slower growth, with RV shipments being up 6% in the U.S., RV registrations up 3% in the larger markets in Europe, and the RV production down 4% in Australia. In May, RV shipments were down 2% in the U.S. We do believe that this needs to be seen in the context of a prolonged and unusually cold winter going on until mid-April in many places.
Naturally, this had a softening effect on retail demand. We noted some dealer inventory levels being somewhat higher than usual as shipments remained high in Q1. Even in April, shipments to dealers grew 12% year-on-year. Perhaps it was not surprising to see a correction of dealer inventory levels taking place in May. Having said that, we saw, again, a positive evolution in June and our RV OEM business grew close to double-digit in the month. When looking at July, it also looks positive. The same situations we observed in the U.S. market we saw in Germany, with registrations of RV being flat in May and coming back nicely in June by 9%, both for caravans and motor homes.
If we look at the heavy truck market, it has been flattish for a while across Europe, at the same time as we have seen high double-digit growth in the EMEA region. When looking at Americas, we see as well the market is growing, and even there, we have double-digit growth ourselves as a consequence of investments that we started in this area some months ago, and they are starting to pay off. When looking at Marine, the growth on the market is still positive, 2%, and we are outperforming the market both in EMEA and Americas. I believe that it is important to remember here that at the time of the acquisition, we were mentioning the technology shift that the industry is going through, moving from mechanical products to hydraulic and electronic, which is giving us an extra growth in comparison to the markets.
Obviously, we see tariffs that will be implemented in EMEA, still, we need to see what kind of effect we are going to see. We don't have a lot of traffic, in reality, from the U.S. boats into European markets from our side. If we look at some of the most important marketing activities that have taken place during the second quarter, we have been investing in the digital area. Our organization is selling through distributors and dealers, and we believe that we need to use new technology in order to create pull and support our partners. We have seen a very high growth in number of visitors to our website. Americas up close to 60%, EMEA 50%, and APAC 120%. We foresee this evolution to be maintained moving forward.
At the same time, we are also introducing e-commerce, and during the quarter, we launched a new platform in the U.S. market to push even more for our development in the area of the mobile cooling. We are just now running at a $1 million in sales through the new digital platform, which is about 70% higher than what we saw one year ago. We're also trying to get closer to the end users. Our end users, since we believe that they are great influencers for our products. We launched an ambassador program that has been a great success. It's attracting a lot of visitors to the social media. We perceive ourselves to be market leading in this area. We have today over 320,000 followers on Facebook or 81% more than we had one year ago. It is growing all the time.
We have about 1.5 million visitors every month, and continues to grow. Again, a very important area for us to develop even more. When looking at products, another area where we are accelerating innovation. We have three major product launches. We launched a new refrigeration program in the European region, which is innovative since it's a double hinge door, meaning that you can open in both directions. At the same time, the main benefit is that it's the best-in-class cooling performance unit in the market. We also introduced a new program of awnings for the American market, which is going to offer our customers a substantial weight reduction. Last but not least, as a consequence of the Oceanair acquisition that we completed about 18 months ago, we also introduced a new range of automatic blinds, which are offering much lower noise levels and improved darkening features.
After looking at some of the most important activities on the marketplace, I would like to get back to the different regions with Americas showing a consistent organic growth of 11% in the quarter with a very strong RV OEM development. I mentioned the number previously, 15%. SeaStar performing according to plan, but much better than the market as such. As a consequence of the investments that we have been doing in the market, retail showed 60% organic growth and CPV 10% organic growth. EBIT development +73%, ending up at 17.4%, which is 120 basis points above last year. We continue to work on improving our distribution and logistics setup. At the same time as we continue as well to build up the organization.
This is an area that we are just now focusing North America, but we are also accelerating our segmentation, our focus on the different vertical segments across EMEA. We will see that later on. Clearly, we are seeing the same headwinds in terms of raw materials anybody else. We saw prices going up dramatically during the last 18 months. Then they stabilized for a while, but have been keeping growing. I'm happy to see, obviously, that we are more than compensating in all the regions, the raw material price headwinds, as we already announced some months ago. If we move over to the EMEA region, good organic growth of 6% with nice evolution on CPV, 20%. Nice evolution as well in Marine. This is very much obviously the old Dometic Marine. We see continuous growth in RV as well.
