All right, hello and welcome everyone to Inission's Q4 report presentation. My name is Henric Hintze. I'm an Equity Analyst at ABG Sundal Collier, and I cover the company. With me I have Fredrik Berghel, CEO of Inission. He will walk us through the report, and I will moderate a Q&A session afterwards. If you have any questions about the presentation or the report, please type them in the chat, and I'll read them out once Fredrik is done. Please, Fredrik, go ahead.
Good morning everyone, and welcome to Inission Q4 presentation. My name is Fredrik Berghel. I am one of two co-founders and one of two principal owners of Inission. Myself and Olle Hulteberg, we started this company now almost 18 years ago, and we are still both active. I am the CEO of the company, and Olle is the chairman. Inission Group these days consists of Inission EMS, contract manufacturing of industrial electronics, and Enedo, which is a company that develops, marketing and selling and producing power supplies. Both these business areas operate with customized high-end, high-mix, low-volume industrial electronics. The agenda for today: I will go through the Q4 performance. I will talk about a few headings during the quarter. I will also comment on our targets for 2025 and midterm. As Henric said, we will end this session where you can ask questions.
Please type in your questions to Henric. Reported sales for the quarter decreased 4% to SEK 531 million. However, adjusted for AxxE, SEK 43 million, sales decreased SEK 65.7 million, or 11.9% organically. A high-level explanation of the Q4 result is that the net added value, that is when you take the revenue minus direct material, was SEK 12.5 million higher compared to last quarter. If we take away the AxxE net added value, almost SEK 23 million, we are SEK 10 million lower in net added value. The material share, both in the year and the quarter, was significantly lower compared to last year. That is partly due to product mix, but also partly due to the prices that we have been chasing in 2022 and 2023. We have caught up with that now.
We have a stable price situation for incoming material and also a stable price situation for our customer. Cost level, SEK +26 million compared to last year, of which Axxe consists of SEK 13 million, half of that money. We are trying to reduce costs, but here we obviously have a problem here, not coming down in cost enough. Direct costs, we're doing quite well on the operating units, but we have difficulty shrinking on fixed costs, white-collar people and other overhead. We are also at the moment now moving forward with the list change that I will talk about later. We have added on cost here for that project alone, and we have another one also in Enedo in the quarter, old things that are still floating up.
From the mother company point of view, we have added on services with an extra business area manager. We have sustainability, we have HR, and we have an IT and data manager employed now compared to last year. This is investments for the future to build a more robust and stronger company and more fit for the next level. That is in combination here with economy going down, revenue going down. It is bad timing, but still long term, this will be the right thing to do. Of course, as with this said, when top line is coming down so much, it is very difficult to maintain the margin. This gives an EBITDA of SEK 17.8 million, which is SEK 13.4 million lower than last year.
We have better financial net with SEK 9.1 million, which makes the EPS, earning per share, then dropping from SEK 0.6 to SEK 0.4 in the quarter. Yeah, as I said, it is really important now on our operating levels that we are shrinking, keep on shrinking. That is really the message. If we look at the yearly result, we had a yearly turnover of SEK 2.15 billion and an EBITDA of SEK 125 million. The organic sales dropped SEK 191 million compared to last year. However, this much better or much lower material share that I talked about gives that the organic gross profit drop is not that severe. Again, higher cost of SEK 39 million, AxxE adjusted, gives an EBITDA drop of these 54, and then we add on the EBITDA that AxxE contributes with, and we are SEK 37 million behind compared to last year.
If we look at the longer timeline and zoom out a little bit, we can see that we have had fantastic growth over the years. As I said, last year, we sold for SEK 2.15 billion compared to SEK 2.195 billion the year before, meaning that we are running slightly slower. With the lower EBITDA, of course, the margin is also dropping. We end up this year with a 5.8% margin, which is then, of course, clearly lower than the 7.4% last year. Also, on a high-level explanation, we have added on one factory. We have added on the unit AxxE in Halden. We have increased from 10 operating companies or factories to 11, but the top line has even come down. We are disappointed, absolutely.
