Welcome to NCAB's Q2 presentation for 2022. This conference call is being recorded and will be posted on NCAB and Financial Hearings' web pages afterwards. Participants will be on listen only mode, and there will be an opportunity to ask questions afterwards. Today, I am pleased to present CEO Peter Kruk, CFO Anders Forsén, and IR Manager Gunilla Öhman. With that, I will hand over to Mr. Kruk. Go ahead.
Thank you very much. If we move to page number three, summary of the quarter, I'm very pleased to present a very good quarter for us in NCAB. We had the sales amounted to SEK 1.1 million-SEK 2 million, showing organic growth of 15% in U.S dollar, which is our main trading currency. With acquisitions, our sales growth is up to 25% in U.S dollars. We've had continuously good order intake. Order intake at SEK 1,035 million, which is down 2% in Swedish krona versus prior year. In comparable units, it is a decrease of 27%.
However, one needs to bear in mind that during the first half of 2021, there was an increasing order booking related to both price increases and predominantly longer lead times or increase in lead times. If we factor out the estimated extra SEK 200 million of order intake in Q2 2021, then we will actually see that our order intake is still growing by some 20%. Also very positive in this quarter is that our acquired companies are all continuing to perform very well. This and combining and leveraging our growth in net sales led us to improve our EBITDA to SEK 160 million, which is an increase of 54%.
Our EBITDA margin reached a record high of 14.3% compared to 13.6% in prior year, which actually also included forgiveness of PPP loans. Also very good is that we've had a very strong cash flow in the quarter, amounting to SEK 148 million compared to SEK 30 million prior year, which is a combination of the good EBITDA performance, but also a small improvement in our working capital. Over to you, Anders, on major events in the quarter.
Okay, good morning. We have some highlights for the quarter is that we made a decision about the dividend for 2022. It was decided to divide as SEK 0.06 per share. 50% was paid in May, and the remaining part will be paid in October. We also launched a new credit facility with Nordea, so we have another SEK 300 million, which boost our possibilities for further acquisitions. Sadly, on April 8, we had to sell off our Russian operations. We stopped all our production or sales to customers already in February. In April 8, we sold the business to the local management in Russia. That had a small order write down, cost about SEK 43 million, but no impact on the result in Q2 .
On the other hand, we are happy to say that we made a new acquisition of Kestrel International Circuits Ltd in the U.K., which we did on June 24th, just before the quarter ended. On next page, some information about Kestrel. They are based in the U.K., rather close to our present office in the U.K. They are a high-quality supplier of value-added PCB. They had sales for roughly SEK 125 million, mainly for customers in the U.K. Together, we will be the clear leading partner now in the U.K. Kestrel also had a rather good result. The EBITDA amount is about SEK 17 million for last year. The company has a long history. They have been founded in 1995. They have some 25 employees, 20 in the U.K. and five in China and Hong Kong.
The purchase price was SEK 103 million for the shares, which amounted to an EBITDA enterprise value multiple of a little bit more than six. We believe that this acquisition will add on the result per share for 2022. Back to you, Peter.
On page number six, a little bit background about who we are. In NCAB, we supply the printed circuit boards, which you see on the picture to the far left. This is the basic component upon which our customers mount semiconductors to create PCBAs, which in turn form the core of any electronic product. Important to remember is that all of our production is outsourced, but we provide advanced technical support as well as production engineering services. We actually have more than 100 specialists only working with factory management, and that enables us to secure leading quality and delivery performance for our customers. We move to page seven. We have a long-standing history starting in the early nineties in Sweden.
As you can see from the bottom graph, since 2008, when the original founders sold the company, there has been a continuous good growth in the company, an average growth rate till today of 19%. You can also see that from our IPO in 2018, that growth rate has been on average 29%, which is a combination of continued strong organic growth, and global expansion, as well as an increase in activity in acquisitions. If we move to page 8. You see here a summary of the key figures in the quarter.