Aftermarket did show a pretty good development despite the cold spring, where I mentioned before that April was really very disappointing, but we compensated that in May and June. Very strong EBIT evolution, +21%, with a 110 basis points improvement on EBIT. It is clear that the pricing activities, but also the efficiency program that we have been running across EMEA are kicking in and showing positive results, and we expect that to continue in the quarters to come. As mentioned previously, they are more than compensating the increase on raw material prices. If we move over to the APAC region, also very good growth, 7%, with the aftermarket driving the evolution, especially on RV, retail, and CPV. Very high growth in China, where we are at almost 60% organic growth after six months, and the second quarter continue in a very good manner.
We see as well that on the RV market, we are outperforming the growth that we see on the RV market according to the association. I'm especially happy to see, obviously, that despite the geographical mix to lower margin areas in Asia, we still improve the EBIT margin with 30 basis points, partly due to the growth on aftermarket. So in the APAC region, we have a negative geographical mix, but we have a positive product mix affecting the margins. At the same time, we have also been working in pruning the low profit products that we had one year ago. This has started to begin having a positive effect, and we will see this continuing during the coming quarters. Then in the same way as all the others, we have sorry, raw materials, obviously kicking against us. We are well compensating for that.
On strategy, very important, after six months in charge, one of the things that we are doing is to get more specialized resources, dedicated teams to develop the different verticals, which means that we are very keen on reducing our exposure to the retail market and growing all the other markets. We have seen the effects already in retail, in CPV, but also in marine. I am also happy to see the new organization for RV, where we appointed a CTO a number of months ago, and we are starting to see the plans taking shape, and we will see implementation moving forward as well. At the same time, as we have been looking at SKUs, taking away complexity, this is going to be also very important in the future, but we have already seen during the quarter plans for reducing the number of SKUs in minibars with almost 50%.
That will have a very positive effect on our inventories and our cost in the long run. I mentioned operations previously, a very important role for the future. At the same time, we are also focusing quite a bit on sourcing, getting a stronger organization across EMEA, getting to category management and focusing on a number of areas that we have not touched until now. Then last but not least, digitalization, another very important activity moving forward where we are accelerating. I am very happy to mention that we implemented the spare part module for the ERP systems across Europe. It is fully implemented in all the countries without any kind of disturbances, which I believe is quite of an achievement. At the same time as we also implemented during the quarter a new collaboration platform that will facilitate the communication within the group.
With those words, I would like to leave over to Per-Arne, please.
Thank you. Starting now with the Dometic Group. As you can see that both sales and EBIT has had a very good development during, I would say, the last six to nine months. We had a plateau in middle June last year, but after that, we have taken on to both improve EBIT and sales. Especially, I am happy to see also that the operating cash flow now is improving well in the second quarter. You could see that on the graphic on the operating cash. If you look at the business area developments, we are growing in all different areas, RV and CPV, marine and retail lodging. If you take the marine, for example, it is not only the growth in SeaStar that is good right now. If we take the Marine OEM business in EMEA, they are actually growing with 9% in the quarter right now.
If we take the CPV, we have had a good quarter as well, we are starting to see more growth. We had a growth of 4% in the quarter in Americas, 10% in EMEA, and 7% in APAC. CPV starts also to grow at a higher pace than we can see in the 12 months rolling. If you take the retail and lodging, a growth of 16% in the quarter. U.S. retail was growing with 61%. It's a good development of the different areas. We see also other areas in the RV to grow at a good pace. The 5-year look since 2013 shows a good development, more than 110% in net sales improvement. This will continue to grow given that we have only half year of SeaStar included in this. This will continue to go upwards automatically.
Even better to say is that EBIT has grown quicker than the net sales. We are close to 150% in improvement since 2013. We are now pacing at close to SEK 2.5 billion in EBIT. Looking at the key ratios, I think worth mentioning here is the organic growth trend. Over the last 15-18 months, we have been growing between 9%-11% in organic growth, which I think is a strong trend. As I said, it's not only the RV business that are growing right now. We also see a good development of the EBITDA. We are close to 20% in EBITDA margin in the second quarter, more than SEK 1 billion in EBITDA. That also supports then the good cash flow that we have. With good control of the working capital, we are now close to SEK 950 million in operating cash flow.
Looking at the LTM trend for EBITDA is now close to SEK 2.8 billion, means that cash flow is now pacing upwards now to SEK 2.1 billion. This will continue to improve during the year. We also have an EPS pace of SEK 5.84 right now. If we look at the quarter and the effects on sales, you can see that FX has, of course, impacted this. Not that much as we have different sort of trends when it comes to the U.S. dollar and also the euro. We have a 3% effect on the translation. More positive effects for euro and negative from U.S. It has been very volatile during the last months, but so far in this quarter, all in all, the effects from FX is pretty limited if you look at translation, transaction, and then the hedges that we are working with.
