Welcome to Electrolux Professional fourth quarter 2021 results presentation. My name is Jacob Broberg. I'm Head of Investor Relations, and with me I have Alberto Zanata, who is the CEO of Electrolux Professional, and Fabio Zarpellon, who is the CFO. We'll kick off immediately with Alberto. Please go ahead, Alberto.
Thank you, Jacob. Good morning to everybody. Q4 is confirming the recovery of the market and the continued recovery of our business. For the third quarter in a row, we delivered roughly 10% underlying profitability, despite the increasing challenges that we had to face, the increasing headwinds related to the cost inflation that we had to face in Q4. We closed the quarter with organic growth, quite significant organic growth, 14%, mainly driven by the recovery of the Food and Beverage business that, during the pandemic, suffered much more than the Laundry one. The highlight of the quarter is that we had a record level of order intake, so collection of order bringing up our order stock again to a record level.
We said that this very high order incoming was probably driven also by two elements in addition to the recovery of the business. One was the fact that customers anticipated orders with the understanding that from January 1st the price increase was announced. The second one is that in these days there is the understanding that lead time and availability of product there is uncertainty on lead time and delivery of products, so they wanted to book products to make sure that they were available when they were needed. We were expecting also a decline of the order intake in January while confirming the recovery of the market in this case, the continuous recovery of the market.
In this case, we still have a good order intake in January, not at the level of December, but confirming that despite the increase of the price list, we are still getting a good order coming in. Consequence of the growth is the improving profitability. I said it, underlying is 9.5%, close to 10% as it was in Q2 and Q3. The actual one is lower because in the quarter, we completed the acquisition of Unified Brands, a great addition to our business, and in the quarter, we reported all the acquisition cost. Important element is also the cash flow. Very strong cash flow with the cash conversion much higher than 100%. That is confirming the strength of this company for what concern the management of the operating capital.
All in all, we are also proposing, in line with our policy and with our target, the dividend to distribute the dividends this year. I think I already mentioned the fact that the recovery is ongoing. These are our sales growing in the different area. Flat in the Asia Pacific, where we have different dynamics in the different regions, but very strong recovery in the Americas region, mainly North America. North America is a market that is back to the pre-COVID-19 level, probably even above that level. Indeed, our sales in that part of the world are very high, in particular in Food and Beverage, and we will see this later on.
Europe is slightly behind the Americas, but quite close to the 2019 level already. We expect that this should be already beginning of this year. The Asia Pacific area and Middle East is behind. Still some area in the Southeast Asia are close. Japan is still in difficulties. What we see during the past days is that also this area are in a recovery trend. If not at the end of last year, even if also in Q4 the food and beverage had a recovery in the area. Beginning of this year, we see many projects revitalizing and getting orders also from these areas. All in all, a positive market environment.
The fourth wave seems to be not impacting so significantly this business. Personal experience is that still suffering at the travel business. Whatever is related to travel business, because still a lot of company are keeping people working from home, but the outlook is positive. Going into the detail of the Food and Beverage and then the Laundry business. Not unexpected, the Food and Beverage reported a very strong growth, organic, and to the organic growth, we also added the acquisition, the net sales of Unified Brands for the month of December, so it is only one month. Later on, we will give you more details about Unified Brands performances. Sales very strong.
I mentioned Europe. In particular, some countries in Europe, Italy first, but not only. Even stronger, the United States, 50% growth in the quarter is an amazing one. As you can see, differently from the past reports, even the Asia-Pacific and Middle East area delivered a growth in this, in this part. Margin in this case is affected significantly by the acquisition cost that had been reported in the quarter. If we move to Laundry, the Laundry growth is lower than the one we had in Food and Beverage. Also this one, not unexpected, but I have to say that Laundry in most of the country is already on the 2019 level in Q4.
We are expecting to go over the pre-pandemic situation in the full year of 2022. Sales were driven mainly by Europe and United States again. Profitability is in line, I would say, with the good profitability we had in the other quarters, despite the headwinds. In particular, the material was affecting more Laundry than Food because of the kind of material that is used in the different product. With this said, I would let Fabio comment the financial results.
