Welcome to the Green Landscaping Group Q4 presentation for 2022. For the 1st part of the conference call, the participants will be in listen-only mode. During the questions and answer session, participants are able to ask questions by dialing star five on their telephone keypad. Now I will hand the conference over to the CEO, Johan Nordström, and CFO, Carl-Fredrik Meijer. Please begin your meeting.
Thank you. As mentioned, a warm welcome to everyone to Green Landscaping and the presentation of our 4th quarter report of the year of 2022. My name is Johan Nordström, and together with me here today, we have Carl-Fredrik Meijer, our CFO. Let's begin with a short introduction to Green Landscaping on page two. We are today one of the leading landscaping service providing companies. That means we have outdoor services, we have landscaping services, and we have road and winter services. We were founded back in 2009 in Sweden and now have business in Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Lithuania. We're also the leading consolidator of the landscaping market in Northern Europe.
I believe we went into Norway two years ago, then Finland one year ago, and then Lithuania back in 2022. There's a lot of talk about decentralization, and to my opinion, we all have different definitions of it. To us, it really means that we have a business model that is based on trust and local accountability. That really means that we have 48 subsidiaries. They act locally. They are close to the customers. They can make quick decisions, and they are business-minded. That really enables us to provide good service to the customers. We also see that that has a healthy impact on the bottom line. That was really the short introduction to the group per se. Moving on page three, please.
As you perhaps are aware, we had a very strong development in the 4th quarter of 2022, even though that on a macro level, the economy is quite turbulent. We have high inflation rate, interest going up, and it's a lot of uncertainty into the market. The way we look upon our specific market, it's quite the solid market conditions. We haven't seen a significant impact. We have seen, of course, the impact of inflation, but otherwise, in terms of customer demand and what's going on in the marketplace, it's quite stable conditions for us. The numbers we achieved in the 4th quarter is really that the revenue grew by a healthy 74%, we achieved SEK 1.6 billion in revenue.
Uh, and of course, as expected, uh, 2022 was quite a hectic year for, for us in terms of acquiring and, and welcoming new colleagues. Uh, I believe we had a grand total of eleven companies coming into to the year in, in, uh, the year of 2022 . Uh, so they contributed by the mainstay, and that's close to 60% of the increase came from the new companies.
But we all saw a very healthy increase in organic growth. Uh, and of course, the, that number is to some extent a result of the inflation, but we also saw that we had new contracts, and we also had, uh, quite, uh, substantial amount of additional work that is a part of the contract but above and beyond the base level of the contract. And that contributed a round total of 14%.
I would not speculate in how much of the 14% that is based on inflation. I assume that question will come up. I don't really have a good, we don't have a good answer at this point of time. We are, of course, adjusting the, let's say, the fixed agreements on an annual base. We have quite a number of different contracts, and there are different index clauses, and there are different variations to it. That means we have to go and take a deep dive into each one of our subsidiaries, and each one of our subsidiaries have a large number of contracts. I won't make qualified guess. I know that some part of the 40% is based on inflation, but to what extent, we have to come back to that one.
In terms of profitability, I'm quite happy with the number of the 98% increase, we achieved the number of SEK 166 million, that's a healthy development for the company. In particular, we saw that the EBITDA margin of a 10.2% is quite strong. Of course, the reasons behind it is that we have a positive mix effect from the acquired companies, as we typically acquire companies who are led by very good entrepreneurs. They have been in business for many years, and they have run successful and profitable companies. Then you have a positive mix effect from them. We have also been, I would say, very prudent and worked very hard for many years in terms of improving some of the less profitable companies we have in the group.
Some of you who have followed us for a number of years knew about what we had did with the old Svensk Markservice and who we made those into subsidiaries and so forth. That has been going on for three, four, five y ears, I would say. We have seen a trend that today we can really see, I would say a very strong positive trend on that those kind of businesses are improving, and I'm quite happy with the work that is being done with our employees and improving those businesses. In the quarter per se, we also made four additional acquisitions, and I will come back to those more in detail further down the road here. Let's move to page four, please.