Taking a look at the regional results. Happy to say that we see improvements in all the regions in this quarter, especially Asia Pacific, improving a very high margin already, going up from 23.3%-23.6%. We know that we are growing outside Australia and New Zealand, where we have the highest margin. It shows that it's a good cost discipline. It's a good discipline overall when it comes to also our pricing that helps us to keep up the margin. You can also see a good trend for the first half-year, especially EMEA going up from 13.1%-14.5%. Remember that the first quarter last year was not that positive, but we have changed that trend as Juan said here before. We will expect further margin expansions in EMEA going forward.
In the quarter we landed at SEK 2.13. Taxes are slightly higher than last year, 26%. We have had for the first half year, especially when it comes to the paid tax, more of one-off events. We have started to take out more cash from China. We need to pay tax on this. What we are doing that is 5%-10% that we are paying for this. This affects the paid taxes. We have also made some extraordinary taxes for taxes in Germany. Over time, we will expect the tax rate to be around 25%. Taxes paid, I would guess, will be between 15% and 16%, given now that we have a different situation with SeaStar coming in where we pay more taxes than we have done before in the U.S.
Looking at CapEx and product development, more or less at the same level that we have said before. Slightly higher on CapEx, 2.4% compared to 1.8%, is nothing dramatically changed in this. We are looking at investing in the business. We have said that somewhere between 2%-2.5% should be expected on CapEx. The same goes for the product development, around 2%-2.5%. Slightly lower now in Q2. That is more a timing issue than anything else. We are not holding back on the investment. It is more that we are timing it in a different way, as I said. Working capital development, slightly high. As you can see, to some extent, perhaps a small disappointment here that we are now back over 33%. If we exclude SeaStar, we are at 22.7%.
This is expected to go down. I think that we have had a good control of the working capital in the first quarter. We will continue to see improvement in the working capital. Especially if you then look at the composition of the working capital today, it looks here superficially that we are at the same inventory level in the second and the first quarter. We are actually down SEK 170 million in inventory in local currencies. We have seen especially the U.S. dollar increasing with 5% in this quarter. That takes it up. What is good then is that the underlying inventories go down. What we have seen increases in is then accounts receivable. That will come back very quickly now in August. That will also strengthen the already strong cash flow that we have shown in the first quarter.
Talking about the cash flow, you can see that in the quarter we had a cash conversion of up to 90%. This is very, very good. We continue to focus on this cash flow to be able to improve our leverage, but also be prepared for further investments in M&A in the future. Leverage is the same as in the first quarter, partly driven by that we have negative impact from the movements in the U.S. dollar. Over time, this will settle itself. We have a 5%-6% difference between the average rates that we are using and also the closing rates. Average rates are lower. Eliminating the FX effects, we should have been down at 3.2. You can see that we have been using the RCF, our revolving credit facility, in the first and second quarter.
This will be paid down in the third quarter and not utilized more this year. On the financial targets, we are at 9% when it comes to net sales growth, which is above the 5%. That is our target. We are at 16 now, we are above the 15% that we have as a mid- and long-term target for the EBIT margin. At that, of course, a bit higher than our target. We said that we would come down to two and a half end of this year, come down to the target around late Q2 and the beginning of Q3 next year. Juan, please summarize the quarter.
Thank you, Per-Arne. Summarizing, a very solid organic sales growth of 9%. We saw a good aftermarket evolution as well, despite the cold weather that we saw in April. Profitability improvements in the three regions, most especially in EMEA. That's very much due to the program that we initiated both in the last part of last year, also that we are becoming keener on executing operational activities. Good integration of SeaStar, with my background, I feel this is a very important one. It is important to keep on growing the company acquisitively, a precondition, obviously, is that we are good at integrating the companies that we are acquiring. I like to believe that this is a very good example of how to do it.
Last but not least, we believe in decentralization, we believe in coordination, we are working hard to strengthen a number of the group positions in order to get even better on the operational arena moving forward. If we look at the future, we have seen an RV OEM growth of 12% in the first half of 2018. Going into the second half of the year, it is very hard to say how market will develop. We don't know if we are going to see a plateau, continued growth, or potentially softer markets. We also hear the talk about a slowdown for RV, so far we have not seen any changes in our order book. As late as June 4th, the RVIA, the American Association, gave the most recent outlook, expecting the year 2018 to show a growth rate of 7%.
