Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Lagercrantz presentation of our Q4 and full year report of our fiscal year ending end of March. Me speaking is Jörgen Wigh, CEO, and together with me here today this morning, we have also Peter Thysell, our CFO. We will try to guide you and give a presentation of what we have announced this morning. The report is available on our website and also the presentation. You can gather the information there if you'd like.
We, I would try to, as we normally have done this, we will do it in English, and we will try to guide you through the presentation available on our website, page by page, really, so that you can feel that you are truly up-to-date with what's out within the presentation. As normal, we have divided the presentation into sort of three sections. We would like to sort of start off with some introduction for those of you that are new to the group. After that, we will jump right into the numbers and the Q4 report.
We will then, at the end, look a little bit ahead and also have some year-end extra reporting in terms of numbers for the full year in some aspects with the customer dependencies and stuff like that, we would like to go over with you this morning. Welcome, everyone. We will start at page number two with the introduction to the group then. While it feels very good this morning to be CEO of Lagercrantz, is we've had a tremendous year behind us, and we will, and we also feel that the market has kept up very well with us and that we also see the expected downturn that we sort of was a bit of a fear of earlier.
I think it's hasn't hit us this quarter, and then, and it looks very good also for the coming quarters. It's holding up very well for us, we think. Looking at the page number two, it's an overview of the group. We can see the five divisions that we have and all the companies adding up to the 70 companies approximately that we have within the group. We have in revenues now exceeding SEK 7.3 billion and 2,400 employees. You can see where we have our needles over to the right, and you can see that our most important markets are the Nordics, with Sweden in primarily and Denmark.
We also have some new ambitions in Central Europe, and we can see especially that in the U..K, that we've added a few more needles here lately, where we have made some more acquisitions. That's great to see some development here as well. You can see all the way over to the right, I mean, we are becoming more and more export-oriented with all the companies that we have, the B2B tech group, tech type companies that we're adding to our group. You can see that we are also have some strong export ambitions with also putting up some hubs and some initiatives all around the world, really, for our companies to sell into foreign markets like China, India, and the U.S. especially. You can see all the way over to the right there.
We definitely have some growth ambitions when we go abroad as well. Looking at page three, we have our revenues and profits our over many years. We can still see that we have had a tremendous sort of growth path here in the last year or two. We put together the ambition of reaching the 1 billion, we are very close to reaching that goal here, as you can see all the way to the right. You can also see that the top line has picked up with the bars behind there, you can see that the top-line growth has been picking up very nicely here in the last couple of years as well. Adding...
Of course, this is both organic, and M&A. But I think both sort of things have been turning out very well for us with both some good organic growth in the last couple of years and then some really good acquisitions adding to the numbers as well, and very nice growth from us on both sides, really. And close a very strong, another very strong quarter, with really following the trend that we've had here recently. That's great to see. Our comments regarding the business conditions on page number four, you can see a little bit of that.
We felt that the market situation was generally continued to be very stable, and remained good for most of the businesses during the Q4. I think looking back six-nine months ago, I feel that we, most of us maybe was expecting more of a downturn, but we have seen very little of that. We've seen it in a couple of our, handful of our companies, where we've also initiated some cost reduction programs. Other than that, I think, all is holding up very, very nicely.
We have seen that the order intake has been in line with the previous year here in Q4, where we saw the strongest demand within the electrification, which is part of the Electrify division or half of it, or more than half of it, really, and also for the TecSec and international divisions. From a profit side, we also have the Niche Products division doing very well, I'll come back to that. We saw a little bit of a slower growth rate here during the quarter, slightly. About 5 percentage points. It's not dramatic or anything, we see a couple of companies that are affected by some signs of a downturn.
We also feel that I think the order books have been very strong for us and also for our customers. That means that when we see lead times coming down from our suppliers in Far East Asia, and freights are being normalized, the freight rates and freight conditions are being normalized along the way, we also feel that it's very sort of obvious that we also don't need to put orders so much in advance. That is I think, a stronger sort of component in why we see the growth rate going down a little bit. I think that's the general economy has been very limited effect on the companies, generally speaking in the group.
