Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Lifco Q4 report 2017. Today, I'm pleased to present CEO and President Fredrik Karlsson. For the first part of this call, all participants will be in a listen-only mode, afterwards there will be a question and answer session. Speakers, please begin.
Thank you very much, and thank you for joining in this telephone presentation. I have the presentation in front of me. If you turn to page two, we are stating that Lifco is a safe haven for your business. This is just to try to describe why we are an attractive buyer for certain sellers. A seller who wishes to sell his company and wishes that it continues to work in the same way as it's done and no sudden changes, they like to sell to Lifco. We go to page number three, and we see the long-term development. You see that they grow the EBITA at 80% average growth rate, much quicker than the sales. That's what we are focusing on. We are not focusing on sales growth, we are focusing on profit growth.
You can also see down to the right, the EBITA margin development, which has been very positive the last five years. We turn to page four, we have our financial targets, and page five is a small table. This is actually information you already have in the quarterly reports, but I choose to present it in this way because often I get the question, how much of the growth do you get from acquisitions and how much is organic? This is a way of calculating it. As you can see, we have increased every year, now three years in a row, our EBITA from acquisitions. So SEK 118, 2015, SEK 152, 2016, SEK 198 , 2017. It's been 12, 13, 14% growth rate from acquisitions. It seems to be stable, and probably I would say that it's easier to achieve steady growth through acquisitions than organically.
Little bit down below, you can see our organic growth as well. It has been more fluctuating, 11%, 2015, 3%, 2016, and 11% 2017. Organic growth is also possible, but you never know when it comes. It's like shaking a ketchup bottle, and you shake and shake and shake and eventually ketchup comes out. That is how it feels running an operation and looking at the profit development. We turn to next page number six, and we have our profit-oriented culture, and we run our businesses. Now we look at two examples, and this is pure organic growth, no acquisitions. When we take the original Dental companies, we can see the growth after 2013. We showed this growth at the time of the IPO. You can see also in the Dental, we have continued growing also the last couple of years and achieving ever higher margins.
The same thing goes for Brokk. It seems that our model, how we handle our companies, we can continue growing old entities at a healthy organic growth rate. I turn to page number eight. We always get questions about our asset allocation, and if you look at the right-hand side, you see CapEx is very small. It's not material. The big asset allocation question, that's the acquisitions, and you can see how that it's fluctuated the last couple of years, how much we acquired. The last two years has been SEK 1.6 billion and SEK 1.4 billion. I would turn to page 10, and if you look at page 10, we can see on the left-hand side our net debt to EBITA development.
We've been able to achieve this 13% growth for acquisitions by keeping the net debt to EBITA multiple constant under two. That is something I'm very proud of, that we've been able to keep the debt under control in spite of 13% average growth through acquisitions. If you look at the multiples we've paid, we paid about five times 2015 for what we acquired, eight times 2016, and about seven times 2017. We have our target of acquiring about eight times. We are staying below our target there as well. Turn to page number 11. You can see that we have, if you take the growth last year, we have 26% growth in EBITA, and we have 20% growth in earnings per share, which I think is pretty healthy. Of course, in general, the market conditions have been very good. It helps.
We are very happy with this development. Also, if you look at the return on capital employed, we've been able to increase the return on capital employed. That's very good as well. We are happy with that. Turn to page 12, the business area performance. Dental, stable business, slower growth. Demolition & Tools, cyclical business, fast growth. It's also been helped by two acquisitions this year. Systems Solutions, good growth, also helped by acquisitions. That was all for me. We can start the Q&A session. Thank you.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, if you do want to ask a question, please press zero one on your telephone keypad now. Our first question comes from the line of Johan Dahl from SEB. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Yes. Hi, Fredrik. It was excellent with a bit of a more disclosure on the contribution from acquisition and what's organic, much appreciated. I was just wondering if you could clarify on the numbers that you presented in the presentation. You argue that the contribution from acquisitions was SEK 198 in 2017. You say that you have acquired an annualized EBITA of SEK 223. I was just wondering, the SEK 198, I guess that's from the numbers of these subsidiaries, what they actually delivered in 2017. The SEK 223, should we view this as sort of pre-cost savings and pre-
Rolling 12 months.