We have seen some manufacturers taking a week extra holiday, some might run four-day weeks. We see this primarily as an inventory correction. We also have important events coming up in August and September with a trade show in Düsseldorf and the open house in Elkhart providing good indications of the situation on the market. If I move to marine, there were some discussions two weeks ago, connected to the comments from one of the major manufacturers about a slightly lower outlook for the bigger boats over 70 feet. Dometic still sees a positive demand and growth in both the U.S. and EMEA. The marine market for us is mainly represented for the smaller boats, that represents about two-thirds of our sales. We have, obviously, exposure to larger boats within the air condition product area, we have so far not seen any negative indications on our sales.
In all the other business areas like CPV, retail, and lodging, we have not seen any changes in the underlying demand. We also need to make sure, obviously, to utilize and develop a strong aftermarket position with many thousands of distributors all around the world, an install base which is more than 50 million RVs and 8 million boats. We believe that we have a good install base to keep on growing, even if the market slowdown moving forward. This is a prioritized area within Dometic, and our target moving forward is to become even more specialized on the aftermarket area. I can assure you that we are just as cautious as you are. We follow the development in each market very closely every single day. We will make sure that our local organizations are ready to adjust and adapt to any changes that may happen.
All this taken into consideration, we keep our outlook of 5% organic growth for 2018, while we keep also our targets of 15% EBIT during 2018. At the same time as we also believe that our leverage will be down to 2.5 times at the end of the year. With all that said, I would like to thank you for your presence and open for the Q&A session.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, if you have a question for the speakers, please press 01 on your telephone keypad. The first question comes from the line of Eric Carlson from Industrial Equity Partners. Please go ahead.
Thanks for taking my questions. I have one on pricing and one on aftermarket, please. If we start with pricing, you mentioned pricing initiatives in your comments. Can you tell us how much you have increased prices and when this came into effect, please?
It has not been once. It has been several times, we will keep increasing prices as raw material prices move as well. Our estimation is that we are getting out the majority we are getting, which is compensating and more than compensating the negative impact of raw material prices.
Just to be clear, so you think you're fully compensating and more than compensating on the pricing side?
Correct. Again, keep in mind, the raw material prices are moving all the time.
Absolutely.
We increased prices at the end of last year, we increased prices again at the beginning of the year, that's kicking in as we speak. At the same time, raw material prices are moving, we will keep on increasing prices again. Our expectation is that we will not see any negative impact.
Just to be clear, in the first half, we did see some negative impact, but in the second half, we won't.
We didn't see any net negative impact of the raw material prices. We saw a positive net effect.
Okay. Perfect. That will continue in the second half of the year?
That will continue, absolutely.
Very clear. Thank you. One question on aftermarket as well, if I may. How have aftermarket, which is important here in the summer months, how has that performed here in June and July, please?
Very positive. Of course, that we were disappointed when we saw the numbers in April, since April is normally the first month when aftermarket is going big time. Those weak numbers were very well compensated in May, June, and we see a continuous positive evolution in July.
Okay.
That goes both for EMEA and also Americas, where we have the peak season right now.
Thank you so much.
The next question comes from the line of Peter Reilly from Jefferies. Please go ahead.
Well, good morning. I've got three questions, please, all on the U.S. Firstly, I know you don't have a crystal ball in terms of the RV market outlook, but maybe you can help us understand what's happening with your market share with your customers. It's obviously hard for us to judge because we don't see the detailed production numbers, but I get the impression you're winning share with the U.S. RV makers. Maybe you could talk about what's happening in the market share trends there. Secondly, you've made reference to the making investments in the U.S. for CPV and retail and coolers and so forth. Can you give us some idea of the scale of margin that's being invested in those initiatives? Thirdly, on a related note, you've been talking positively about U.S. CPV, I think mainly on the OEM side.
I assume that's more contracts that are going to come downstream, maybe in 2019 or 2020. Maybe you give us some more color in terms of what's happening with U.S. CPV and what it is that's making you positive about the future.
Yeah. With the market share is obviously very hard to say because we are selling many different product groups. Our estimation is that we are in par with the markets. I think we are gaining some market share in some product areas. We are obviously as well getting out our prices to the market and perhaps getting some negative impact in some product areas. All as one, we see that we are growing faster than the market. That's telling you obviously that we are moving in some product areas, and by that, gaining some market share. Again, I wouldn't overestimate how much faster than the market. I think we are in par. The second question was, could you please repeat?
