Welcome to the NCAB Group audiocast with teleconference Q1 2022. For the first part of this call, all participants will be in listen-only mode, and afterwards, there will be a question and answer session. Today, I am pleased to present CEO Peter Kruk, CFO Anders Forsén, and Head of IR Gunilla Öhman. Please begin your meeting.
Thank you very much. If we move to page number 3, I think we are very happy to present a very strong first quarter. We have net sales of SEK 1,141 million, which corresponds to a growth of 85% in SEK or 66% in US dollars. Also a very strong organic growth of 42% in U.S. dollars.
As we've mentioned before, U.S. dollar is our main trading currency, which is for the most relevant growth numbers to compare with. Also on the order intake side, 1,171 continued strong order intake, up 8% in U.S. dollars. Comparable unit, it is down 8%, but I think this is natural as we had in quarter 1, quarter 2 of 2021, very strong order increases due to increase in lead times.
Lead times are now stable and actually slightly improving, which is also then meaning that we are working off our existing order stock. Very good performance also in our acquired companies. All in all, this is all contributing to an improving EBITDA to SEK 146 million in the quarter, which is an increase of +151%, leveraging our growing net sales.
Our EBITDA margin amounted to 12.8% compared to 9.5% in 2021. If you move to the next page, we have some of the important events in this quarter, and some of them we will come back to in greater detail. We acquired the company META Leiterplatten in Germany just here at the start of the year.
We also, as a consequence of the war in Ukraine, decided to stop all of our deliveries to customers in Russia on the 28th of February. On April 8, we have exited the business by selling our subsidiary to the Russian management team for one ruble.
We can also see that the component issues that have been a factor in the market during 2021 are continuing to happen to some of our customers. We also have been experiencing freight and COVID restrictions in China, and that has further impacted the delivery situation, but something we have navigated through with reasonably good results.
We will have our annual general meeting on May 3, and we have a suggested dividend for 2022 of 0.6 Swedish krona per share, and this is to be paid by 50% in May and 50% in October. Moving to the next page. Yesterday evening, we also released updated business targets for the midterm.
We have defined net sales target of 8 billion SEK to be reached in 2026, and an EBITDA target of 1 billion SEK also in 2026. We have remaining as before, we have a net debt Adjusted EBITDA target to be lower than 2x , and that we will also continue to distribute available cash, which we estimate to be in the order of 50%.
To give some perspective at the time of our IPO, we then had introduced midterm targets, which were of 8% organic growth and 8% EBITDA. If we look back ten years prior to the IPO, we had on average around 15% growth. Despite an extraordinarily strong growth year in 2021, we believe we can continue to grow at a higher rate than our historical performance.
We expect that the growth is going to come equal parts roughly from organic growth as well as from acquisitions. Our profit target is, as you also can see, then significantly higher, around 12.5% compared to the 8%, but it reflects our stronger performance while still continuing to make investment in further growth. Anders, over to you.
Thank you, Peter. Yes, as we said, 50% of the expected growth will come from acquisitions. We are happy that we could announce some acquisition in Germany, first of January. This is of course, maybe now a little bit old information, but anyway, it was done this quarter.
META Leiterplatten was founded in 2000, had about 85 million SEK last year, and some 17 good employees. They have a business model which is very close to NCAB, focusing on high quality and low mix, high volume business or high-mix, low-volume business. We will see some synergies from supplier and payment terms and so on. This one we paid less than 5x EBITDA multiple, so it was a good acquisition from that point of view.
The next page, we come into our divestment of our Russian operation. It's of course sad to see the development in Russia and also the consequences for NCAB. I think we were rather quick to decide on halting all the deliveries to our Russian customers, which we did already 28th of February.
I mean, we have been in Russia for over 20 years, and the Russian company stands for approximately 5% of both EBITDA and revenue last year. Anyway, we thought it was impossible to continue the business, and we didn't see any real value in continuing for us in Russia. We made the decision that 8th of April, we sold the business to our employees.
This is also a good way because we could secure the future earnings for our former colleagues in Russia. It will limit our risks. Of course, it had a write-down effect, but no cash flow impact, and we take away lots of risks and future negative cash flow for NCAB. All in all, we think this was a good decision despite the situation, and then we are limiting our risk going forward.