Our sales numbers, SEK 1,122 million in sales, which is an increase of 47% versus prior year. In U.S dollars, $114 million, increase of 25% and our EBITDA of SEK 160 million, which is an increase of 54%. You can see our EBITDA margin of 14.3%, which is an improvement of 4.7 percentage points. If we go to page nine, you can also see here, which is also very positive, is that Bare Board segment, we see very strong growth in all of our regions, and also very good financial performance.
In the Nordics, you can see growth of 78%, which includes also the acquisitions of Elmatica, but also a good organic growth excluding acquisitions and a very healthy EBITA margin where our markets are performing well. We also start to see some synergies from the Elmatica acquisition. In Europe, also good organic growth, 22% organic, 30% growth, including acquisitions, and a very good margin of 4.4%. Also in America, good growth, very positive margins, close to 15%. It's important to remember that only a few years back, we could see that both Europe and North America were steadily more performing somewhere between 5% and 10% EBITDA margin. It's good that we're now for a number of quarters being able to lift the performance in these regions.
Finally, East, where we see a big drop in sales, of course, relates to the fact that Russia is no longer part of the business here from quarter two. But we also saw that our business, predominantly in China, was impacted by COVID lockdowns in quarter two in China. We also had some quite tough comparables from last year where our business in Asia was the first region to really take off after the pandemic. Nevertheless, a very strong performance by the team in our East segment, delivering close to 19% EBITDA margin. Moving to page 10, we're also happy to see that we are continuing to develop our gross margin continuously.
We've seen in the graph, you can see a decline from 2019 to 2020, but that is all related to acquisitions of Flatfield and Bare Board Group in 2020, which were both running lower-margin gross margins. Back on that, we're now continuing to develop our gross margins in all of our regions. Then we move into the sales growth. Here we can see in the trend chart, you also see that the growth 25% in U.S dollars, 47% in SEK, and comparable units 15%, order intake going down 70% in US dollars, 2% in SEK. Again, this is related to the additional or the high order intake we saw in Q2 of last year.
Comparable units, you can see we saw a decrease in U.S dollars and in Swedish krona. Moving to our EBITDA side. Here, again, you can see we're continuing to develop and grow our EBITDA results. In the quarter, it was improved by 54% to prior year. EBITDA margin of 14.3% versus 13.6%. If we just excluded ex-transaction costs for our transaction one-time effect, we had a 14.7% EBITDA margin versus 12.3% in prior year. Our earnings per share was 0.75 SEK versus 0.42 in prior year. Over to you, Anders.
Okay. Start on the next page 13. Looking into the different segments. Let me start with Nordic. We see that orders increased by 30% in U.S dollar and 53% in SEK. Main driver here is the acquisition of Elmatica that we did in October last year. We also see a very strong development in our Danish operation. If we compare for comparable companies, the order intake is down compared to last year, but we had a very strong order intake Q2 due to the increasing lead times. Looking back to the net sales, we saw a steady growth 78% in U.S dollar and 109% in SEK. Also positive to see is that we had a positive book-to-bill.
Even if the order intake was lower than last year, we had a positive book-to-bill. EBITDA has been strongly improved. We had some one-time costs for the integration of Elmatica in Q1 . We see now that that's the result, this is going up for the Elmatica acquisition as well, and they are in line with all the other companies. We also see growth in Denmark, Finland; we see profitability is increasing. We're very happy for the strong EBITDA margin of 20% for Nordic. We can also see that we have some customers here suffering from component shortages, especially in our own Norwegian business. It looks like it will ease up a little bit for the Q3 . Okay, going to the next page, number 14, about Europe.
Also here we see a strong net sales growth in all our markets, especially our main markets, Germany, Netherlands, and U.K. Net sales increased by 30% in USD and with more than 50% in SEK. Growth for comparable companies was 22% in USD. Still we see a very positive and healthy growth on the revenue side. Order intake, the same thing here. It is lower than last year, but Europe was a segment that really had very high extraordinary order intake in Q2 . Of course, we can say that we are hit in two ways. We have very tough comparables for 2021, and we also see that orders are lower right now due to that lead times normalizes, that the customer doesn't need to place the same amount of orders.
