Welcome to the ITAB conference call. For the first 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. I will hand the conference over to the CEO, Andréas Elgaard, CFO Ulrika Bergmo Sköld. Please go ahead.
A very warm welcome to this presentation of ITAB's year-end report 2022. My name is Mats Karlqvist, I'm the Head of Investor Relations at ITAB. We will end the presentation with a Q&A session where you can ask your questions in the conference call or if you want to submit them via the webcast, we will read them out in the call. The presentation, including the Q&A session, is recorded and will be available at our website afterwards. With that, I am delighted to hand over to today's speakers, Andréas Elgaard and Ulrika Bergmo Sköld. Go ahead, Andréas.
Thank you very much, Mats. I would do as we usually do, that I will focus a little bit on, telling a story about who we are and, the current situation of the company before handing over to Ulrika, who will go through the numbers, and then I will come back and do a wrap-up with the main takeaways from the year-end report. By that, I start by just kind of highlighting that ITAB, we have many shapes and faces, and we are really, what we create together with our customers. Depending on if it is a pharmacy customer, or a electronic card dealer or, a grocery retailer, our outcome looks very different depending on the situation of the customer and depending on, the level of engagement that we go in with.
We are today one of the three largest companies in Europe. We work in a very fragmented industry that is really ripe for consolidation. Far, historically, it has been, to a very large extent, ITAB that led the consolidation. We intend to do that also going forward. Today, we say that we are a leader in Europe, and that we have a global reach. We help customers in all parts of the world, on all continents, but the majority of our business is concentrated to Europe. Grocery is our largest customer segment by far. It is a very stable customer segment that regardless of what's going on in the world around us, usually grocery is quite stable. Home improvement is our second largest leg.
Here we work with both home furnishing and do-it-yourself type of customers. The third leg, and that's very, we're happy to see that the fashion segment have started to grow again during this year for us. That's been a part of the business that has been struggling more during the last couple of years. In the other segment, it's quite a big part of our sales. I would maybe shout out things like pharmacy customers, home electronic customers, restaurants, also hotels, petrol stations are there. Pharmacy is very important and is also a very stable business for us. ITAB of today, we are, we'd like to be a strategic partner to our retailers and together with them then co-create experiences that drive outcomes that are truly measurable and that creates a clear return on investment for our customers.
We do everything, basically for them, but depending on their wishes, our engagement looks very different. We can offer services all from designing concepts to manufacturing, installation, taking care of the aftercare, and so on. As I mentioned before, we are supporting, I would say, most retailing sectors with, of course, the focusing on yourself. Today our activities span 15 production facilities. We have approximately 2,900 employees in across 24 countries. I want to shout out and highlight that in March 2022, we took a quite early decision to exit all our activity in Russia, and this was communicated in March. As of Q3, we have separated also Russia from our reporting. By that, I just want to highlight a little bit, that that's a little bit about ITAB.
We, in our communication, we often talk about something called One ITAB. One ITAB represents both our transformation plan and strategy. So it's all about taking, driving the best out of the many faces of ITAB, delivering the synergies that are embedded within us and using the best practice. That's what our strategy is all about. It's built on an outside-in view, on understanding the consumer dynamics and the changes in consumer expectations and consumer behaviors, how that impacts retail.
The dilemmas that retailers have today is very much guided by expectations from customers and their changing behavior, sometimes posing challenges for retailers that they need to address. Basically, you could say that retailers today are under quite a heavy cost pressure, and they need to invest more than before in order to live up to the consumers' expectations. Those retailers that are good at managing this, they are really, really successful, and those that are struggling are often the ones that we're reading about in the newspapers.
You could say for all of our industry and for us then, it means that we need to be much more in tune with understanding consumer changes and consumer behavioral changes, how that impacts our retailers, and how we then can help them to deliver better experiences, more efficient solutions, and more sustainable solutions, and to be more agile in our offering, in our capabilities. That's really what our strategy is built on. If you break down the strategy, we have seven strategic priorities. They are listed here, and there's more to read and videos to look at at itabgroup.com or itab.com. Just to kind of highlight, Before this strategy, we came from several years before the pandemic that were kind of where ITAB's performance was slowly deteriorating.