We also feel that, I mean, we have a very broad focus. We are in many geographies. We are in many sort of niches. I think we have a very broad view on what's going on. We see that most of it is holding up very, very nice. That we see that the emphasis that we have on electrification, the infrastructure, security, and the specialized products and niches provide a good resilience and continued good growth opportunities as we're stating here. So far, so good. It's holding up very nice for us. We also can see over time that we I will come back to the proprietary product there to the left that we have another graph of.
We also see that we are becoming more and more international over the years. You can see that Sweden is currently 33%, Denmark is 13%. You can see that the other parts, and the international part of our business, or sort of, for more other e-export related markets are becoming an increasingly important part of what we're doing in Lagercrantz. That's over to the right in the slide, on the graph down to the right on page four. Looking more straight to the numbers on page five, we can see that we closed yet another good quarter when net revenues increased by 30% to slightly above SEK 2 billion. Organic growth was the 9%.
It's been nine, 10-ish here for the last year or so, and that held up very nicely here. The acquisitions then was that part coming from there was 17%, and then we have a positive currency effect of 2%. The EBITDA then increased by 29%, so it had with reaching the SEK 343 for the quarter, as opposed to SEK 265 the same quarter last year. The EBITDA margin was then at 16.8%, a very good level, the same as last year. Organic part of the EBITDA growth was 9%. That also corresponded to the organic growth in the net revenues.
We especially saw international tech and Niche Products contribute the most in terms of the EBITDA growth in the quarter. We're also very satisfied with the cash flows. The cash flows from operations was SEK 418 million in the quarter. We could see throughout the year, last year, that we built some safety stocks in the couple of first quarters of the year. Here in the last couple of two quarters, the last half year really, it's been very much stronger, and we had a very good cash conversion here in Q4 as well. That's really great.
We also see that the balance sheet is very strong now and that we have a lot of dry powder to do more acquisitions and to continue to grow the Lagercrantz Group. Profit after financial items reached increase by 27% to SEK 272, which I think is an all-time high in terms of the quarter. That's a strong one for us as well. Profit after tax increased by 26% and return on equity, we have the goal there of 25%, it reached 29% here, it was 20 last year, a strong equity ratio at 37% at the end of the quarter.
To sum up the full year then on page six, we can see that the numbers are really corresponding. We had the net revenues increasing by 32% and organic growth in that was 10%, as opposed to the 30% and 9% here in the last quarter. Slightly lower, but very, very limited sort of change really. The EBITDA then increased by 35% for the year, reaching SEK 1.2 billion during the year. EBITDA margin for the full year then increased from 16.6 to 16.6 from 16.3. That's good as well. Organic growth was 14%. Cash flows from operations for the full years was slightly above SEK 1 billion then. Up from SEK 594 million last year.
Very strong cash flows for the year as well, even though most of it came from the last couple of quarters during the year. The profit after financial items then increased by 31%. We can see also the year that we added some eight acquisitions. I think six of them are companies, right? Two are more asset deals, but adding to this eight sort of new businesses that came into the group. The PCP is the major one, is the biggest acquisition we made.
came in very nicely the first year. Their first week year within the group. We have a number of others here, and they are again, doing more in-demand than the fasteners or the asset fields that we are also have presented in our separate press releases. The earnings per share reach an all-time high of SEK 3.70 as opposed to SEK 2.80 for the previous fiscal year. Again, the return on equity that I've already commented on in the quarter, it's the same for the full year. That's the full year number really. That's a good one as well. Looking a little bit at the outcome by division, we have that on page seven. We could see that we have five really strong divisions.
We see that we have EBITDA margins on all of them that are exceeding the 14%. The lowest is the International. The International has become the division that has been lagging behind. If you look a little bit further back, we were at 8%, 9%-ish or so, but we have been driving that margin quite a lot and are currently at the 14.7% or have been at 16% as well. It's a different seasonality there, but otherwise it's otherwise the other ones are well above that. Niche Products is now ahead with 20.4% here during the quarter. 5 very strong divisions. In terms of growth, we could see that we have three divisions that are slightly bigger than the rest, and that is the Electrify, TecSec, and Niche Products.