Thank you, Alberto, and good morning to everybody. As anticipated by Alberto, since quarter two last year, we have been able to increase consistently both the top line but also the EBITDA value quarter- on- quarter. In Q4, EBITDA grew close to 16% year-on-year. Like for like, meaning excluding Unified Brands and associated integration acquisition cost that accounted for SEK 56 million the quarter, EBITDA was approximately SEK 210 million, meaning SEK 70 million better than quarter four of 2020, with a quarterly margin closer to 10%. Volume growth as well as the benefit from 2020 restructuring plan cost saving were the main driver of this EBITDA increase.
When reading through the P&L, gross margin increased to 32.7%, 1.6 points higher than 2020, thanks to higher sales and production volumes. Productivity in the factory also positively contributed to the improvement of the margin. The impact from price was positive in the quarter. We had a positive contribution from price, but it was not enough to compensate the material and transportation cost increase. The gap between the contributions from price minus the additional cost in material and transportation cost was negative by SEK 35 million. When it comes to this year, we expect material cost as well as, in the medium term, transportation to increase during the first part of this year. We anticipated during last call an additional price increase since January , the 1st of this year. The price increase is in place.
Such price increase should bring the company to compensate the direct material cost increase from quarter two, already quarter two of this year, but we expect still a negative gap between the contribution from price and the increase of raw material and components in an area of SEK -60 million to SEK -70 million in quarter one. When it comes to sales administrative expenses, they increase in value quarter- on- quarter, even excluding the additional acquisition cost, but the weight on sales was reduced to roughly 24% on sales. Business activity to support the volume growth and the SG&A includes also year- on- year the additional accrual for the variable pay.
In the quarter, the government subsidies was around SEK 10 million compared to SEK 18 million of quarter four 2020, and the benefit from the restructuring contributed with additional SEK 16 million in the profitability of the quarter. When it comes to the development of operating working capital, at the end of December, operating working capital was reduced by 5% year-over-year, the same perimeter, meaning excluding the Unified Brands. That was a remarkable achievement considering the sales growth we reported for the quarter and the full year. Average operating working capital on sales therefore was decreased to below 15%. We reported 14.9% at the end of last year. A result that is in line with our financial targets, but also, as you see from the graph, showing a pretty consistent improvement quarter-on-quarter since September 2020.
After the acquisition of Unified Brands, our financial position remain pretty solid with a ratio of net debt on EBITDA below 2x, meaning at 1.9x. At the end of December, Electrolux Professional had liquid funds of SEK 849 million, and revolving credit facility available for close to EUR 100 million, meaning that we are fully equipped to support also from a balance sheet perspective the development of this group. As anticipated by Alberto, cash flow was pretty strong in the quarter, but I would say pretty strong also for the full year. During 2021, we deliver over SEK 1.1 billion cash flow.
I would call it quite a remarkable results that is bringing this group to the cash generation we enjoyed before COVID in the year 2017, 2018, and 2019. Overall, I would call it a positive quarter, where Professional deliver a significant EBITDA and a strong cash flow. The balance sheet remains strong and adequate to support the business and the margin expansion of this group, even after Unified Brands acquisition.
Thank you, Fabio.
Thank you.
A couple of words about Unified Brands that is now part of the group. You can understand that I'm personally very happy to have this company becoming part of the group because it's clearly addressing one of our strategic priority, that is the development of the business in North America and the development of the business with the chains that are mainly, or at least the largest one, are headquartered in North America. I'm very happy to have this team on board, a great team of people that is in the business, very experienced in the business, with strong and well-recognized brand in the market. We are talking about a company with roughly 600 employees, with two facilities, one in Michigan and Mississippi.
R&D capabilities, obviously to develop the product, but also to serve chains with customized solution. That is important and strategically important to address these kind of customers. It is a company with more than SEK 1 billion of turnover. Fabio will give us more details. With two major brands that are Groen and Randell that are typically serving the institutional market with cooking solutions and the chain market with customized prep tables. A lot of the big chain company are now our customers. We are a trusted supplier of this company, and we surely intend to leverage this organization to develop the business in that part of the world. Fabio, please, with some additional figures about the financial of this company.