Just to go back on the growth a little bit here, I did mention that the sales grew by 74%, and we saw the organic part of it that is quite high, and we're happy with it. As I said, I don't know the inflation, and also, of course, when you have had 11 acquisitions done during the year, of course, we're growing quite significantly in that area. On the right-hand side of the picture, when we look upon what's the historical trend here, then we see that we have been doing this for a number of years. I believe we have a CAGR of the excess of 30%. We have a steady growth. We have been growing, and that's a part of our strategy to going forward as well.
Continue to grow both organically as well as by acquisition. Just a short comment on the organic growth there, that we are operating in a quite a big market. It's kind of if you choose to grow organically too quickly, we consider that to some extent being a risk, because you have new customers, you have new contracts, you need new employees. If you grow too quickly, during a short period of time, you have a tendency on not making those margins. That's a trade-off between how fast do you wanna go organically versus what type of margins can you provide.
We prefer to grow on a kind of a steady pace in line with the market, that's to some extent 4%-6% on the organic side, keep improving the profitability. That's the chosen strategy we have. We are not per se being very aggressive on the organic target. However, we like to make the profitability out of our contracts. Page five, please. Order backlog is kind of important to us, and that one grew a healthy 51% year-over-year. That's a significant growth and in line with our expectations, given the number of companies and what type of companies that we have acquired during 2022. Also, this business has a high retention rate, meaning that if you are the incumbent supplier to a contract, you are...
You want to keep the contract, you are quite well-positioned in order to do so 'cause you have the upper hand versus our competitors when it comes to bidding for that particular contract because you know the details of it in a, in a slightly different way. Also, the, the majority of the contracts we have are long-term contracts. They span typically three, four, five, six y ears into the future. They are Majority of the contracts are also fixed contracts, and you have an additional work coming out of those contracts. Having a large order book for us gives us a very good visibility on the development moving into the future.
We're kind of happy with having this order book, in particular, as the market conditions out there are kind of difficult or challenging, the order book is for our extent, it's a good place to be. Let's move on to next page, please. Here we take a little bit more deep dive into the market per se and what the market is growing. That should be seen in the light of if we are going into a recession or if we have a crisis, what typically happens. Moving back 10 years in time, we actually did the analysis when we moved back even further to see what really happens on the spend of our municipalities. This graph describes the spend in Sweden per se.
We have made the same analysis in Norway. We can see that we have a CAGR on the average of 4% in Sweden. We are about obviously around 6% in Norway. It's moving, or the market is growing organically by 4%-6%. If you look upon our, per se, let's say what we do, what's the proportion of that spend at the customers? It ranges between 5%-6% of the customer's total spend. It's a small proportion, and again, should we move into a recession scenario, then from our perspective, having a lower visibility from the customer side, that's a good thing to do. If you have major spending items in your budget, that's typically the ones the customer will be looking at.
What we are doing is quite a small part of their total spend and thus will fly under the radar. Next slide, please. Here we take a little bit of a deep dive into the profitability and the development of the profit margins. As mentioned, we had a very healthy growth in terms of profitability in the 4th quarter of 98%, where of the organic was 27%. That one, I know that the 68% that comes from acquisition is kind of important. They really are, and we are happy to see that number. As we have been dealing with organic part, as we can see when we come to the segment report, that we have made significant improvement in the old entities, and I'm quite happy to see that.
Both the organic companies or the, let's say, the old companies are performing in a very good way, and that the new companies that comes in are also performing in a good way. That really leads to the healthy growth of the profitability. Now, this is on the right-hand side there, you can see the trend going back for since 2020. It has been a growing trend for a number of years. We did see a setback in the 2nd and 3rd quarter, mainly due to the inflation, now the trend is continuing to trend upwards. I'm happy with the performance, I'm quite proud that we landed the year at a record high level of an EBITDA margin of 8.5%. That's a good number for us.