Especially the TechSec has been doing quite a lot of acquisition in the last year, so we see very impressive growth rates in terms of TechSec. The TechSec division has done it very well for us with the safety and security type products in different markets and different niches, doing it very well for us along the way. The Niche Products is has been doing it very well for us for many years, and are continue to do it very well here during the quarter.
We have some comments by division on page eight and nine, and especially within the Electrify, closed a strong quarter with EBITDA growing 13% here during the quarter, and a strong EBITDA margin of almost 17%, as you can see there. Especially good to see is that the electrification type businesses, the Elpress, Elkapsling, and Norwesco did it very well. We also see some several of the Finnish companies doing it very well, and also the cable harnesses businesses, with the exception of Elfac in Denmark, which have a dependency up on the wind power industry, and that industry has been struggling a bit here in the last year or so.
We expect it to come back here in the near term or for next year. You could see from other players in that market that it's picking up better along the way. We also commented on the QD. QD, I mean, they have their installation materials for the deployment of 5G telecom infrastructure, and a lot of that deployment is being done here in the Nordics right now. That is adding good volumes to QD along the way. They also have a strong business in Poland and Central Europe and also abroad. It's good to see that QD, post a very strong year, second year in a row, really, that QD did very well. That's good to see.
Tykoflex, the newcomer, we acquired that company in December, and it's been coming in very nicely for us in the group. Looking at the Control division, I think most divisions are doing it very well, with maybe with a slight exception of Control. I think it's holding up very nicely with SEK 39 million versus SEK 41 last year, and a strong EBITDA margin of 19.2%. We have seen some challenging market situation in some couple of specific instances. I'm not sure it's that business cycle related, we see some component shortages that is affecting some of the companies. It's more that, I would say. We also see companies doing it very well. Precimeter and Exidor are a couple of examples of that.
Rather KnowWhy, which is a very important business unit within the Control division, had a good year, even though it was on the same level as the year before. We had expected some growth there, but it's been more flat-ish in terms of growth. It continues to do it very well. That also have a seasonality towards the winter. That's also behind some of the good numbers that has been delivered here by the Control division. The TecSec division, here we have some comments. That is the fastest growing division. The revenues were up 100% and EBITDA as well, as you can see here, and a good EBITDA margin of 18.4%.
I think the market situation remain favorable for most businesses. We saw a strong organic growth of 25% in the Q4. We see the larger units, the CW Lundberg, the R-CON, the ISG Nordic, and Frictape, they did it very well. Also COBS, which is a smaller unit, has been struggling a bit, but it delivered a very good profit improvement during the quarter here and the last six months really. That's really good to see that we have a bit of a turnaround within the COBS unit. That's good to see. The recent acquisitions, the PcP especially, the big one, are delivering according to plan. Also Door and Joinery is producing good contribution, basically above our expectations. That's also good to see.
Within the Niche Products division, we see revenues growing 16%. The EBITDA was up 29%, so very strong profit growth there. We see a particular strong development in a couple of units there, where Tormek is very important for us, and continue to do it very well. We also see Saiya, Aset, Truxor, and Condor and PSV doing very well during the quarter here. Tormek has been doing it very well. The other ones are picking up really, so improving along the way. The Waterproof also came in very nicely. Last but not least, in the International division, I already commented back on that, but that's growing quite nicely. It's growing. We see some good development in our older businesses, doing value-adding distribution.
Other than that, we also see good contributions coming from acquisitions. The Libra, especially ISIC, but also the Tebul has been coming very nicely here during the first six months. The E-Tech in the U.K., an older business, also has been growing quite nicely during the year, and that has also been picking up. Internationally, it's definitely on the right track to reach new heights really. So that was comments by division. Anything you'd like to add there, Peter?
No. No, I think, I agree. Things are quite in line with previous quarters and very stable. Maybe that the we have very particularly strong cash flow in the last quarter.
