Hello and welcome everyone to Inission's Third Quarter 2024 earnings presentation. I'm Henrik Hintze and I'm an equity analyst at ABG covering the company. We'll start with a presentation from Fredrik and then we'll follow up with some Q and A after that. Please feel free to write any questions you have in the chat during the presentation and I'll make sure Fredrik answers them afterwards. All right, go ahead, Fredrik.
Thank you very much, Henrik. Good morning everyone and welcome to Inission Third Quarter Presentation. My name is Fredrik Berghel. I'm one of two co-founders and one of two principal owners of Inission, myself and Olle Hulteberg. We started this company 17 years ago and we are still both active. Myself as CEO and who is the chairman of the company. Inission Group today consists of Inission EMS contract manufacturing, industrial electronics and. Sorry, old Inission EMS. Contract manufacturing of industrial electronics. And now we also have Enedo in the group and they are an OEM company developing, marketing and selling producing power supplies. Both these business areas are operating within customized high-end, high mix, low volume industrial electronics. Today I will present our third quarter financial performance, go through the main items for the quarter.
I will also comment on our revised target and then as Henrik said, we will end the presentation with a Q&A session. So please come in with questions and we try to do our best to answer those yes. Reported sales for the quarter decreased 9.1% to SEK 468 million. However, adjusted for AXXE sales 33 million sales decreased SEK 80 million or 15.5%. A high explanation of the third quarter result. If we take the total sales value and take away the material, what I refer to as the net added value, it was actually nine million higher in the quarter compared to last year. But if we AXXE adjust those numbers, it was six million lower. Meaning really that the material share is significantly lower or our gross margin is higher.
The other way of seeing this, and that is partly due to product mix, but it's also partly due to that our price increase has caught up now and material prices have stabilized and we have caught up increasing our prices. We also have a cost level going up SEK 23 million. And if we take away those that belong to AXXE, 12 of those, we still have a higher cost level compared to last year, even though we are shrinking step by step now. And we can clearly see this in our personnel cost that is actually lower for the quarter. The total comparable units Inission to Inission is actually one million lower this quarter compared to last year. So we are shrinking towards a smaller company since we have the lower revenue.
This all in all gives an EBIT of SEK 26 million, which is then SEK 18.5 million lower than last year, and in the quarter Axxek contributed with SEK 3.7 million. Of course it is very difficult to maintain the margin here now when top line is dropping so much. We also have lower financial net cost of SEK 1.6 million, making the EPS, earnings per share, dropping from 1.4 to 0.6 SEK, and as I said last quarter is now of course really important for all the Inission units to simply adjust spending and income here, so shrinking costs is still high in focus throughout our units, some more and some less. Of course, if we zoom out a bit and look at the longer timeline, I think Inission had made a significant fantastic journey earning money and growing fast.
If we look at the LTM numbers, we are just below SEK 2.2 million or SEK 2,172,000,000 to be super exact. And we have an EBIT earning in the LTM of SEK 135 million coming out as 6.2% as a margin, meaning that we are running slightly slower compared to full year 2023. And the EBIT margin is somewhat. The EBIT and EBIT margin is somewhat lower compared to last year. 6.2% versus 7.2%. So even in this challenging market we are reasonably well. I think if we look at the year to date now or LTM numbers maintaining the profitability. If we put it really simple, we have added. We are 11 factories now and one year ago we were 10 factories. So we have added one factory cost to the program. We run slightly less in top line and that is a challenge of course.
And then we have to shrink to make this work. If we look at the EBIT. Sorry about that. I have the camera balancing on the top of the computer here. Really stupid. It had been sitting there all the while. Sorry . Back to Inission EMS. I think the EMS portion of this company is doing reasonably well. Reasonably well the first nine months. And, and also here I think it makes sense to look at the little bit longer time span also seeing where we are coming from and where we are moving. We have an organic decline in third quarter alone of 14%. And as I said just a bit before, it's. It is difficult to. To maintain the margin. So we have a margin in the quarter alone for the business area of 6.3%.
And of course then same goes for Inission for the total company we need to come down in cost. Enedo is also shipping much less volume third quarter compared to last year. SEK 23.5 million or 17% gross margin have improved also here. So the net added value is less. It's not as less as small as could be expected. That is what I wanted to say. And we are also saving backing costs. All in all, on EBITDA level we are SEK 3.7 million lower compared to last year. Cost cutting. I've also said this before, so it's a little bit of repeating, but cost cutting since we have recently shrunk in Enedo quite hard. It is of course difficult compared to Inission EMS that has been growing for a while.