In some way, you can say that we are hit in two ways, but we see very stable business from our customers and we are not worried about the market situation. Also here we can see a good improvement in EBITDA from SEK 38 million- SEK 68 million. Of course, it is due to the acquired companies, but we have also improved profitability and so on. We're very happy to see the development for our European segment. Going into next page, North America. Here we see order intake decreased 6% in dollar, but increased 11% in SEK. They are a little bit lower for comparable companies. We had a smaller RedBoard acquisition done in October last year.
We can see that the market in U.S. seems to be more stable and more growing a little bit more than we have seen in Europe and Nordic. They did not have the same extraordinary orders in 2021 either. Also here, we're happy to see that the EBITDA is increasing. We have a strong margin of 14.8%. You have to remember that in 2021, we had a one-time impact of this forgiveness of the PPP loan, which was about 11 million SEK, it will be. Going back to East, which of course is little bit of a crazy quarter for East. This is the Q1 without our Russian operation. Of course, that has a big impact on the revenue.
We also have had a very strange situation in China with a lot of lockdowns. We have seen a lot of slow activities in our Chinese operation. On the other hand, we see that in the end of the quarter, it seems to ease up a little bit, and it seems that the customers are starting to act in a more positive way. Therefore, sales decreased, both excluding Russia and also our Chinese operation. On the other hand, we were very good in handling the EBITDA margin. We managed to increase the EBITDA margin to almost 19% for the sales in China. Hopefully, we will see less lockdowns in the coming quarters for our China operation. Going to the next page, talk a little bit about our acquisitions.
You know, we are happy that we can continue to do acquisitions and the market seems to be very positive for us. We are in discussions with a number of more potential acquisition targets out of this sort of pipeline that we have created. We still have some 40-45 companies to meet up and discuss with. I think that the market right now is rather positive for us still. I mean, the smaller competitors are not allowed to travel to China, or cannot travel to China. They have difficulties with meeting the factories and so on. The market is still very good for us to do further acquisitions. The interest for the companies to sell is also rather good.
Looking to the next page, just to repeat how we work with our integration of acquired companies. We focus in the beginning very much on marketing, sales, and people and culture. We would like to rebrand the companies to NCAB because we believe that's the way going forward. Of course, what we are buying is customer relationship and good employees. It's important that we really take care of the employees, that we work with the customers in a good way. We're looking into operations, how we can make that maybe more efficient, how we can use the same IT tools, and how we can find some large-scale activities on finance side. Of course, normally we can see benefits in our factories.
We have often better pricing or better payment terms, and we try to implement that as quick as possible. I think we can see all our acquisitions done last year. We have seen improvement in gross margin and in EBITDA margin. We have not made many savings on the employee side. Important part is to see the benefits of growing acquired companies. We change slide then to page number 19. Some more financial KPIs, return on equity, and June was 43%, which we are happy for. Net debt has increased to 1.6 in relation to EBITDA, and we have our financial target to be around two. Solvency little bit lower than last year, but of course, we also done the extra dividend in December 2021.
The net working capital has been increasing, but we've seen our slightly positive trend. I mean, the net working capital increased when we had increase in lead times, we had more in buffer stock, we had more sea freight, and so on. We can now see that it slowly starts to go down when the lead time is more normalized. Net working capital versus net sales, 10.7%. It was 8% last year, but it was above 11% in Q3 , so we see a positive trend. Including the new loan facility, we have available liquidity of over SEK 700 million for further acquisitions. Of course, we are very proud of the cash flow in the quarter of almost SEK 150 million. Peter, back to you.
Mm-hmm. If we just want to summarize our strategy and how we want to move forward. We as a company, we are a global leader, but we are operating in a very big fragmented market amounting to roughly $20 billion-$25 billion of the high-mix, low-volume printed circuit boards. Our first focus is focusing on growth and increasing our market shares in Europe, USA, and East. We're also working to develop or deepen our collaboration with existing customers. This is both an opportunity for further growth and providing more value to those customers, which also in turn can help us improve our margins and move up in technology. We are also looking further to expand into more new geographies or strengthen our position in parts of geographies where we already have a presence.