We also added another sort of set of informations around the outcome by division here on page 10. That is new from us, that we also have right now in the report provided you with some numbers around the profit over working capital, EBITDA or over RK in Swedish. We have sort of announced that or disclosed that on a group level before, but now we can also see how it developed on a divisional level. I think it's great to see that we have a very broad-based set of companies within the group doing it very well. This is another sign of that you can see that it's really good numbers. You know that the targets for all of these companies is the 45%.
That is where you, where we should be. We see that we exceed that quite significantly in all of our divisions really. Especially the TecSec division has been very good at keeping working capital at a, at a good level, and thereby you can see the whole division exceeding the 100% there very well. That's really satisfying to see. We will, we've announced those numbers the first time here now, and I hope that that's helpful to you guys. We have the coming back a little bit on where we're heading now, and it's a log accounts towards the SEK 1 billion. I mean, we are now at the SEK 9,868, right? We are approaching the SEK 1 billion.
I think it's well, sort of, been very appreciated both internally and externally that we've had this goal. Now of course, when we reach this, we need to push it and find something new to talk about. I think it's been great for us. What we did here was that we decided to clarify the strategies and financial goals with the new reorganization into the five divisions. We increased our capacity within M&A, also increasing geographical scope of the M&A ambitions that we had. We also set some clear ambitions in terms of sustainability. That was what we did. This we announced now some two years ago, or exactly two years ago.
We had ambition to reach SEK 1 billion in five years, now we are all almost there in just two years. That's I think a very strong point from us. What we decided to do then, you can see from page 12 then, is then that we, I mean, the ambition is to build a very strong tech group with a lot of nice companies, sort of represented by the arrows here in the cougar, where we are, have a very strong group of set of companies. By building a very strong group there, we should grow our annual profits by 15%, and then doubling every five years.
We also highlighted that at least one-third should come organically, and the rest through five to eight acquisitions per year. Return on equity then should exceed 25% over the years. We have some, sort of, we have been above that here in the last couple of years. We then organized ourselves into the five divisions. You can see on page 13. I've seen, I think you've seen this before, so I won't cover that. That, what we tried to do here was with ambition on finding areas where we see some, underlying structural growth and also some connection to sustainability in all the key areas we would like to be in.
That has surely affected how we work within the group and made it clear where we would like to go in the different divisions. It's been definitely helpful. We've also provided here some new sets of data. Looking at page number 14, you can see we have decided that we would like to be a little bit more detail on how we have our dependence in terms of market segments. Therefore we have released some new numbers here today, and that's sort of alterations or we have done a more diligent work towards the subsidiaries in looking into where we have our dependencies.
You can see here that I think it's very satisfying to see that our biggest segment is the power and electricity, 21%, and also high dependence of infrastructure. Previously we had infrastructure included in the building and construction, but we have decided to separate that in order to make it more representative really. We have transportation 14%, very especially within the Niche Products division we have a couple of companies working there. We have the building and construction sector, which is adding up to the 11, 12% then of the four. The private sector is quite small, you can see from 1%. We have electronic services and a couple of others there as well.
You can probably better analyze where we have our dependencies to look a little bit at that. For your convenience, we're also included on page 15, the breakdown by division of those numbers. You can see where we have our dependencies in the division, different divisions, and I hope that's helpful for the understanding of how the group looks really along the way. We have over the years also, on page 16, you can see how we have our distribution of our companies. Also to highlight where we are heading and where we have our sort of dependencies and again, that we are a very broad-based group in terms of where we have our return on sales.
This is the internal benchmark we're doing. I hope, I think most of you have seen this before. Just to highlight where we are over to the right, you can see that about 20% return on sales, very high margin businesses at 19 as opposed to 14 a year ago. You can see that the 15-20 is 12 as opposed to 14 last year. I think most of them have climbed up then to the 19%. We have the 10%-15% is 16 as opposed to 17 units last year. You can see how it looks. We will always have, when we rank our companies, well, of course, we will always have someone in the bottom and something to work with.
Currently we have four companies on red, i.e., a return on sales less than 3%. There are smaller companies, fortunately, they are smaller, all of them, and two of them are currently on sort of rolling 12 months loss making in, on an EBITDA level. We're dealing definitely with both those companies. In order to keep this very, sort of, a very sort of a strong portfolio of companies, getting even stronger along the way. I think in our, in our report, we've also discussed on page 17, we've also discussed that we're meeting some of our long-term targets as well now. One has been the proprietary products.