Then coming down in cost is comparatively easier compared to here where we are coming closer and closer to the bone really. But I also think it's worthwhile to remembering where Enedo is coming from with many many years of losses. And then 2022 we had a break even year, had a reasonably well year last year. So if we see in that picture, I think it's quite okay anyhow. Okay, let's move to some happenings that we have had during the quarter. We have hired Elisabeth Nilsson as our new MD for Inission Innovate. Elisabeth has previously worked for Volkswagen Group in Germany. She also worked at McKinsey as McKinsey consultant. Innovate is our engineering company. And Elisabeth's focus now because we to be to make this good, we have to grow. So Elisabeth's focus is really about growing this unit within the group.
We have also hired Charlotte Johnsson as our CDO Chief Data Officer. Charlotte has a background from key positions at Ericsson, H&M Group, and Epidemic Sound. Charlotte shall maximize the potential of our data to be used in business development and strategic decision. Apart from, of course, also upgrading our IT infrastructure and IT security. That is also an important task for Charlotte in Finland. At Enedo, we have replaced Hannu. So we have a new CFO working together with Kalle there. And Tomi has been previous CFO roles and deputy managing director at LU-VE Nordics. He also have experiences from Patria in Finland and Nanocomp. We also continue the work, of course, with our changing to Nasdaq main list that is ongoing and a big project for a company like us. We have delayed the schedule somewhat.
Now we are planning to change listing early second quarter next year, as said earlier, but this is also one of the main items that we are working on, so I'm mentioning this again. We are moving our factory that belongs to business area Enedo to Inission EMS. The factory in Tunis, meaning that Enedo will be a focused product development, marketing and sales company. And on the Inission EMS side we will get a broader offering having a low cost factory close to Europe where we can offer our customer running a little bit higher series at a little bit lower cost. Changing of our financial working capital has impacted our cash flow more optically than in the real world perhaps, but still the way it's measured.
Since we have quit factoring and quit sales of invoicing, we are losing out in the quarter SEK 46 million the way cash flow is measured, and year to date we're losing out SEK 78 million. This change will result in lower financial costs and a lot less administration in our factories. We will have a clean structure now with cash credit. I think it's also. I said it last quarter, but it's also worth mentioning if we look at our cash flow year to date that repaying the COVID loan early this year impacted our year to date cash flow with SEK 82 million. Then totally we have these extraordinary negative effects here of about SEK 160 million. Yesterday I was in Malmö taking part in our grand opening of our extended factory.
We had a great celebration there with our co-workers, community officials, ribbon cutting, a lot of customers, suppliers. We also had the board of directors of Inission at the site, so we sent over to our revised targets. The board of directors of Inission have decided to revise the targets for 2024. Sales for the full year is expected to be between SEK 2.1 billion and SEK 2.2 billion as compared to the old target of SEK 2.4 billion. EBITDA margin we will expect to be above 6% as compared to the old target of 7%. Our capital structure and equity ratio is well in line with our targets. Also of course however slightly affected by this when we have stopped invoicing sales which are off-balance-sheet for our mid-term targets regarding growth and profitability we have not changed. The board of directors has not changed the targets, so we.
We still think we can reach these levels of 15% annual growth and EBITDA level of 9%. We are systematically and have been working on this for a long time, and the growth parameter has never been a challenge for us. We have been growing much faster than this throughout the years. On the other hand, the profitability level has been 5% over many years, and we have on the EMS side increased it to 8% a couple of years and 7% last 12 months. Enedo is also on the upturn here. Being a product company, we expect actually even double-digit EBITDA numbers from Enedo when we are coming through this slower economy and destocking that a lot of our customers is up to at the moment.
The key items here are we are going towards larger business units. We are working step by step. We have done a lot with central sourcing, but we are moving on further. Same goes for sales. We are on a journey on centralizing, especially hunting of new customer. We are doing more there also. This shift from organic from acquisition growth to organic growth will also affect the profitability. We see the mega trends here coming with near shoring, automation, robotization, digitalization. All of this is actually creating more need for industrial electronics. Of course mentioning electrification, it's a huge driver for electronics use. Even though we are in a recession now with lower demand, the underlying trends is still there. Absolutely. Consolidation in the market. We are acquiring company, but so do also our colleagues.
So there will be less and less players. And all of this has created a market pretty much in balance, which is beneficial. So that was all from me and really sorry for this camera debacle there. Over to you, Henrik. Do we have any questions?
Yes, we do. Let's start with some questions of my own maybe and give the listeners some time to type their own questions in the chat. You started a report order intake and order book this quarter and I can see that the order book is down almost 30% year on year. I was wondering if you could give any comment on if and how the duration of the order book has changed year on year.