Yes. Thank you, Alberto. As you heard from Alberto, Unified Brands was quite a sizable acquisition for Professional. On a pro forma basis, assuming Unified Brands was part of Professional for the full 2021 year, this would have mean to increase group sales and EBITDA by approximately 15%, meaning increasing significantly the presence of Electrolux Professional in U.S. market as well as delivering, I would say, a better geographical balancing. Sales of the company grew 21% year- on- year compared to 2020, and the growth also in quarter four was pretty remarkable. Underlying profitability of the company in 2021, excluding the acquisition cost, excluding the integration cost, was around 9%, with a significant improvement compared to the previous year.
The companies manage pretty well also from a asset management perspective, and the operating working capital on sales of Unified Brands is slightly below the rest of the group average. As the rest of Professional, Unified Brands also enjoy quite an increase of order intake during last year and ending up the year with a pretty good order stock. I would say I can only reiterate the message from Alberto. Pretty happy about this acquisition that makes a change in our presence in the U.S. market. Also from a financial perspective, an acquisition that has the ingredients to deliver a good 2022 as well. With that, back to you, Alberto.
Thank you, Fabio. If we move on to the things happening in the quarter, I would say that Q4 was a quarter pretty full of important event taking most of our strategic priority. First, for instance, we have been growing for the third quarter in a row our customer care business. That is an important one. We suffered the missing growth of this part during the pandemic because our technicians were not allowed to visit customer. Now, for the third quarter in a row, despite the high growth of the product, the customer care business grew more than the product sales. We all know how important is this one, and this is one of the cornerstone of our strategy. We brought a new product to the market.
We are not commenting this right now, but we will do it in the next step, that product addressing change, in particular and mainly that will surely deliver positive impact to our business. We completed the rollout in the first three countries of our Digital OnE platform. That is the new platform connecting product, customers and the company in a digital environment that will make the customer life easier and our performance better both in term of service but also in term of efficiency and productivity. Mainly, I'm very proud to say that, for the first time, we received the rating from the CDP.
This is important because we are the only company in this industry with a rating in this one. It was the first time that we disclose our climate impact through the CDP, and we got a B rating that I have to say that it is a good one. It is a very good achievement also considering that it is the first one. Why I'm underlining these things so much, because despite the overall importance to be a sustainable company, a company that delivers sustainable product, I believe these days our focus on this matter is making us even more competitive than what we were.
We all talk about the dramatic increase of the cost of energy, the cost of gas, the general cost. With our range of being so focused on the lifetime cost and not more on the just purchasing price of the cons, so providing long-term benefit to the customer on the savings that the usage of our product can provide, I believe these days we are even more competitive than before. Because energy and gas increasing are important elements in the running cost of our customer, and with the possibility to cut in half this cost thanks to the performance of our product, I believe this makes them even more attractive and more competitive.
Very good things that is making me proud, and I'm sure is just the first step in a journey that will make us better and more sustainable as a company. With this said, if I have to summarize what is behind us, but at the same time what is in front of us, the recovery of the market is continuing. With the recovery of the market, our growth, our sales have been growing in a quarter, and we expected to have the market back to the 2019 level at beginning of this year. The order stock is a record level.
I said that it probably grew so much during the last month weeks of 2021 because of the announced price because of the concern of not receiving the product. It's also true that it didn't drop in January. We still see orders coming, and also the market that didn't move during 2021 are now restarting activities. The performance of the company are solid. The underlying business is for the third quarter 10%.
Also considering that we experience an increasing headwinds related to the general inflation, energy, transportation, material that was only partially offset by the price increase that we did in 2021. This is the same for the first quarter of this year. As Fabio said, we still see that even if the price increase that we announced and we implemented from January 1st will mitigate this inflationary cost from Q2 with a growing positive impact, everything stays equal. We see that in Q1 we will still suffer the higher general cost to run the operations. The acquisition of Unified Brands has been completed.
This really is strengthening our position in the U.S. market that is the one with the fastest trend in the recovery, that is the home of the largest commercial restaurant chains, that is a third of the global market. All in all, I see the quarter closed with the solid results. I see still dimension of the challenges in Q1 that we are set to offset, sorry to play with the words, and the outlook for the medium long term is positive with the recovery of the market and all the things in place to continue to deliver solid result.
