Good morning and welcome to this presentation of the third quarter earnings for the NCC Group. My name is Tomas Carlsson, and I'm the CEO of the company. With me here today, I have Susanne Lithander.
Hi, I'm Susanne Lithander, CFO.
I will give you an overview of the quarter, and then Susanne will come back and provide all the details of the report. The things to remember from this quarter is this. This was strong quarter continuing on the improvements that we have been working with for three years now. We see strong earnings in the contracting business. All business areas are improving earnings and margins. We have profit from property development contributing from three sold and profit-recognized projects. We experience good demand in all our countries, in all business areas. Industry is fundamentally stable, but have a negative impact from Asphalt Finland. Finally, we have strong cash flow and at the end of this quarter, we have a net positive cash position.
Those are the main things to remember from the quarter, and I will get back to all of them in a little while. If we look at the earnings numbers in brief for the quarter, the improvement compared to quarter three last year is 55% or SEK 310 million, 6% margin. Of course, that has the contribution from property development. If we look at year to date, we see the same development with improving earnings, ending at a little bit over SEK 1.2 billion EBIT for the first nine months compared to SEK 981 million last year. Another way of looking at it is like this, grouped by our business areas.
Comparing Q3 this year with 2020, we see clear improvement from the contracting business areas, that is, Infrastructure, Building Nordics and Building Sweden, continuing on the improvements that we've seen over the last couple of years. We see EBITA SEK 288 million better than last year. Industry negative impact of SEK 117 million, primarily driven by Asphalt Finland and then a positive effect from other eliminations. An EBIT earnings on SEK 877 for the quarter. Let's talk about the different business areas and start with contracting. Improved earnings from what was already a relatively good level a year ago, but it's 37% up. All business areas are improving their margins and their earnings, and it looks like this.
A long trajectory going up, most notably is Building Nordics coming up from 3.2% to 3.7% and overachieving on our internal target of 3.5% for contracting units. Strong margins and strong earnings from the contracting business. Looking at property development, three projects recognized in this quarter compared to none in 2020. That meant that we came from a situation where PD had a negative earning in Q3 2020. As you know, we recognize profits in PD on completed projects, which means that we have to have sold the project, we have to let it, we have to have handed it over, and we have to be paid before we recognize the profits.
Last year, we had our big sale in the first quarter with K11, the office where I'm standing right now. Now in the third quarter, we have recognized projects from Hatsina Office One in Helsinki. K11, that's the neighboring building to this one in Solna and Omega in Aarhus. Most of the profits comes from K11 and Hatsina. Looking into future quarters, we have 13 ongoing projects. We have previously announced that we will recognize the profits from Fredriksberg phase two and the next in quarter four, and that's what we're planning for. We have also previously communicated that we would recognize Bettorp in Q4. We have moved that for purely administrative reasons to Q1 next year.
It's a relatively small project, so it has no significant impact on the earnings. We have also announced that we previously announced that we will sell Kineum and MIMO to Platzer in Gothenburg. We have a number of projects that are ongoing, and we will get back to them as soon as we have sold them. Finally, industry. Fundamentally a stable performer, but negative impact from Asphalt Finland. Let's look at that from a couple of different perspectives. First of all, the overall business areas. Stone materials business stable and delivering strong results. Asphalt business in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark performing well. The big issue here is Asphalt Finland. Let's talk about Asphalt Finland.
We announced in November 2020, a year ago, that we intended to divest our Finnish asphalt business, and we have now signed a contract on that. The rationale behind that was several years of loss-making business. We had been through several unsuccessful turnarounds, and we had no strategic fit with the rest of NCC in Finland, i.e. we don't have civil engineering infrastructure business and only a small fit to the stone business. We sold the company or the assets to a Finnish company, Asfalttikallio, and we expect to close the business before the end of this year. There will be a one-time negative effect of SEK 180 million in the fourth quarter.
That is, of course, the effect of the sales price that we were paid minus the book value of the assets, but also provisions for guarantees, provisions for remaining contractual obligation and the transaction costs to actually make this happen. I think it's worthwhile pointing out that there will be a positive cash flow effect from the sales of Asphalt Finland . I want everybody to understand this, we will account for the earnings or the losses in Finland for the full year, and I will shortly go into that in some little bit more detail. If we look at the Finnish Asphalt business over a 10-year period, I think there's two questions that needs to be answered.