Got you. Those numbers should be viewed as Yeah, I understand.
They are the company numbers.
Got you. Okay. Could you say something about, in general, some round comments regarding how much you have been able to improve profitability in your acquired companies post the acquisition? Just to make us understand better when you announce an acquisition and when it is realized, I mean, 12 months passed.
It is very different. If you make a price increase, it is immediate. All other improvements take a longer time. Sometimes take also time to make a price increase. One reason why we get these kind of low acquisition multiples, because they are counted on these numbers, is that we do achieve some improvements already the first year.
Right.
Normally the big improvement comes second year, if we have an improvement.
Yeah. Would it be possible to say how much the 200 that acquisition contributed with in 2017? How much was that at the time of the announcement?
No. We only have these numbers.
That's fine. Much appreciated.
Yeah.
If you look at the table, they will next year contribute with another. They took SEK 223, we got SEK 130 in this year's results. Next year's results, we will get SEK 93.
I understand. You have SEK 93 million growth already in, you can say.
Exactly. Can you just talk about the margins and growth in Demolition & Tools? Was there anything special happening there, or was that a sort of a regular seasonal improvement? Secondly, could you talk a little bit about organic growth in the Dental business in the fourth quarter?
Yes. We can say Demolition & Tools, as you know, I think many cyclical companies have, they deliver good numbers in the fourth quarter. I think it is just the markets are good, and you have more volume on the same fixed cost you have previously, and therefore the profits go up. We have two acquisitions in the Hultdins and Solspets which also contribute to the profit growth. Yes.
Were there any sort of other structural measures taken, such as price hikes or any sort of cost out actions to improve margins?
No. I think it is not that. It is more volume, I would say, which is driving profits right now.
We are already at high margins. The higher margins we have, the more important is volume growth actually, and not margin growth. In these businesses, it is so important to win the next order.
Exactly.
I just had a question regarding organic growth in Dental. Any outlook there? It seems to have been pretty flat in 2017.
Per, can you give a comment?
Yes. Organically, 2017 was a small, very low growth organically for us. We also had the, in the last quarter, it was a little bit impacting us because we have volume bonuses sometimes related to our growth in the distribution business. It had a slight negative impact on the profit in the last quarter.
Okay.
None of these are really material impacts, so it is a small minus. All in all, it is a low growth for the year in Dental.
Got you. Final question from me. I am just wondering what is the basis of selecting these examples on slide number nine? You choose a couple of companies to show organic growth.
The reason we use that is because these are our original Dental. This was part of our IPO package when we presented Lifco. We have just been continuing to follow the original five Dental companies that were part of Lifco in 1997.
Yeah.
We want to see the 20-year development of these. It is not the only organic development in the Dental group. This is now a subset, but these are the original ones. We continue to track them, also now the last four years after the IPO.
It's the only reason that we use, these are the only ones we can follow over a 20-year period, the others have come in during the last 10 years or 15 years.
Excellent. Thank you so much.
Thanks.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Robert Redin from Carnegie. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Yeah. Hi, two questions. One on the analysis on the Dental organic.
I'm sorry to interrupt you, Robert. Can we ask you to speak up? We cannot really hear you on this side.
All right. Sorry. It's better now, maybe. Two questions, if I may. First on Dental, on that organic growth in Dental in Q4 in 2017, did you feel that calendar effects had any effect on Q4 and maybe 2017 overall, fewer business days? What do you see looking into Q1 in terms of business day effect? That was my first question.