We were in a situation where we had to stabilize our financial position, we had to reengineer our cost structure, we need to make sure that we were focusing on the right things to drive the right value for all our stakeholders and for our customers. That phase was quite cumbersome, and it happened during, I would say, the most difficult of circumstances during the pandemic period. We managed to go through that in a really good way, and during 2022, we finalized that phase of our strategy execution. We have already started the second phase, that is to build new capabilities and invest in new competence, new abilities across the group.
We are modernizing our IT, we're modernizing our ways of working, and we're really creating one tone of voice and one go-to-market model and one operating model for the company. Much more focused on driving excellence and continuous improvements. All of this, what it's all canvassed around is to simplify ITAB and make us more scalable. When we push the accelerator and wants to grow faster, we do that on a scalable base, which is really, really important in order to improve the profitability. Our focus in the strategy is really to be, as I mentioned before, to be in tune with the changes in consumer demand and how that impacts retailers. To be relevant, we need to make sure that whatever we do, whatever solutions we develop together with our customers, they need to be really outcome-based.
That means that the value needs to be measurable by the retailer themselves, and it needs to be really, helping them to either reach the desired consumer brand experience or, and increase conversion and sales, improve efficiencies and service, and then the operational cost, in order to solve the dilemma that retailers need to change faster, invest more, and at the same time, reduce the cost of operations. That's what we're helping them with, and it's really, paying off for us so far, despite, the last couple of years that has been quite disruptive markets and volatile market conditions.
Basically, if you want to understand what ITAB is doing today, we are mainly influencing the consumer journey at a retailer, the experience that consumers have throughout that journey, and then we also influence how the retailer is operating their stores and sometimes the whole chain. That's really what we are focusing on today. We do that with our solutions on interiors, lighting, retail technology, and everything in between. Of course, there are some service components in that as well today. Going forward into the future, we believe that we will continue to be relevant to do to influence the consumer journey and the retail operations, but we also believe that we need to influence more of the value chain perspective or of our retailers and of our retailers' suppliers.
The service element, the data element, smarter stores, more flexible stores, and then I would say connected stores where insights can be driven out of physical retail, leveraged online, vice versa, will become super important. The retailer can reduce costs across the value chain in order to be able to invest and meet the changing consumer demands. With one word or one phrase, when we sum up our strategy, it's all about rethinking retail and doing that together. Together across ITAB, that's the One ITAB part. Together with our suppliers, of course, together with our customers, and that we together develop solutions that will help us to meet the ever-changing demands of today's consumers. Far of our strategy execution has been, I would say, everything we have promised, we have delivered on.
We are kind of putting a green mark on the stabilize phase, where we have started to simplify ITAB. The amplification will come once we have built and invested in new capabilities. It's all about turning us from a more product-oriented company to a solution-oriented company. It's about investing more in technology and more in services, but it's also about driving internal efficiency and internal excellence. We're investing in all of these areas and building new capabilities. It's all kind of purposed to help ITAB grow. We have targets that we are going to focus on organic growth, but also to drive use strategic acquisitions as a part to accelerate our transformation. Our main focus there when it comes to I would say acquisitions in the future is to...
There could be some acquisitions that are more traditional, shop fitting companies similar to ITAB, but there can also be most likely more service-oriented companies and technology-oriented companies. That's what we are focusing on, and the market right now is, there's a lot of opportunities out there. We hope that we will be able to capitalize on that. Of course, there are some threats as well where we really need to focus, and that is to be good in managing the inflation economy, good in making sure that we use our capital to, in a much more efficient way.