The first one is, why didn't we do anything with this 2018 when we did all the other turnaround write-downs? The second question is, why is SEK -180 million a good decision? Let me try to explain that. First of all, in the middle of 2018, when we were conducting the review of the business, we knew that we had three consecutive loss-making years just in the recent history. We also knew that we had had years with profits in Asphalt Finland. We did some write-downs of a one-off nature in Asphalt Finland in 2018, but most of the earnings of SEK -93 million was actually the ongoing operations.
What the organization in industry and Asphalt had was also what I considered to be a credible turnaround plan going into 2019. The decision was to continue with this business and to execute on the turnaround plan. That turnaround plan for 2019 was obviously not successful, and we ended the year of 2019 on approximately the same level as the year before. At this point the organization presented a new, and I still have to say I thought it was credible, turnaround plan for 2020, and we started to execute on that. You have to remember that this type of business is accounted for to a large degree on the Percentage of Completion accounting, so forecasts are key.
In the beginning of 2020, the forecasts were pretty positive on the outlook of success for the turnaround plan. The third quarter was actually positive in Asphalt Finland. That turned out to be not correct forecast from the organization, so we ended up with a really negative earnings in the fourth quarter. The effect that you see this year with the large difference between this year and last year because we're comparing negative earnings with positive earnings last year. At this point, turnaround plans were not really credible anymore, and we didn't see a bright future ahead for the Finnish asphalt business, not at least the way that we operated, and we decided to divest the business.
Now, the first nine months of this year has even larger losses than what we've seen before. There are three drivers behind that. First of all, the asphalt market in Finland is down, so we see lower volumes and lower prices. Second, we see that there's been an impact on the process of divesting the business of uncertainty in the organization, what will happen, and I hope that that will, that is more clear now and we have a higher degree of certainty of what will happen with the organization. Particularly in the beginning of the year, that was a large degree of uncertainty. Then we've had a more prudent approach on assessing forecasts for the business.
My assessment now is that we have seen most of the losses for the rest of the year, but we have still one quarter to go, but my assessment is that we have had a more prudent approach to Asphalt forecasts this year. Looking at the history, we thought that we had credible turnaround plans. That didn't turn out to be true, so we changed our mind and made the right decision in 2020, and now we've executed on that. Then the sum of the earnings for the last year, I think that pretty clearly motivates that even having a pretty steep one-time loss motivates our action here. That's enough of Industry and Asphalt Finland, and let's move on to the rest of the third quarter.
Orders received on par with last year. I've said it many times, but I will repeat it again. The orders received in an individual quarter or actually a couple of successive quarters is not a good indicator of the market. In this type of business with large projects, you can have large differences from quarter to quarter. We had really good orders received in the second quarter this year, and we experienced good demand in all markets, in all countries, and in all business areas, and I think that's important to remember. That is reflected in our order backlog. The order backlog remains strong, and if we compare it to net sales and if we use the metric book-to-bill, i.e., how...
What's the size of the order backlog compared to rolling 12 earnings? We can see that we now are at 10% above one year net sales, and that's a good level where we want to be, and it's an all-time good level to develop the company. Remaining backlog is strong. Individual quarters on orders received can't really say anything about the market. What we experience is a strong demand in all countries, all business areas. We've seen net sales go up in this quarter. It is to a large extent driven by profit recognition in PD. But also we see that Building Sweden has started to grow in the quarter on the back of good orders received last year.
Finally, let's look at the same type of numbers, but for the 9-year period up until the end of September. Same trend, contracting, improving over last year. PD has not yet caught up with the earnings from last year, but we have one quarter left with two planned closings of two sales. Industry, I think it's worthwhile noting that the difference between last year is not as large as it was in the quarter. Again, that's a combination of good underlying performance in the rest of the business and a more prudent profit recognition in Asphalt Finland.
