Ladies and gentlemen, good morning and welcome to the NCAB Group third quarter conference call. All participants will be in the listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing star then zero on your telephone keypad. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Anders Forsén, CFO. Please go ahead.
Yes, hello. Good morning, everyone. I'm happy to present the third quarter results for NCAB Group. I'm not joined by Peter Kruk today because he's in recovery after a minor sport injury, but you have to take this from me instead. If you go to page number three, summary, we see a rather solid and good demand continuing from our customers. We also can see that the component situation is improving for our customers, which feels good, of course. We're also very happy to present a record EBITDA result and the highest margin ever for NCAB. All segments is doing very well except East that's still struggling after the disclosure of Russia and from the lockdowns in China. Connection to our profit, we're also very happy to present a strong cash flow since we see lead times decreasing.
We also see that our working capital is going down step by step, which is very good. We still believe that we have a positive acquisition climate going forward. Overall, a very positive report from our side. If you go to page number four, you can dig in some deeper in the numbers. We reported a net sales of SEK 1,168,168,000,000, which was a growth of 35% or 10% in US dollar. Organic growth, taking away the acquisition impact, it was flat in US dollar, but increase on 23% in SEK. We see still order intake at a good level. We still have the situation where we had very high order intake during 2021.
We also have a situation right now where customer lead time is going down, meaning that customer doesn't need to order as much as before, we can deliver of the previously made orders. We are happy with the situation, even if you can see a decline in US dollar. Also very happy to see that the integration of our acquired companies is doing very well. We see the synergies we have expected, and that also adds on to the improved EBITDA margin. EBITDA reached SEK 184 million, an increase of almost 50% compared to Q3 last year. We also are very happy to report the high EBITDA margin, 15.7%. To some extent, it is connected to the stronger US dollar, since we are buying and selling US dollar and have a lot of operating costs in euros and SEK and so on.
Finally, of course, the very strong cash flow. The 212,000,000 SEK is a strong number and connected to reduced working capital and a strong profit. Next slide, a short recap of NCAB. What we are producing is the bare board that you see to the left in the picture. Our customers mount all the components in the middle, and then it will become a final product to the right. Of course, what is important to note that we don't own any factories. We only have relationship with the factories and with the customers. All PCBs or printed circuit boards are customer unique or product unique. It's not the shelf goods that we are selling. Next page, we work in our niche, which we call high mix, low volume.
That's the area where we can add much more value. That's a higher product value. It's much higher demands on quality, less price pressure, and it's more difficult to buy directly. That is the area where we can sort of really give our customers a good added value. PCB market global is about $80 billion. We say that the high mix, low volume is something between 25%-30%, meaning that we still have less than 2% market share. There's a lot of opportunities to continue to grow in the PCB market. It's important to be in the right area where we see we can make profits. Going into the next slide, talking more about sustainability. This is, of course, getting more and more important. I think we have to note that NCAB has been working intensively with sustainability since 2014.
We do a lot of work together with our customers. We're having a lot of seminars. We are discussing with customers how to design and how to produce the printed circuit boards in a more sustainable way and so on. The important part is that we can actually prove that what we are saying is true with the factories, because we have more than three people in China working only with sustainability audits. They are visiting our factories on a daily basis. They are doing audits. They can control that everything we say is actually true, and not just notes on the paper. Of course, choosing the right factory from a sustainability point of view has been more and more important. As I said, being on site is crucial. I think we can take this many steps further.
We also started to measure now the energy consumption, the water waste from the factory, so we can, together with customers, really go Make sure that we make the right choices to have a better sustainable production. Going forward to the next page, a little bit of our industrial segments. As you see, we're not working with consumer products. We're much focused on industrial, medical, telecom, and power. What we say in power is a lot of EV charging. That is an area that is improving a lot. Also on the customer mix, it's very healthy. Our top 50 customers represent only 44% of our revenue, and the two biggest customers about 7%. We have a very good mix. The bigger customers have several sites we are working with and often in different countries.
Next page, a little bit about the story of NCAB that started in 1993. Then we set up a number of greenfield companies around Europe and then USA from 2012. We have since 2008 had an average growth of 20%. After the IPO in 2018, we have intensified the work with more acquisitions and seen the synergies from that kind of growth. Also have a CAGR of 29% since the IPO. The last acquisition, 2022, has been Meta, Ingenia, and Kestrel in the U.K. in June. Going forward to next page, we can see the numbers for the quarter. As we said before, we are very happy of this number and see the strong growth. As we said, we reached 1,168,000,000 SEK in net sales, an increase with 35%. If we measure in USD, it was an increase of 10%.
