Welcome to the Lindab Pre-Quarter Four update. During the Q&A session, participants are able to ask questions by dialing #5 on their telephone keypad. Now, I will hand the conference over to the President and CEO, Ola Ringdahl, and CFO, Lars Ynner. Please go ahead.
Welcome to this pre-quarter update with Lindab Group. My name is Ola Ringdahl, and I'm the President and CEO. I'm joined in this meeting by our CFO, Lars Ynner, who will also be available for the Q&A session later. I will start with a short presentation, and after that, we're happy to take your questions. Let's have a little look at the market. The market situation for ventilation systems remains weak, with many projects on hold. We estimate that the European ventilation market has declined by around 5% until the end of Q3 2024. We cannot see any signs of recovery yet, so we expect the negative volume trend for ventilation systems to continue during the first half of 2025. Our best estimation is that the ventilation market will stabilize and start to gradually recover during the second half of 2025.
In the medium to long term, the outlook for ventilation systems is strong. The main drivers are energy efficiency in buildings and stricter regulation. Let me share a picture that we shared when releasing the Q3 report. Lindab has successfully managed 24 months of negative market development. Ventilation systems have shown a stable operating margin during this period. In the third quarter, the adjusted operating margin amounted to 9.5% for ventilation systems. Actions to reduce our cost base have been implemented during Q4, and let me come back to that in this presentation. Over the past two years, Profile Systems have been negatively affected by reduced construction activity in the Nordic region and a very challenging situation in Eastern Europe. Profile Systems had a weak start of the year but have gradually reversed the trend in the Nordic region.
Let's look at the next page on our actions to improve profitability within ventilation. Already, when we announced our Q3 results, we communicated that we are taking additional actions in Q4 due to a delayed market recovery. And this is exactly what we have done. On the 28th of November, we communicated that we are closing down 10 sites for warehousing and local production, serving the customers instead from other Lindab units in neighboring locations. Also, we are cutting 180 full-time positions across the group, focusing mainly on the fixed costs. As a result, these actions will reduce our fixed costs by an annual 120 million SEK with quick implementation. Now, let's look at the actions we take within Profile Systems.
To address the low profitability in Profile Systems, we communicated on the 11th of December that we are exiting the Profile Systems business in Eastern Europe in order to fully focus on profitable growth for the ventilation business in that region. From 2025, Profile Systems will have its strategic focus on the home markets in Scandinavia, where the market position is strong and where there are significant synergies with the ventilation business. 15% of our sales in the business area Profile Systems today come from Eastern Europe, and the business has been loss-making for the past 12 months. Despite challenging market conditions, our cash flow is strong. Over the last two years, Lindab has generated more than 3 billion SEK in cash flow from operating activities. One important contribution to the cash flow has been a reduction of capital tied up in stock and inventory.
Our accelerated investment program, which started in 2019, came to an end in 2024, and we will now have investment rates at lower levels, which will free up further cash flow going forward. The strong cash flow has enabled Lindab to continue the acquisition journey, and I will talk more about that on the next slide. Lindab has completed six acquisitions during 2024. The latest one was finalized just before Christmas, and we welcome Aircom in France to the Lindab Group. On the slide we show now, we have listed the date of consolidation of each transaction to facilitate for investors to project Lindab sales in the coming quarters. Since 2020, Lindab has made 28 acquisitions, adding annual sales of more than 4 billion SEK. We have a healthy acquisition pipeline, and we will continue to make acquisitions during 2025.
Then, also to facilitate for investors, we often get questions about the seasonal effects on Lindab's profitability. On the next slide, we will describe how the operating margin for our two business areas varies between the quarters, so what we have done is we have analyzed the seasonality of Lindab in terms of profitability per quarter during the five-year period 2019 to 2023, and on these graphs, you can see that ventilation systems have relatively small seasonal variation, but we can notice that there is a negative impact from the Christmas season. On average, the adjusted operating margin is two percentage points lower in Q4 than in Q3. For Profile Systems, the seasonal variations are clearly bigger. The main products in this segment are external roofing products, and November to March is low season due to winter weather when it's cold and there is snow on the roofs.
On average, the adjusted operating margin is four percentage points lower in Q4 compared to Q3. Let's move to the last slide in my presentation. So to conclude this presentation, Lindab's strategic focus is ventilation, an attractive market with a strong market outlook. When this market recovers, we will have a strong profitability leverage thanks to the significant investments we have made in capacity and automation. While the market is slow, we have taken actions to protect and strengthen the profitability, and we're doing it at great speed. We have also acquired 28 ventilation companies since 2020. We see clear synergies materializing, and we will accelerate these synergies during 2025. Our pipeline of attractive acquisition prospects is strong, and we aim to continue our acquisition journey. Now, with that, we are ready to take your questions. Thank you.
If you wish to ask a question, please dial #5 on your telephone keypad to enter the queue. If you wish to withdraw your question, please dial #6 on your telephone keypad. The next question comes from Carl Ragners tam from Nordea. Please go ahead.
