Welcome to the Beijer Electronics Analyst Conference. For the first part of this call, all participants will be in listen-only mode. Afterwards, there'll be a question and answer session. Today, I am pleased to present Jenny Sjödahl, President and CEO, and Joakim Laurén, Executive Vice President and CFO. Speakers, please begin.
Okay, thank you very much for that. Hi, everyone, welcome to this quarter four call for Beijer Electronics Group. With me today, I have, as usual, Joakim Laurén. We are currently in Malmö, and we will walk you through our quarter four and 2022 results. As usual, I will start with business updates, then Joakim will move into more details around our financial performance. Finally, some concluding notes and outlooks, and then, of course, we open up for Q&A. Let's move right into the summary of the quarter then. We are happy to see that we have achieved another strong and stable quarter. It's a strong ending to a record year for Beijer Electronics Group.
If we start with the customer demand side, which is of course where it all starts, so to say, we can see that the customer demand continues in general on a good level. We posted our fourth consecutive quarter above SEK 600 million in order intake, driven mainly by Westermo, I would say, in the quarter, who had a fantastic strong order intake. Also Beijer Electronics came in on a stable level where for Beijer Electronics Americas and Europe were strong and the China market actually showed some weakness. In terms of sales, we posted a new record quarter of SEK 589 million. That's 26% up on the same quarter of last year, both business entities contributed to that.
Westermo came in finally at SEK 300 million and we saw a significant step up in delivery, so that was good. However, we do still see constraints due to the component situation. I wish I could say that, you know, those problems are gone. They are mainly gone, I would say, in the Beijer Electronics business entity with the components that they are using. On the Westermo side, with the very high spec components that we need, there are still a few, fewer, but a number of suppliers that are still letting us down, so to say, in terms of capacity and are pushing out confirmed deliveries, which are still causing issues for the Westermo delivery situation.
Earnings came in at 10.7% for the quarter, somewhat lower than quarter three of last year. There are some explanations to that which Joakim will come back to in just a bit. In terms of Westermo business entity, as I mentioned, good increase in sales and an EBIT level of 12.3%. As I mentioned, the component situation continues to affect us quite a lot. We are prioritizing deliveries to our customers, and in the quarter itself, we were forced to buy components on the spot market to an extra cost, so to say, of SEK 12 million in quarter four. We have seen that issue throughout the year.
Just to point out that this is still having a major impact on the earnings in Westermo. Beijer Electronics came in with another very stable quarter and posted an EBIT of 13.9%. They are staying on that higher level, so to say, that we have seen over the past quarters in that business entity, also with a nice sales volume. When it comes to the global situation, so to say, there are, of course, as we all know, a lot of uncertainties still out there. We of course follow that development, and we are preparing for different scenarios. However, for the time being, we are not seeing any major effects on our demand side related to that.
Today the board has decided to propose a dividend of 0.50 Swedish krona, same dividend as last year. Basically, based on the fact that there is a lot of investments and good things that we would like to do during 2023, and that is the reason why the board proposes to stay on that dividend level. Okay. I think I mentioned already quite a few things about the business entities. In Westermo, we see that the high demand that I mentioned is driven by mainly our focus segments with the train and energy segments really sticking out with very nice order intake from our key customers there.
Of course, despite the components issues, the organization is fully focused now on continuing to step up the sales volumes. We have a very, very strong backlog, as most of you are aware, and we need to deliver that backlog to our customers. Beijer Electronics, again, stable demand. Americas, very strong growth. EMEA, Europe, Middle East, Africa also on a good level. We are seeing a weakened demand in China at the moment due to the issues that they have over there right now. We believe that situation will somewhat improve throughout the year. The delivery situation in Beijer Electronics is on a good level now.
There are a few issues related to capacity of suppliers of the same components, but it's in general, we are in balance now with the order intake. As I mentioned, a very stable profitability level now for this business entity. Okay, here in a graphical format, orders and sales. Order level again, it came down a little bit, as you can see there, because of the Beijer Electronics a little bit weaker demand in Beijer Electronics. Westermo was still very strong. You can see fourth consecutive quarter above SEK 600 million, which of course historically is a very, very high level. Sales 26% up compared to last year, almost SEK 590 million. That's an all-time high for the group.
