Welcome to NOTE Q3 Presentation for 2024. As always, I'll try to make a short summary of the quarter. First of all, we did not reach our sales expectations. That is pretty clear. We had to go out and give a new guidance. With that, lower sales, I think the profitability came in pretty much where I expected or even slightly better. I still believe we're doing good cash flows, and I think we are, that means that we are, how should I say? We're converting the results as it should. I mean, we're not growing, that means that we have a positive impact on the cash flow. We have lower ARs. Inventory is going down or continues to come down. This also gives a positive contribution to the cash flow.
Those, what I call financial fundamentals in our world, is working as it should. Therefore, we are expecting cash flow to be stronger than normal, also for the coming, say, one to three quarters. It depends on when we are through all that. I would say that we still have maybe 50-75 million SEK more inventory to be reduced in the coming quarters. We also see that our debts to our suppliers is slightly lower than normal, and that is an effect of that. We buy less at the moment than what we consume. That would also, when that normalizes, it will also have a positive impact on the cash flow. Cash flow is expected to continue to be strong for the coming quarters.
With that said, it's also very tricky to have these calls. We are looking very positively upon the future, and then we have a very weak quarter from a sales point of view. So how do you summarize that in a good way? I would say that the industry, when we went into 2024, were expecting a quite slow year. Expectation were basically flat. The latest expectations is, of course, quite more negative than that, so the complete industry is going quite weak at the moment. If I look at NOTE, we will see that Q3, 20% negative on sales. That will be the lowest point in this dip as we see it.
Guidance for Q4 is about 8% down, if you look in the middle of our guidance. If you look at that guidance, you can see that normally, a weak year, you close a few weeks more in when you have vacation in Sweden, Finland, and Estonia, and therefore, July will become a month where you have basically half the speed compared to a normal month. If you would add in one half month in the Q3, we will be in the guidance of Q4. So we're not expecting Q4 to be better run rate than we have in, say, August, September. It's basically the same speed.
So we're not expecting a big recovery in Q4. It's more that we normalize the monthly average that we're hitting in Q3 and Q2. So that's what we see. We don't see this as a weaker, or we don't expect the Q4 to be a strong recovery. We expect it to be at the same level as, I would say, Q2 and onwards, if you take the normal month level. So that's what we are looking at. So why do we continue to invest in new buildings, expanding factories, and so on? But the issue is that we're not seeing one, the same trend for everywhere we are. We see China extremely weak. I think we're down 35% plus this year.
Estonia has had a very weak year, a lot of customers that have been dealing with stock reductions. Then we have Finland doing a new record year, Torsby doing a new record year. Lund will do a new record year. We had a record month in September. So very different depending on where you are in our world. So it is not only that between the segments, it is very different. It is also where you are in implementing the new customer programs that we have been awarded. So what we will see, as we see it, is that we will gradually come out of the weak trend, and then more and more of the sites will go from negative to positive. And when that happens, we will see a more general recovery.
We have predicted that to come in this, in the second part of this year. We are no longer, we're not longer expecting that, so therefore, we have guided low for Q4, and we will get back to you how we see upon next year. In our customer's view, we would if we would believe the customers, we would see a strong recovery in 2025 . But we will, we want to get closer to that before we start to give you more details in that guidance. So we believe that 2024 will be a very weak year and that 2025 will be a growing year again, and we will, as I said, come back to more guidance around that.
But if I look at what the customers are expecting from the programs that we're producing, their view of the demand coming 12-18 months is significantly higher than what we're achieving at right now. And therefore, we are investing to be able to cope with that demand, say, in the second half of next year, then we are expecting to be at a significantly higher level. So therefore, we are continuing the plans. We are expecting the Torsby factory with 7,000 more square meters. We are moving out of the current premises in Lund. Because we are simply currently, we are renting more than 2,000 square meters in another building, so we have already outgrown the Lund facility, and we have others where we are expecting similar things.
We will continue to invest heavily in automation and in new equipment also in Q4 and next year, because we believe that that is going to be necessary. So it's a very mixed emotions. We are presenting a quite weak quarter from the sales side, and yet we're we are putting the gas pedal quite hard down in investment and preparing for the future. So very interesting. If you like numbers, you can say, "Okay, we are the trend is very negative." But if you look at say a five-year average, we're still with the guidance we have for 2024 , we're still reaching 15% organic growth year- over- year, if we start at either 2018 or 2019 as a starting year, it doesn't matter.