Thank you, Alberto. With that, we open up for questions. Please go ahead, operator.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question and answer session. If you do wish to ask a question, please press zero and one on your telephone keypad. If you wish to withdraw your question, you may do so by pressing zero and two to cancel. There will be a brief pause while questions are being registered. We've received the first question. It is from Karri Rinta, Handelsbanken. The line is now open. Please go ahead.
Yes. Thank you very much, and good morning. I just wanted to ask a few questions about the Unified Brands. If we look at your North American business before Unified Brands, it was probably quite a bit of laundry and beverages. Specifically about the food part of the business, how much bigger will Unified Brands make you in North America compared to the position that you had before? That's my first question.
Yeah. Unified Brands is making us significantly larger than what we were before. We are not disclosing the separation between the beverage and food, but you're right that beverage was an important part of a significant part of our Food and Beverage business in North America. The beverage business is the one that we got through the acquisition of Grindmaster-Cecilware. I would say that the acquisition of Unified Brands is bringing us to a level that is much higher than what it was, bringing us to a different level also in terms of relevance in front of the reps, the dealers, the network in North America, the distribution network in North America.
Perfect. The higher underlying margin that Unified Brands had last year compared to what you had in Food and Beverage, is that? Or maybe more specifically, have you said anything about what percentage of Unified Brands or their sales comes from aftersales or customer care?
No, we did not disclose that one. We can say that there is room to improve also the percentage of sales coming from customer care in Unified Brands. We know that the margin of the company was higher in the pre-pandemic period. The company went through a restructuring in the years before the pandemic period, moving from consolidating in the two current factories. They have also done some disruption related to this consolidation that resulted in some problem that have been addressed. Now, quality of the product is a great service to the customer, despite the current obviously long delivery time related to the components availability, the problem that everybody has, are okay.
The trajectory to grow back the profitability is good. We are expecting this to be delivered by the team that came together with the company.
Thank you. Finally, what should we expect to be your key priorities for Unified Brands in 2022? I guess in the early part of the year, it will be a lot about sort of technical integration of systems and so on. Will there be any scope for trying to, I know that there will not be any cost synergies and even the cross-selling synergies are a bit way off. What will you focus on this year when it comes to Unified Brands?
Yes. The first part of the year, you rightly said, the focus is to complete the separation from the Dover Group. We have been going through a separation from a group, being, a division of Dover and becoming independent. Focus is on there. Complete the temporary service agreement, completing the separation, getting a standalone, operation model with all the function operating in the proper way. Clearly, and I'm not saying that we will do, we will not do this in parallel, but we'll start looking at what we can get. How we create value with this company, making sure that one plus one makes more than two. Again, don't think that we didn't think about that already. Obviously, it was part also of the business case to justify the acquisition.
Now that we are all together, we are starting to group and understanding how we are able to create value. I believe there is a lot of meaning that chains serve today in the United States, we can, thanks to the Electrolux infrastructure, serve also abroad, or thanks to the legacy relation that Unified Brands has in North America with dealer reps or chains further increase the business that we currently have.
Great. Thank you very much.
Welcome.
I have a follow-up question from the web, connected to Unified Brands from Rodolfo Zeidler at Paradigm Capital. He is asking about our expectation regarding normalized long-term EBITDA margin of Unified Brands, and if we can explain the difference between E-Pro's Food and Beverage target margin. Is there a difference?
What we can see and what we can say right now is that Unified Brands is perfectly aligned to contribute to reach our overall target in terms of profitability. Unified Brands is a company. You see the underlying EBITDA that we had in the quarter is aligned with the overall company EBIT that is a mix between the Food and Beverage and the Laundry business. I would say that the contribution of Unified Brands will be positive even in the short and medium term.
Please, operator.
We go to the next question. It is from Johan Eliason, Kepler Cheuvreux. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Good morning, Alberto. Good morning, Jacob. Just a question while we're on this subject of the margin. You obviously have a long-term target to reach 15% EBITDA margin someday. We heard your German competitor sort of saying that they expect margins to improve going forward, but it will take years until they are back at the pre-pandemic margin level. What's your sort of view on the timing of you hitting your target, which is sort of above what you reported or pro forma indicated before the pandemic?