We have an FX effect that you can see here in the quarter compared to last year. Our backlog, as we have been talking about before, is at an all-time high of SEK 1.5 billion now going into 2023. With that, I hand over to you, Joakim, to give some more meat to the bone.
Thank you very much.
For this.
We start with Beijer Group, up in the left corner you see that the order intake came in at SEK 603 million. The sales was SEK 589 million, and the EBIT almost SEK 63 million, representing an EBIT percentage of 10.7%. As Jenny pointed out, it is the fourth consecutive quarter above the SEK 600 million mark, despite the fact that China market has developed quite low when it comes to order bookings in the fourth quarter, where they've had a very good or very strong early 2022, but the last quarter was weaker. Sales, as Jenny pointed out, all-time high. EBIT level, well, it's almost three times better than last year and the second quarter now that we are well above the 10% mark.
If you look at the graph, you see the orange line, the solid orange line, that is the last 12 months development, and the trend there is of course in the direction that you would like to see going upwards. FX impacts, and with the weaker krona, in total for the group, we have a positive impact of about SEK 4 million in the quarter. We have been struggling for quite some quarters during 2022 with cash flow. Now by the end of the year, we post a quarter with, I would say, positive free cash flow of SEK 57 million. Still our working capital, it's a bit challenging with the component situation. We stated still on too high levels compared to where we want to be.
Still we show a positive cash flow in Q4, which is of course good for us. Net income, bottom line, SEK 51 million compared to SEK 11 last year. EPS increased nicely from 0.37, sorry, last year to 1.77 this year. Let's go to Westermo. Westermo order intake, SEK 326 million, sales of SEK 300 million and an EBIT of SEK 37 million, representing 12.3%. The order intake all-time high as well, fifth quarter above 300 mark. Very strong development in Westermo, as Jenny pointed out. We are also happy to see that we have been able to step up the deliveries, giving us the SEK 300 million in invoicing in the quarter.
Still, I mean, you should look at the pace that we are booking orders compared to what we are delivering. We still have a way to go when it comes to increasing our ability of deliveries. EBIT margin, 12.3%, decent is what we describe it as, but we should be aware, as also stated before, that we needed to do expensive spot market purchases of some components to be able to deliver. As Jenny said, we are prioritizing deliveries towards our customers. Then we have to do these kind of activities that will or have affected the result with SEK 12 million, as we pointed out before in the quarter. It's what to expect when it comes to the component situation.
Well, it is still challenging for us, and it will impact us in the short perspective. Of course, with the inflation and the cost increases that we are facing, we are active on price management, and also our strategies when it comes to working with development to make sure that we have the latest technology that's needed with those focus segments that we have. We continue that on full force, making sure that we will be competitive and open up for the growth going forward. Beijer Electronics, we have an order intake of SEK 279 million, sales of SEK 290, and an EBIT of SEK 40, representing the 13.9% EBIT.
If we are comparing to Q4, we state it's a stable bookings, where China has had a weaker development, but Americas and also EMEA, they are developing in a good way. The slowdown in order bookings is not general. It is limited to the Asian or specifically the Chinese market. Deliveries, stable development, without too many hiccups, in balance with what we are booking orders. Profitability, well, we can conclude another quarter around the 14% level. It's actually the third quarter in a row where we've been on this level. In Beijer Electronics, of course, we need to be active on price management, and that we are doing. We have for quite some time talked about the integration of Korenix into Beijer Electronics.
Now when we close this quarter, we can conclude we've done. It's fully in place, and we will now basically globally operate under the name Beijer Electronics only. Also in Beijer Electronics, it's full focus on R&D activities to maintain the position that we have and to make sure that the offerings that we have, both hardware and software, are competitive and the best to offer to our customers. That concludes the numbers. Over to you, Jenny.