Still, the growth for a longer period has been very strong, and we don't see any signs in the market that will indicate that this has came to stop. Therefore, we are preparing for higher numbers in the coming quarters and years. Even though we don't get support for increasing our guidance in Q4 more than we have been guiding in our guidance in September. Okay. Long story short, here are our numbers. I think most of you have seen them, but sales, SEK 809 million, down 22%. OP came in at 8%.
We have some positive one-offs in this, which is the currency and the currency translations, and we had some negative with one-offs, where we are continuing to adjusting our cost level. I will come back to you a little bit how that has worked for the last year. Underlying 8.3, compared to 9% last year. I mean, we're, as you know, we're always talking about what I call fall-through on increased sales. If you look at this, we have if you look at the negative fall-through on reduced sales, we are hitting much better numbers than we have, than we are expecting for increased sales. We're expecting 15% of growth to end up at bottom line.
The reduction here of 200 million has only resulted in a reduced OP of 27 million. So we are below the 15% on the negative fall-through, which I think is very strong. It's much easier to increase profit when you grow than to keep profits when you are declining. So I think this is very. I'm very impressed with how we have done this. So this is telling me that what we have done from an automation point of view, from a cost mitigation point of view, has been efficient. So this is one thing that we're very proud of. Cash flow, I've talked about it. SEK 157 million in the quarter, almost SEK 400 million year to date, very strong numbers.
If we then exclude the investments that we have done in other acquisitions, we are, yeah, SEK 340 million in free cash flow. Very positive. Going into the segments, if you look at Western Europe, we are declining less than we do in the Rest of the World. I've talked about it before. China is significantly weak. If you look at this, we are also hitting quite good numbers in operating profits. So Western Europe is not affected as much as the Rest of the World. We are only declining 1.1%, but that also related to that we are not losing as much sales in Western Europe. So that is very. The link is very clear.
If you look at the Rest of the World, we are declining, yeah, from 8.9% to 5.4%. That is something that we are working on, and one part of the one-offs that we were presenting is another cost-saving initiatives in China that we will do in the coming quarter, but if you look at the number of employees, and we are counting number of employees in the year to date number, and then we see an increase in total, but if we look at where we were one year ago, when we ended Q3, we were 972 in Western Europe. Now we are 922.
So we're down with more in headcount than our sales is dropping. So we are, we're seeing an efficiency there. The same goes also for the Rest of the World. We're down with 24% in sales, and we're down with 14% in headcount. Here, we have some more work to do, so we will continue with that. But this is, to me, this is showing that we are continuing to prepare ourselves for being efficient, also in the lower sales that we're having. So this is something that we will continue with. What will happen when the growth comes back is that we have reduced our overhead costs.
So when the sales is coming, we're gonna hit the 10% mark that I already see as our target, much earlier than we would have last year. Say that last year, we were reaching 10% at maybe SEK 1.1 billion. This year, I think that level is down to maybe SEK 1 billion, SEK 1.025 billion or something. So very important to keep in mind that we are adjusting our cost base to hit better operating profit at the lower sales. It's very easy to add capacity when needed, and it's better to adjust to where you are, and then you add resources where you need them. Otherwise, you would have a bucket full of not fully utilized resources, and we don't like that. So that's how we think.
But if you look at the numbers, see China minus 35%, and as I see China, we are not seeing a quick recovery. We are preparing for a lower speed in China. We are preparing for growth in Estonia, we are preparing for growth in Sweden, and so on. But China will continue to be at a quite low level as we see it in the near future. We don't see a recovery there, as of now. Looking at the segments, and here we're seeing that industrial is the only growing segment. We were declining in Q3, but year to date, it's a growing segment. And in this segment, we have defense. Defense is what has grown with maybe, I don't have number, 150 million plus.
It's probably SEK 200 million this year, but I don't have the number in back of my head. But if we exclude that also, industrial is negative. But what happened in the Q3 was that we were expecting communication to be at a higher pace, and in this segment, we had a few customers coming in with quite high expectations, and the conversion from forecast to orders were not happening. So we have one of our biggest customer in this segment were expecting sales of SEK 30+ million, and we ended up at SEK 9 million. We didn't know that when we entered this quarter, and therefore, we were a little bit caught by surprise.
I had a meeting with the CEO of that company just before the summer, and they were very optimistic, and they did not get the orders as expected, and this is a customer where we're doing only all the installations that they do is a bit of custom design, so they cannot buy for to inventory because they don't know which customer that will order, so there is a late configuration. That was converted to pushed out orders or pushed out forecasts, as we see it, so this segment had problem with converting quotes and tenders into orders, and we hope that that will change. The guidance in Q4 is that we keep these customers as a similar level as Q3, just to be clear.