Though for those of you that have been following us, you know that we've been discussing this for many years, that we have the aim for 75% proprietary products. We started out by acquiring Elpress in 2006. Since then, the share of proprietary products has been growing steadily along the way. You can see that here. Now it's good to see that we have reached the 75% proprietary products. We will continue to buy proprietary products, and I think we will exceed the 75% and probably push our goal a bit here along the way as well.
We feel that doing proprietary products, we see that margins are higher, and that means that we also have some opportunities to also invest a little bit more in the business, and especially on exports, going for exports in the niches that we are working in. This has been a very strong strategic ambition from us, and we are now delivering on the 75% here as of this quarter, which is very satisfying. Last but not least, we have the acquisitions. During the on page 18, you can see how that's been working. Again, we have been growing with some additional resources, especially in the U.K. We have some new ambitions here as well.
You can see here that we have closed now three acquisitions in the last year in the U.K. The eight acquisitions there that are in the bubble there, those are the ones that we concluded during the fiscal year 2022-2023. That is adding SEK 1 billion then. Here in the first part of the new fiscal year, we have added three more acquisitions, adding some SEK 260 million in new sales for us. We have been active in the M&A space here lately as well. Looking at the last acquisition, we have that on page 19. That is the Glova Rail.
Glova Rail is a Danish company, working with providing components and products and solutions within the niche area of vacuum toilets for trains. You can see a very nice company with good EBITDA margins down to the right there, in addition to the International division and the active group in Denmark, which already have some businesses going to the rail and the transportation sector. This will be a good add-on to that company as well. That's really satisfying to see the Glova Rail coming into the Group. The next one is the Fireco. Fireco is an English company providing these door guards, and located in Brighton with GBP 7 million of turnover approximately.
They had a slightly slow year last year, but been doing it very well along the way. Based on what we see in the company, we have a good expectation for 2023 as well. That will be a good acquisition coming into the tech sector division as of April in 2023. We also have another one, which is the Supply Plus that we have announced that is contingent upon authority approval before we can close that. We're expecting that to happen in May, and then we will also have the numbers for that. We, well, I've also included here in the deck, the Tykoflex and the TCP and the Door and Joinery.
All of these companies have come in very nicely. The Waterproof and the Bull, I won't comment on them here and now. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask if you have something you'd like to ask there. They're the acquisitions, the eight we made last year have all come in very nicely for us. That's, I think, been very satisfying to see. I round off with a financial overview on page 26. You can see that we closed another strong year. You can see that we've had a very good trend in our net sales, in our EBITDA. Our EBITDA margin is picking up every year. The EBT has been growing quite nicely. There we have the goal of at least 15% per year.
You can see that we've been at that or above that most of the years. That's very satisfying. The second financial target we have is the return on equity, where we should be above 25%, and you can see that we have been there most of the years as well. The earnings per share has been growing quite nicely. Also we included now the dividend per share, and you see that's also grown quite nicely. We had one year where we lowered the dividend, which was the pandemic year. Otherwise it's been going quite nicely with the dividend growth as well. A very strong sort of long-term track that we have been delivering here. Two, that was all, I think. I would like then to open up for questions.
If you have any, please, press star six, and we will try to put you all in a decent line so that everyone can ask their questions. Anyone would like to start? Press star six to start if you'd like.
Victor Hanson.
Yeah. Victor.
Can you hear me?
Welcome.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Hi, Jörgen. Thank you. Nordea Equity Research. My first question here, there was a large increase in central costs in the quarter. Are there any one-offs here, perhaps related to M&A or what's driving this increase? Is it sustainable?
That was the SEK 25 million. Is that the one you're talking about? Yeah.
Exactly, yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Well, I think, the easiest way to explain is that it's the end of the fiscal year, and we have a lot of assessments related to that, actually.
It's not sustainable then?
No, it's not sustainable. It's more related to the end of the fiscal year.
