Good morning, welcome to Profoto's Q2 presentation. My name is Amanda Åström, and I am Head of Investor Relations. Today, I have with me our CEO, Anders Hedebark, and our CFO, Carl Bandhold. I will now hand over to Anders, who will start off by giving you some highlights for the quarter.
Good morning, everyone. Thank you for listening in today. It's with great pleasure, we are going to present the Q2 of this year. We were facing a tough market all around the world, and our net sales decreased by 2% for the quarter, but the organic growth was - 9%. We had good profits given, and I'm very proud of that we, our team, has actually delivered acceptable sales and good profits during the quarter. Our EBITDA was SEK 61 million, and our EBIT margin was 26%, corresponding to SEK 47 million Swedish crowns. What is Profoto? As most of you know, Profoto is the premium-position global niche leader, and the brand for us is extremely important since we are used by the very best photographers around the world.
We have a very long history and we've been doing the same thing for a very long time. We were founded in 1968. We are active in the growing image and content creation market, where we have the premium position in the segment photography lighting solution. We are offering an innovative and easy-to-use lighting, light shaping system for different uses, and we're used by the very best studios, brands, and photographers all around the world. We sell everywhere where great photography is made, which means that we have a global distribution. Our focus is on organic growth based on new products, delivering new products to market with high gross margins. This means that we're investing heavily in innovation, and it also means that operational efficiency is super-duper important.
One of the things that we do is we let other people, other company, do what they are best on. We have all our production is outsourced, meaning also that the operational staff is not so many, and it means that everyone at Profoto is very skilled on what to do, and we strive really to hire the very best employees. As I said, R&D investment is crucial. Last year 65% of sales came from newly launched products, and with that I mean product that was launched the last 3 years. The investment continues in Q2. It's in line with our target of around 10%, investment in product development in R&D. We, for the future, we are investing in R&D in order to grow where we stand.
Primarily, we're investing in light shaping for professional still photographers, which is our core, but we are looking into other areas as well. Number two is light shaping for moving images, where we're watching the market and trying to understand what is the best way into this market segment. Thirdly, we are investing in workflow solutions for a large volume studios, especially within e-commerce. Last year, we invested in StyleShoots, which are selling automated studios. As you know, Profoto is more focused on high level of creative photography, and we call this modular flexibility. During this year, we launched something that we call Creative Automation, which is in between, which enables photographers and studios to create high volume photography with a great level of creativity.
Making images that is driving traffic to their websites and are converting the customers or the visitors at the website to being customers. Great creativity and great high level of productivity. We also, during this quarter, we launched Profoto Asset Flow, which is a workflow system, source-based, cloud-based system for ensuring productivity in the studio. With this, Profoto is offering a combination of hardware and software for the content creation process. We are the only one in the world with the possibility in this niched market to offer an end-to-end system for this, combining software and hardware within the eCom photography, high volume photography area. Thank you very much. I'll leave the word to you, Carl.
Thank you, Anders. I will take us through our financial performance in a little bit more detail, starting with the Q2. As Anders mentioned, in the Q2, net sales was a little bit weak, declining 2% year-over-year in reported in SEK, but organic growth was negative 9%. As we mentioned, I think after both Q4 and Q1, we see that the market is a little bit weak and that our customers are a little bit hesitant to invest in these uncertain times. This is driving the decline in organic growth. On the other hand, we still managed to have a healthy profitability. EBIT for the quarter was SEK 47 million for a margin of 26%.
A margin that's very much in line with the Q2 last year and within the range of our financial targets, which is 25%-30% EBIT margin. Looking at the a little bit longer-term trend then, the last 12 months, EBIT grew 11%, and EBIT margin was top end of our target range 30% which we're very happy with, of course. That said, you know, net sales in SEK also grew 7% last 12 months. But the majority of the growth was related to currencies, so organic growth for the last 12 months was also negative. If we take this down per region, and looking at the Q2, the strongest region was clearly Americas, where we grew by 13%.
You know, part of this, of course, was FX, the strong dollar in the US. We could also see, though, that we had a couple of campaigns that were quite successful in driving demand as well. Reasonably decent quarter for Americas. We also grew in APAC, particularly on the back of a little bit of market return in China, as well as successful activities by the Profoto teamf there. EMEA, I think, was the weakest link this quarter, coming down a little bit over 20%. That's really across the region, and demand was a little bit weaker, and particularly Germany and the UK, we saw a little bit of a challenging market climate. That's a little bit on how we performed in the markets.
If we look at, you know, our balance sheet, we continue to have a very, very high return on equity, 70% for Q2, which we're very proud of. You know, this is a result of the business model and focus that Anders described earlier. You know, we're resource effective and very capital effective in how we set up and run our business. In the Q1, we had very strong operating cash flow, as you can see there, over SEK 100 million, which was over 100% operating cash conversion, which really isn't a sustainable level. Naturally enough, operating cash flow in the Q2 was a little bit lower. In Q1, we had super strong collection on receivables, naturally, this was a little bit lower in Q2.
