More welcome to this call, where we are focusing on SKF's Performance for the Q1 of 2025. Once again, we delivered solid margins, and that's thanks to our diligent strategic execution. My name is Sophie Arnius, I'm heading up Investor Relations, and I will also be joined by our CEO, Rickard Gustafson, and our new CFO, I should say, Susanne Larsson, who rejoined SKF in mid-February. After their presentations, we will open up for questions, and there are two ways to do that. If you are dialing in via the telephone, you press star and one.
If you are instead watching via the webcast, you can already now write your questions, and you do that in the tab that you find just above the slides. Let's get started, and it's a great pleasure to hand over to you, Rickard.
Thank you so much, Sophie, and good morning and warm welcome to all of you, and thank you for joining us on this webcast. Today we're going to present a story that the journey continues. As you can see on this chart, we now present for the seventh consecutive quarter a negative organic growth, while at the same time our margin demonstrates strong resilience. This is due to diligent strategy execution, both in terms of driving commercial capabilities and operational capabilities, and I will touch more on this shortly.
Furthermore, our work to establish two competitive and fit-for-purpose businesses continues at a high pace, and clearly the ongoing discussions around tariff and geopolitical issues have required some significant attention from all of us during the quarter. Of course, I will also bring some more flavor to this as we go through this presentation. Let's start by looking at our numbers from the top. Starting with net sales, we report net sales just shy of SEK 24 billion, representing a negative organic growth of 3.5%. Clearly helped and offset by a strong price mix, so i.e., demand has been low but somewhat offset by a very strong price mix.
Turning to the operating margin, which again demonstrates resilience, as I mentioned, coming in at 13.5% just ahead of the same quarter last year. The main drivers here are primarily our pricing capabilities, our portfolio management, effective cost management, and also a little bit of tailwind from currency in the quarter. Turning to cash flow, which was actually weak in the quarter, driven by an increased or higher working capital, and also some headwind from FX when it comes to cash.
You will hear Susanne share more about this shortly. This is something that now all our business areas are focusing highly on and scrutinizing their plans and activities to make sure that we bring back cash generation to more normal levels as quickly as possible. If we take a look at our sales by region, as I mentioned, we are still navigating in a rather soft market environment, and it is reflected by these regions, starting with EMEA, where we saw a negative organic growth of some 7% in the quarter, where we see continued weak demand in many of the main geographies in Europe, primarily Germany, Italy, but also Turkey turned to have a rather soft demand during the quarter.
When looking to some industrial verticals, starting with automotive. A utomotive had a rather soft demand both for commercial vehicles and light vehicles. While on the positive side, we have noticed on the industrial business, we see that the incoming order book, order intake in our industrial business for the last few months have actually shown a positive trajectory, providing some indication that markets are about to bottom out.
Longer term, we are positive about the commitments that have been made by some of the countries, main economies in Europe, where we have state-backed investments for defense and infrastructure, and that could in the longer term be a positive injection to the European economy. If we then turn to China and Northeast Asia, which being the bright spot on this chart in this quarter, after seven consecutive quarters of negative organic growth, they have now turned into a positive organic growth of 2%.
To some extent, due to a favorable comparison versus the same quarter last year, but more importantly, the destocking in the industrial distribution market that we have discussed the last couple of quarters has now flattened out. We see very strong demand in automotive, and especially in the EV space in China and Northeast Asia, and I will come back to that later on. Turning to Americas and India and Southeast Asia, it is a different story than the China-Northeast Asia story. Here in Q4, we reported a positive organic growth that has now turned into negative organic growth.
To someone as expected, if you may recall, we did say that in Q4 we had some timing effects, that some sales that we had planned for Q1 or January slipped into December, and therefore had some inflationary effect on the growth numbers in Q4, and now we see that that has come back in this quarter. On a positive side though, in Americas, we continue to see a very strong demand in aerospace, while automotive, especially related to commercial vehicles, continue to see a rather slow demand. India and Southeast Asia, similar story, automotive having a rather soft environment, while an industry like rail is a bright spot in this particular region in the quarter.
As I talk about sales by region, it's hard not to also move over and discuss the current tariff and trade situation. This is, as we all know, a highly dynamic topic, and we are constantly fed new information that we need to digest and figure out how we should act upon it in the best possible way and how to navigate in a very, very volatile environment. What we have done in the quarter is that we have initiated a number of mitigating activities. We have established a tariff command center that is meeting on a daily basis, making sure that all the new information that we receive, actually we work with that throughout our entire value flows and value chains in the organization.