We are not disclosing the timing, but we see that performance are improving. They've been improving, thanks also to the recovery of the market at beginning of the year, or let me say since the half of the year before. We added these headwinds related to the raw material price increase, to the transportation cost increase, to all the inflationary item now adding the energy cost increase. We took actions with the price both during the summer and beginning of this year.
We have to say it is clear it is in front of us, and Fabio was clear about that the action taken with the increase of the price didn't offset completely the too rapid increase of the cost that we're experiencing in Q4, particularly during the last part, and are staying in Q1. We also see that starting from Q2, this action will give us the benefit, meaning that offsetting the inflationary items, and as a consequence, gradually giving us even a positive contribution. If we remove this effect, the trajectory is positive. Unified Brands will help to accelerate this one, because as I said, it is in line with the total company profitability. Also, Unified Brands has a positive increase in trajectory.
Being in the U.S. market with the chain customer, we have a good expectation on the matter.
Excellent. Your comments on Q1 margin, is that mainly related to that, in Q1 you will mainly deliver off your current backlog and then the new orders with the new pricing will sort of only hit your revenues by Q2 going forward? Or, can you do anything about the pricing in your backlog?
Obviously, it is harder to change the price with a backorder that we already confirm. Even if in particular the order that we receive during the past, the last part of the year, we have been clear that if the customers will not get the product within a certain period of time, we are going to apply the price increase. It will be a matter of negotiation, but it is. I think it's important, this one. Majority of the sales in Q1 will be done with orders that have been confirmed with the old price. It is also true that gradually orders are kicking in with the new price. This is important.
If you look at also the mix, the contribution for price is increasing along the quarter. We are expecting that it will further increase in Q1 and Q2. Sorry to say not enough in Q1 to cover the extremely high inflationary item.
Then talking about the inflationary item, remind me, do you have any sort of hedging policy regarding stainless steel prices or steel prices or anything?
Yes
Have you changed that policy this year?
No
In a way?
No. We are hedging the stainless steel, the base of the stainless steel. We have been hedging the price of the base for the first six months because clearly the hedging was done during the last part of the year when the price were already pretty high. The point is that for instance, the nickel that you cannot hedge and that is-
Mm-hmm
-impacting mainly the stainless steel. It was touching the record level, I would say, in the past days. The big part is hedged, but there are still variances. The hedging, I repeat, is for the six months. The uncertainty is still high, so we don't know what is going to expected in the second part of the year. Possibly better situation, but that is our policy and we are sticking.
Just on components, do you have any specific components, like the car industry talks about semiconductors, that is causing you supply disruptions? Or is it just the general cost inflation and logistics cost, et cetera?
It's general cost inflation, but components, I would say that in some way we have the electronic components in general. There is scarcity. In this moment, we are able to run production at normalize at full capacity, in the meaning that we are working on one shift in every factory, as normal let me say. The thing that we have trouble to do is for instance to plan further increase of capacity. That in some cases we'd love to do because I repeat we have a record order stock. So we could increase further increase capacity. I still believe that we have to wait some weeks, not months, but some weeks to go for that one because of the uncertainty for what concern the supply chain.
But is much better than what it was at beginning of the last quarter.
Okay. Excellent. Then maybe a bit more forward-looking, coming back to Unified Brands. They seem to have a pretty broad product portfolio, but I understand part of the idea is that it will be a sort of a access to distribution network also for some products you have already. Are there specific technologies that you already had before that you think will fit quite well to this customer segment, the big chains that Unified Brands now give you access to, or will it has to be developed by using your larger R&D platform?
No, no. I believe we have everything that could match the needs of the customers. As you rightly said, we can leverage the strength of this organization to further expand the business in North America and with this customer. In particular, when we talk about chains, many times chains are looking for customized solution, but that would be independently from Unified Brands and independently from us. For what concern the product technology, as you rightly said about technology, I believe that everything is set and.
Okay. Excellent. Many thanks.
Before we move to the next question, operator, I have a follow-up question from Stellan Hellström at Boden Capital, and it's also related to price and raw material cost. His question is if we can comment on how we see January price increases are accepted by the market, and how much of the raw material cost increase we expect to offset. It's related to what I think Fabio discussed before, if you can repeat that cost range, how much we expect to have extra cost in the first quarter.