Finally, it being a very fragmented market, many of our competitors are smaller, local, regional, players like Kestrel, that we just acquired. There's a good opportunity for us to consolidate the market through acquisitions, which is part of our core strategies. By that, I think we close our presentation.
Thank you. If you would wish to ask a question, please do so by pressing zero one on your number pads. If you wish to withdraw a question or feel that your question has already been addressed, please do so by pressing zero two. There will now be a brief pause while questions are being registered. Thank you. Our first question comes from Frank Vang-Jensen , Nordea. Go ahead. Your line is now open.
Thank you very much. A few questions from my side. Starting off with the order intake side. That's obviously growing quite strongly in SEK still if you exclude the lead times and so forth. Could you help us give a bit of an additional color on how that's growing if we kind of adjust for FX and acquisitions on that basis, to start off?
Yeah, I think we can start by saying I can come and start, and you can follow up, Anders. I think overall we see a good strong demand from our customers. I mean, even though we can hear in the news about a lot of sort of worries in the market, we don't see any decline in demand from our customers at this time. I think what we're seeing is a number of customers are still struggling with component issues, but demand is very much still there for us. It's a positive outlook from that perspective.
As we said, we had quite a significant order intake during the first half of last year, and in Q2 of last year we expected it was around SEK 200 million of additional orders that was placed just from the effect of increasing lead times. Therefore we feel that, say, we are in a good position to continue also our growth going forward. Anders, do you wanna...
I think how you should think is, I mean, we saw that we in Q1 had maybe roughly the same amount, close to SEK 200 million in additional orders due to the longer lead times, and then another SEK 200 million in Q2 last year. Of course, when we now see that the lead time is going down, customers doesn't need to place orders with such long lead time as before, meaning that they can postpone the order into next quarter instead. In that way you can say that the orders for this quarter is hit by two ways. It's tough comparison last year, and it's also a little bit lower due to that they already placed the needed orders.
Based on that and the comments we hear from the customers, I would say that we still see a positive trend even in U.S. dollar. If you have to take away the $200 million in U.S. dollar, it is still a small decline for comparable companies versus last year. We strongly believe that is due to the fact that customers don't need to place orders since they already placed orders last year.
Is that because I guess the backlog for you guys has, I guess in Q3 or so, been about 4 months or so? Is that still the same kind of amount now? Or I guess by the logic that you're kind of presenting, it sounds like it's perhaps back to being around those three-month levels, or am I misunderstanding?
Yeah. Much closer to at least. I think we still can see that we have some more sea freight, I think, than we had before the pandemic. Maybe that will add on a little bit, but I do believe that we are very close to be back on 3 months order lead time again.
Right. Right.
I think what we could see was that we saw an order increase during the first two quarters of last year, and then maybe a part of that was bled out through the system in Q3, Q4. You could say Q1 you had a renewed COVID risk in China with logistics issues in Hong Kong, et cetera, which I guess I think that even though maybe production lead times was slightly improving, it made our customers cautious, and we did not really see a decline in the order intake in Q1. I think now in Q2 things have stabilized more, and then I think more customers will step by step are adjusting to the better lead times.
I think it's a gradual process where there is an improvement in the lead times, and then not all customers change their ordering pattern day one. They will maybe still want to make sure that they have sort of stability in those supply before they will readjust their ordering, methodology.
Okay. Well, that sounds logical for sure. I mean, clearly fantastic performance on the EBITDA margins in this quarter, particularly I guess in the Nordics. There's also strong performance across the board. There's that. Could you maybe give us some additional color on what's driving that? I guess there's some seasonality in that, but I mean, should we extrapolate four percentage points higher margins in the Nordics and some 3% in North America and so forth, or is there anything kind of special that's going on there?
I think, I mean, in Nordic, I think, we see some scale advantages. I mean, we have had some lower revenue streams in Norway and Denmark before. We see that those countries have been growing rather positively last year. We have more or less the same number of employees and same sales. That will have a good leverage on the EBITDA. We also see that the Elmatica acquisition also drove in more profitability and was good in that way. We believe that will be good add-on to the profit level. Of course, I mean, we must say that we have some positive things from the currency. Of course, revenue is driven by U.S. dollar, as you all know, and gross profit.