Then other and elimination, which seems to be really high, and that's the effect of the sale and lease back effect that we had last year and that we don't have this year. Overall, a good quarter and good first nine months. There are two potential risks that I would like to mention and highlight, though. First of all, it's supplies of cement in Sweden. We're monitoring the situation and preparing for different scenarios, and you can make a thousand different scenarios. We're in close contact with our suppliers, and we're preparing our organization and our technical solutions to mitigate any possible effects. I think it's important to say that this is not primarily an NCC question, this is a question for the Swedish economy and for the construction industry.
I hope that all good forces will make this come to a positive conclusion. Finally, price increases in supply chain evident for us. Everybody's talking about it. I'm pretty sure that all our projects have had their challenges with price increases. What I think is more important is that they dealt with it. We've seen individual solutions with maintaining prices on an acceptable level, but also increasing prices to customers. We can see no material impact on the group from price increases so far. With that, I hand over to Susanne Lithander.
Thank you, Tomas. Our business area Infrastructure continues to improve on earnings and margin. They have orders received of SEK 2.9 billion in the quarter, which is a bit lower than last year, but they have over the year built a very strong backlog that is now up to SEK 20 billion. For the nine-month period, they have grown their orders received with approximately SEK 4 billion or 34%, and their book-to-bill for the year is 1.3. The increase comes from all units, but Norway is the strongest contributor. Net sales is SEK 3.8 billion, which is declined compared to last year, driven by the lower order intake from last year.
As we can see, Norway and Denmark are now equal in size compared over nine months, and Sweden has grown its share of sales to 78%. Earnings is SEK 123 million, and in spite of the lower volumes, the improvement is driven by improved project margins. The margin is 3.2% in the quarter. Business area Building Sweden also continues on their improvement trend with growth in both sales and earnings. Orders received was SEK 3.3 billion, slightly down compared to last year, but they have a very strong backlog, reaching SEK 17.8 billion, which is up compared to last year. The net sales is almost SEK 3 billion, and it's a growth in the quarter of 9%, and they also show growth over the nine-month period.
Earnings is SEK 100 million, and that's driven by both volume increases and improved margins in the project portfolio. The margin in the quarter was 3.4%, and on 12 months rolling and 9 months, it's 3.3%. Building Sweden's residential orders was a bit above average. The average line is here, the red line. Slightly above for the quarter, and 44% of that was rentals. Building Nordics had strong earnings in the quarter, and they were exceeding the targets for earnings, both in the quarter and on rolling 12 months. Orders received SEK 1.8 billion. It's an increase compared to last year, however, on a pretty low level, and the increase comes basically from two major projects in Norway and Denmark. The backlog continues to be quite strong, SEK 14 billion. Net sales is on par with previous year.
As you can see, Norway and Finland are declining while Denmark is growing. Earnings is SEK 111 million, which is more than double than last year's third quarter. That is driven by improved project margins on the back of having no growth in sales. The margin was 4% in the quarter and 3.7% on the rolling 12 months. The volumes in our industry business remain stable. As we can see here, the stone material to the left on the graph is up slightly, and the asphalt volumes are slightly down, and that's driven by the Finnish operations. Net sales basically on the same level as last year. There are some differences between the divisions, however.
We have increases from stone, primarily from Sweden and Denmark, and we have declines in the asphalt business driven by the Finnish operations primarily. Earnings is down to SEK 273 million, and as you have heard from Tomas already, driven to the large extent by the Finnish operations. The drop is SEK 117 million, and SEK 73 million of that is explained by the Finnish asphalt business. The remaining part is also within asphalt, and it constitutes of volume variation, primarily in Denmark, and also reclaims resolutions that we've had during the quarter. What could be noted is that the stone material business have been very stable, and they show also improving earnings over the nine-month period, driven by Denmark and Sweden.
Operating margin is down to 7.2%, and with the low earnings, they of course are not close to their 12% target of return on capital employed. Property development had three projects recognized to sales and profit, giving them SEK 2.072 billion in net sales and SEK 277 million in earnings. Tomas has already been through the projects that were sold, and the decline from last year is explained by the fact that we've had no projects recognized last year. Looking at our project portfolio within property development instead, we have started one project in Sweden, Project Nova, right next door to our head offices here. As we have sold three projects, we now have 13 projects in our portfolio. 65% of that is in Sweden, and we have around 230,000 sq m lettable space.