We have had a lot of focus on that, and we have to continue to focus on it because for many leaders, many suppliers, many customers, there is not, there is still some immaturity in how to deal with this type of economy and this type of market conditions. That's something that we all need to be really focused on in order to mitigate potential risks. Earlier in the year, we have communicated our financial targets. We have set out to have a target that we are going to grow between 4% and 8% annually, and it should be a mix of acquisitions and organic growth.
We have said that we are aiming to reach an EBIT margin between 7% and 9% over a business cycle, and that we want to have a cash conversion ratio above 80%. To that, we have a fourth financial target that we brought with us from before, and that is to be able to give dividends and to do that at the minimum of 30% of the profit after tax. I would say that we are well on our way. We have kind of I'm just showing here on this slide the movement from pre-pandemic situation then over the pandemic COVID years into what we sum up in 2022, and that is that we have strengthened our grocery position.
I think we strengthened that early on during the end of 2020 and during 2021. This year, other sectors have started to strengthen themselves, so the ratio has gone down a little bit, but we have clearly strengthened our grocery position, which is super good because it's part of our business and also where we are, I would say, leading. Our ratio of retail technology, things like checkouts, gates and guidance, smart solutions, digital solutions, that has grown from 22% of total turnover to 28%, which is very good and also shows the movement that we're on. During this period, we have significantly reduced our debt, and I just want to point out that in this number here, we talk about the net debt including leasing.
We've gone from SEK 2.5 billion down to SEK 1.1 billion, and the net debt, if we exclude leasing, is just below SEK 400 million. During the period, we have improved our profitability. The EBIT margin is now at 5.9%, so we are approaching our targets of 7%-9%. If we should exclude the adjustments that were done during the year, we would be higher than 5.9%. By that, I hand over to Ulrika to go through some of the numbers.
Yes. Good day, everybody. I will do a short summary of the financials. If we look and summarize the full year of 2022, ITAB grow net sales with 13% and our adjusted EBIT result with 16% despite a challenging 2022. We have continuously worked with price adjustments to balance increased cost and inflation, and we also had a beneficial product mix with increased sales of our technical solutions mainly in the second half of the year. Also during the second half of the year, operating cash flow was significantly improved, where our actions to reduce stock levels and normalize the level of operating capital started to materialize.
As Andréas mentioned earlier, as of the interim report for the third quarter 2022, ITAB's Russian operations are reported as discontinued operations in accordance with IFRS 5. Full-year sales amounted to 13%, and if we look at the currency-adjusted organic growth, it was 8%, which mainly is driven by price increases. We see increased volumes in retail tech and lighting areas during the year. In the fourth quarter, we saw a decrease in sales with negative organic growth. This was mainly driven by the grocery sector, where the comparable quarter in 2021 was very strong. Growth within the fashion sector showed the strongest growth coming from very low levels in 2021. Over the last years, grocery sector is our fastest growing sector.
In the fourth quarter, ITAB's adjusted EBIT was somewhat behind the last year's strong result, where we in 2022 had a significantly stronger third quarter. Full year adjusted EBIT was SEK 443 million, and the reported EBIT of SEK 403 million in 2022 was significantly stronger than last year. This was mainly due to the more limited impact of non-recurring costs as we closed the first part of the One ITAB transformation initiatives during the second quarter. Results have been positively impacted by price increases implemented during the year, initiatives to reduce costs, and we are now in more in balance with the significant cost increases in the market. Our increased sales in retail technology and lighting had a positive impact on our pro-product mix and margins.
Uncertainties, we are still affected by uncertainties in the world, and in short terms, we experience that some customers are a bit hesitant towards commitment in investments. However, our underlying trend is continuously improving as we go further into execution of strategy. Cash flow in the second half of the year turned positive with a strong cash flow of SEK 469 million in the fourth quarter. In the beginning of the year, we had negative impact from increasing inventories with the aim of serving our customers despite supply chain disturbances and also price increases affected our inventory values. We have implemented actions to reduce our working capital, and in the second half of the year, our efforts started to materialize, and we can now see, re-reduced inventory levels.