Investment in RV and CPV, what we have done.
Yes. We are putting together a team, a sales team, both in mobile cooling and in CPV, and we are talking about SEK a couple of million. That will continue in the months to come. This is an investment, obviously, that we are doing for the future. You all know we have been clearly mentioning that we want to get less exposed to the RV market, and this is part of those initiatives.
Also, if you look at the investment that we're making in the U.S., it's also on the IT systems to support the mobile cooling. As Juan said, we talk about perhaps two or three million U.S. dollars in the quarter.
All right. The third one was optimistic about.
Was the U.S. CPV.
Yeah. I am personally very optimistic. On one side, we are obviously starting to transfer a lot of the competence that we have built up across Europe for decades. We are investing in putting together a team. I am very happy to see the resources that we have brought into the company. Exactly as you said, what we are seeing just now is just the top of the iceberg. I expect very good results in the years to come.
You may not want to answer, but when you talk about positive developments, is this just interest from the customers? Because I guess if it's mainly OE we're talking about, there's obviously a lag between a customer agreeing a project and you starting to deliver product. Is it just interest, or are you actually signing contracts for future production?
Yes. We are signing contracts
What this mainly is all about is that it's a cooling compartment for SUVs, and you can see that there's a big market for this. Then over time, it will also be in trucks. It's very much SUV cooling compartments right now.
If I just come back briefly on the market share issue in the U.S., one of the reasons I was asking is you had talked on some previous occasions about some of your smaller competitors having capacity issues, and obviously you're bigger, more global with a more diversified supply chain. Are you having any capacity issues in the U.S. given the ongoing fast pace of the market, May notwithstanding, or were you able to keep up with demand?
No, not really. We don't see any capacity constraints today. Keep in mind as well that we have other factories around the world. In reality, what we are doing is that we are complementing the production in the U.S. with production in other parts of the world. Partly to mitigate the effects of labor constraints that we have seen in Elkhart specifically, also obviously to be even more competitive.
Yeah. That's great. Thank you very much.
Thank you. The next question comes from the line of Peter Testa from One Investments. Please go ahead.
Hi. I have three questions, please. One was just on labor costs. As you mentioned, some constraints in North America. I was wondering whether you could give some thoughts on what you've managed to do regarding productivity versus labor inflation around the group, and how you feel about that going forward. Secondly, just on the market, and given your comments around some inventory adjustments, I was wondering if you had any sense of what inventory days had done in the RV market or downstream in distributors for yourselves over this period, just to get some views on that. Thirdly, on the cash flow. Obviously cash flow conversion, quite good. There's also a SEK 97 million non-cash positive in the cash flow, which I was curious of what that was.
I was wondering if you could give some thoughts on that and SeaStar's sort of inherent cash generative characteristics versus the RV business or existing Dometic business. Thank you.
We'll start with the labor cost. It is clear that we have seen labor constraints in Elkhart. This business is obviously seasonal, and we, like many other companies, have been using temporary workers for the peaks. Obviously, when you have such a situation, people are coming, and people are going. We are moving temporary workers to permanent jobs. That has been a way of mitigating. We have also been adapting, obviously, our wages to the labor market in order to be competitive. At the same time, we are working on Lean. We are celebrating Lean. We have a number of programs going on. At this point, I believe that we have a slightly negative effect in Q2, which is kicking in. At the same time, we also have activities that we believe are going to get back what we lost in the first two quarters.
That's on labor and productivity. In terms of inventory on the markets, I wish I could answer. I think that we are asking the same questions every single day, and it's not an easy one. You have shipments from us to the manufacturers, the manufacturers are sitting sometimes on inventories. They are sending to the dealers. I'm coming back to what we described before. We saw a correction in May, at the same time, the volumes came back strongly again in June. I simply believe that we need to wait and see and follow this closely. Unfortunately, I cannot give you a more accurate answer to that one. On the cash flow.
This is connected to unrealized FX effects, that's what we usually have in all the divisions. Sometimes it's plus, sometimes it's minus. Even without this, we have a very strong underlying cash flow.
Can you give us, please, also just looking at SeaStar's cash conversion, when you look at the cash conversion tipping up from the 70s to about 90%, whether that's SeaStar related or other factors, maybe thoughts on how SeaStar would change the cash characteristics going forward now that you've got more experience with it?
I think that this quarter come from SeaStar. This is basically what we call the old Dometic effects on the cash flow.