Okay. Okay. Yeah. It should be similar to last year and then some personal stuff increases. Okay. Okay. Yeah. That's good. My next question here, are there any areas where you find it harder to raise prices in line with costs? Or are you able to offset all the cost inflation in all areas?
I think we have been doing a good job at raising prices, depending on pushing prices over to the customers. I think that we've seen along the year that we have seen an increase in the gross margin. I think we saw a higher volatility in terms of raw material prices and interest, yeah, and currency rates and stuff like that a year ago. Then we were struggling a couple of quarters to really get the gross margins at the right level. I think along the way that we see a tendency to stronger gross margins and that we have been able to compensate ourselves broadly speaking.
I think it might be, yeah, we are definitely on the track to keep it that way, but to I think to some extent there might be more of where we are a little bit closer to consumers, that it might be a bit more difficult. We also see within the electronics area that the margins have been very nice for a while. I think that some when we see supply shortages coming down, and then I think we also would see a sort of a slight spread of margins there as well.
That's helpful. Another question. Then perhaps I can go back in line to leave some for my colleagues here. Your balance sheet is looking strong despite despite some recent M&A here. I'm wondering what you can tell us about your M&A pipeline. Is it still strong? Any areas where it's extra strong?
Yeah. I think we see a strong pipeline. We are, I mean, we normally look at 10 - 15 sort of cases that we feel are relevant to. We try to drive three -five processes simultaneously. I think that has been the case for the last six-nine months or so, or even a year. I think they continue to be on that sort of level going forward as well. So no change there really. We've seen in the last year or so that the prices of companies have come slightly, maybe a point or two, I would say, but not dramatically or not significant really.
I think we have been acquiring companies basically at the same price levels or multiples all along. I think we are basically in that range and neighborhood along the way as well. When we see bigger deals or we see deals that are more growth related, then we have higher multiples while others are lower when we are looking at more stable sort of, yeah, more of cash count type companies.
Yeah. Yeah. Understood. Just a follow-up here. you mentioned three-five processes simultaneously for M&A in the last month. How many processes could you run simultaneously before?
Yeah. I think that we probably can run two-three previously, and now it's more three-five. It depends on the resources. It comes with a new organization. It comes with that we have resources more on a divisional level, and that we also have some resources in Finland. We also have some resources in the U.K. as we have, yeah, welcome some new people.
Okay, great. Thank you.
It's not huge, but it's still significant. It's still important to us.
Yeah. Thank you.
Thank you. Yeah. I invite people to ask questions. In order to participate, please press star six, and we will try to answer your questions.
Hello?
Hi, Jörgen. Aline... Oops, sorry.
Yeah. Okay. Thank you. It's Carl Ryrberg here at ABG. I hope you can hear me okay.
Yeah. We'll do Carl first then, and Aline has to ask with them. Good?
Okay. Thank you. My just first one is on the illustration with the profitability and underlying units there, and the kind of shift over time. I understand that some increases in the certain units are due to just the fact that you have been good at acquiring high margin units. Are there any other ones worth highlighting towards the low end that have been moving upwards based on efforts while being part of Lagercrantz?
Definitely so. I think that's one thing that we really work with, and I think we have tried to highlight that on our webpage and also in our annual report that what we have been doing working with the companies. Normally we put together a very strong board, and we try to drive things with putting some structure into companies, but also a lot of energy with some greater ambitions in all the companies that we acquire. I think we have around 10 cases or so that way you can see. Here lately, I think, one company I'd like to highlight is the R-CON down in Norrköping.
They have been pushing it quite a lot to really get everything in order and building also with the we've made some add-on acquisitions, but also driving it through a lot of strategy work within the group, and also some pricing work there. Therefore, R-CON has been really picking up here in the last six months or so. That's one example. Another example is the Radonova within the Control division. That is also where we put in some both export ambition, but also some initiatives in their go-to-market strategy, changing things. Along the way, that company has really been performing much better.
A couple of others, the ISG Nordic and the Tormek is a couple of other examples of companies that we have really been driving things in and with that, where we've seen some significant improvements along the way.