Next slide, please. Moving into the different segments we have, I won't do too much detail here. It's pretty much what's in the papers. In Norway, net sales grew to SEK 740 million, and that's both acquisitions and organic that contributed to that one. The EBITDA margin went down from a very high 20% to 13.4%. It's not a big concern to us, it's only the numbers game really that you're growing. We both acquired some large companies.
They still have a healthy profit, but the mixed effect really means that we went from 20%- 30%, and that's kind of expecting given the size of the total revenue we have in Norway and the numbers of companies we have in Norway at this point of time. Again, Norway is doing it. That's the strongest region we have. Then we're looking upon region Mid in Sweden. They also grew to a SEK 349 million, and that was a significant contribution from acquisitions as well as to some lesser extent, the organic part of it. They did have a very positive development on the profit margins, where we went from a negative 0.7% to a positive 7.2%. The reasons behind that one is twofold.
It's the acquisitions that contributes, it's also an organic development of the old companies, as we did have some challenges in that region the last quarter. We made some big changes that cost us a little bit of money. That's why you actually have the slightly - 0.7%. We went up against, to some extent, an easy quarter there. Having a 7.2% is a healthy profit margin for that region. Moving down south in Sweden. There, we also saw that we had a healthy organic development, where we went from SEK 161 million to SEK 191 million. That is more or less all organic growth there.
They also showed a very positive trend in terms of the organic development of the profitability, where they achieved, I would say, a very strong 13.1%. Yeah, that was a very nice development they had there. Next page, please. We have region Stockholm. To some extent, we had a positive impact on the revenue side from the acquisition of Sorex. We also saw that we had a strong contribution organically in that region, and we reach a revenue of SEK 201 million. Also here we see a very good development on the margins, where they achieve an 8.7%. Yeah, it's a strong performance.
Those who have followed us for a number of years knows the challenges we had in Stockholm, and it seems that we have finally turned a corner. We have seen for a number of quarters now that they are gradually improving, and I'm quite happy to see at what pace they are improving in region Stockholm. That's impressive done by the local management here. They have region North that actually shrunk a little bit. They had SEK 94 million previous quarter or previous year, and now they achieved SEK 91. This is mainly due to two factors. You had a very strong winter previous year. To some extent, we see the weather dependency here, but it's not the majority. It's like SEK 3 million on the revenue side.
However, we also see that the margin went down to a large extent. That is really that you're replacing winter work that to some extent is more profitable with other work that is, has less profitability in it. We also have some operational changes in one of the entities that we sort of so to say, had to deal with in the 4th quarter, and that was an extra cost associated with it. Otherwise, I don't see that as a major issue here. It's healthy, it's sound. We have a good management, so they will continue to perform. It was a hiccup to some extent.
We have region Finland, and that's quite a new region, and that means that the numbers are to some extent moving quite rapidly in different directions here. Again, we saw that the revenue came in at SEK 191 million, and that the EBITDA margin went up to a very healthy 13.1%. They are becoming more stable as you have more companies coming into the group here. That's pretty much what I had on the segment performance. Moving on to next slide here. We have four acquisitions to report upon from the quarter. Let's start with a group called Sandnes. It's a Norwegian company. They were founded back in 1972. It's a classic, I would say, groundwork company that are into water and sewage. Very skilled management.
They have an annual sales of SEK 140 million and about 50 employees in that company. Now we have quite a few companies who are into water and sewage, so that's slightly and surely becoming, I would say, a sub, section in what we do here. We have three, four companies who are specialized in that area. We do welcome them into the group. On the same page, we have UAB Stebule in Lithuania, was founded back in 1993. This is really a classic, service company. They do exactly what, Svensk Markservice and Green Landscaping used to do in the beginning. That means they take care of the parks, you have winter services, you have all the stuff that makes our cities green and looking good.