Right. Okay, thanks very much.
Thank you.
The next question comes from the line of Clara Johnson from SEB. Please go ahead.
Hi. Thank you for taking my question. I have a question about tariffs. You ship some of your products from China to the U.S., and considering the new tariffs we have there, could you provide us some indication of potential impact for you?
We can give you some thoughts. As you know, this has been moving back and forth during the last weeks. We have a flow of goods of about SEK 1 billion going from China to the U.S. We have factories in the three continents, and our estimation is that we could move tomorrow about 50% of that SEK 1 billion. That would give us 50% less of SEK 500 million. On the SEK 500 million, we need to look product group by product group, device by device, to be able to calculate. We assume just now the worst-case scenario, that we got 10%. That would mean obviously about SEK 50 million-SEK 60 million on an annual basis. Then we would need obviously to start looking at the remaining part, what we could produce in the U.S., whether that's going to have some negative impact on our cost or not.
It's early days. It's early days, but we are working hard to get more accurate numbers ourselves. It is very time-consuming, believe me.
Yeah, I understand.
We don't have a very clear answer yet. Yeah.
Looking at the new E.U. tariffs on recreational crafts, are you impacted by them?
Sorry, could you repeat the question?
The new tariffs between the U.S. and E.U., so when you ship goods from the U.S. to E.U.
We have a very little inflow of goods. That's primarily air condition for marine industry. We don't have a lot of flow. We are manufacturing air condition both in Europe and the U.S., and they are serving primarily their own markets. Of course it happens that somebody is asking for American motor, but it's very limited at this point.
Okay.
All right. Thank you for that. I also have an additional question on SeaStar. You're saying that your SeaStar is performing according to expectation, and you're growing above the market, in marine, if I understand correct? If you look at OEM and aftermarkets within SeaStar, could you give us some indication of growth rates there?
Exactly the same number.
Same numbers?
To these both on OEM and AM.
Right. Thank you so much.
Again, what we have to remember there, I think it's a very important comment, is that SeaStar was very clear at the time of acquisition that we have a clear technology shift in the industry. We are moving from low average price products into high. Again, a hydraulic kit is four times more value than a mechanical kit. An electronic kit is 20 times higher than a mechanical kit. That's having, obviously, a very positive impact. We are still on early days, so we don't see that stopping tomorrow.
Thank you for that.
Thank you.
The next question comes from the line of Rasmus Engberg from Handelsbanken. Please go ahead.
Yes, hi. I wanted to ask you, firstly, where is your focus in the second half of the year? Obviously, you're heading now a very diverse company with lots of bits and pieces. Where is it important that you focus in these early days for you?
If you look at our company, as you know, I'm coming with a background, but I don't have the feeling that this is so much different to what I was doing before. We have a number of technologies, we have a number of segments, and we have a number of markets, and we are planning on it. If you ask me, give me one. I would say just now is focus. Is get more focus on the segments. Again, this is one company with many different areas. From a market perspective, is really segmentation. I believe that we need to get our teams to become much more specialized. We need to understand the language when we are talking with marine customers in the same way as we are doing when we are talking to the RV market or CPV and so forth.
At the same time, I also believe that we need to focus much more on efficiencies. That's obviously factories, that's Lean, that's automation, that's putting in place a number of KPIs. In the third place, we are talking about digitalization. We need to become a more than company. Again, when I'm meeting competitors and I'm meeting customers, it is not that we are out of phase, the other way around. We are most probably ahead in this industry. We compare ourselves with many other industries, there is so much more to gain. Sorry for being perhaps not as clear as you would like to. I believe that in a company, you need to have different people focusing on different things. We need to get a market organization to get more specialized. We need to get the original organization to put much more emphasis in reducing cost.
We need to get digitalization because that's going to be the future, both from a market perspective and from an efficiency perspective.
You can say that it's four different areas. Product development, segmentation, digitalization, and efficiencies.
Yeah.
Another kind of more big picture question. Do you guys feel that we are heading towards a situation where organically, so to speak, the aftermarket actually starts to outperform OEM shipments in the second half of the year and thereby maybe help giving you a bit of tailwind with regards to mix for your margins?
Well, that's clear. We see that purely mathematically, as soon as the OEM comes down, the AM will have a major impact on our margins percentage-wise. That's not a secret. Obviously that one also. Anything that we are doing just now is obviously to work proactively to reduce the weighting of the RV market in our numbers. We have a huge install base. I do believe that we can become much better in driving the aftermarket. Even in terms of service, we need to get much more parts and parts sales into our products. We need to develop upgrade kits. This is going to be one of the focus areas in the coming two, three years to come.