In addition, during the fourth quarter, a large portion of the accounts receivables built up from the really strong third quarter sales were settled, and we also have a seasonal decline in sales during the later part of the fourth quarter. Our focus and efforts to reduce operating capital will continue, and we aim to continue to further increase our capital efficiency. By that, I hand over to you, Andréas, to summarize our main takeaways.
Thank you. Just to kind of highlight then that, of course, continuous price increases and our cost saving efforts that we've been driving that have strengthened our net revenue and the profit for 2022. I'd like to remind everybody that in the beginning of the year, we were struggling a little bit to catch up because the wave of inflation and the quite steep increases in energy and in material, et cetera, it always take some time before you can manage to transfer those increases to your customers or according to the market pricing, et cetera. We've caught up and have improved throughout the year. We have sales growth in most of our markets and most of our customer groups during 2022, which is something to highlight.
We are in a better balance now. When it comes to price increase to mitigate inflation, we have also seen that our product and customer mix have been more favorable in the second half of the year versus the first half of the year. Like I highlighted the strong cash flow, I don't need to do that anymore, but it's very happy to see that all the hard work is paying off and that we are improving our financial position. Yeah, I would say that all our financial targets, we're moving in the right direction. We are improving all of them, which is really, really good.
Of course, at the end of this slide, the financial targets of dividends, we're happy to let the market know that the board is suggesting to the annual general meeting that we should give out the dividend of SEK 0.50 per ordinary share in 2022. We acquired a company that maybe flew a little bit under the radar in the beginning of the year because there was so much other things happening in the world around us, but that has been really positive. Checkmat in Finland, which is a retail technology company mainly active in the Nordic region, I would say. We will continue to focus on improving our margin.
We believe that that is essential in order to mitigate a market that is more volatile than what we're used to from before the pandemic years. Now we're getting quite used to navigating new disruptions and at the same time transform and perform. we just need to stay really, really focused and be agile when we need to adapt. we are preparing ourselves for doing additional acquisition. That's just good for you guys to know that we are really focused on these things. The world around us is really uncertain, and it's hard for anyone. There's very few people that have a crystal ball that can help you to give clarity on what's ahead of us.
At the same time, I would like to say that I'm super proud over how ITAB have managed the last couple of years, where challenge after challenge has been thrown at the organization, and the teams have really stepped up and done a tremendous work. By that, I would say that we wrap up this presentation, and we open 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 Karl-Johan Bonnevier from DNB Markets. Please go ahead.
Good morning, Andréas, Ulrika, and Mats. Good move in technology there. Good to see that percentage moving in the right direction for and I guess it's a key priority for you to, as part of your overall strategy. Could you elaborate a little also on maybe the interior side and the light side, what's happened and how that mix has changed and what is driving those segments for you at this stage?
Yeah. I mean, we usually don't communicate W e don't have any segment reporting like that. we don't communicate those numbers. W e can share that during the year, lighting has, seen quite good growth. We have also communicated through releases some of our, some of our successes there. I mean, we are... It's not everybody that knows that, but we are one of the largest, retail lighting companies in Europe, and we are, we're having very efficient solutions, that save a lot of energy, so that has been attractive throughout the year. The focus for the lighting business is really to do... I mean, before it was really focused on building new stores.
Today, it's all about retrofitting, so going in, often during nighttime, and taking out old luminaires and replacing with new modern ones. We have seen a trend also to replace the first generation of LED with the most modern and efficient LED solutions that are out there today. Here, this is an area where we are leading, both in the service part and in the energy efficiency part and in retail lighting. Retail lighting has grown throughout the year. I would say, interiors was probably the area that grew the most in the early on and has been more, more stable through this year.
I would say maybe even slowing down a little bit, which also affects the product mix, and that has been positive in the second half of the year. I don't know if that answers your question, but I would say that's what we could say at this moment, I think.
No, that's a good indication. On the interior side, I guess a lot of the factory consolidation that you've been working on has, I guess has improved that positioning for you. Is there a lot still to do and come in that sense to optimize the interior platform?