Moving to page 8, some background around NCAB. What we do is the foundation for any electronic product. Our deliveries are the green boards you see to the left, and our customers then mount components on them to create printed circuit board assemblies, which then form the intelligent part in any electronic product.
We have had a history, if you go to the next page 9, starting the company in 1993, a continuous growth journey, and a growth journey that has been accelerating in later years, both through acquisitions but also through strong organic growth.
Moving to page number ten, we've also been able to demonstrate over the years that our growth, which historically was around 15%, and of that maybe around 10% organically, has been clearly stronger than the general market of the printed circuit board market, which has on average been growing around 3%-4%.
You can also see in the last year in 2021, the global market grew by some 23%, whereas we grew organically by close to 40%. Our growth on the page, I mean, you can see where it's partly coming from. We can see that overall, we are focused, our focus is on high-mix, low-volume markets and focusing on highly demanding customers.
In the projected analytic view of where the market is developing, we can actually see that a lot of the electronic growth is coming from industrial applications rather than from kind of customer PCs and mobile phones equipment, which maybe historically have been driving a lot of the growth. A lot of the high-mix, industrial applications where we are focusing are in the higher growth areas to the right, which is a good foundation.
If you look on the following page, 12, you can actually see how we have grown and solidified our position as a clear number one worldwide. To the graph on the left, you can see our position as presented before the IPO. Based on 2017 numbers, where we were the leader, but the leader with a number of close competitors.
Now in 2021 or based on 2020 numbers, you can see that we have more or less outgrown our competition and are now almost twice the size of our second-largest competitor. A part of this has been through stronger organic growth, but also through acquisitions. Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Over to you, Anders.
On the next page, coming into the first quarter, we are very, very proud of robust good results from the first quarter. We had net sales of SEK 1.1 billion, increasing actually 85% compared to last year. We see that we have some positive gains from the weaker Swedish krona.
Measuring U.S. dollar, it's even 66% up. Very, very strong growth in the company. We have also been able to leverage the growth into good EBITDA good profit. We had the result of SEK 146 million, which is actually 151% better than first quarter in 2021. That amounts to 12.8% EBITDA margin, which also is a strong improvement from 9.5 one year ago. We are very happy for that good result.
On the next page, we can see the different segments. Also here, it's very positive to see that we can see the positive trend in almost all segments. We see that Nordic had about 180% growth. If we exclude acquisition of Elmatica, it's about 50% growth.
Also EBITDA margin is good, 14%, but we have taken some one-time cost in Elmatica. If we compare the comparable companies, actually EBITDA margin was 17% for the old NCAB Nordic. Europe continues to grow as well, 78% including acquisitions and 69% comparable companies, which is also very, very strong. We see a good development in especially Germany, Benelux, and U.K. Also here, we are happy to see that the EBITDA margin is increasing and reaching at 12.7%.
North America growth of before acquisitions and including acquisitions. The only segment that is going down is East, of course, connected to the divestment of Russia. If we should compare without Russia, we would be about 7% up actually.
EBITDA margin would be much higher excluding Russia, since they were making a loss during March. On the next page, we can see that the growth continues as you can see, and also with the stable gross margin. I mean, this is also a very strong improvement that we have been able to handle all the price increases in a good way. Because we have seen price increases both from factories and from logistics, and the fact that we have been able to keep the gross margin on an even level.
We have either we can transfer the prices further to customers, which is of course good for us. Next page, looking further on. As we said before, growth in net sales was 66% and in SEK 85%. If we take the comparable companies, we saw a growth of 42%. We are very happy to see a strong organic growth in all our operations.
Order intake increased by 8%, but for comparable companies, it's a little bit down. The reason here is of course that we had a very strong order intake first quarter in 2021. As Peter mentioned, the reason was that we had longer lead times. We saw a lot of orders before the price increase and so on. It's tough competition with last quarter's order intake.
Still, we have order intake, higher revenue, which means that we are building order book. Next slide down, we can see the results and margin for the group. We are happy to present a 151% increase in EBITDA and a strong EBITDA margin at 12.8%.