Rasmus, remember now that we have had a very good growth in the aftermarket this quarter. It's been between 6%-10%.
Yeah
In the different regions. It's not bad. It's just that we have been.
It's the weighting. Our problem is not that we are not growing the aftermarket.
Yes.
It's that we are outgrowing on the OEM market.
Yes. Very good. That was all for me. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. The next question comes from the line of Johan Eliasson from Kepler Cheuvreux. Please go ahead.
Yes. Hi, this is Johan. Just a question on this comment regarding Asia Pacific, that you are walking away from some low-margin products, but you still have a negative geographic mix. Will it always be that growing China and the rest of Asia will have a detrimental impact on the average margins for the division, or are you adjusting the product portfolio now, so eventually that effect will be less going forward?
Personally, I have been exposed to those markets for 20 years. You are totally right that we have a number of projects just now ongoing to adapt our products to the region. Nevertheless, we are competing with Chinese companies. Chinese companies are pretty good, are running very Lean. As you know, we are applying legislations, that means that it will be very difficult to compete on the same base. I don't expect our margins in Asia or in China. Again, if you look at Singapore, we have good margins. If you look at Hong Kong, we have good margins. As soon as you move into Korea, you move into China, you move into Indonesia, it's a totally different market condition, and it's a different game. I don't think that will change.
On the contrary, what we can do is that when we see that we are not making money enough on some products, then we will discontinue as we are discontinuing just now. That this is a product group which is going very much to automotive, where we are competing with automotive suppliers, Chinese automotive suppliers, and no matter what we do, we will never make any money. I do believe that we need to be consistent and take the decision, the tough decision of letting it go.
We are trying to develop other areas. I don't think that from that perspective, we are different to any other Western companies in China.
Okay.
That's why I think also that if you take the Q2 right now for APAC, it's a very good result because we have done that. We are growing quite a lot outside the APAC area. In New Zealand, Australia, still we're having these high margins because certainly, we're working with efficiency, but it will be dilutive to grow outside Australia.
Good. On these CPV efforts in North America, I guess initially, that will hamper margins. Over time, do you think the CPV business in North America can show better margins than the RV business is doing?
The CPV business we have today is not diluting margins on OEM. It's having a positive impact on our OEM margins.
In North America?
In North America. It has been on purpose as well. We had some issues a couple of years ago. We corrected that. During the last 12 months, I would say, we have been focusing on the right products to the right customers. What we are adding just now is that we are putting also an organization behind.
Okay, excellent. Many thanks.
Thank you.
The next question comes from the line of Joshua Bretherton from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Hi, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. Can I just go back to the performance of RV in the Americas? You had pretty strong + 15% growth in RV OEM, which is quite considerably higher than what we saw in the RVIA data. Can you just talk about how you outperformed in this area? What was the drivers behind that discrepancy?
I think, again, you have different average prices for different products. That's why it's so difficult to say your market share, because we don't have any competitor which is competing us with all the product areas where we are. If you compare us with our peers or so-called peers like Lippert, they are much more in the mechanical products, and we are much more on the electronics or high value, whatever you call it. It's practically impossible. I believe that we are in par or slightly better in the product areas where we are competing. I wouldn't read our numbers as we are outperforming totally the market. I don't think that's the reality.
I think.
I think on purpose as well, because we have seen, we have stated a number of times that we don't want to grow at the spend of losing margins. We want to have sustainable growth. You could say that we could grow even faster. Yes, we could. We will not do that. We believe that it is important as market leaders that we are consistent on our pricing. We cannot just absorb all the raw material price increases. That has obviously a cost in some way.
Okay. Thank you. Can I just ask what visibility you have over the European RV market so far as July and kind of going forward a bit further? Because we've seen some slightly more cautious commentary from some of your customers coming out in the last month or so.
I think it's what we said before. If we look at May was weak. We hear that some of the manufacturers are taking one week extra holidays. At the same time, we also have forecasts still saying plus 6% versus last year. We don't see any drama. We saw strong numbers in June, July looks good so far. I know this is the question of the million, we are just as curious and keen on knowing as you are. We don't see the clarity. Still, it's May. We have one month that was weaker than we have seen year to date. Numbers came back in June.
I think that it will be important, as Juan mentioned before, that we have the Düsseldorf.
In August.