Yeah. I believe, Fabio, you can comment again about that. The only comment that I can say about the customer accepting, obviously, it is different customer by customer. There are customer with whom we have long-term contract that is more challenging. There are customer that wants to negotiate, as usual. At the same time, we have to say that there is a general understanding that everything is costing more. The general understanding is there. From this point of view, I don't mean that is well accepted, but at least it is understood. Please, Fabio.
Yes. Let me just remind what happened in terms of material and price increase during 2021 and now beginning of 2022. As you recall, we have put in place a first price increase in July 1st, 2021. We practically took the decision to communicate to the market a second price increase in the autumn of last year with effective date January 1st this year. The raw material and together with transportation cost at the same time have had an accelerated cost increase, in particular in quarter four of last year. As I mentioned earlier, in quarter four we reported a negative gap between additional price positive contribution and raw material and transportation cost in area of SEK 35 million.
Quarter four results in terms of EBITDA was negatively affected by this amount when we look into the margin. This direct material cost increase is expected to further increase during this first part of this year. Price will start to kick in. As Alberto anticipated earlier, the majority of the sales of quarter one will be at the 2021 pricing, meaning that the gap between price and cost will be enlarged from SEK 60 million to 70 million year-on-year. At the same time, we are confident, and Alberto commented earlier about the price thickness, that already from quarter two of this year, the additional contribution from price will be able to compensate the material cost increase.
Thank you, Fabio. Operator, please go ahead.
We go to the next question. It is from William McCauley , Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Hi. Good morning, gentlemen. Thank you very much for taking my question. For the first one, sorry to return to price cost. You know, we have a negative balance in Q1, and then it gets positive in Q2 and increasingly positive through the year. Overall, for 2022, do you think the balance should be positive or negative based on what you currently see?
With everything staying the same, and sorry to repeat this one because really the fluctuation that we see in the price of the raw material these days is energy and price is quite significant. Considering stable elements at the current value, we see that the overall impact along the year will not be negative. It will be slightly positive, but it will not be a negative. The purpose was exactly this one, to balance with the price increase applied January first to offset the inflationary item that was to our knowledge in place right now.
Okay. That makes sense. I know this is a difficult question for you to answer because the price increases at different levels across different products, and then the net effect you get is always a bit less than the gross because of rebates. How should we think about the overall price increase you have or price benefit you're going to have in 2022? Maybe if you can't give me the actual number, could we bucket perhaps between mid-single digits, high single digits, and low double digits?
I think first we don't give the element of the price increase. It's not only because we don't disclose this number, but because it's very different product by product and region by region. There are different habits. For instance, North America and Europe are in some way the extreme cases, where in North America both the application, so the implementation, the execution of the price increase as well as the magnitude of the increase is different from the one you can expect in Europe, where in many cases you have limited possibility because of the long-term contract with the public institution and other things.
It's very different by region and also by product, because I think Fabio mentioned that the impact on Laundry in Q4 was higher than the one in Food and Beverage. Now we have the nickel going up that is mainly impacting the stainless steel and as a consequence the food product. Beverage is mainly plastic. According to the kind of product we have a different impact, and we don't go flat on everything, but we do category by category different increases.
Okay. Sure. Maybe finally, are there any further kind of integration costs for Unified or restructuring costs for Unified Brands in 2022? Against that, are there any savings we can expect to come through?
Yes, there are, and I would let Fabio comment about that.
Yes. We expect this year to have roughly SEK 10 million between integration cost and inventories step-up falling into quarter one. For the remaining part of the year, we expect to have no additional cost regarding the integration.
Okay. Any, you know, additional savings for the business as a whole that we can expect?
As Alberto anticipated, we are working on two sides. First, as a priority, from Unified Brands management,
Ourselves is to complete the separation from Dover Corporation, having Unified Brands working as a standalone operation within Electrolux Professional Group. This is priority together with business development. At the same time, we are working to understand which are the additional value we can implement from this acquisition, both on the sales side, but also looking into opportunities on the cost side. I would say that expectations are more going into the top-line development, as Alberto mentioned, in particular referring to U.S. and the chain business.