Since we buy and sell most of our goods in U.S. dollar, gross profit margin will be increased by the strong U.S. dollar. I mean, we have most of our costs, at least in the European segment, of course, in euro. Before U.S. dollar, euro have been not stable. For this quarter, the U.S. dollar is much stronger than euro as well. Of course, that give us some advantages, that we have costs in euros and gross profit in U.S. dollars. For sure there are some positive impact from the currency on the profit side as well.
Okay.
Some revaluation effects there, I guess, on the currency side or.
Mm-hmm.
As the currency movements. Yeah.
I think lastly, I hate to be that guy focusing on the downside, but clearly I think the markets are currently focusing on recession risks as of now. I think if we look back at NCAB, it was. You were down about 15% in sales during 2009. I mean, could you comment on how you think you're positioned today versus that period? Also kind of what your levers on cost and so forth in such a scenario.
I think we have a very good structure as a company. I mean, we are extremely well positioned that we are very asset light. We have strong cash generation. I mean, a lot of our costs are variable, and that enables us to flex quite significantly with the market. I think in 2009, what we've seen then was that when there was a big market decline, so top line went down, but it also meant there was a lot of opportunities to bargain with the factories for lowered pricing in purchasing, which also meant that we could offset part of that volume decline by improvement across margins. I think historically, we have proven that we can handle these potential decline very well. I think that remains also going forward.
I think today we can also see that, those who might struggle in those kind of situations will be a lot of those smaller traders. I think it may even also, on the upside, open up more acquisition opportunities for us.
All right. No, that's all for me. Thanks very much.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Robert Lidén, Carnegie. Go ahead, your line is now open.
Yeah, hi, just a few follow-ups on the same themes, I think. Those currency impact on margins. You had a text in the notes saying that there was a SEK 6 million-SEK 10 million positive impact estimated. Is that it basically on that theme for margins? I mean, that would be a percentage point.
Yeah.
margin improvement or less equal.
Yeah. Yes, it is. It's of course, it'd be tricky to be exact, but we tried to make the estimate. We believe around SEK 10 million is the one-time impact on the currency situation for the quarter.
Great.
The main thing is that you see as we have a gross profit in U.S. dollar which got stronger and we have a lot of operating costs in euros, SEK and so on.
It's an order of magnitude, think of 1%. Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Cool. Those margins in East, I mean, they were really strong despite those China lockdowns. Is that a function of Asia margins being sort of better than Russia margins and sort of sustainable then or mix shift or is it something very contemporary positive somehow in the segment?
I would say partly at least. I mean, I think we have always been more of a higher EBITDA margin for our China operation than our Russian operations. Partly it's due to that. I think also we were in a situation, there were a very strange quarter in China due to all these lockdowns and there have been shortage of components and so on. I think we have a very smart businessman in our China operation, and they also taken advantage. The business we have taken has been maybe more profitable than normal. It is a combination I would say. Normally we have a very strong EBITDA margin in our China operation and Malaysia is still very small for us. East is more or less only China right now.
All right, perfect. Sounds good. Then, I mean, we talked about this order intake, adjusting for, you know, comparisons and whatnot. Could you say something about the trend throughout the quarter? Have you seen any sort of slowing down in order intake trends monthly, or
No. No, we can't really say that it's been a trend. If anything, maybe we can see some positive signs in East. I think they were struggling quite a bit at the end of Q1 and beginning of Q2 . I think maybe here there are some positive signs that sort of the lockdowns still occurring in China have been less detrimental to the business climate. Otherwise, there is no trend that we are on a dying downward slope or anything like that.
Right. Sideways and an up in East. Okay, perfect. Sounds good. Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Thank you. There are no further questions from the telephone line at this time. I will hand over to Gunilla Öhman, IR Manager, for closing remarks. Thank you.
I just wanted to kindly remind you that our Q3 report is on November eighth, and thank you so much for listening in today. Thank you.