We did have some extra costs for final earnout payment, excluding that one, it should have been 13.1%. The earnings per share went up from SEK 0.22 to SEK 0.35. Of course, on this line we see the impact from the write-off in Russia of SEK 43.2 million. If we should exclude that one, earnings per share would have been 0.58 Swedish krona per share. Overall, we are very happy for a strong quarter and a good result.
Very good. Let's move over to the segment. If we look at Nordics on page 18, we can see that our order intake increased by 42% in U.S. dollars and close to 60% in Swedish krona. The growth is primarily of course driven through the acquisition of Elmatica, but also very strong development in the region and particularly in Denmark and Norway.
Net sales in U.S. dollars up 117% and in Swedish krona + 142%, and reached a total of SEK 307 million compared to SEK 127 million last year. A strong improvement in our EBITDA to SEK 43 million versus SEK 18.4 million in prior year. Our EBITDA margin came to 14.0%, slightly down from 14.5% prior year.
Again, this is the part of the effect of Elmatica. Excluding the Elmatica impact, the EBITDA margin in Nordics was 17%. Looking at segment Europe, strong net sales growth in all our markets, especially Germany, Netherlands, and U.K.
Order intake increased by 5% in U.S. dollars and 17% in Swedish krona. In comparable units, we were actually down 9%, compared to prior year. Again, this is the effect of increased ordering with longer lead times in 2021 in the comparables. Net sales increased by 78% in U.S. dollars and 98% in Swedish krona. The growth in comparable units was 69% and 52% in U.S. dollars.
A very strong improvement in EBITDA both in absolute numbers to SEK 72 million, but also an improvement in margin from 8.2% to 12.7%. Also to be noted in European segment was the acquisition of META that happened at the start of January. Moving over to the U.S., we had order intake increase by 19% in US dollars, by 32% in Swedish krona.
Excluding acquisitions, we also here show continued growth on the order side by 11%. Net sales grew by 40% in US dollars and 56% in Swedish krona, reaching a total of SEK 184 million. Excluding the acquisitions, we still had growth of 33% in U.S. dollars.
also good improvement on the EBITDA, reaching SEK 9.7 million compared to 9.6 in prior year, and margin lift from 8.1% to 10.7%, which is also a good improvement. Looking then at East, which has been the one most challenged segment in this first quarter, where we've seen the order decreasing by 46% in U.S. dollars, or 40% in Swedish krona to SEK 85 million. Of course here the impact is of course that Russia sales stopped after the twenty-eighth of February. Net sales are decreasing by 14% and 3% in Swedish krona.
EBITDA decreased to 9.4%, versus 10.3% in prior year, but still very healthy margin of 11.5% versus 12.5% despite the issues of closing down Russia. We've also been in China and seeing a lot of challenges on the customer side with the COVID restrictions.
I think we've been able to manage the supply chain in a good way, but we've seen many of our customers in China being affected by lockdowns and therefore being difficult to drive customer activities in China and keep production with our customers in China, which has impacted part of the numbers here in quarter one. Over to you, Anders.
Mm-hmm. Thank you. Going back to future activities and more acquisition opportunities, we still will focus on continue our acquisition path. I think the corona pandemic have created a lot of opportunities for us. I mean, there have been difficulties for many smaller companies to travel to Asia and to China, and they have difficulties to attract the good suppliers.
There are many interesting opportunities for us out there. We are talking to rather many companies and of course it takes some time to reach an agreement. We have identified that before some 170-180 companies, we have shortlisted about 45 target companies. We have done for last year, including the [uncertain] of course.
Still we are working with the short list here, so it looks promising. Yes, go back to the next page on the integration process. I think it's important to note that we would really like to make sure that all acquired companies will be part of NCAB.
They very quickly adapt to our marketing strategy, our way of working, make sure that the sales and the employees are taken care of in a good way, and that we can rather quickly change the names, marketing activities for NCAB, et cetera. That will be important for us. We look into operations. We see how we can benefit from our factory management in China, how we can make sure that we get better pricing, better payment terms, and so on.
Long term, we should also strive to have the same IT systems in all our companies. Normally, it will take 12-18 months to get the company fully integrated. Then they should work according to our values, our way of working, and with our brand, and so on.