Understood. As you highlighted, the cash flow improvement compared to perhaps a slightly weaker start to the year, that you have two quarters now in a row with very strong cash flow. Do you feel that you are kind of at the fairly normalized level? If we look at in relation to sales, yes, it's a couple of percentage points above what you used to, a couple of years ago, but just how you feel about the kind of catch up and the effort you have made in terms of improving collection terms, et cetera.
I think in terms of collecting credit, customer credits, I think that work is probably done. I think we need to continue on a good level there, but we are on a good level. I think that we will see cash flows good from operations, but of course, the working capital cannot be sort of reduced every quarter. That's a difficult one. I think in this quarter, we managed to sort of work very well with our supply debt. That was a strong one for us. We are not satisfied. We still do not with the inventory levels. They're still at a high, too high level.
I think we will continue this, the very strong sort of effort we are doing in terms of bringing stock to a more, to a lower level. Hopefully, that will generate some more cash flows along the way. It's hard to say what we'll have on supply debt. That is that was very strong during that quarter. That might be sort of offsetting the improvement in terms of stock.
Understood. My final one is more of a technical, financial question. When you talk about the remeasurement of earn-outs. Just looking back at the prior quarters, I believe it's, it was a SEK +3 million number for the fiscal periods for, like, the first three quarters. Now in this quarter, you say on a rolling twelve months it went from SEK +3 million to SEK -4 million. I just want to make some clarification here. Is that kind of delta something you booked now this quarter? Because you also add a comment where you say it was recognized in the 1st quarter. Are you referring to, like, the calendar first, i.e., this reporting quarter?
Oh. Very good. I think it was recognized that most of this in the first quarter of the fiscal or, of the fiscal year 2022, 2023. We are not referring to the first quarter of 2023, 2024.
Okay. 'Cause at that point in time you reported a number which was... I understand it's small numbers, but I mean, you reported plus three. Now you say it was negative four. Is it a restatement? you know, if you want to, we can just revert back with an email separately.
Yeah.
It was just a curiosity.
Yeah. Maybe we should do that. I think we need to look into that because I haven't really realized it myself, so it's something that we need to look into then.
Okay. Yep, that's perfectly fine. That's all for me. Thank you.
Thank you. We'll let Aline come in then.
Yes. Hi. Aline from Carnegie here. I just have one quick question, that once you're already being asked. Of the organic growth, would you say that it's mainly related to price increases or are you also seeing volume growth?
I since we don't measure that, it's very hard to give sort of a sort of a correct answer. I would say that 60%-70% is price related, of the 9%. I think we still have some slight organic growth. That has to do with most of what we did in pricing we did more than a year ago, so the comparables are coming up a bit.
Are you still doing price increases?
Yeah. In some companies we are still doing price increases.
Okay.
The gross margin in a couple of quarters was also affected by the high electricity prices that we saw in some of the, some areas. I think that has been more normalized here during the last quarter as well. That is also affecting the gross margin level a little bit upwards here in the last quarter.
Is there any units where you see that volume growth are declining or something like volume growth declining?
Sorry, I didn't get you?
If there's any units where you see that volume growth are going down in some divisions or markets.
We see it as sort of when we talk about space, not necessarily, no. We see a very sort of stable and good market, but we also see that sort of the whole value chain is affected by the shorter lead times. That means that we are to some extent. I think many companies are to some extent either eating order books to some extent now. That, I think it's normal. We're coming down to more of a normalized sort of level of order, delivery times and level of order book. It's hard to say really. We don't see any sort of business cycle related really declines anywhere. That's hard to say really. It's holding up very nice.
Okay. Super. Thank you. I'll get back to you now.
Mm-hmm. Thank you.
Hi, it's Anna here from Handelsbanken. Can you hear me?
Hello. Yes. Hello, Anna.
Hello. Three short questions from my side. Firstly, do you note any geographic differences?
Not really. We feel that it's holding up in the markets we're in. We feel that we have some companies in Norway lagging behind a little bit, but I think it has to do more with ourselves really than general market.
Yeah.
It's hard to sort of make a judgment on where we see the different markets. We feel it's holding up generally very good, and we see we're in the middle of any downturn.