Long-term contracts, very good customer relationships, and quite an advanced company. In terms of size, it's actually one of the larger entities we have. Even though the revenue is around EUR 30 million, they do have 330 employees. You have a different cost level. Should that company be in Sweden or Finland, then you can easily double the revenue or more. It's a, I would say, quite big company, quite professional in what they are doing. They have a good management in Mr. Stanislavas and his team. We are happy to have them aboard and do welcome them being part of the group. Next slide, please. Then we have Taimisto Huutokoski Oy in Finland. Also a very stable company, was founded back in 1952.
They are in the plant nursery business, that is to some extent an odd bird in what we are doing. There's a very nice match between what this company does and the other remaining companies we have in Finland. They create actually a very good entity and a good team. Talking about team, they also have a very strong management team that impressed upon us. They are really a good contribution to our local business in Finland. We do welcome them to the group. They have an annual sales of SEK 3.5 million revenue with 30 employees. You have to keep in mind here, this is a long-term business. These guys, when they talk business, they basically plant a tree, and then it takes 10 years before you're gonna sell it.
They are really long-term in what they are doing and how they are investing and how they are managing their company, and we clearly can learn something on what they are doing. The last company is H.T. Vike AS, and that's a company run by Hans Tormod Vike. Sorry, here I got wrong my paper. It was founded back in 2012 in Norway, and it does provide. There's a market change going on here on in Norway as well as in Sweden, and that means that the traditional fuel stations are being replaced by automatic fuel stations. You have washing stations, and you have the electrification or the charging of electric vehicles. As that market is transforming, that's really the work done by Hans Tormod Vike.
They come in, and then they remove the old systems and put up the new automatic stations, and they do that all over Norway. They have an annual sales of NOK 60 million . It's a good contribution to the group, and it's actually forward-looking because we know that the electrification is coming. It will have an impact on what we're doing, and they are kind of part of that transformation. I think that was what I was about to say. I thereby hand over to Carl-Fredrik Meijer.
Thank you. Going into some numbers on the quarter. Net sales increased almost, yeah, from SEK 900 million to SEK 1.6 billion, as Johan mentioned. EBITDA almost doubled. I'm particularly satisfied with the organic EBITDA growth of 25%, meaning that the companies that come into the group, we make them better as well as the older companies. Sweden actually went from 4% margin to 6.6% margin during 2022 full year. The EBITDA margin increased to 10.2%, and we're at 8.5%, as Johan mentioned. We had a strong cash flow of SEK 215 million. I will come back to this. The order book is solid.
The earnings per share increased significantly, more than doubled during this quarter. It went to from SEK 0.6 to SEK 1.4 during the quarter. We will be talking more about earnings per share growth going forward. The leverage, the financial leverage is in line with target. It went from 2.7 at the end of the 3rd quarter to 2.4 in this quarter. We extended our credit facility by one year to 2025. Cash flow. We had a strong cash flow, SEK 250 million, up from SEK 47 million during the same quarter last year. We had a very strong growth in organically in both Q2 and Q3, and we used more working capital.
We see somewhat of a small reversal here in the 4th quarter, especially compared to last quarter, the same last year. What drove the cash flow here is that the EBITDA went SEK 80+ million. The working capital contributed to SEK 50 million compared to last year. We had SEK 476 million in the cash and cash equivalents at the end of the quarter. Cash flow bridge. Here we've illustrated the cash flow statement in a simpler way. The 1st part is the operating cash flow, and you see the SEK 215 million. We have the investment activities, where we made acquisitions. The four acquisitions, we used SEK 289 million in cash.
SEK 32 million in CapEx and other investments. The 3rd part is the financing activities, and we took new loans of SEK 326 million during the quarter. We had other financial activities such as amortization and lease payments of SEK 70 million in the quarter. We had a net cash flow of SEK 150 million during the 4th quarter. Financial leverage. We are below our target of 2.5. I usually say that I'm happy when it's between two and three, given the stable nature of this business and the cash flows. We have a strong generational cash flow from the operating activities this quarter, as I mentioned before.