We don't have any high expectations of communication in the Q4 either. We will see if the conversion comes in. We will exceed what we expect in this segment. Green tech took also one hit in this quarter, where our biggest customer in the EV chargers, they were. We were doing a refurbishment program with them instead of building new units, so we lost maybe SEK 15 million in new sales of that. We were helping them to upgrade the older revisions into the latest revision. We were changing the communication cards in the units, and therefore, that had an impact of our sales. That one-off is not expected to happen in the Q4 . We are expecting them to be back on a normalized level.
So Greent ech were affected by one, a kind of one-off. Medtech is running at a slightly lower level than last year. We are, we're expecting Q4 to be in line with the Q3 . We haven't made any big adjustments to that in the guidance. We haven't increased that. So our guidance is feeling very, how should I say, modest, rather than that we expect growth in it. So what do we expect for the future? I mean, communication, very low level. Medtech, we also see some of the customers there have been doing less compared to what they have forecasted in. We had very high growth in 2023 in Medtech, and we are probably expecting to get back on the 2023 year level in 2025.
Greent ech, yeah, I hope that that will recover. It's we have much higher expectations from the customers than they're not converting expectations into orders. So I would say that Greent ech, as a segment, is a lot of wait and see, not so much conversion to orders. So that is where we are sitting. Industrial, we have a lot of big industrial companies outside of the defense area that are also pushing some orders out. We're doing fairly good volumes, but we know that there is a lot more to come. We have also quite a few new customers that are on the way in, especially in the industrial segment, that we expect quite high sales from in the coming 12 months.
So we have some growth enablers that we will see some effect of in the coming year or so. Challenging market. If you look at this in a broader perspective, what do we see? There is not only in the contract electronic manufacturing industry where I've seen reduced guidance for the Q3 . If you look at the car industry, we're not really selling into the automotive industry, but we're selling to the suppliers to the automotive industry. So when those are reducing, we're seeing a decline for us as well. So there's, I would say, automotive industry will.
If that takes a big hit in the coming year, that will affect most of the industrial companies supplying into them, and that could be a challenge for us. We're not that much directly involved in those businesses, but it will have spreading effects that can be stronger than what we see. I would say that is the biggest challenge for us, if that industry is not bouncing back a little bit. But overall, I think that we are pushed down. There is a lot of this inventory reductions going on among several of our customers, and when that runs out, we'll see higher sales going forward.
We can talk a lot about this, but I would rather come back in the presentation of Q4 when and see where the quarter has landed. Some highlights: despite all this, we still keep operational excellence is part of our offering, and our quality and delivery performance is still world-class, as we see it. Yeah, we're adapting our businesses. We're continuing doing restructuring, we take a cost for that for SEK 7 million in the quarter. The most important thing is that we're trying to adjust our cost base even lower than where we are, to be able to hit higher profitability numbers on the lower sales.
Order stock, we have the lowest decline in the last, say, five quarters now. We are declining with 3% in the quarter. That would indicate that there will be, and we're guiding down with 8%, so maybe the order coverage is better now when we enter Q4 related to the guidance, compared to where we ended Q4 last year. That is a positive signal, as I see it. We're also seeing that this shortening of the order cycle that we have been talking about, I would say that has more or less ended. The availability on the market for components is good. There is no allocation as the suppliers is talking about.
That means that we will not see any more reductions of the order backlog going forward related to the component shortages. So I would say that we can say that this is normalized after Q3. As I said, CapEx is continuing to increase. We are moving, or we have just decided to move Lund into new premises. That will happen in the mid of 2026. There is going to be a new building that is starting to be built this fall, and I think that is very important. Lund is one of the sites that have been showing the highest growth in the last, say, four or five years, so that's very important for us.
Lund is also where our current building is in an area that will be restructured into housing, and that industrial field will be turned into housing. Return on operating capital, 23%. We're still keeping that number high up. This is in line with our long-term objective, and I think we are quite higher than many of our peers on this number. Our equity ratio is up to 49%. Our liquidity situation is very strong and solid. So we believe that our balance sheet looks very good. If we find the right acquisition targets, we have plenty of room for those. So we just need to find the targets and agree on the price. That's easier said than done.
But we have a good pipeline, and we have some good dialogues in this area, as always. Yeah, outlook. As I said, we have our guidance is around SEK 1 billion for the Q4 . That means negative 8% from last year in the middle of the guidance. Profitability, we expect to have a higher underlying profitability in Q4 than we had last year, and we believe that that is a solid number. We don't believe. Our performance as of now is indicating that that is fully reachable. We also believe that the market is strong in the long time period, so our guidance for 2028 remains as is. We moved it one year ahead, and I would say the outlook for the industry has not changed.