Thank you for that. This is really just a summary of what has already been said. The takeaways are that we are seeing a stable overall demand where Westermo continues to show a very strong development, and Beijer Electronics is stable. Good profitability development compared to where we come from. We are not happy. We are not content with that. There's still much more to do to reach the financial targets that we communicated in November of last year. That would be the key focus, of course, for us going forward. The component shortage, as much as I would want it to be over, we still see issues with a handful of components causing us challenges regarding the delivery capacity, specifically in Westermo.
Again, global outlook is somewhat uncertain still. As we have mentioned before, we are not directly impacted by the Russia war on Ukraine. Of course, the inflation and the risk of a recession and so on is something that we monitor very closely, and we prepare ourselves for different scenarios. Outlook. Yes, this is early days, so to say, looking at 2023. As I mentioned, our target now is to strive to reach the financial goals that we communicated in November. The fact that we operate in attractive markets with good underlying growth driven by digitalization, sustainability, electrification, and so on, gives us a certain optimism for reaching both the growth and profitability goals in the medium to long term.
It also gives us some optimism for 2023. Again, difficult to tell how the market will develop. That's how we look at it right now. With that, we would like to open up for Q&A.
Thank you. If you wish to ask a question, please dial zero one on your telephone keypads now to enter the queue. Once your name has been announced, you can ask your question. If you find your question is answered before it's your turn to speak, you can dial 02 to cancel. Once again, that's 01 to ask a question or 02 if you need to cancel. Currently, we have two questions in the queue. The first is from the line of Marek Rostov of Redeye. Please go ahead, your line is open.
Thank you very much, operator. Hello, Jenny and Joakim. I have a handful of questions. Could you expand a bit on the slowdown in China and perhaps also on what signs that make you cautiously believe that it could potentially rebound a bit in the second half of 2023?
Yeah, maybe we take it then one by one, otherwise we will forget. Well, if I start with the China situation, then maybe Joakim would like to fill in. We are seeing a slower demand, basically related to the lack of liquidity in China and the overall economy slowing down there due to the COVID situation, and so on. That is something that we see. What is making us cautiously optimistic still about the China market is that quite a few of the customers that we have in China are global exporting companies, like the big car manufacturer, BYD, Build Your Dreams, that are exporting their products globally. They have become an important customer to us. We are delivering our X2 panel to...
They are actually making electrical batteries for electric cars, and we are delivering equipment or panels to the production equipment of those batteries. That's a global business, and those kind of customers, there we see a continued strong demand going forward. That's the reason why we are cautiously optimistic about China coming back and picking up again.
There are quite a few Chinese customers that we have design wins that we believe will lead to order intake later in the year. That is the reason why we are cautiously optimistic still despite the weak Q4.
All right. Interesting. Well, during the Capital Markets Day, you discussed the growth opportunities in new infrastructure such as EV chargers and in the grid network. Are you looking to recruit perhaps more sellers or other support personnel in the U.S., specifically, and increase the local presence in 2023? Or do you have the organization in place for this growth opportunity?
I think, overall, we have a strong organization in place in North America. We have strengthened the Westermo team during last year, actually, specifically to focus on the energy market in North America. We have already recruited a couple of people, and we will probably continue to strengthen our presence there during 2023. Also in Beijer Electronics, we have increased our capabilities, so to say, to support these new segments in North America, but also in other geographies. Selectively, we recruit and add the resources where we see there is a growth opportunity that we want to capture.
Right. Are there any other, like, high margin pockets or interesting growth areas you, that you see? I mean, you have talked about, like, mining ports, water facilities, et cetera. Is there anything that is, like, standing out?
I think that you can say that the energy segment overall, which is a focus area both for Westermo and for Beijer Electronics, represents a higher margin segment. It, it of course depends on the different applications, but it is a segment overall that is growing and where we see that we can get good prices, so to say, for our products. As we grow that segment, I believe that will have a positive impact on our gross margin.