This means that we actually deleverage over time from the profit and cash flow generated from the businesses. Then when we make acquisitions, the leverage temporarily goes up a little bit. Yes. Loan maturity profile, since this has become a more talked upon topic during this year.
It's kind of a hot topic.
a hot topic. We can say that we have only bank loans today. They mature end of 2025 as of now, and we have one year, one extension year that we can use. We're quite happy with this. The total maturities amount to SEK 1.7 billion today. We have one covenant in our contract, and that's the financial leverage one. That leaves plenty of headroom at 2.4. Financial targets. If we sum up the year, we grew by 53% this year compared to our target of 10%. We had a long-term, medium to long-term target of reaching 8% in EBITDA margin. We're now surpassing that to 8.5%, up from 7.4% a year ago. The leverage, talked just about that.
It's SEK 2.4, which I'm happy with. The board suggests that no dividend is given for the financial year of 2022. Over to you, Johan Nordström.
Okay. That really is the last slide then. Just to sum up there that there is a turbulence in the economy, as I did talk about it. At this point in time, we do have some readiness, of course, and we're monitoring what's going on. From a market perspective, when I talk to the subsidiaries and the customers, they are solid market conditions, and we have a very healthy backlog, as I mentioned. We're kind of looking forward into the year to come here. Also, I'm quite pleased with net sales that increased by 74%. It's a very high growth phase we are in as a company. Profit-wise, we increased almost by 100%, it was 98%.
Of course, I'm really happy with the margin development, both, as I mentioned, from acquired companies who seems to thrive and develop in our business. Also in particular that some of the less profitable companies are gradually improving their performance. I'm quite happy to see that the work they are doing are being appreciated by the customers, and they are improving their profit margins. All in all, we are presenting a strong quarter, and we are quite pleased with the development with the company and where we are at this point in time. Thank you very much, and by that, I believe we hand over and open up for questions.
If you wish to ask a question, please dial star five on your telephone keypad to enter the queue. If you wish to withdraw your question, please dial star five again on your telephone keypad. The next question comes from Henrik Jernbeck from SEB. Please go ahead.
Hello. Thank you for the presentation. You know, the region Finland performed pretty well in this quarter. It was a step up in the margins, and then now you have included Lithuania into Finland. I mean, could you talk a little bit about the recent acquisition and the new market and how that is affecting the region Finland? Is that the reason behind why we see a big step up in the margin?
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For example-example, if you have a company or, or landscaping business, they really don't have much to do in the 1st quarter, for instance. So if they break even, they're kind of happy, then they move into the high season of the, of the 2nd and 3rd quarter." Applying the rules: One. **Remove filler sounds:** "Uh," "uh," "Uh," "uh," "uh," "uh," "uh," "uh," "uh," "uh," "uh," "uh," "uh," "uh," "uh," "uh," "uh," "uh," "uh," "uh," "uh," "uh," "uh," "uh," "uh," "uh," "uh," "uh," "uh," "uh," "uh," "uh," "uh," "uh,
To some extent, what happens in the 4th quarter depends on in Finland when the winter comes because that's the end period of the landscaping groundwork that they can do. If that company comes in, in, let's say, the 2nd quarter, then they would show very good number. Then they got. When a year have passed, then you're gonna show, to some extent that they are trending downward. That's not really the case. That's really why we prefer to, before you have a critical mass, then we won't single out any companies or markets from that perspective. We don't comment exclusively on what in Lithuania. As I mentioned, we're quite happy with the company. I'm quite impressed with UAB Stebule as a company.
They do have profit margins, equal or greater to the group target.
Thank you. I mean, you make another significant increase to the backlog this quarter. Could you give a percentage split maybe between the public exposure versus the private? You said that the majority is public, have you seen any difference now in Q4? Maybe the private sector is a bit weaker.
No, not really. We have not seen that actually. We think the activity is coming both in the public sector and in the private sector, in our space. The split between the order backlog and the orders coming in is similar to what it has been before.