Still, this is the second best year in Inission history if you measured it as top line and if you measured it at EBITDA. We shouldn't be too sad about it. If we look at the performance per business areas, I think that all in all, Inission EMS performed quite decently for the full year. Also here, I think it makes sense to draw out the timeline a little bit longer than just focusing on one quarter, even though I know that this is what this presentation is about. An organic decline here now in top line for Inission EMS of 12% makes it, of course, again, difficult to maintain the margin, which dropped to 4.7%. The same goes for the Inission EMS as for the whole company. We have the shrinking cost here. Enedo, same story really.
They are also shipping a lot less volumes compared to last year, 11%. They do not have any acquisition, so the decline here is all organic. Gross margin has also improved as for the total. The gross margin has also improved for Enedo. We are saving back in costs here. The EBITDA drop is SEK 3 million in the quarter compared to last year. We also have more difficulties to cut costs in Enedo since we have already shrunk that organization quite a bit. We have taken temporary measures in Finland. Now we have made them permanent, so we have changed there. We have also taken temporary measures in our Italian operation for Enedo to come down lower in cost.
The factory in Tunis now, as we speak, are reducing quickly now in manning, simply to adapt capacity to the needs and also, of course, to reduce the cost. Some highlights for the quarter. We held a grand opening in Malmö, our newly renovated and enlarged factory. We have a lot of colleagues from all around the country. We have a lot of customers around, and we had the officials from the community cutting ribbons, and we had a great celebration there in Malmö. That was really a highlight for the quarter. We have also, with our ambition to be listed on Nasdaq Main Market, the composition of the nominating committee was established. Olle Hulteberg representing himself in the nominating committee. Anders Hillerborg from Creades is representing my shares in the nominating committee, and Jacob Jonmyren is representing Lars Wingefors.
We are working on the bonds with Tunisia, so we visited their embassy in Stockholm with a delegation during the quarter. It is really two things that we are doing on corporate level, on headquarter level. One that we spend a lot of energy and focus on. One of those is the preparation to changing from Nasdaq First North to Nasdaq main list during the spring here. That requires, as I explained earlier, reinforcement of the organization. On top of that, we also use quite a bit of external consultants to help us through this process to upgrade, lift our documentation and our processes to a new standard.
One could think there is a lot of bureaucracy there, and some are bureaucracy, of course, but there are also a lot of good things that we are, as I said earlier, we are investing for the future by actually putting these things together in a much better way than we have done before. We were not bad before, but now we have lifted up really. That is pulling a lot of energy and a lot of focus at the time. We will be ready soon, though, so that will be, we have that behind us, and then we will focus on the future. The other big projects that we have been working on for over a year now is actually to move the organization home from our Tunis factory, from Enedo to Inission EMS.
We see a lot of potential in that. One is that Enedo will be a focused developing, marketing, sales company, really a product company, and leave the production to production professionals, and those will be Inission EMS. The other positive thing about this is that we will have a wider offering for our EMS customers. We have already had a few customer visits in Tunis together with our sales organization. In this project, there are a lot of items all the way from ERP system to IT environment, but also to upgrade the factory in appearance. The customer that is coming there now, they are impressed. We have a European standard EMS factory now in Tunis with a totally different cost level. We have made a few quotes, and yeah, we are really looking forward to this. It's a good opportunity.
About our financial targets, the Board of Inission has decided the targets for 2025. The full year revenue expected to be SEK 2.2 billion compared to the revenue for 2024 that was SEK 2.15 billion. EBITDA margin, we expect to be above 6% to be compared with the actual of 5.8% last year. Our idea about net debt over EBITDA is less than 2.5. Here, our covenant vis-à-vis our bank is 3. We have quite a bit of headroom between our target and the bank's demands here. We have an equity ratio of about 30%. Those are new for 2025. The targets for midterm, they are not changed.