During the quarter, we also sold MIMO to be delivered during, or expected to be delivered in Q4 2024. The letting can vary a lot between the quarters, and the previous quarter in Q2 we had a very strong letting. While we in this third quarter had quite low letting, six contracts, 6,000 sq m. However, we see a very strong demand and strong interest in the good market we have, good interest for our products, and we are really not that concerned about the quarterly dip in letting. As letting and completion ratios, even if the gap between them have decreased or it is smaller now, we still have a balance between the letting ratio and the completion ratio with a letting ratio of 56% and completion ratio of 55%. That brings us to the last unit.
After the business areas, we have other and elimination, and this area usually has a substantial negative impact on our earnings. This quarter it had less negative impact due to the fact that we sold the three property development projects and reversed the eliminations that we do during the construction phase in those projects, giving us a positive effect on internal gains compared to last year when we had no sold projects, only building, giving us negative impact with eliminations on this row. That's the big swinger in other and elimination. Financial net improving or lower due to the fact that we have much lower financing needs. Our net profit ended on SEK 706, and our earnings per share was 12.9 on rolling 12.
We had a very strong cash flow in the quarter, driven by both earnings in our operations and the sales of the three property projects, as you can see. We have a slight or we have a negative impact in the quarter from working capital, and that's working off of prepayments in some of our mega projects primarily. We have low investments being made in CapEx during the quarter. Cash flow ending on SEK 1.389 billion before financing. Our net debt has decreased from SEK 5.1 billion down to SEK 3.2 billion. As you can see, we have a corporate net debt that is now a corporate net cash position of SEK 500 million. A big swing here is also in the pension liability, where we have actuarial changes primarily from changing or increasing the discount rates.
As we have a net cash position, our net debt to EBITA target is within target level. With that, Tomas, I hand it over to you again.
Thank you very much, Susanne. I will give you a couple of other pieces of information, and then I will wrap up. First of all, an update on our financial targets. As you know, our target for 2023 is EPS 16 SEK. We're now at just short of 13, moving towards that target. Net debt, as Susanne pointed out, we don't have that, so it's actually a positive cash position. Dividend policy. The AGM decided in the spring that we would have a 5 SEK dividend, and that's 43% of profit paid out in two installments. I like to remind everybody that the record date for the second installment is November ninth, and then it will be paid a couple of days later.
We have targets for sustainability or ESG targets. For us, we have picked CO2 emissions and health and safety that we think is the most important for our business. We are since a couple of years back measuring Scope 1 and 2 CO2 emissions, and we've set the target until 2030 of -60% reductions of Scope 1 and 2. We are for the first half year now at -46%, moving towards that target. We have also decided to measure Scope 3 for four important areas where we have the most impact from Scope 3: concrete, steel, transportation, and asphalt. The target is 50%. We're setting the roadmaps right now, and we start reporting during next year. Health and safety.
We have a target of LTIF, Lost Time Injury Frequency, four days, of 3.0. By the third quarter, this year, we're now at 3.3, so I'm hopeful that we will reach that target going forward. To sum it up, this was a strong quarter for NCC, despite the fact that there are a lot of impact from Asphalt Finland , uncertainty regarding the cement supply, and price increases that we've managed to mitigate to date. The overall message is that we see good demand in all countries, in all business areas. We see a strong order backlog, as Susanne pointed out, in all the business areas. We have three property projects that we have recognized profit from.
Earnings and margins improving in all the contracting units, and an underlying, stable business from industry, and a strong cash flow from MC. With that, operator, we open up for questions. Welcome back, Susanne.
Thank you.
Thank you. And if you do wish to ask a question, please press zero one on your telephone keypad. If you wish to withdraw your question, you may do so by pressing zero two to cancel. Our first question comes from the line of Stefan Andersson from SEB. Please go ahead.