That has, I think, historically been a rather good way to find synergies, especially on the supplier side, where we can see some opportunities in payment terms and on gross margin side. Okay, going into next page, looking into some financial KPIs. Return on equity was up to 37% in the quarter. It's good. Our net debt has increased due to the acquisitions we ha ve made last year. But still, we have a solvency of 32%.
Our net working capital has increased in the last year mainly due to the freight issues and longer lead times. We have seen a lot of disturbance on the sea freight and so on. We are now running about 11%. That has been stable for the last quarters, about 11% of last twelve months sales.
Before that, we were down to 7%, 8%, 9%. We believe there will be some opportunities going forward to reduce working capital. But as long as we have the freight issues, that will be on this level, probably. We still have some good firepower for further acquisitions.
Wrapping up, you can say that we have a very strong quarter behind us on the back of a very strong 2021, and we are continuing to deliver on our strategic plan, where we are continuing to see a lot of opportunities to increase our market shares in Europe, U.S.A., and in the East regions.
We are also working continuously on deepening our collaboration with existing customers, broadening our scope and moving to high technology applications. On top of that, we are expanding geographically, adding new markets to our portfolio, as well as strengthening our positions in markets where we have a foothold, but maybe we can increase our presence.
Finally, a lot of activities in a very fragmented market, it gives us opportunities to consolidate. Acquisitions is one part of our clear strategy for growth, which is also then reflected in our updated financial targets. With that, we wrap up, and we'll be happy to take any questions you may have.
Yeah. Just a few comments then on activities going forward. We'll have our general meeting on May 3rd, next Tuesday, and then we will release our second quarter report on July 21st.
Thank you.
Ladies and gentlemen, if you have a question for the speakers, please press zero and one on your telephone keypad. We have the first question from Klas Danielsson from Nordea. Please go ahead.
Yes. Thank you for taking my questions. A few housekeeping questions, and then maybe just looking at your targets a bit. If we start on the order intake side this quarter, could you maybe help us a bit more what's in the kind of mix there? What's the kind of growth from lead times or decline from lead times? How much is price? What's volumes? If we start there.
I would say, I mean, during last year, we had a special situation during the first half of the year where we saw both big movements on pricing as well as big movements on lead times. I think that generated a situation where we have customers not only placing normal demand orders, but also needing to place orders with longer lead time further out in time.
That sort of boosted, created a larger than demand really driven order situation. I think what we've said before is that from Q3 and onwards, we started to see this situation normalizing again. I think now we're in a situation where we are partly still enormous.
We are working off a little bit our existing order book, and we see signs of potential improvements, some improvements on the lead time side. Pricing, there are not so much movement. If anything, we've slightly seen some increases, but not very much.
It's primarily now that we can see that we have a big order book with us, which our customers are partly working off. Also, some improvements on the lead time side, which is really behind the expected decline in orders. I think we have been waiting for when this would happen, where we will see a correction on the order side as we would sort of see the net sales and order books is starting to converge.
We still see this. We don't see this at all as any sign of a weakening demand. In fact, we have good opportunities to grow, and we expect net sales to continue to grow.
All right. Just kind of boiling that down, just to be very clear. If we look at the kind of average lead time in the order intake this quarter, is that starting to kind of come down from the five? Because I know you had five months basically around there, that level. That's starting to come down a bit.
Yes. Yes. We're starting to see improvements now. We're starting to see improvements partly on the factory side and also on the logistics side. Of course, we've had some setbacks with COVID in China, which has partly impacted some of the logistics flows on how you can transport goods to your shipping location, et cetera. I would say the underlying trend is positive, but there has been some temporary setbacks from COVID outbreaks in China. We expect and hope to see further improvements in the coming months.
Okay, that's very helpful. That's very helpful. Because you're talking a bit about your order backlog there. I mean, looking at that as a whole, how is that kind of developing in Q1? Could you give us any clues on how we should expect kind of deliveries developing into Q2 and then into Q3 and Q4 and so forth?
Now, I think the good part is to see that we even if we see that the lead times is slightly going back, we keep to have an order intake which is higher in revenue, which I think is a positive sign from the market. I think it's tricky to say when everything should be delivered. But step by step, we see that we are sort of delivering out of this high order intake that we got in the first half year last year. Hopefully we're getting back to some kind of normal lead times by end of the year.