We are targeting for an annual revenue growth of 15%, where we really want to focus on organic growth, invest in sales and do better there so that we have the main portion, two-thirds of those 15% would be organic growth. We will top up with acquisitions. Regarding the growth, we have never grown less than 50% if you measure us almost over any longer time span backwards. When it comes to profitability, we see clearly from our larger colleagues that two digits EBIT level is not impossible, and we have factories our own or companies, daughter companies of our own that is doing double digit EBITDA. That is about to fine-tune this and trim this, and we will get there. I have talked about this many times, and we have an environment with nearshoring, regionalization, automation, robotization, digitalization, Internet of Things.
There are a lot of mega trends here that is actually requiring industrial electronics. We think we are in the right business, really. All together, we have a balance in the market here, even though those of you that are in the sector would know that some of our colleagues are building new factories, and we can see about that where capacity is going to meet the needs. At the moment, I think at least the bigger players here, they are wise enough not to trash the market by just supplying cheap or below cost here. They earn decent money, and I think they will keep on doing that. We also have the consolidation in the market still. It is very, very fragmented. There are a lot of companies to be acquired, and there are a movement here.
When it comes to Enedo, it's a totally different story, much smaller, much more focused. Here we really have to adapt cost to the income and then build from there. Their products are highly rated from the customer, service level, quality level, and performance. We have good hopes that Enedo, being a product company, should be able to be higher in profit compared to a contract manufacturing company. A few takeaways before I end this, and we move to the Q&A session. Q4 was slow in sales, as expected. We are still shrinking in cost, and we have a little bit further to go. Our projection is that we should be able to see the full effect of this Q2 this year. We had a strong order intake in the quarter. We have a book-to-bill ratio of 1.4.
We have a clear positive trend all the way from July onwards now. We have added onto our order backlog. There will be a new life after this headwind. We are positive there. We also had a strong cash flow in the quarter. Very good in the quarter, but also if you look at the yearly numbers, it does not look so impressive with SEK 7 million in cash flow. One has to remember that we paid back the COVID loan there of SEK 82 million. We have also changed the financial structure by taking out sales of invoices that cost us about SEK 77 million in cash flow. All in all, if you adjust back from there, we have a cash flow of SEK 166 million for the full year. We are proud of that.
We also decided about dividend at the board meeting yesterday evening or night. We will pay out dividend, SEK 1 per share. That was all from me. Have we got any questions, Henric?
Yes, I'll start off with some questions of my own. If our listeners type any questions in the chat, I'll read them out too. First, looking at the order intake, that was quite a sharp recovery going all the way to 1.4 times book-to-bill. Could you tell us anything more about what drove this among your customers and how you expect this to develop going forward?
It's quite wide, but there are some bigger projects that are included in this, and they make an impact. We have got sort of annual volumes during the autumn here, but that we normally also get. We get these frame orders.
We have a new business, and especially in Norway, they are doing well. I mean, all our factories are differently loaded here, but our Norwegian factory in Trondheim, they are the only one that is more or less fully booked for 2024. They have got quite a few interesting substantial orders. Also, the total bulk of our customers are putting back orders again. If we talk about the Inission portion of the company, if we take the Inission EMS, if we take the Enedo side, it is still slower. There you can see a trend from sort of the middle of the year towards a little bit up and down, but it is trending upwards. They have more difficulties in actually getting a good order flow again. Yes?
Yes. We also got a follow-up question on this from the audience.
Could you comment on how the order situation has developed so far in Q1 compared to Q4? Maybe also how does the order situation differ between Inission and Enedo?
Enedo, yeah, it looks a little bit different in that sense that Enedo has a, they tend to have a little bit longer order book. They have more months covered into the future. It varies also for Inission. Some of the factories, they are running with quite a short order horizon, a few weeks only in our sheet metal factories. They actually sell more the same month than they have when compared where they start in orders. It varies in that sense. Sorry, I missed the first.