In addition, we continued to invest a lot in product development, to drive future growth. Even with a slightly weaker cash flow, our balance sheet remains very strong, with low leverage. At the moment, we're at 0.3x net debt to EBITDA. Very good, and even though net debt increased to SEK 175 million in the quarter, the balance sheet is strong. The increase in net debt is primarily related to us paying a dividend of SEK 160 million here in May, or 4 SEK per share. Our strong balance sheet continues to give us both the opportunity to return capital to shareholders, but it also gives us the strategic flexibility to continue to pursue acquisitions, which we see is a way for us to accelerate the growth strategies that Anders outlined earlier.
You know, light shaping for professional photographers, e-commerce workflow solutions, and light shaping for moving pictures. We still have the opportunity to both pursue these strategies with own product development and acquisitions, which we believe is what will return us to growth over time. Rounding out today's presentation and relating back to our financial targets, we continue to have an EBIT margin in the range that we target, 25%-30%. We paid a significant dividend in Q2. The last couple of quarters, revenue growth has been a little bit more challenging, so our target there is 10% over time, and we have a strong faith that we will return to that, even though the market climate today is a little bit challenging.
With that, I finish today's presentation, and we are open to any questions. Thank you.
If you wish to ask a question, please dial star five on your telephone keypad to enter the queue. If you wish to withdraw your question, please dial star five again on your telephone keypad. The next question comes from Karri Rinta from Handelsbanken. Please go ahead.
Yes, thank you, operator. Good morning, Anders and Carl. A few questions from me. Firstly, about the new product introductions, which Anders, you showed that it's important to keep bringing new products to your customers, but in these times of more hesitant customers. Does that have any impact on the planned new product introductions? Are you postponing them, or are you bringing them forward to give your customers reasons to buy? Does it have, or doesn't it have any impact on new product introductions? That's my first question.
Hi, Karri. We have done product introductions. They are more long-term sales. They're not like the normal one that we usually do when we sell through indirect channel. Both Asset Flow and the Creative Automation is more on direct sales. Right now, they are not visible. We can't see a major effect from those introductions in the figures. That is number one. Number two, we are keeping only investing in the all different kinds of R&D projects, and they are not really affected by anything because they take the time that they take. It's like in the beginning, it's like sailing. If you have headwind, it takes longer time. If you have wind from the back, it goes faster.
We do them in, focus on, especially on quality, on the right cost level of the product, and that the product has the high quality that our customer demands. There is no major launches during the quarter that has affected the sales.
Okay.
That-
the product roadmap that you have, that's still intact. I mean.
Yes
focus on direct sales,
No, we have.
You are now executing.
We have both products coming for the indirect sales, which is more from, for the e-commerce workflow market. We have the majority of our R&D investments is in our traditional business, like that I tried to talk about in my presentation. There will be products in the future, as always, and I can't talk on exactly when they will be launched, but we have several major R&D projects that will hopefully have a good result on when we launch them into the future.
All right. Sounds good. If we talk about your different end customers, and if we look at professional photographers, studios, and rental companies.
Yes
Is there any or any differences in their levels of hesitation at the moment?
No, it's just a general thing. It's both some large deals are postponed because of financing, and individual photographers are also hesitant because they need to pay both their other bills, like energy as well as a mortgage. There is just this, the customers are very careful and sometimes hesitant in general, and they are looking more and more the same. Having said that, we also see, of course, the e-commerce market. We have two trends working in opposite directions here for the e-commerce market. First of all, of course, a lot of e-commerce companies, they are struggling with their profitability. Which puts a somewhat downward pressure on their willingness to invest in new content creation studios.
On the other hand, as I communicated earlier, we have a lot of discussions with customers that see that they could be more efficient, so produce better content at a lower cost if they invest in Profoto type of automated products. Both trend works in different direction. I cannot say exactly the end result of that, but most probably we have a slightly downward pressure in the e-commerce also as a result of this.
Rental companies, are they still a significant enough of a customer that, it's worth saying a few words about them?
Yes, rental companies are important, not as historically important as they've been historically. They are still investing, they are still renting, they make a lot of money in letting our, let their Profoto, especially Pro-11, into the market. The last couple of years, we've seen in-house brand, in-house studios also investing in that kind of product. The total demand is good in that market, it has shifted somewhat from rental into brand studios.
Okay, finally.
Yes.
Retailers your direct customers both, how are they thinking about around inventories, and are there any excess inventories out there somewhere? Is the weakness in Europe somehow to some extent related to inventory reductions?
Not really. They have very limited always have very limited stock pro, of Profoto products. One of the reasons is that we ship on a short notice, so they don't need it. We do not see a destocking. It's the slightly lower demand is dependent on that the customers, the photographers and large studios, they have a slightly sluggish demand at the moment. It is not about destocking.
All right. Thank you. I think that was all for me. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Karri.
There are no more questions on the line at this time, so I hand the conference back to the speakers for any written questions and closing comments.
I don't think we.
I have no more questions in written form either, so I would like you, to thank you for joining us today, and I would like to give you a gentle reminder about our Q3 report, which will be published on November seventh. Thank you.
Thank you, everyone.
Thank you.