All right. Thank you very much.
Please, operator, go ahead.
Yes. The next question is a follow-up question of Karri Rinta, Handelsbanken. Please go ahead. Your line is now open.
Yes, thank you. Just a simple modeling question. What kind of depreciation and amortization rates we should have for 2022 in, on the back of, Unified Brands?
I can take the question. I would say that in terms of depreciation, the weight of depreciation on sales due to the Unified Brands acquisition will not change, while we will see somehow a significant increase linked to amortization.
Significant or insignificant?
Significant.
All right. Thank you. Thank you very much.
Thank you. The next question is from Henrik Christiansson, Carnegie. The line is now open. Please go ahead.
Yes. Good morning. Two questions, please. First one on FX effects. You had the SEK weakening quite a lot here recently. Do you have any major FX effects or benefits from that or negatives coming through in your EBITDA into 2022?
I'm not going to speculate on currency at all into 2022. We are living clearly in environment that is pretty much volatile. We are seeing in particular in these days what is happening on the U.S. dollar getting stronger against euro and other currencies. We are really in a pretty volatile environment, but it is also difficult to give direction. If I can give a comment instead on the quarter four, I would say that the overall impact between currency transaction and translation was pretty neutral in term of EBITDA summing up the two with the currency translation being negative and compensated by positive currency transaction mainly linked to U.S. dollar.
You don't have to speculate, but based on current FX, will there be any material impact, or will it be similar to Q4?
Difficult to give a direction this moment. Let's see how-
Okay.
How currency will develop along the first part of this year.
Okay, great. Second question. I mean, you talk about markets being back to 2022 levels here this year. I mean, could you provide a bit more color around what segments are driving that? If I look around, you know, both leisure and business travel seems to remain at low levels. Conferences, big gatherings are also at low levels.
Yes.
Which segments are back or above pre-pandemic levels and what segments are still to recover?
Yes. Okay. In general, the Laundry segments, specific Laundry segments are back to the 2019 levels, so the pre-COVID. The Laundry segments, apartments, house laundry, all these ones are back. I would say even better than the pre-COVID situation. Another segment that is better in better condition than the pre-COVID is the one related to the commercial restaurant chains. I would say all over the world, so not only North America, even if this segment is huge in the North America market, and this is also explaining the different dynamic of the market in that part of the world. We see that also the hospitality in general, so the hotel restaurants are restarting investments. During the summer of last year, the main part of the business was replacement.
These operators are restarting their activities, just replacing small items, but postponing the larger investment to, for the complete refurbishment of the kitchen or of the Laundry operation. Now, these investments are coming back to life and, as I said also at the beginning, geographically, they are not limited only to the countries that recovered earlier, Oceania, China, North America, some European countries. It is expanding also to the Middle East, also the Southeast Asian countries. The main segment that we still see suffering is the one related to travel.
Travel business, restaurants in the airports, hotels also, mainly used by travelers, and obviously the restaurant related to travelers. That is still suffering quite a bit. I would say that, also from personal experience, if you look at overseas flights before Christmas and after Christmas because in some way the second wave was limiting this move. Not stopping, but limiting. The other segment that is still suffering, but in some way they converted themselves, is the one related to the restaurants that were in the business centers.
With the fact that still a lot of people work from home, the places that were mainly working with the employee going out for lunch during the business hours is still suffering. I have to say that in this case, the segment converted their business to the delivery one. A lot of them are now working more on the delivery. We have been talking about the delivery business growing during the pandemic because people were not able to go out for dinner, for lunch or whatever. That is something, is a habit that didn't change. People restart going to the restaurant, but at the same time, they didn't give up the habit to get food at home.
Many restaurants that were not used to deliver and they start to deliver during the pandemic are still continuing to have this one because they discovered that it's a good and profitable business. As well as the increasing share of the business that the dark kitchen. The kitchen that are not visible to customer but are used only by the delivery company is also growing quite significantly.
Thank you.
Welcome.
Okay. Thank you. I think we have no further questions. With that, I would like to say thank you for today, and have a good weekend when it comes, and speak to you next time. Thank you and goodbye.