In August, that is of a very good indication of what will happen there the coming years. I think that we are looking at that. At the same time, we're looking at the open houses in Elkhart coming up in September. That will really be a good indication.
Yeah
how manufacturers are looking at the future.
Okay. Thanks. Then just one last question, a bit more specifically on tariffs. We've seen that there's potentially tariffs going to be implemented on air conditioning products for motorized vehicles manufactured in China, exporting to the U.S. Can you give us a rough indication of what % of the manufacturing of your air con products is in China? Would that be included in the 50% that you said you could move kind of tomorrow out of that region?
No, air condition is outside.
Okay. All outside China.
Today it is, yes.
Okay.
Everything is produced in China, obviously. Yeah.
Okay, brilliant. Okay, thank you very much.
Thank you.
We have one last follow-up question from Peter Testa. Please go ahead.
Hi. Thank you. Just two things. One is just on the margins, on the underlying like-for-like margins of both 16.5% and for Dometic and the period and for this period now. You'd mentioned that labor was slightly disadvantaged, price versus raw much slightly positive. Let's just call that kind of flat. Given the good growth, can you just help us understand how mix versus operating leverage plays on your margins? Maybe using this as an opportunity to understand those dynamics a bit better, please. The second question was just to complete the story on tariffs, and the extent to which your customers are shipping boats from U.S. to Europe. If you have any sense on that because of where product is registered or aftermarket is registered, whether there's much flow. Thank you.
If we talk about mix and labor constraints, what we see is obviously that we had specifically in the Elkhart region, difficulties to find people, and as you know, the whole industry is in the same place.
Sorry to interrupt you. I was asking a slightly different question.
Sorry
The labor productivity kind of works out.
Yeah
Versus the slight positive you have on raw mat versus pricing.
Yeah.
I was trying to understand the mix between aftermarket and OE versus operating leverage. Just trying to understand how those play out.
That has a massive negative impact.
When we are growing by 15% on RV, and we are growing by 6, 7% on aftermarket, and we have a substantial difference in gross margins or even EBIT margins with those two. Again, what you will see if the market just slows down is that the EBIT margin will go up.
Okay.
Our raw margin is what?
Operating leverage is offsetting that, though.
Yes.
Yeah.
For us, as for many other industries.
You can understand, if you take the U.S., for example, where the OEM is more or less double the size of the aftermarket in the second quarter, and that is growing with 50%, and the aftermarket is growing with 6%. Of course, it's a really negative impact on this.
It's a substantial difference.
Yeah.
Okay. Would the operating leverage factor play the other way around? If OE came back down, you'd be offsetting the positive mix would offset by different operating leverage? Or do you think it would be a more advantageous situation than that?
I would think it would be more advantageous also. I think that we are working with the efficiencies all the time.
Absolutely.
Sometimes if you are running on high utilization for certain shifts, I think that you could be more efficient and with a better balance.
Right. Okay.
I feel we are discussing just now the U.S., but you have a similar situation in Europe. Unemployment has been coming down in Europe dramatically in the last couple of years. It is a little bit of the same. We see headwinds even on labor in Europe, and we are, of course, compensating that by efficiencies all the time.
this is not a unique situation. I think what is important to remember is that the higher OEM numbers we get, the more pressure we get on our EBIT margin and our gross margins. The higher aftermarket, the higher EBIT margins we are going to have.
Right. Okay. The other thing on just the customer flow in boats, you have any sense of the extent to which on the marine side, there's customer flow from shipping product from the U.S. to Europe inside vessels?
We have a very little sort of What you are asking more is the general engineering question about flow of boats from the U.S. to Europe, or?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yes. I understand your direct shipment is very little, but I didn't know whether your indirect through customer product was something else you knew about.
No.
Not really.
No.
Unfortunately, we cannot comment because it is nothing that we follow. Again, when talking to organizations, and of course, that even if the boats are built in the U.S., we will need to have aftermarket on them sooner or later. After discussing with the organization, they don't see a negative impact at this point.
Fine. Okay. Thank you very much. Thanks for the help.
Thank you.
There are no further questions at this time. I hand the conference back to the speakers.
Thank you very much for your attention, all of you. Again, we are very pleased with our results in Q2. We are pleased with the first half-year results. We remain optimistic about the future. We have many activities ongoing. We have an organization which is triggered by success. We will continue to work hard in that sense. Thank you very much, everybody.
Have a nice summer.
Have a nice summer, all of you. Thank you.
Thank you. This now concludes our presentation. Thank you all for attending. You may now disconnect.