All right. Before Korenix and Beijer Electronics merged, you wrote in the Q4 in 2021, I believe, that Korenix, you wrote about the Korenix extensive product development and the new Korenix Switch OS platform. In this report, you also mentioned JetNet and JetWave, et cetera. I'm just curious to know, especially since you have talked about a few larger deals, about how Korenix is doing in the new business segment and whether the investment have gone through.
Yeah. What part of the fact that we are integrating the Korenix business into Beijer Electronics, we have of course looked at the portfolio and the focus areas. You could say that we have limited the scope of the former Korenix from, you know, more wide and to focus more on supporting the Beijer Electronics development. I think about a year ago, we talked about the TSMC order. That is still a very good business where we still see good progress going forward. there's a lot of opportunities in that area, which is then the digitalization of production or manufacturing 4.0 applications.
There, the offer that we have where we combine the Beijer Electronics and the Korenix side, we see good opportunities and we believe that we are very competitive.
All right. One last question. It's on the component shortage. What are your, like, suppliers telling you on the outlook of getting into balance once again?
Yeah. They were telling us early quarter four that there would be improvement in capacity and so on with the consumer electronics demand going down. That made us feel a little bit optimistic actually about about the situation. I can say that the situation has improved in terms of, you know, that there are less components now that are on the critical list, so to say. Less components, less suppliers to deal with. The ones that are still critical, those suppliers, which is basically two, three suppliers, are still having major issues with the particular components that we are using and are pushing out deliveries with very short notice that had already been confirmed.
We are of course having a very close dialogue with these suppliers, trying to get attention and priority. The hard allocation situation that has been around for more than 18 months now, is still there for those components. You can end up having no allocation 1 quarter, for example, and getting to know that very late. There seems to be still supply chain imbalances for some specific electronic components. It's very hard to understand exactly why that is. That's what we are seeing.
Sorry. One last question then. Do your customers understand this, your end customers?
Yeah. They, I think they understand it. We are also asking for their help, so to say. In some cases, they can help us push and help us get priority and so on. I think that there is a good collaboration with our major customers. Again, the reason why we are doing these spot purchases to a very high cost is that we want to serve our customers. That's the priority number one after all, so that we can have life also after this situation is gone. That has been our focus area, and I think most customers appreciate that. We are still, we have too long lead time still, and we are working hard on getting the lead times down and improving our delivery, our on time delivery, basically.
Yeah. All right. Thank you for answering.
Thank you, Marek.
Thank you very much.
Thank you. We currently have one further question in the queue. Just as a reminder to participants, if you do wish to ask a question, please dial zero one now. Next question is from Markus Almerud of Penser Bank. Please go ahead, your line is open.
Hi. Thank you very much. Markus Almerud here at Penser Bank. My first question is on China. China deteriorated in the fourth quarter. My first question or sub-question on China is, I mean, they have now opened up. Have you seen any signs of any relief from that? Second, if you were to maybe you can't answer straight away, but if you were to kind of strip China out of the order intake, what would the trend look like if you compare with China?
Marcus?
Well, in the short term, I think it's too early to say, what will happen. Right now we are in the middle of Chinese New Year and quite a lot of the China country is basically, when it comes to business, is closed down. Many people are on vacation, et cetera. Let's see what happens when we open up and we come out of the Chinese New Years. When it comes to your question on how does it look, well, what we state is that if you look at the order development in Beijer Electronics, the Americas is doing really well, or we've used the word even strong, and we have talked about MEA is doing really well. That means that it is the Chinese market that is making the numbers look like going flat or sideways.
If you take away the Chinese, it's positive, definitely positive in both, especially Americas, I would say, but also the MEA market, or region is doing well in Beijer Electronics. I hope that, answers your question, Markus.
Yeah. Yeah, it did. Thank you. On the component, just, I know that there was a very positive tone in Q3, and I'm just curious to know what happened during Q4. Was it one of the situations where you got more of these critical components you were referring to in Q3 than you did in Q4? Yeah, what was the difference?
I would say that in Q4 we have had higher cost of spots purchases. We have had that the full year, every quarter, but there has been more in Q4 than before. We felt that there was a need for you analysts or the market to understand what kind of money we are talking about, and that's the reason why we explicitly give you the number of SEK 12 million that is extra in the quarter. That's the reason.