Well, thank you. A few questions from me. Starting off with Industry there. I don't think you've given the Finnish loss before. I think you talked about the loss in Q2, and now it's for the nine months is SEK 116. Could you maybe help out a little bit with the loss in the quarter? I mean, I would imagine it's a very seasonal business, and you have losses in Q1 normally. Just trying to understand what kind of impact that had in the quarter in Industry.
That's correct. It's a very seasonal business. The way that we account for it means that we are recognizing a lot of cost for maintenance and other fixed costs in the beginning of the year, and we fundamentally don't have any production. It's also a business that is accounted for in the paving business with a Percentage of Completion. There's a link between the volumes that we produce and the volumes that we pave, which means that we are really dependent on forecasts from the organization on what kind of volumes should we expect at year-end. What was clear during the two turnaround processes that we had in 2019 and 2020 was that the forecasts were over-optimistic on the volumes.
For example, in the third quarter, 2020, there was still a lot of optimism regarding how the year would end. That turned out not to be correct. We had large losses in the third quarter. This year, on the back of the decision of divesting and also realizing that there had been a certain amount of optimism in the forecasting from the organization, we've had a much more prudent profit recognition. Acknowledging that the volumes last year wasn't enough to get to and the prices to get to a profit, we see even lower prices this year, we see lower volumes, even though we're defending our position on the Finnish market.
My assessment right now is that we have larger losses, that's true, for the three reasons that I talked about, but this is a more prudent profit recognition at the position that we are right now. I don't know if you would like to add something to that, Susanne.
No, I think you got it all.
Was that understandable, Stefan?
Well, not really, but it was understandable. I was trying to understand if that business had a loss in the quarter or it was just that it was way below what it should have been in profit to make up for the start of the year.
It was a loss in the quarter.
Okay.
Cumulative first nine months, it's a loss, and it was a loss also in the third quarter, where it should have been, if you look at what good looks like for asphalt business, third quarter should be good. That was not the case. Last year, they recognized actually a profit in the third quarter. That turned out to be a far too optimistic forecast. That explains the big delta between Q3 in Industry, most of the delta in Q3.
Perfect. Thank you. Maybe I should have known this, but the SEK 160 million you get in Q4 in repayment from Afa is. I guess that's gonna be distributed out in the different divisions more or less in line with number of employees or how should I look on those?
Just from an accounting perspective.
Yeah. Actually, it's not going to be distributed out completely. To some extent, it will. About SEK 120 million we will book on other and elimination, and the rest will be distributed.
Perfect. Thank you. Looking at the construction divisions, all three of them really, more or less, the very strong margin in the quarter. I mean, I guess you had a good Q2 as well. Just to take away any worries, is this the underlying development? There's no positive one-offs that we should know about. I mean, you haven't written anything about it, so I just wanted to double-check.
No, it's underlying margins in our project portfolio that makes up for this.
Thank you. On the cement question, I guess it's all gonna sort out itself one way or another, but I guess from my perspective, I guess the end of this will be that it most likely is more costly to buy cement than it has been historically. In that case, you know, how are you thinking? Are you preparing yourself and customers with such an impact in the long run or what's your thinking?
Well, there's probably 1,000 scenarios on what will happen. I mean, it's not an unrealistic assessment if you have a shortage of something or uncertainty that that will have a price effect. Perhaps not as important as if we have a shortage, you know, a significant shortage of cement. That will have a more material impact on the business. Think about it like this. For a house, cement and hence concrete is important to actually make the house, you know, to build it, but it's a relatively small part of the cost of the building. If we can't get it, the cost impact is devastating.
I'm not that concerned about the cost increases, but I think it's a fair assessment that you're having.
Okay. Thank you. On the final question on the order intake, it's been very strong in the last couple of quarters, and this one was okay-ish, I guess, from my perspective at least. You talk about the very strong demand. Could you maybe elaborate a little bit on where you see that? Is it large orders or is there a big demand of smaller ones? Which areas are we talking about?
Yeah. We're talking about early involvement projects that we are having lots of discussions with our customers, but we want to have them, you know, we want to get to a high degree of certainty with them before we announce. But we see lots of requests for all types of projects in the quarter, and I hope that we can announce some of them pretty soon.
Okay. Thank you.