The other question was, how has the order situation developed so far in Q1?
Yeah, I would be, yeah, no bigger change.
Since this is only those listening here now, I would not like to actually give new numbers here that are not officially spread. I would be a little bit careful there. There are no signs that there will be a drop here. Absolutely not. Keep on going. Keep on going. I would not expect 1.4 to continue the rest of the year, though. I think we have recovered back a little bit. We really think that we will be above one going forward. That is really what we think. Yes.
All right. All right. Looking at this quarter's results, there were quite a few one-offs, first off the listing change costs of SEK 4.8 million. Could you give any comment on what additional costs we should expect in H1 until the listing change is concluded?
I think external costs will be Q1, Q2 now, same magnitude, SEK 4.5 million per quarter. That is the budget per quarter. Most of that will be in quarter one because we hope to be done with this mid-quarter two. There will be SEK 4.5 million that will be spread over Q1 and Q2. That would be my projection. We have got the bulk of the invoices now, so we are really on the end of this project. Yes.
All right. Secondly,
as I said earlier here now, when we talk about this, that is external costs. That is invoices from auditing companies and law firms and things like that. We have our own add-on costs where we have actually, as I tried to explain, reinforced the organization to be able to do this.
To be honest, a lot of these advisors, they think even though we have reinforced the organization, that we are quite thin in the headquarter here. I also like it to be thin, but we can't do it with nothing. It is a balance point here. We have put on a few persons here now that is really crucial and essential to be able to do this. With the old organization that we had one year ago, we wouldn't have been able to pass a list change. It would have been impossible, actually. These extra IT, HR, financial persons that we have added on, you can see them in the cost here for salaries partly. Yeah.
Yeah. In Enedo, you had SEK 3.5 million for retroactive payroll tax, if I remember correctly. Could you just explain what happened? Yeah.
We have had a long fight and a long discussion with both our auditing company and also the tax authorities in June. That is how we should compute pensions. One auditing company is saying this. We have other experts that are arguing for that, and that has been ongoing. In order to clean it up now, we have put reservations there for the worst scenario. This is a matter of we are reserving pension funds, and that is when and how these people will leave. Whether we are actually going to pay that out or not, no one knows yet. We have reserved the full amount now for this. That is what we have done. The tax authorities found this.
They came to us and said, "Hey, we think you should have this and that in the books." You could call it cleaned up. Yeah. It comes out when you see in the cost scheme here in our P&L, it comes out as salaries. It is not salaries. It is provisions for maybe pensions in the future.
Yeah. All right. Finally, there were some inventory write-downs. Again, if I remember correctly, you had those in Q4 last year in Enedo as well. Could you just tell us about this? Is this something that you think will be a recurring thing, or how frequently have you had to do this in the past?
We put it out here because it is extraordinary. You could also—and we really do not like to talk about adjusted results at Inission. You can refer to it also as cost of doing business.
We have bought material that we do not have any use for. Of course, we have a structure, and we have processes to make sure that our stock is correctly valued. Maybe we have not been good enough to implement those things at Enedo yet, but we will get closer and closer, of course. I think we should be there now. It can be issues. We have a big stock, and we have agreements with customers because it is their stock, really. We do not need any of this material. It is the customer's stock that we cater for them. There can still be issues because that has happened to us in the history that customers have asked us to buy too much, and then we have paid for it. We have it in our houses, and it can be issues.
I will not promise that we will never do any stock write-off in the future. I think we should have a good situation now, at least a lot better situation. Yes.
All right. Looking at the guidance for 2025, the 6% Adjusted EBITDA margin target seems a bit conservative to me, given that at least with the adjustments I have made for 2024, you were already above 6%. Should we not expect any significant margin expansion in 2025? If so, when do you think you will start making progress towards the medium-term target of 9%?
I agree with you. It is conservative because we really want to meet the target. It is a matter of volume here. It is a matter of volume.