Okay, great. Do you see any shift in trends during your fourth quarter?
Not really either. I think it's been holding up very nice throughout the quarter.
Okay, great. My final question is regarding the comments on the supply chain challenges for the Control companies.
Mm-hmm.
Because generally we get the comments that, you know, supply chain issues are easing up. Do you have any comments on what specific components is challenging for the companies within Control?
I think, sort of when we talk about semiconductors and that type of thing, that has been generally been hit very hard, very long lead times. We usually back in the days used to get those supplies, say, in six weeks delivery time. Usually, here a couple of years back, when we saw things really deteriorate, it went from six weeks up to one year. After one year, they didn't even want even give us any type of notice on whether they had the plans to deliver. They couldn't give us any delivery time at all. Now that we see it's coming back generally speaking, but not on all components. We still have a couple of companies, but it's electronics related.
It's usually Far East Asia sort of supplies. We still see some suppliers that are lagging behind in terms of the deliveries. Generally speaking, it's improving.
Okay. That's all my questions. Thank you.
Thank you. Do we have some more?
I could go again, Victor.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. Feel free.
Yeah. Thank you. I noticed here on one of your slides the Profit and Working Capital, that it was lower in three divisions this fiscal year compared to last. I'm wondering if you could talk some about the reasons and if also if you expect this to improve?
I think that has to do with the with the some of the safety stock build up that we've seen. Most of the or all of the divisions have improved their numbers, and you can see that's improved versus two years ago. It's. I think on these levels it depends on how sort of things are affected at the year-end and sort of also those type of circumstances. I think you should generally look at it and we feel very confident and feel very proud of really what levels we are at here, even though we see some slight declines in a couple of numbers here.
Yeah. Understood. Then I noticed on the end market split that you gave here, that the power and electricity distribution was down a lot in Control and then slightly down in Electrify. I'm wondering, is this only due to M&A, in other areas within these business areas? Or is it also related to, for example, component shortages? Should we expect this here to bounce back since I know you want to grow-
Yeah.
in power and, electricity?
Yeah, I think you're into the two main reasons there, right? We see some changes in this slide due to the acquisition. The mix changes when we do larger acquisitions, and we made eight acquisitions during this period, right? Especially the PcP then is significant, and of course that affects the numbers. You see the total revenue up there to the right? Where you see SEK 7.2 this year versus SEK 5.4 last year or SEK 4.5 last year, right? Of course that affects the percentages here.
We can also see the as you, as you're mentioning here, the component shortages might affect or the mix might be affected by some company, being affected by shortages or, yeah, a loss of sales or gaining sales or, the mix will change over time. I think it's important to highlight that the power and electricity distribution and the power electricity is very important to us, and they're our main sort of segment, and the infrastructure is the second biggest. The infrastructure, we see many aspects have increased, but we also see especially within TecSec, there we see a change, and that I think has to do with the PcP acquisition coming in affecting that number. I think we.
I hope this is helpful, but rather than confusing, but I think there are good sort of good signs in most of these numbers.
Yeah. Great. Then maybe just a clarification as well. When, when you write building and construction private, is that residential or what does private mean?
Yeah. Yes.
It's residential. Okay.
Yes.
Okay, good. Good. My final question, I'm wondering if you have started adjusting your organic headcount downwards in any company, is that still to come? You know, this Plan B, et cetera.
I think we've been talking about that for the last couple of two, three quarters, that we have initiated the Plan B work where we sort of expect make contingency plans in our companies. We have that in all our companies, but we have not implemented them, more than maybe in three to five companies or so, and that number is, has been unchanged here in the last quarter. It's sort of we are dealing with it in three to five companies maybe. Then, yeah, we were. It's been holding up very nice.
Great. Those were all my follow-ups. Thank you, Jörgen and Peter.
Okay. Thank you. Any final one, or do we call it? Me and Peter are available here for any sort of one-on-ones over phone, so if you'd like to call us, please do. Otherwise, I'll I'm looking forward to talk to you soon. Thank you very much for listening in and thank you, thank you. Have a good day. Bye-bye.