The 2024 has become a lot worse than where when we set this number. So we basically say that 2024 will be what I call a lost year in sales. It's not lost in any other activities because we have, in our mind, built NOTE to be a stronger company during this period. So we're better prepared for growth and better prepared for the future today than we were one year ago. So we look very positively upon the future. So with that said, I will open the floor for questions. If there is any questions in the room, I take them first. Yes?
Thank you for the presentation. Lucas Mattsson, Equity Analyst at Inderes. I have two questions, maybe three, if we have time. First, do you believe that the expected sales in Q4 is primarily due to timing factors, or seasonal patterns, or increase in end demand?
In order-
Or increase in end consumer demand.
I would say that our guidance is fairly flat to our run rate if you look at the month. So we are not expecting any big deviation from what we have seen in Q2 and Q3, if we exclude the July, that is lower. So we don't expect a recovery. We are expecting Q4 to have similar market conditions. We are expecting that the destocking will be less and less going forward for every quarter. We have expected that for some time, so that is due to happen sometime.
Okay, thank you. And in your opinion, besides lower interest rates, what other factors would encourage customers to shift from, let's say, a relatively defensive approach to a more active one?
Yeah, that's a very good question. I think that will be one enabler. I think that just going back to the, or just for us to get our sales up to where the customer's consumption of the product is, that would be a step up. But I would say that the general economic climate is a limiting factor now. All the private persons and a lot of the companies are not investing in so much at the moment. So there is a lot of wait and see, as I see it as of now. Yeah, so that would be my biggest, how should I say, the biggest upside.
If the economy bounces back, we will see a good growth, especially if the construction industry is recovering, that will have a good impact for our business.
Great, thank you. And do you still see that the 7% estimated market growth is a realistic outcome until 2030 , given the, as the global economy has faced, like quite notable challenges during the recent years? For example, geopolitical risks, China slowdown, and the trade wars, et cetera.
Yeah, we believe that that number is valid for Europe, and I think the European production is going to benefit from the geopolitical disturbances. There will be more production down here than that have been originally or historically been made in China. So we believe that the European part of the manufacturing will increase, but the world economy I see quite negatively, and I don't think that that will grow more than maybe 2-3% a year, but the production in Europe will grow faster. That is what the indication is showing.
Great. Thank you very much.
Thank you. Any other questions? Otherwise, I start with some questions from the web. Yeah, I have one from Karl Norén here, or I have a few from him, so I'll take them one by one. Karl is not here today. "New customer wins here today, is it possible to comment on this or on this, or how you are tracking versus previous years?" Very good question. We have seen a decline. This has been weaker than the last few years. We have seen that the time from quote to decision has increased, so we're working with a similar number of quotes and a similar number of bids, but we see that the time from we submit the quote until the customer makes a decision is significantly longer.
This has been a bit weaker this year than last year. Second question from Karl: "Is it possible to tell us a bit more on the development within industrial in Q3? It is some SEK 90 million lower from Q2 in Western Europe. Which segments are seeing lower demand? I understand there is some company-specific, but can you share some more info on this?" I would say that Q3 is a quarter where we close the factories a bit longer, and that has a negative effect. We had less working days this year than last year, and that... So it's more of a general decline rather than a company-specific decline. "Greent ech continues to slow further.
We know you have Plejd, which is developing very strong, but the rest of the portfolio must be really weak. Are you seeing Green tech being worse going forward or stable, or what is the trend?" I think that Green tech is at the lower end where it will be. Just Plejd, this one part there, and there is also a listed company, so I will not comment on them specifically. But yeah, in general terms, I would expect that Green tech is at the lower end of where it will be. So I would expect, if any, I would expect increases. One more from Karl: "Can you comment anything on price pressure and pricing in the market?
Are some companies wanting lower prices from you, and have you lowered prices, but rather customers wanting lower prices?" Yes, this is a very good question. I would say that customers are always wanting lower pricing. We would see that we are in an inflation economy. Many of the economies out there are still pushing up salaries and so on. So there is a cost increase pressure as well that is offsetting, as I see, the price reduction activities. I would say that we have not reduced prices more this year than any other year. We have mechanisms where the material cost is constantly adjusted to the price that we pay for it.