Good morning. It's Carl Ragners tam from Nordea. A couple of questions from my side. You talked a little bit about the sort of Q3 demand and also seasonality, but I know that you only have a few subsidiaries with the sort of proper order intake. But could you first elaborate on what you see there in terms of any green shoots or signs of improvement in the demand, and if so, where? And secondly, on that note as well, if you look into your bread-and-butter business right now, would you say that foot traffic in your branches is down as much as sort of the organic drop of, what I heard, at least around 5%? Or do you see a discrepancy there with sort of the price mix shaping your customer behaviors?
Thank you, Carl. Try to answer that. Not very easy. You're correct that we cannot look so far into the future. We don't have a very long, typically not a very long order pipeline. A lot of our sales is more transactional sales, more daily sales, and in the areas where we are booking orders further in advance, for technical products, technical ventilation products, the demand has held up relatively well, and we see a stable level of sales and orders. We don't see any big drops in, say, quotation activity. We see stability. I don't dare to say that we have started to see increasing inquiry levels either. Rather stable. When it comes to our bread-and-butter business, the daily business, and the traffic in our branches, typically the traffic for, say, smaller projects, renovations, upgrading, that is holding up rather well. What is lacking is primarily the larger projects.
They don't normally go through any branches. That is a different type of sales. But bigger projects, project business, that's where we see the largest declines. And then let me add, I mean, there are big geographical differences. The market situation for ventilation has been very tough in Sweden. We've seen clearly a negative development also in Germany, to some extent the UK. Those are big ventilation markets for Lindab, and of course, that brings down the total volume on average for our group. But we also have some markets that have continued to perform well and are still continuing well and where we have organic growth across this difficult last two years. Denmark is doing really well in ventilation. Norway as well. Ireland, Switzerland, Italy, France. We have several countries where we actually see good activity levels.
So of course, a volume decline of 5% is an average number where we have big variations in between. But when taking that average and calculating that average over the last seven quarters, it is a pretty constant negative minus 5% quarter by quarter, seven quarters in a row.
Okay, that is very clear. In terms of pricing, you've increased prices over the past few years like many others in the industry. Firstly, do you feel that the minus 5 over the past few quarters then on average is on par with the market, or is it better or worse? Meaning, are we gaining or losing market shares? Secondly, on pricing, I think, did you plan to increase prices in 2025 as well despite steel being at a fairly low level?
Pricing is always an important tool, of course, in our toolbox, but it cannot be the only one. Our main focus is price stability. We try to keep prices unchanged, and we compete on high quality and excellent service level. Is it easy to keep prices constant at the moment in a tough market? No, it's not. It requires a lot of work. We are trying to increase prices, but we, of course, also need to take project volumes and have a decent load in our factory. So this balancing act is something we work on every day. How has it played out in the past 12 months? Well, on average, our prices in the market for ventilation products is relatively unchanged. Perhaps a 1% decline in average price levels, but around that level. It's small variations.
We have to remember we have seen high cost inflation for rents, for salaries, energy, etc. It's helpful for Lindab that the steel prices are on their way down, but many other cost categories have increased as well. The end game for us, we want to have happy customers. We want to protect our market shares, and we want to have a decent profitability so that we can continue to invest in the future. I think we have managed that balancing act rather well, and I'm quite proud of how we have handled that in the past two years. But it is, of course, getting increasingly difficult if we now go into a third year of market decline. And that is also one reason why we have implemented these further cost reductions to make sure we have the right fixed cost base.
That's very clear. And on the cost savings, the ones you announced in ventilation systems, how do you see the ramp of them entering, I guess, Q1 then? Do you see full effects from, I mean, during the latter part of Q1 or Q2, or when do you see, and how do you see the ramp? And also on that note, you talked about the synergies between the acquired companies, many of the companies you acquired are in ventilation. When do we see the effects of, I guess, production merges from them?
We are constantly working on both efficiency and synergies, and the fact that we made a press release and announcement on the 28th of November to take a further step in the reduction of cost, that does not mean that we have not worked a lot on that in the past two years. We have taken out several hundred people from the organization in the past two years, but we have done it gradually, month by month, without taking any, say, non-recurring or one-time cost for that. This time, in order to get quick effect, a lot of it already from Q1, we had to take one-time costs and declare that in a relatively detailed press release on the 28th of November. In that press release, we have tried to be clear when the impacts are coming.
From January, around 75% of the cost savings should be realized, and then we will capture the remaining 25% during the first half of the year, so the program will have its full effect from the third quarter, but it will have the majority of its effect already from the first quarter.
Okay, that's very clear. Thank you so much.
Thank you, Carl.
As a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, please dial #5 on your telephone keypad. There are no more questions at this time, so I hand the conference back to the speakers for any closing comments.
We thank everybody who listened in on this third quarter closing call. Next time we speak will be when we have released our Q4 report. Thank you for showing interest in Lindab. Have a good day.