I can give you an example because we have communicated this. We have communicated building of prisons in Sweden, but we haven't communicated the full order value because we're still working on that. That's, you know, that's an example. We have communicated the extension of the harbor in Gothenburg, but we haven't communicated the order value because that's still being developed. That's the way we think about it.
Yeah. Okay. Thank you.
The next question comes from the line of Erik Granström from Carnegie. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Good morning. I have a few questions as well. The first one is regarding the asphalt operations in Finland. Could you give us some sort of guidance as to the size in terms of volumes, how big this business is that is now being divested, just so that we get a sense on that? You've guided quite substantially on the results effect, but I was just looking at sort of the top-line effects.
It's relatively small. It's small. It's well short of SEK 1 billion.
Well short of a billion. All right. Thank you. My other question is actually regarding your view of the balance sheet. You now report a net debt to EBITDA, which is negative, if we look at the corporate net debt situation or the adjusted one. At the same time, you are now running Return on Capital Employed for property development, I believe was 8% for last year, and now on a rolling 12-month basis, it's around 7%, which is okay, but it's not that impressive given the very strong market. How do you view your opportunities in creating returns from investing in property development versus the fact that you are now quite overcapitalized, at least according to your own debt targets?
Well, we think it's a good thing that we have a strong balance sheet. That has not always been the case. We're happy with strong cash flow. It's true, Return on Capital Employed for PD is right now not stellar, and we're working on to improve that, but it takes some time because once you have the projects, you have to end them, and those are long processes. We see good opportunities for property development going forward.
You do believe that the balance sheet is actually needed in order to increase investments in property development and that it shouldn't be, for example, redistributed to shareholders?
There's a lot of opportunities we can use the capital we have. We will get back to that once we made a decision.
That sounds fair enough. Thank you. Those were my questions.
Thank you, Erik.
We have one more audio question from the line of Markus Henriksson from ABG. Please go ahead.
Good morning, and thank you. Just to follow up here on the asphalt operations as well, I just want to
To highlight, you showed the SEK 160 million accumulated for Q1 to Q3 and on page 26, you also mentioned SEK 73 million. Is that in the quarter? So that we have the figures to impact. Just want to
Susanne?
Yes, that is in the quarter.
Okay, perfect. Thank you. A little bit on the leasing market. I saw that you leased out to PwC, for example. How's your overall feeling for Q4 and for your projects?
The organization is reporting lots of activity and lots of interest for to let office space.
Okay. Could you also comment something on the Bromma Blocks project? That one is getting closer to completion. Could you highlight something for that project?
Yeah. There's still some way to go, but we're getting close, closer to completion. We're now getting close to 60% of the area let, and we have lots of interest in that project now. It's a rather large project. It tends to be office space for smaller companies, and they tend to make the decision on new office not that long before they can move in.
Okay. Thank you. Those were my questions.
As there are no further audio questions, I will hand it back to the speakers.
Okay. We have a couple of web questions, mainly from Simen Mortensen. The first one on the balance sheet. Will you use your balance sheet mostly on PD or M&A? Getting back to that question, what is most appealing? Susanne?
I think we already had an answer to that question from Tomas.
I think, I mean, we have the same opportunities to do it as you know, other companies in our business. We'll get back to that once we've decided.
Another question. There are a lot of orders in residential, but do we see any trends in tendering for non-residential for the office market?
Not that we really would like to comment.
A final question on cement. In Norway, the cement prices have been hiking, based on HeidelbergCement communicating their investment needs. Have we seen any of the same arguments being used here for the cement price going up in order to support investment needs?
That has not been a big issue. There are other more pressing issues that we're dealing with right now.
That's it.
Thank you. No further questions?
There are no further audio questions, no.
If not, then thank you for listening in. Remember, this was a great quarter. We had improving earnings from all our contracting business, both earnings and margin. We had three profit recognition from three projects in PD. A good demand in all markets, in all countries, in all business areas. Industry fundamentally stable, but negatively impacted by Asphalt Finland and then a good cash flow and a net cash position for the group and at the end of the quarter. Thank you all, and see you around. Thank you.
Thank you.