I would say that, I mean, our interiors are more bespoke solutions. The level of bespoke is always growing, and it's natural because retailers wants to be unique, and they want to have their personal consumer experience kind of, enhancing their brand desires. Interior sometimes sounds a bit. For some people, it sounds a bit maybe dull, et cetera, but those who are in the industry knows that there is nothing else that changes or emphasizes or really materializes a brand's ambitions. Interiors is really what is driving the whole, I would say, the majority of the retail experience in stores. It is a very important area, and it gives us, I would say, the right to play. When it comes to consolidation, we don't have...
We have not communicated. We don't have any major plans to do further consolidations on the fixed site. There could always be things that we do in order to optimize, but at the moment, there are no major restructuring costs planned. Those things we have behind us. Going forward, of course, we are going to drive excellence in our operations. We're going to optimize, and there could be some small changes here and there, but that we see as more as part of normal business and continuous improvement.
Finally, on technology, it seems like you've grown that business, maybe around 40% this year or something like that. What are the solutions that the retailers are most interested in at this stage?
I would say that, I mean, there are many things. Basically, the overarching ambitions is really to reduce operational or to increase regional efficiency. This year was a really big focus, and I think it's also a focus in the coming years, is to help retailers to reduce shrinkage or product loss or theft. Because there is a trend, I would say that the product loss sales are increasing for retailers. Probably also due to the tougher economic climate. We have some really, really smart solutions there that are very non-intrusive, that don't disrupt the consumer experience. On the other hand, they actually enhance it.
There is less hassle, less interruptions, and at the same time, it's smart solutions that the retailer really can leverage, and they can collect data and when they need to do, I would say, more to interfere a little bit with the consumers, then it's based on facts and not on kind of random random interference. We have some really, really smart solutions that many retailers have understood and we are probably going to see that success continuing going forward as well.
Excellent. Looking at your sales during 2022, I guess you started the year talking more about component shortages and the impact of that coming up to the end of the year. Are there still some legacy impacts from that or can you deliver what the clients ask you basically at this stage?
I would say we are in a much more. It's not like it was before. I mean, there's still some disruptions, but compared to the situation we had in 2021 and beginning of 2022, it's, we're almost in back to normal. I would say that the reason for why we are in that type of situation is of course a lot of hard work. There's still some issues out in the market and not always that we are behind the issues or involved in the issues. There could be other parts of the, of a retailer solution that is supplied by other customers where it's difficult to get the right electronics, et cetera.
For our sake, we are in a really good situation and have not experienced for quite some time now any problems in supplying our customers and our lead times are really back to normal, I would say. In order to keep that level up, you need to be very proactive. You need to work with forecasting. You need to be tight to your customers. You need to have strong dialogue because it doesn't happen by itself. Availability is something you need to work hard for to achieve.
Good to hear. Good to hear. Just want to dig a little on the 2023 outlook as well. Obviously uncertain market out there. Have you seen that your, say, the backlog you have that clients have been, say, pulling back on taking deliveries and these kind of things that you're seeing into your own operation at this stage? Or it's just a, say, a cautionary statement that there's a lot of uncertainty out there?
I would say if you go back and check our previous Q reports, we have been. Maybe I'm a little bit defensive, but we have been trying to be cautious in the outlook in order to set expectations in the right way. Because I mean, we all know how disruptive the world is right now. So I would say it's more a word of caution and that things are not. You cannot extrapolate anymore what will happen in the future. So I would say that then when it comes to the order stock, I would say that, one, and we saw a trend that consumers, customers were really worried if they were going to get their goods in time for their store openings or for their projects, et cetera.
We saw maybe that there was a trend of placing orders further into the future. When supply capabilities have returned to normal, then also the order behavior is a little bit like it was before, that orders come with shorter lead times. I would say that's one of the things that we are seeing right now. I would say that's probably the thing I can say at this moment.