Yeah, what happened really? 2020 and 2023. It was an expected shortage, especially on component level, not so much on production capacity level because normally if we have components we will be able to fulfill our customers' needs. But the shortage of components had an impact on us that we had a lot longer lead times. And then our customer booked orders, they placed their order with long, long lead times and that has shrunk back. So a big portion of the lower order book is more that it's shorter in length, not necessarily in height, but it has come down per week or per month also. But it is not as severe as it looks like because we have a much shorter order book now compared to one year ago. A big difference. And you can also see one example of that.
You can see that we were running high speed all the way, good speed all the way out first quarter out. And that was actually eating up some of that. So, too big order book, I would say. Yeah,
yeah. So, is the length of the order book now sort of in line with what it was before the shortage?
Absolutely. This is exactly what has happened. Now we have a situation. 2022 and 2023 have been exceptional in that sense. So now we are back to the old situation with normal components, three months. And then customer place orders with three months, six months, some customer also nine months. But now we have a much more normalized time horizon or time visibility, you can also call it, of the order book. Yes.
All right.
But we have also. We are now, of course, if you don't ship so much, then it's easier to get the high book-to-bill. I realize that, of course. But still we are close to one now and September was actually over one. So there is slowly, slowly, slowly there is customer coming back now and placing orders. And then some of our factories has actually, even though I just talked about shrinking some of our factories is actually hiring back now to cater for these. It's not massive, but there is a slow demand increase somewhere somehow in the market.
Okay. So you also wrote that you're reducing costs at an increased pace to match the lower sales levels. Now could you just give us some detail on how far you've gotten in this process and when we can expect your costs to reach a more appropriate level matching the current demand?
Yeah, absolutely. We have shrunk step by step, mainly when not key position, but because then we have to replace, as I just talked about, CFO for Enedo, for example, or Managing Director for Innovate, we have to replace. But other positions, if they go out, we don't replace. If we have temporary contracts, we don't prolong those. So we have sort of slowly shrunk. But now we have hard programs. Factory in Tunis, for example, there we are negotiating now and that will be severely much smaller cost base there. So we are talking about in the magnitude of one out of three in our Tunis factory. And that will affect the cost level somewhere.
First quarter, because there are some lead times and there are also it has to be done also in balance, but that and we also have other factories where we are negotiating about with the labor unions about cancellation of contracts. So it's boring and it's sad, but it has to be done. So I think the full cost impact will be. It will. You can, you will clearly see first quarter and definitely second quarter next year. Then we have adjusted to this lower cost level.
Okay, very good. So you also said that on demand it differs significantly between different customers. Did you notice any changes during third quarter with regards to which types of customers you're seeing stronger and weaker demand from?
Yes, we have those. We have had an overheated EV charger market which is almost still stone dead. We have not been very exposed to that. But those type of customer we have had there very slow. If we talk about perhaps if we call that infrastructure, we have a lot of other long term more infrastructure type structure kind of customer, you know, and they are coming back now. So those that is more perhaps on a long term investment level when their customer on the next level, if they are putting up grid systems, for example, ABB is a good customer for example of that and they are building that type of long term infrastructure project, they are coming back. Yes.
All right then let's take an audience question as well. We have an audience member asking here, how are contract manufacturers in Europe going to be affected by potential raised tariffs versus the U.S. assuming that a large part of manufacturing has ended up in Europe to get into the U.S. cheaper than if it's in Asia, for example?
It's a very good question. And of course we had a conference in Poland a couple of weeks ago where there were a lot of EMS colleagues that I was meeting. And of course if we see a China that is sort of subsidizing and boosting their manufacturing industry with a lot of subsidies and a lot of support and we see what is happening in U.S. also with this Inflation Reduction Act pouring out billions after billions of U.S. dollars to support U.S. industry, manufacturing industry. And if that means that our customer moves out of Europe, that is of course bad. That is bad news. Of course. And then as you exactly said now if we put tariffs on top of this. Yeah, it's not promising. On the other hand, I think maybe this will Europe.
The conclusion really is that Europe has put their act together in a much more stronger way supporting their industry, but also since we are also buying U.S. products, so there have to be a balance in this and hopefully the Europe, if we unite and do it good, we can actually play the game versus China versus U.S. and bargain there, so the total effect shouldn't be that severe, but of course everybody would understand that free trade, especially for a country like Sweden, free trade is, that is what we are living from, you know, competing on a free market, and if that is restrained, that is not good, yeah, but maybe also it will be over longer time, yeah, we will see. It's a very good, but also very difficult question.
Yes, definitely. All right, that seems to be all the questions from the audience. So if there are no more questions, then I thank you all for listening and leave the word to Fredrik to say some final remarks here.
Okay, thank you, everybody, for listening in and thank you, Henrik, for helping out. That was all from now. All from us now, and thank you and goodbye.