EBITDA was close to 50% improved from last year, up to SEK 184 million. We have improved our EBITDA margin with 1.4% units. If we look at the next slide, we see the numbers January to September, which are almost the same. I see the growth is about 53% in SEK and 31% in USD. Also here we see that the EBITDA has increased a lot, 72% compared to first three months 2021. That is of course connected to a strong growth and an improved EBITDA margin. The EBITDA margin comes very much from the scale impacts from the bigger revenue and the acquisitions. On next page, we go into the different segments. Except for East, we see very positive development in all segments. Nordic is improving revenue with 49% and almost flat including acquisition. Of course, it is the Elmatica acquisition that drives the growth here.
EBITDA margin continued to be in a very high level for 18.1% in third quarter. Europe also good growth, 14% including acquisitions and almost flat without. Also here we have seen the improvement in the EBITDA margin continues. We are proud of the 13.2% in Europe. North America also growth both with or without acquisitions and a healthy margin. Eastern, of course, we have some issues. We know that we closed down Russia in April. We also see declining revenue and order intake for our Chinese and Malaysian operation, mainly due to the lockdowns in China. On the other hand, the business we are doing in China is very profitable. We keep up a very high EBITDA margin.
Going into next page, you can see that the revenue continues to increase year by year. We are in a position where we can continue to also improve gross margin. We see that we have an improvement compared to 2021. A little bit lower numbers for 2020 and 2021 is mainly driven by acquisitions we did during those years with lower gross margin. We can see a positive trend in almost all those companies where gross margin is improving. Going back next page, number 14. We see growth in net sales 10% in SEK 35%, as we said. Comparable companies almost flat in USD. We see the order intake, as we said before, is decreasing in USD. We see a growth in SEK.
The main reason is of course that we had all this order loaded during last year. Now we see lead times going back to more or less normal. We expect that from fourth quarter, we are in a normal position where we can expect that order intake will be close to revenue the quarter after. We expect these extra orders in Q3 about SEK 75 million 2021. If we count on that, we see an increase in SEK with 16%. On the profit side for the group, EBITDA, as we said, increased 49% to SEK 184 million, and EBITDA margin increased to a new record high for us of 15.7%. We've also been working a lot with reducing working capital.
We see that inventory is going down due to shorter lead times, which has resulted in a very strong cash flow of over SEK 200 million for the quarter. Also earnings per share was up from SEK 0.49 to SEK 0.74 in the quarter. Let's continue then into the segments on the next page. Starting with Nordic. As we said, we continue to see a good growth in order intake. Of course, this is driven by the acquisition of Elmatica, which was made in beginning of October last year. We also see a strong development in Denmark and Norway. We also here can see that it is a lot of EV charging applications that's driving the growth for those countries. Net sales were up 49% in U.S. dollar and 84% in SEK, and the EBITDA increased from SEK 32 million to SEK 56 million.
Also here we saw a stable EBITDA margin between quarters. Anyway, we are very happy of the performance of the Nordic countries, and we are very confident on this will continue this high profitability level. It's also good to see that we have been able to integrate Elmatica in a good way and see some cost synergies going forward. Going into Europe, we see a net sales increase of 14% in U.S. dollar and with about 40% if we measure in SEK. We see also here a strong growth in our bigger customers like Germany, Netherlands, and U.K. Order intake was here as well, down in U.S. dollar, but flat in SEK. Also here we had a very high extra order intake during 2021 in the third quarter. EBITDA continued to increase. We're up to 13.2% for last quarter.
Here we see some good synergies from the scale impact and also from the acquired companies. We are happy to see that we have been able to onboard the Kestrel acquisition made in June in a very good way. We have seen that we have got new prices from our common factories already from August. We have got new payment terms extending them from some 45-90 days, also valid from all orders placed in August and going forward. We see very strong synergies in that part. Going into North America, we see here as well a decrease in the U.S. dollar in order intake, but in SEK, it was a small increase in orders. Net sales, on the other hand, grew 7% in U.S. dollar and 32% in SEK. If you exclude acquisitions, it was more or less flat in U.S. dollar.