If it stays slow or even worse, if it keeps on shrinking and we are chasing the margin here now by cost cutting, then 6% will be a challenge. We have been conservative. We put it there because that is really what we think we should achieve. We have a decent order book. We have about half of what we would sell next year. We already have an order backlog over a long time, of course, but still. If volume comes back as we predict second half of the year, we should be able to achieve over that. If volume comes back here and customers start to order and we can ship better, we will have a rapid improvement if volume comes back. This will be easy. Yes, we are careful and we are cautious about this guiding.
All right.
A question from the audience that is kind of connected to this. Have you lost any key customers on the Enedo side of things considering the guidance of further decreasing revenue? Are you still hoping to keep a margin of 3%-4% for Enedo, as mentioned during the last presentation? If you go below that, perform further cost cuts?
No, we have lost severe volumes to our main customers within Enedo. They are keep on destocking. We have an idea of that on the total level, general destocking has reached its peak now and should get back to normal. A few of our bigger customers on Enedo, when we talk to them, no, they have not left us, but they buy a lot less due to the case that they still have too much products on the shelf.
Yes, as I said earlier, we have taken temporary measurements to reduce cost within Enedo. Now we have reached a point here. If we do not see that orders are coming back, in Finland, in the Finland part of Enedo, we have already taken permanent actions. Also, the factory now goes from 300 + to 200 + people in Tunis. We are reducing in order to adapt capacity to requirements or to the need here. Cost will come down also. We are behind in schedule. I am sorry to say that, but we will get there. We will get there.
All right.
Looking at the cost savings, which you say will have full effect from Q2, and just connecting that a bit to the margin guidance, could you give us some more details on the cost-cutting measures and how they jive with the relatively conservative margin guidance?
Yeah, we are reducing, as I said already. Factory in Tunis is shrinking severely, really quite a bit.
Yes, it's mainly Enedo or is there also Finland?
No, no, no. We are reducing in Finland. We are also reducing staff right now. In Estonia, we are reducing staff. We have also other factories that have to come down in cost. One could think that you are always, if we only had a little bit more volume, we should be able to be profitable. We are shipping for SEK 2.15 billion. You can't say that we are too small to earn money.
That is not the case. It is a matter of when we were growing fast, we were putting on headcount and we were putting on cost. When it comes back again, it hurts and it is difficult and it takes time. We have to shrink. The contradiction there is, as I also already said, the central organization is swallowing or beefing up a little bit. If the daughter companies here would perform as our best daughter companies, that would be a non-issue. The listing process costs of SEK 5 million + SEK 5 million or other things that we are reinforcing the central organization. It will be a non-issue. Now that puts a stone on the burden. I would not know that. That is an English expression, but still. Keep on shrinking.
All right.
Finally from me, if the audience has any more questions, please type them out now. Finally from me, given the shift away from factoring, what kind of net working capital to sales level should we be expecting going forward? Do you feel that you're currently at a reasonable level there?
I think if we are, it's a little bit new times though. I think it also varies among the factories. If we should trim down, we are close to 30% over invoice. We have been running factories with half of that stock level. There is a lot of net working capital to be taken out if we would be really, really successful. With that said, we also have a little bit of a new world where this just-in-time idea has sort of bounced against a few rocks.
Maybe you should have a little bit more on the shelves in order to be able to give service and also in order to keep your production going. It is a balance act. My forecast would be that we should be able to shrink at least another SEK 100 million given the same size of the company, at least another SEK 100 million, especially in stock level. Yes. It is like the margin. It is easier said than done. It is absolutely possible. It is absolutely possible. It is within the projects that the business areas and the daughter companies are working on. Yes.
All right. That is all for me. It seems the audience has no other questions either. Thanks a lot from me and everyone for listening. I will hand it over to you, Fredrik, for any final remarks.
Yes. Thank you, everyone, for looking in.
We end the session hereby. Thank you very much.
Take care.