So there is that factor. We're not negotiating that because the agreements are stipulating how to deal with that. But outside of that, I don't see that the price pressure is higher this year. But this is a good question, and as long as we and the peers are maintaining a healthy profitability, there is unlikely that there will be a price competition among our peers here in our part of the world. But as soon as we will be if we see companies making negative profits, then I would expect the price pressure to be higher, because then some companies will start to underbid to get more volumes to fill up the factories.
That has not happened yet, so I hope that everyone else is doing similar activities that we are doing to avoid that. But that could happen. That was all from Karl. Then I go over to Harald. You explain how the current pace is quite stable and that low turnover in Q3 is largely explained by adaptation in July with prolonged holiday. Given the picture, why did you wait until September nineteenth with the warning for a weak second half of 2024 ? What was the additional negative from July to September? The big negative was that we agreed with the one customer in the EV segment to do rework on products instead of building new, and that the conversion within the communication segment from forecast to orders did not happen.
These were factors that we did not see in the Q2 . Q2 was fairly strong in the communication segment. So that was the reason. Then we have one from Tommy, or well, two from Tommy. We start with the first. You keep presenting forecasts for the next quarter, despite the fact that some of the lost forecasts have had to be revised. Has there been any discussion about pros and cons about this forecast? Very good question, and I can assure you that there has been a lot of question or discussions internally about this. But why have we continued to do it when we are not meeting what we are saying? That is, that can be argued. But we feel that we should be the best one to give forecasts.
We, and we want to give you, as owners and followers of NOTE, the best possible information to make your decisions on how to use the NOTE, and even if we know that the climate has been very hard to predict, we have still continued to do this because we believe that it adds value. If we would feel that there is that the analysts and others that are following us is seeing that this is the wrong thing to do, we will cease to do it, but so far, we have been encouraged to continue with it, even if we have missed it.
But, I know that this has been a bit problematic, and we can only say that we are doing our utmost to do as best guidance as we can. One other from Tommy. You list a figure of SEK 7 million of provisions for restructuring expenses in Q3. Can you tell us a little more about this? Have you explicitly listed restructuring expense in recent history? If not, why not? We have not done it lately. We have made adjustments as we have taken them. This quarter, we took some initiatives to change some in the management, and therefore, we made them as one-offs.
And at the same time, we did a quite big reduction in China, and therefore, we decided to present it as some kind of one-off. So that's the reason why we did it. But in the last year or so, or the last years, we have not presented this in this way. We might have done it in the way past, but I don't know that. I'm looking at our CFO, and she's nodding her head, so that's. We have probably done it in the past. And the last question I have is from Thomas: Thank you for your presentation. Do you see any risk of customers, especially in Green tech and communication, going away, i.e., going out of business because of the market conditions? Yes, there is always a risk.
We have what we feel provisions that are covering for that in our report. We have an open dialogue with our auditors and presenting where these are standing. We see some risks in our customer portfolio. I think that we are well covered in this area, but there is a risk. I would say that I hope that the economy, especially for the Green tech customers, are bouncing back a little bit. There is a lot of companies that are struggling at the moment. One of them is, of course, Northvolt. We're not exposed to Northvolt. I would like to say that here we don't have them as a customer.
This is rather interesting because we have tried to get them as a customer for many years, and we have not been successful there, and currently, we're quite happy with that we were not successful. But if we would have won them three years ago, we would have been very proud at that time. So time is changing very fast. Okay, that was the last question I have. Then I will close the questions, and I will summarize. I think if you look at... We think Q3 is, as I said, it is weak from sales. We're proud of the profitability. We think that that's a good position for the future. Q4 is slightly, if you call it, bounce back from the current run rate. We will be back on, say, the Q2 run rate.
We have a lower cost base today than we had in the Q2 , so our expectations for profitability is good. We continue to be optimistic about our cash flow. We expect that to continue to be strong. I mean, Q3 was really strong, 157 million SEK. If it's that strong in Q4, it's very hard to say when this is timed, but if you, if I say that we will have another maybe 100 million SEK positive cash flow from the compared to where we stand, if that comes in Q4 or Q1, it's hard to say, but it will come in the near future, coming from continued inventory reductions and so on. So that is what we see. And we still invest in the future.
We still believe that we need to be better positioned and better covered for the growth that we are expecting to come, and therefore, we are continuing to invest in this. Automation. I've talked about it a lot. We are continuing to invest in automation and making our factories more efficient. That is something that we will benefit from in the future. We have benefited from it in the last couple of years, and that is something that we remain very focused on. We're still building for the future, even if this is a quarter that is quite weak. With that said, I thank you all for listening.