Here we see a strong development of our EBITDA margin and EBITDA, and the main reason is that we have been working hardly with the gross margin from the BBG acquisition made in 2020. I think in average margin, gross margin have gone from some 20%-21% to, well, about 30% now for all customers. Been a hard work with that one, but that has really paid off in the higher profitability in the U.S. market. We are very proud of the team in U.S. as well doing good there. Going into next slide. Looking into East, sort of the segment where we see some issues or not growing. First of all, it was that we stopped all our sales to Russian customers in February, and then we decided to divest the business in Russia in the beginning of April.
It was sold off to our local management in Russia. That have an impact on the development in the segment, but we also see a slower activity in China. A lot of customers are in lockdown, there are some issues to be meeting customers and so on. We have seen a decline in order intake for the comparable units, about 34% in USD, and revenue is also down compared to last year. On the other hand, we have been going to take good business, and we are taking the right kind of business with high margin and high profitability. We're still aiming to report a good EBITDA margin and EBITDA in East. Like I said, a lot of the customers are in lockdown, but we have not seen the same kind of problems in the factories.
There have been a few factories which have been in lockdown, but more or less the production works well, we don't see any issues or hiccups from the production side. Continuing with the next page, possible acquisitions going forward. We are still working and building up our pipeline with companies. We are focusing mainly on U.S., Europe, but also starting to look into Southeast Asia. We see a number of companies, and we have found a number of interesting potential acquisition targets also in that region. We also see that as a big growth area, that could be interesting going forward. Next page, a little bit of how we work with the integration of our acquired companies. It's of course, important to make sure that we take care of the marketing, the branding, use the NCAB brand rather quickly.
We focus a lot on these customers and on the sales, make sure that the customers understand and see the value of being part of NCAB or customer of NCAB Group, and of course, work with the employees to make sure we can keep and attract the good people. We look into the operations like IT and finance and find some scale advantages. Very much, we see also huge advantage with our big team we have in China and Taiwan. With the support from that team, we can often find better factories or have more high-tech factories or better position at the factories, which will be an improvement for the customers of the acquired companies. We say that within 12-18 months, all acquired companies should be a fully NCAB office. Next slide, some other financial KPIs.
Once again, strong return on equity, up to 42%. Net debt over EBITDA, 1.0. Little bit higher than last year, but still down compared to last quarter. Solvency over 35%. Net working capital, we see a positive trend where we reduce working capital, which also means that we will have working capital relationship to our last 12 months sales is down from 11 last year to 10% right now, and we expect that to continue. The strong cash flow has also meant that we have a good firepower for further acquisitions and so on. We have available cash of SEK 950 million together with a new bank loan from Nordea that we also have taken during the quarter. We are in a good and strong financial position.
As presented 2 quarters ago about our new financial targets, we said that 2026, our target is to reach SEK 8 billion in revenue and SEK 1 billion in EBITDA, and that we should not have more than 2 times net debt versus EBITDA, and also that we should try to have a rather good dividend policy and try to distribute available cash. We believe that we are on a good path to reach these targets. How to grow them on the next page. We still believe in our 4 cornerstones to grow the business. Of course, increase market share with the customers we have in Europe, U.S.A., and East. I mean, in money markets, we still have a low market share. Deeper collaboration with existing customers is sort of an easier way to grow with the customers we have.
Expand geographically can be into new markets, new areas, new states in U.S., for example. Of course, acquisitions due to consolidation of the market. We are working on all these 4 pillars to continue to grow the business, and we see still good opportunities. Quick summary of the quarter. Now we go back to some Q&A or questions.
Should we start the flow for questions and answer? Should we move on to the Q&A? Mr. Forsén?
Yeah.
Should we start the questions and answer?
Yes, please. Sorry, I misunderstood that. Yes, please do.
Thank you very much. We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. If you're using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. If at any time your question has been addressed and you would like to withdraw your question, please press star then two. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. The first question comes from Paul De Thiry from Ark Advisors. Please go ahead.
Yes. Good morning. Thank you for taking my question.
Good morning.
Please pass on my best wishes to your CEO for a speedy recovery.
Yeah. Sorry.
I've got two questions, and I'll take them in order. You mentioned in your report that you're taking market share from competitors. Could you give some more details? You mentioned in your investment materials your main competitors are Fineline in Germany, IC France, Taipan in USA. Are these the competitors you're taking market share from? Can you give any more detail on the exact competitors and also which regions, and how you see this developing in the future, and why?