Thank you. Finally, just looking at your focus on the improving the profit margin, obviously you have driven quite a big move on the OpEx side. Going forward, do you see this is more related to say to gross margin management than OpEx management? Or will that play out?
I would say that we will have to work on all aspects. We need to work on, I would say efficiency in our process, in our operations, efficiency in our sales. We need to work on gross margin on customers and on products. We need to make sure that we develop new generations of products that are more efficient for us to supply and also more relevant. I would say that ITAB is in a phase where we're working on many things at the same time, and I think that's how it should be. We are, we have that kind of the re-engineering part is really behind us, and now it's more continuous improvement.
That's, we need to have our focus on capital continuously, and we need to have our focus on gross margin continuously. That's really. I'm more focused on the bottom line than the top, the top line I'm sure will sort itself out if we are, if we have the right performance. We have the right financial stability. We are also excited about the opportunities of maybe, continuing to acquire companies, that can further accelerate our transformation. That's a focus that we're having, but we have also been doing that during these years. We have made two acquisitions that have turned out really well for us, and we're probably going to continue to do that if the opportunity is given.
Sounds promising, sounds promising. Ulrika, just one question. You mentioned there was maybe more opportunities to release working capital. Could you just help me with rephrasing that again so I understand the dynamics?
As Andréas also mentioned, we are continuously having a big focus on our operating capital because we believe that mainly in the inventory, we can reach further efficiency to reduce and balance our inventories in a better way.
Excellent. Thank you very much, and good luck out there.
Thank you.
Thank you.
As a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, please dial star five on your telephone keypad. There are no more questions at this time. I hand the conference back to the speakers for any closing comments.
We have received a couple of questions via the webcast. The first one comes from Vetle Forsland, and the question is, would you agree that ITAB is an investment CapEx cost for retailers or more an OpEx cost for retailers?
I mean, it all depends on how the solution looks like, usually you could say that we are helping them to reduce their OpEx. Very often that's what the end result of our solutions is doing. I believe that in some aspects, there is interest in, I would say, financing solutions and so on. If you take maybe a more efficient lighting solution, the payback is really, really fast. If there is an intelligent financing solution, they could get the savings from day one, they don't have the full CapEx. This market is going to mature, I think, as retailers are needing to be more, they also need to be more aware of how they manage their capital.
That's what we can see, that, everybody is really evaluating how to manage their capital due to the increasing cost of capital. We are basically helping our customers with both. We are not kind of a either/or company. We like the ambiguity of doing both.
From their perspective, would you say that when they consider making investments in ITAB solutions, that they see us as a CapEx cost or an OpEx cost?
It is, I mean, sometimes it's CapEx, sometimes it's quite seldom an OpEx cost. It's usually an OpEx saving. Yeah, I think it's a version of my sense.
Yeah. Yeah. We have another question here from Jerker Danielsson, and it's very much in line with a couple of the questions is, that we got from Karl-Johan as well. Which solutions you provide in the technology segment and which have performed especially well during the year? How large share of the turnover comes from retail lighting? I don't know if you have any more comments on that or...
I don't have any more comments on the share, but I mean, if I elaborate a little bit on one of the solutions where we see a quite a big success throughout the year, that is on, we have some very smart gate solutions that open automatically if the consumer has done the payment. And how we know that they have done the payment is that our solutions is tracking the behavior of the consumer, and it's also connected to the self-checkout solution or the.
It's if you have behaved in the right, in the appropriate way, if the sensors that are built into the checkout solutions are there and the movement, et cetera, for you and your party that you are with, then the gates will open automatically. You don't need to present any receipts, you don't need to. You will not be asked if you have paid or not, you will not be randomly checked. It's all happening automatically through, I would say an AI solution that we have in there that is very efficient and non-intrusive. That's very important that all safety solutions are as with as little intrusion as possible, and that's where we have been successful. That's one example.
We do many things, so I encourage maybe to explore a little bit further our material online, et cetera.