Maybe I should answer this question. In terms of Q4, it was not material. I think that we had a low growth organically in the Dental sales segment, and we had that for quite some time. The profit, as I said, has a slight impact that we didn't reach the volume bonuses, especially in the German market. This has not a huge material effect on Lifco, but it's just giving some more flavor to it. When it comes to Q1 2018, it's worth highlighting that the Easter will come just at the end of March, so it could have a slight negative impact. If I remember correctly, Easter was in April last year.
Right. Okay, cool.
Yep.
On Systems Solutions, you still had the forest being a negative in the quarter. Is that right?
No, actually forest has stabilized now, maybe it was more or less flat last quarter.
What would you say if you would look through the different parts Systems Solutions, what would you say the outlook is? For instance, in marine, which is a positive data point as to date.
Yeah. As you know, I can say, if you look at the market, some sub-segments there, and if you look at marine, there is a clear, you can see the number of ships ordered. It's increasing right now. For example, we have a marine compressor, we sell more and more marine compressors. The thing for us is that, we live on the spare parts and not on selling compressors, you can say, because selling compressors is the way of generating future spare parts sales.
All right. Positive for sales, not so positive for margins.
Not so positive for margin, positive for sales. Yes.
In the other-
We are creating install base. If you look at the forest, what has happened now this year, I think there was an article about Bergs Timber, for example, a big private group in Sweden. They have record profits right now. If the saw millers have record profits, normally they invest afterwards. I also had commented they had some bad projects and they are all ending now. We are through that phase with bad projects as well.
That sounds positive, too.
Yeah.
Any other sub-segments where you expect a pickup or a slowdown in Systems Solutions?
I think the rest is just business as usual.
All right.
If you take two sub-mix where you have something happening in the markets, it's the forest and the marine.
Perfect. All right. Thanks. Those are my questions.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Christian Hellman from Nordea. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Hi, guys. A question on Demolition & Tools. I'm just trying to sort of understand the margin here. You did almost 30% in the quarter, which is obviously fantastic. Congratulations. Looking historically, those were quite high, but some quarters it's been around 20 and then 25, and yeah, some ups and downs, and now you're at 30 almost. How should we view the business going forward in terms of further margin expansion potential? Is it even possible, or what do we make of this?
Yeah, that is really tricky to say. The only thing, if you turn back to page, I don't know which page it was. On Brokk, we have a page on Brokk.
This is only the mother company in Sweden, you'll see that this is page number six. It seems that they flattened out at 40% margin. The only information I have, because if you get this very high margin plus 30%, the incentive to sell more is very high. The managers don't pay too much attention margin anymore because the margins are so high. It's more important to sell than achieve higher margins.
Right.
You can see it's flattened out at the page number six.
Okay. We're getting close to the top then in terms of margins.
Yes.
Most likely.
Most likely.
Okay. Fine. Organic growth, do you have that number for the Demolition & Tools business? You grew.
The only thing we have is about that presented on the tool.
All right. Okay.
You can probably figure out something. Just look at others.
I'll do my best
[tender companies] The marks have been very good this last quarter, you know that.
Yeah, obviously.
Yeah.
All right. Okay. Thank you very much. That was the only question I had.
Thank you.
Thank you. I'll remind you that if you do want to ask a question, you will have to press zero one on your telephone keypad now. Our next question comes from the line of Eric Gelander from Handelsbanken. Please go ahead, your line is open.
Yes, hello. Thank you very much. Obviously, we have touched on that on the previous questions regarding Demolition & Tools, very strong during the quarter. How do you see this market outlook in 2018? Has something changed or do you see a very strong demand also in this year as well?
No, I can't say much. It's very difficult to say. If you look at all around, there is nothing which says that we will have a decline this quarter, in the market in general, in the end market.
Okay.
Who knows? After, who knows?
Yes, exactly. At the moment at least, it seems to be quite good demand out there.
Yeah.
Okay, perfect. That's all for me. I'll get back in line then.
Okay.
Thank you. As there are no more questions registered, I now hand back to you speakers.
Okay. Thank you very much for calling in and listening to us.