Of course, it's difficult to say exactly from who we're taking market share, but we can see that in all markets in general are growing faster than the market in general. That means that we believe that we're taking market shares. Of course, it's difficult to say if it is from the other big players. I guess that it is a lot from smaller players or from partly direct purchase in China and so on. It's a bit tricky to know if it is from Fineline or from someone else. We can measure and see that we are, in most market, growing quicker than the market in general, and that's the sort of the proof that we believe we're taking market share. We believe as well that using the best factories that we can do to our size, it will continue.
We also see that many smaller players are straggling. They are not able to visit the factories in China as we can do. I mean, we have so many people based in China and Taiwan meeting the factories all the time, which always prioritize us in some way. That makes it easier for us to do good business and deliver on time to the customers.
That makes sense. Thank you. My second question, and forgive me if I've misunderstood this, but you said it in the presentation today that Sorry, your customers in China are affected by lockdowns, but not your production or suppliers.
Can you tell me why that would be the case that you've got no problem sourcing the product, but your customers are having problems ordering?
Yeah. Yeah. I think the most PCB factories we are using are in the southern part of China, and I think they have been less impacted than, for example, the Shanghai, Suzhou area. Also, if there are some outbreaks of COVID in some of the cities, many of the workers in the PCB factories are living in dormitories and in the factory, which means that they can continue production.
Even if the city they are located have been in lockdown, the production has not been harmed because they have so far not had any outbreak of COVID at our factories. That is one reason. I think the main customers we have in China are located in the Shanghai, Suzhou area, where there was much more lockdowns. We think that is one of the reasons.
Okay. Many thanks for answering my questions. That's all. Thank you.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you. The next question comes from Klas Danielsson from Nordea. Please proceed.
Yes. Thank you very much. Thank you for taking my questions. Please tell Peter a quick and speedy recovery as well. Starting with the question on the order side, I think the effect from lead times is quite clear, and you explain it quite well. I guess it's also been burdened a bit by over-ordering in earlier quarters, I was just wondering, could you maybe detail where you think you would be adjusted for this as well? Maybe when do you expect it to return to organic year-on-year growth in the order side as well?
As we said before, we are sort of hit from two directions. One is, of course, that we had some extra orders last year, which we calculate are roughly SEK 75 million. We also see now that customers are not ordering due to that we are delivering out the existing order book. For example, we have a number of forecast orders where they place sort of yearly forecast for us, we accept the orders, we did that for 44 weeks before delivery time a couple of months ago, when the lead times were long. Now we're down to 22 weeks. That means that the number of customers with that kind of system, we have a more or less zero order intake this quarter. There is also an impact on that side.
We believe that that will ease up right now, we think also that we are back to a normal position from this quarter, from fourth quarter. We see that most of the orders taken last year are now delivered, we believe that we are back on a more normal lead time situation where we can see this quarter-by-quarter development.
Looking at Q4, should we expect a more or less flat organic growth in comparable numbers, or is it still burdened, I guess a bit by the lead times in Q4 2021 being a bit higher?
Maybe slightly, but I think that might be fair to guess close to flat development. Mm-hmm.
That's good. Secondly, I guess the only weakness on the net sales level apart from Easee, where it's quite obvious, I guess, that's in the Nordics. Could you maybe detail a bit what's behind the decline? Give us some color on the outlook there. Is it just tricky comparables, or is there anything certain in the Nordics?
It's mainly tricky comparables. We can maybe have seen some kind of slowdown in the Swedish market. I would say the other markets is going rather well. You also note that some of the business from Elmatica that we acquired one year ago, they have a lot of business outside the Nordics, and we are step-by-step now trying to move around a little bit to make the business land in the right segment. It's not very much impacted this quarter, but might be some minor impact that we have moved business from Nordic to Europe. That's a minor impact.
That's interesting. Maybe as well, because you talk a bit about it during this presentation on the different growth rates and so forth in each customer segment. For instance, looking at power and so forth.
Could you maybe detail or give us some extra color on what is the type of growth in the power segment? Do you expect that to be a bit more cyclically sustainable, for instance? If you could maybe give us some idea there.
It's a bit tricky. What we can see is that we get more and more customers, more and more projects in the EV charging area. We started maybe two years ago with Easee and Zaptec in Norway, and they were the main drivers. Now we can see that we have more customers in Sweden coming in. We have more customers in Germany. We have in U.S. a few, we have in Netherlands and in Italy. We see more and more projects coming in for EV chargers. It's difficult to predict exactly how much it is in this. We don't measure it that well, I would say, but what we see the trend is rather clear that we see a growth in that area. There are also much more interest now in energy control for a lot of heating system, solar panels and so on.