We have gotten a question from Peter Lindwall, if we could maybe give a little bit more color on the potential acquisitions, what type of acquisitions, regions, products, and so forth?
I would say that our main focus is Europe. We are having more and more success in North America. It could be that we kind of figure out how to accelerate that. Mainly, we have identified three different areas where we want to drive our acquisitions. First of all, we want to become the provider, and we believe there are three elements. One is to acquire traditional shop fitting companies in markets, mainly in Europe, where our market share is maybe not as strong or our market position is not as strong. That could be maybe southwestern Europe or even more in Eastern Europe, could be areas, Southeast Europe, et cetera, where we could where we could see a potential to grow in more traditional types of acquisitions that they have done.
That is to establish a more leading role where we can deliver the same service, the same promise to our customers regardless of where they are in Europe. It gives us a right to play and a right to be at the table with the most important customers. That's more kind of traditional and creating kind of a platform for us. The other two areas are in the services piece and in the technology piece. There we believe that in the future, technology, everything that is connected will also be somehow connected and either leverage data from other types of solutions or deliver data to those types of solutions.
We also believe that retailers are going to invest more and more in technology, and they need to make sure that the data is managed in a uniform or agnostic way, that the solutions are being taken care of in a good way. The networks, the interaction between different solutions, the service of these solutions. The use of the insight that comes from the data that will drive to further enhancements and changes in the retail environment. We believe that increasing our presence in services and technology will increase our recurring revenue, and it will make us even more relevant as a strategic partner. The three areas is really traditional shop fitting, service solution capabilities or companies, and more technology-oriented companies.
Technology and services are very tightly connected to each other.
Okay, thank you. We have a question from Mark: Could you give us more info and granularity on what is working well and not well across your division geographics?
I mean, it's hard to say if there are parts of our offering and parts of our capabilities that is not working well, but I would like to remind everybody that ITAB consists of many, many smaller companies that have been acquired during a long period of time. The whole ambition that we are working on externally is to confirm that our common capability, our common know-how is being leveraged across the group and not kind of kept in pockets. That's one part of where we are really driving and developing our strength. There are some parts of ITAB where we are better at doing this, and there are some parts where we're weaker at doing this.
That's kind of one of the, I would say, exciting things about ITAB, that we have so many diverse points of view and so many diverse capabilities, and we are seeing so many synergies from collaborating. You can say if we are struggling somewhere. It has been, I mean, one of the parts where we have been struggling and where we have taken quite big decisions have been maybe in countries where our market position has not been strong and we have maybe had losses from periods. There we have taken quite active risks in changing our cost structure and changing our go-to-market model.
Today, I would say if we are succeeding or not is mainly depending on how well we are, how close partnership we have with our customers, how well we're executing on the strategy, and the type of leadership that we have in those countries. Where we have maybe, in some pockets, sometimes we don't have as mature leadership as we want, and then we are struggling a little bit. We're coaching and helping these leaders to grow and develop, and then we are seeing the improvements. I don't know if that gives you a little bit more flavor on. It's not that we have any kind of clear weak spots in our offering that we need to shake off or like that.
Okay. We have a couple of more questions just one from Gustav Olsson: Has the outcome of the transformation been satisfactory so so far?
Yeah, I would definitely say so. I mean, I think we spent a little bit more time on that in the Q3, explaining a little bit the effects of the changes that we have done, and then reminding everybody that this was kind of relating back to the pre-pandemic period. If we had not had some of the disruptions that we have seen in terms of, yeah, energy, inflation, et cetera, I do believe that it would be even more evident. Yeah, I hope that answers the question.
Yeah. Then the final question here is from Johan Håkan Tindreng: Your dividend payment is very high and impressive. Are you comfortable with the level of cash post the dividend payment?
Yes.
Okay. Thank you very much, Andréas . With that, we close the Q&A session since there are no more questions at the moment. If you have any questions further on, please do not hesitate to reach out to us. Thank you very much for to the speakers and for everybody participating in this meeting.
Thanks a lot.
Thanks a lot.