When we look upon the market, I believe actually...
Sorry, I can't hear you. Hello?
I'm sorry. This is the operator speaking. I think we have some technical issues. We lost connection with Green Landscaping.
Okay.
Can you hear us?
Yes. Confirm. Are you back?
Yes.
Perfect.
Yes. We can hear you.
Okay, good. Sorry about that. I don't exactly know where you lost us, but from a market perspective and the information I have, it was basically in the 3rd quarter that we did see that the customers raised some concern that they the risk of the recession, we don't know what's gonna happen. There were some talks about the postponing projects and so forth. That was in the 3rd quarter of 2022. To us, it seems like the market to some extent, moved on.
Yeah.
We don't see them that cautious anymore, and they're actually moving along with the different projects. They're not postponing projects or talking about postponing projects. That was in the 3rd quarter when I think everybody was scared what's gonna happen. Now it seems like it's more back to business as usual in the segments we are in. I know that there are other segments out there who of course have been negatively impacted by inflation and by interest rates and those areas. Where we are sitting, I don't see any major impact at this point in time.
Okay. still, I know that there's some concerns about tenant-owned this that's the.
Yeah.
Tenant-owned housing, yeah? In your private exposure, how much would you say that you're exposed to tenant-owned housing units?
Yeah. We have some exposure into that segment, and by some I can basically drill it down to one company who I know do some refurbishment and are active in that area. You are talking about a company with a revenue less than SEK 100 million . At the end of the day, you won't be able to see that on the consolidated numbers of Green Landscaping.
Okay.
it has very good impact, on our explanatory-
Yeah, they're doing great.
Yeah. At this point in time. Even if they should come to a complete standstill, which it won't. No, you won't be able to see any major impact on our business. That is simply two small companies to have any negative impact on the numbers.
Okay. My final question is regarding the Region Middle and Region Stockholm. I mean, this Q4, they performed quite well.
Yeah.
Well above the historical average. You say that it's been a long ongoing work that you've done in the last years maybe.
Yeah.
Is something that we should expect going forward, or is this just also due to some seasonality effect?
The trend is not seasonality, seasonal. The trend is what the trend is. That means that they are improving gradually their performance, both in terms of revenue, in terms of how they're taking care of the customers, in the quality they are delivering, and in the profit. That trend is underlying and I would say quite strong. I won't make any forecast in terms of what will happen into the future, but we are still very actively working in these companies to improve their profit and their margins and the quality of services they are doing. I'm quite impressed with the work. It has taken us some time in order to show the numbers, but I'm still happy with the performance. They have done a great work.
Okay. Thank you. That was all from me.
Yep. Thank you.
The next question comes from Alexander Siljeström from Pareto Securities. Please go ahead.
Good morning, Johan Nordström and Carl-Fredrik Meijer, and congrats to a really strong quarter.
Thank you. Good morning.
I have a couple of questions here. I appreciate that you don't wanna break down sort of the price and sort of the volume contribution here in the quarter. You mentioned that you are still prudent here with sort of the organic growth. Could you just say something about the market as well, or do you see a prudent competition as well as that other players don't sort of try to get a large sort of the market through aggressive pricing?
As I believe I did mention in Copenhagen that I've been around for a number of years, and we've been through a different, a couple of cycles historically. From my perspective now, I might be swearing in church here, but it's not necessarily an evil thing that things get a little bit tougher in the marketplace because that means that the competitors who are trying to buy market shares or not making enough money, they are really struggling. That means that you're basically cleaning up the market a little bit. From that perspective, I would say I'm happy with that the market conditions are tougher, but from my perspective, again, it's not necessarily an evil thing.
You can only, let's say, you can only buy market share for so long, but then when the profit margins are hurting, then you are jeopardizing your business, and that's a lesson that will be learned. From my perspective, again, it's. I don't really don't see that happening. We saw it in the beginning of 2022, when we actually saw that the inflation is coming up, should we increase our growth or should we stay with the current pricing and so forth? In a number of companies, we actually said that, no, inflation is coming and we have to show a profit, so we have to increase the prices should we lose business, which we to some extent did in some cases.