'Cause if I remember
We do focus deliveries, and it is a deliberate decision for us to make sure that we can deliver and increase our capacity to serve our customers. Therefore, that's the reason for the actions.
Now, 'cause if I remember correctly, it's the same kind of magnitude of sums that have been mentioned before, that is in Q1 and Q2, and I also think in Q4 last year. It was kind of 10, 12 million SEK in extra cost that has been mentioned already then, and then we didn't have that in Q3, or at least there was nothing written at the same kind amount to if I remember right. That's why I was just wondering what the difference was, what's happened during this time in the second half of the year.
The response, Marcus, is that it's higher in Q4 compared to Q3.
Okay. Also, how do you work with these issues? I mean, are there alternatives to this, and how do you work with this long term? Maybe this is not the question for this call. When is it time to start looking at alternatives to this? I mean, if we have COVID outbreaks again, et cetera, et cetera. Bottom line, I mean, are there alternatives and can one do anything or is one stuck?
You're absolutely right. We have been looking and working on finding alternatives to those critical components now for 18 months, so to say. That is one of the activities that we can do to move away from the most critical components. However, what we are seeing now is that some of the design changes that we did during 2022, early 2022, to get away from components that were put last time buy by the likes of Intel and so on. We moved to another supplier to get away from that. We bought quite a lot of components to be able to ship those new components.
That other supplier got so many orders from other customers as well that had done the same redesign as we did, so their capacity wasn't enough at the end of the day to supply all the customers. There are movements like that and effects like that that are very hard to predict, but that we are now seeing the effects of. In some cases, we need to again start looking for other alternatives or buy on the spot market. Those are, of course, decisions that we are making every week what is the best solution to a particular problem. It's about juggling that situation still, I would say.
Coming back to, I think Mark's question, but maybe asking different way. I mean, is there any light in tunnel? I mean, is it just we don't know, we'll have to see? I mean, is it possible to predict at all?
Yeah. I'm getting a little bit more cautious now on predicting because I felt that we did see an improvement in the last year, and now still we are seeing issues. I think it's very hard to tell because it depends so much on different types of components being available or not available. No, I think I refrain from making any predictions at this time as to how the development will look like.
Okay. Fair enough. Fair enough. My final question is just on the composition of the two. I mean, you raised your EBIT margin target ahead of the capital markets day to go from 15% in business units to 15% for the group, meaning that the business units will also have to carry the overhead costs. My question is just, I mean, this is very new, but what are your thoughts about the overhead costs and to decrease those? Have that work started? Is it simply that
I'm not sure what you mean with the decrease of overhead costs. That's something that we have stated, Marcus. Please.
Okay, let me rephrase it. Should I look at it that you will, that the margins, you look for the margins in the business units to be. Let's say that we would sit with the overhead costs or the other costs similar to what we have today, and that will kind of continue for the, let's say, hypothetically, you will reach a margin target in 3 years, for the sake of discussion. Should I look at it that the overhead costs should be stable in that time, and that the margin in the business units would raise to high enough levels to compensate for that to get to 15% for the group?
That is the way we view it. I mean, what we have stated is the 15% mark for the group. To be able to get there, it's about continue to grow making sure that we are improving our profitability in our business entities, where there are still sure lots of things to do when it comes to internal efficiency. I mean, in the capital markets day, we talked about running productions in the critical component situations that we're facing. No way we are efficient, and there are so many things that can be improved in that matter. Over time, there's absolutely within reach to reach the 15% for the group, and we are quite confident with that.
We will not grow the overall group OpEx. That is, that is not something that will continue to grow on the level of the growth or the sales growth or anything like that. But, that you can view as more stable. The growth in the business entities, that will create that we are moving towards the 15% over time.
Okay. Okay, perfect. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. As there are no further questions at this time, I'll hand back to our speakers for the closing comments.
Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, all of you for attending this call. Yeah, I wish you all a good day.
Thank you.
Thank you. Bye.
Bye-bye.