There are many projects we see still in a very low level, but we are in discussions with many projects with that side. Of course, there will be a big interest in the energy control sector and green tech area going forward.
Looking at China, I think it's a rather interesting topic at the moment, with regulation and so forth. Starting on the side of the U.S. restrictions on chip sales and so forth, I know that you supply, I don't know, not the most intelligent equipment, so to speak, but
could you maybe detail if you're expecting any kind of spillover effects or so forth, or what you're seeing from this?
We haven't seen any kind of that. We have not seen any PCB factories in U.S. growing or expanding. Of course, we see that the existing PCB factories are already fully loaded in U.S., but we have not seen anything that someone would invest in new production capacity. From that range, we still believe that the Chinese production will be very valid. There are a lot of talks of building production capacity for semiconductors and other stuff in Europe and U.S.A., but so far we haven't seen anything spill over for the PCB. What could happen in some way is that the PCB assembly will be done more and more in Europe and U.S.A., and then they need the PCBs, and it might be easier for us to sell to those customers in Europe and U.S.A. than in China. Yeah.
Could be a small positive impact, but we haven't seen any negative impact so far, at least.
Just to follow up on that, do you think your kind of competitive advantage and the reason for NCAB existing is lessened if production of PCBs were to move more to Europe from China and to, I guess, other Asian parts or whatever? Do you think the more tricky industrial picture makes for still some quite good opportunities for you to keep your advantage, or if you understand what I mean?
Absolutely. I think, the more high tech there'll still be a lot of high-mix, low volume assembly work in Europe and U.S.A., and of course, then they need good support from supplying the PCBs. We still believe that that will be good opportunities for us to support that. If we see more assembly, and I think we kind of see in many of the EMS companies are also growing rather well, that means also that our customers are growing, which means that there are a need for companies like us. We foresee a positive market going forward there as well.
Okay. Fantastic, Anders. Thank you very much for taking my questions. That was all from me.
Yeah. Okay. Thank you.
Thank you. Again, if you have a question, please press star then one. Reminder to the participants, anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and one. The next question comes from Robert Reden from Carnegie. Please go ahead.
Hi, Anders. Maybe I missed what you said, but on North America and the margin of 17% in the quarter, was there something sort of temporary positive there, or what were the drivers to the strong margin development for the North America segment?
I would say the main driver is that we have been constantly working with the gross margin from the Bare Board Group acquisition in 2020, and we see a positive drive quarter by quarter, and it was extremely good here in the third quarter. It's no really one-time impact. I know that we have had some really high margin business on the West Coast for some customers. That could have, of course, pushed this to this top level. In general, we have been working very much together with our team in improving gross margin for the customers. That is the main reason. If 17 is sustainable, I would promise that, but we will be on a much higher level than before.
Sounds very good. I saw you had similar comments about Elmatica, it seems like those large acquisitions, they worked out really well in terms of the margin development post-acquisition.
Yeah, they have. Excellent. Yeah. In the Elmatica case, we also have reduced some headcount, and we have seen some work there. We have been much more efficient on the cost side and when we are operating. They were sort of a mini group, and now we have some headcount less, which was rather expensive on the payroll side. That also gives some profit improvements going forward.
On acquisitions, you wrote that your pipeline is strong and that you have a lot of discussions ongoing and so on. Are you seeing any acceleration in that at the moment? I'm thinking about maybe other buyers being less interested in buying companies now if they have weaker balances and so on. Are you seeing any changes there in the trend?
No, not really. I think maybe we see the same kind of interest in the ones we have been meeting and talking to. We still try to approach a number of companies, and it's not easy to get a good dialogue. Of course, it take some time before a decision is made by the seller. Still see it's very positive, and I think that many of the companies we are talking to, they see a lot of hassle by not being able to travel to China last couple of years. They see huge advantage and possibilities to joining our group in that way. There are some more reasons for them to sell right now than maybe two years ago.
All right. Sounds good. That was all for me. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. This concludes our Q&A session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Ms. Gunilla Öhman for closing remarks.
Thank you all for listening in. I just wanted to kindly remind you that our Q4 report is on February the 17th next year, 2023. Have a good Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you for listening.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, the conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect your lines.