The market will adjust and the competitor will adjust to the current cost level. I think we are at the point of time right now where that adjustment has already taken place.
Okay. Very interesting. Just on the organic growth here, going forward, and then maybe especially related to the 1st half of 2023, should we sort of expect a higher organic growth here in H1 as well, and then maybe more normalized growth heading into H2? If you could give some color to that would be very helpful.
Sure. As I mentioned, I don't like to give forecasts, we typically don't do it. Of course, if we are saying that if we in a non or zero inflation marketplace would like to grow in line with the market, if the market is growing by 4% in Sweden, 6% in Norway and so forth, you should expect us to grow by 5% organically in a zero inflation or a low inflation environment. When inflation goes up significantly, then of course, that number should go up as well. From my perspective, I do expect to see a higher growth number because of the inflation. Whether that number is in 8% or 10% or 12%, I can't say, and I won't say at this point in time.
Should it be higher than 5%? Yes, it should be in my book. How high? Sorry, I can't give a number at this point in time.
Yeah, sure.
to some extent-
That's very helpful.
Yeah. To some extent, it should be higher than what you have seen last year. We also have to keep in mind that the organic growth for 2022, to some extent 2021, was also hampered by the discontinuing of non-profitable contracts and one entity in Stockholm where we discontinued the business as well. We don't have those activities going on any longer, so you should have a slightly higher organic growth because of those numbers were hampered by the improvements we did profit-wise as we held the companies back instead of. We wanted them to grow the bottom line, not the top line.
Yeah. Perfect. Perfect. That's very helpful. Just a question here around M&A for 2023. Now you're at, back at, 2.4, in pro forma leverage. Just thinking here, should we expect the M&A tempo to go down a bit compared to 2022? How are you sort of broadly thinking here without giving any sort of specific items?
We A couple of years ago, we set out on a target on how many companies that we are comfortable with, bringing into the group. That might be strange that you have a fixed scope, but that's really how many companies do we see out there? How can we do the onboarding process? We made that when everything was happy and interests were very low and we saw companies or colleagues to us out there who were easily doing 2, 3, 4x as many acquisitions as we did. We basically said, "No, this is our strategy. Let's stick to the plan." That means we are sticking to our plan, and that means we should continue to acquire companies at the pace we had done historically. We don't see any major changes in that area.
What we have seen, however, is that we, to some extent, have started to. As we are becoming a bigger company, we have also started to acquire slightly bigger companies on the average than we did historically. If you look upon 2022, that was kind of a hectic year. I believe we had 1 company that actually was planned for 2021 that fell, so say.
The closing was in January.
The closing was in January.
Yeah.
From our perspective, that was actually a 2021 year acquisition. If you move that company, it's the company in Uddevalla. If you move that one back into 2021, then you basically get the pace we are looking for.
Perfect. Perfect. That's also very helpful. I guess, just a final question here from the presentation. Very interesting here with the market, analysis, and I just wanted to double-check. Does this, also include, landscaping activities, or is this, more maintenance? What's included in that graph?
This is both investments in parks and buildings and stuff like that. It's a bit broader than our scope of services, but it's a good proxy for the market share or the money spent on our services. It includes investments. That means rebuilding and building new places and green areas and parks and stuff like that. It's only the public sector. It's a part of the public sector because it's only municipalities. I think it's a good proxy.
It's a... Yeah.
Perfect. Perfect. That's all from me. Thanks a lot, guys.
Thank you.
Thank you.
There are no more questions at this time, so I hand the conference back to the speakers for any closing comments.
Okay. Thank you everyone for listening in. As mentioned, we are satisfied with the 4th quarter performance and are looking forward into, what the year of 2023 will bring us as, we see great opportunities out there. Thank you everyone for listening in.
Thank you.