All right. That's helpful. Thirdly, if we kind of go into the target side, I mean, could you maybe go over a bit what your assumptions are within those? I guess the organic growth side sounds quite reasonable and the acquisition side as well.
I was perhaps a bit kind of surprised on the margin side, which stood out as a bit cautious seeing as your margin development has been very good over time here. If you could just kind of go into that and how you're thinking about those assumptions, essentially.
Sure. I mean, on the growth side, as you said, we continue to believe that we can continue with the double digit organic growth. On top of that, we see an opportunity to continue with more acquisitions than maybe we've done historically. That would lead us to be able to generate a high growth pace over a longer period of time than we've done historically.
Historically, maybe we were overall around 15% for quite some time. Then we've had a very strong 2021 behind us, but we believe that we can actually come to a new higher level of around 20%, is achievable for us going forward. Then on the margin side, you said we've been improving our margin.
We came to basically around 12.5% in 2021, although of course there we had some very significant scaling effects with a rapid volume increase. If we look forward going forward, we will be continuing to drive this higher growth rate. We will be continuing continuously in a strong organic growth, which means also opening up new markets as we have in our strategy as well as acquisitions.
We believe that say, looking at acquisition companies, we see very few companies which are matching our profitability levels, at as a starting point. That means that say being able to grow at a higher rate while still keeping or having a profit margin target of around 12.5%, is quite aggressive but still attainable.
All right. It's perhaps a bit blurred on the acquisition margin side, I guess. That's part of it. Okay. I mean, just digging into the kind of organic growth side, how kind of lumpy do you think that will be? Because obviously in 2022, it's likely going to be quite a lot higher than that kind of organic growth pace that you're implying. I mean, just looking at maybe 2023, 2024, 2025 and so forth, are you seeing basically that you'll have organic growth rates in line with what you've had historically then rather, and a bit of a boost kind of in 2022? How should we kind of think about the phasing of the organic growth rates, I guess?
I think just on the fact how we saw the growth starting or accelerating during last year on the order side, et cetera, and the comparables, we will of course have a from a comparison situation, we'll have a weaker sort of H1 in 2021 to compare with. We have good comparables on quarter one. You could expect that for 2022 overall, we could have higher than that average growth rate going forward.
If you look more on quarter three, quarter four, that is when you'll be looking, comparing with very strong quarters in 2021. We still believe that there is a very strong underlying demand in the market. I think the fact that we have grown in terms of size is in itself helping us become the natural choice for many of our customers.
Mm.
We see opportunities to grow there. It's always difficult when we are partly struggling with component issues or our customers are struggling with component issues, and still are. I think it's been something that was problematic in 2021.
I'd say it's equally problematic in 2022, maybe even slightly worse in some cases. I think we can see that the underlying demand is very strong, and of course that gives a good opportunity that as expectations are that component issues will become less of an issue in 2023, 2024, that we can see, start to see this demand materializing also and support our strong organic growth.
I think also we can see a trend that we get more and more nearshoring or that some assembly work is moving back from Asia to Europe, and that will also support our way to growth further in the coming years.
Oh, that's very interesting. Yeah. Just to be very clear, it's not like you're assuming basically 30% net sales growth this year and then basically 5% for the remaining years, or how should we kind of think about that division, I guess?
No, I think we are looking upon this more as an overall that we would sort of our historical growth rate of around, say 15% could be more in the order of around 20%.
Mm.
Of course, there will be some years which are stronger, and then there may be some years which are weaker.
Mm.
We don't expect. We're quite sure we will not be on the average 20% all these years. There will be some years which are stronger, maybe some which are slightly weaker. We believe it's over a longer period of time. It's something which should be attainable.
All right. No, that's very helpful. Thanks. I'll stop there for now. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you.
We have no further question. As a reminder, ladies and gentlemen, if you wish to ask a question, please press zero and one on your telephone keypad. It seems that we have no further questions.
Okay. Well, we thank you all for listening in and wish you a good day.
Yeah. Thanks a lot.
Thank you.