We have already put in force price changes and tariff surcharges that are also helping to navigate in this space and mitigate some of the costs derived from these tariffs. We are on an ongoing basis, constantly looking over, can we do some smart rebalancing of our global production, leverage our global footprint to its optimum, and those activities, also tactical movements, are ongoing, helping to mitigate some of the tariff impacts. We have really scrutinized all our different flows across our global footprint, and we can conclude that the flows between China and the U.S. are limited, and those that exist, we are working hard to mitigate.
To give you some color on my last comment there, I'd like to draw your attention to the right-hand side of this chart, where we present the sales for 2024 in the U.S. As you can see, roughly 50% of what we sell in the U.S. is also manufactured in the U.S., and 50% is imported from our entire global footprint. Below the pie chart, you see how that breaks out by region. Some 20% comes from Europe, some 15% from Mexico, the region that we are rapidly ramping up to support the Americas sales, and there you can see that the vast majority is also USMCA compliant.
Only 10% of the flows actually come from China, and that is why I say that the flows between China and U.S. are limited. Based on these mitigating activities, I think that in Q1 we have effectively managed to navigate through this rather volatile environment, and the tariffs have not had any significant impact on our financials in Q1. Based on what we know right now and the tariff levels that we navigate and live with as we speak, we expect that that should be the case also for Q2. The main unknown and the question mark that I think we and everybody else is struggling with is to try to assess what will these tariffs do to global demand and global GDP.
Are we facing a global recession, and what will that do to global demand? Here we do not have the answers. I do not think that anyone has the answers, but we are monitoring this very closely, and we are encountering different scenarios, and we will prepare to act swiftly and with agility to make sure that we find a way also depending on what is going to happen to global demand. If we leave tariffs side to side and go back to our own business and take a look by segment, starting with industrial business, our industrial business in Q1 represented roughly 70% of our net sales and close to 90% of the adjusted operating profit.
As I mentioned, on a global basis, it's a rather soft market, and we report negative organic growth of 3.6% in the quarter, primarily driven by EMEA and India and Southeast Asia. The margin is strong. The margin is very strong at 16.9%, significantly up versus the same quarter last year. The main drivers here is that, as I mentioned before, is our ability to drive price, work with portfolio management, cost effectiveness, and also some help from FX in the quarter. Turning to automotive, representing some 30% of sales and 10% of net adjusted operating profit.
As I mentioned, a challenging market, negative 3% in the quarter. Here we see, in general terms, a very soft demand for commercial vehicles, while on a global basis, light vehicles and aftermarket is somewhat flat. While we see on the positive side a very, very strong and healthy growth in automotive light vehicles in China, primarily in EVs, that is growing a solid double digit organically in the quarter. We report a margin of 5.2%, somewhat shy of the same quarter last year, but the strong development in EV in China has provided a positive mix effect for the automotive business, helping to offset some of the negative headwinds coming from low volumes and fixed cost absorption.
When it comes to the margin, we still believe that we can do better, and we still believe that the 8% operating margin target that we set for this business by 2025, the 8% is still something that we believe is a reasonable level to reach to, but we do acknowledge that it will extend beyond 2025 to reach that number given current market conditions. If I now leave the quarter aside and then turn the focus to some of the strategic initiatives that we are working on, this time I would like to bring to your attention two items.
One, on our progress on driving and developing two fit-for-purpose businesses, and I would also like to share some light on some exciting innovation that we brought to market recently. Let's start with our two fit-for-purpose businesses. We are working at a very high pace with this separation. It is a massive task that we have said to you before. As you're probably aware, we have identified a unique organizational unit that is working with this, and the rest of the business is all focused on our day-to-day activities, but we have a dedicated set of people working with this split. We have reached a number of important milestones in the quarter.
For example, we now have set the operating model and organizational design for our future automotive business. Furthermore, we have concluded on how we're going to develop our split, our manufacturing footprint, and the starting base for our automotive business will be 16 global factories spread across the globe, as you can see on this chart. We are at the moment tracking towards our overall time plan, but we do acknowledge as we dig deeper and deeper into the material, we realize that there are thousands of activities, and many of them are on a critical path with limited headroom for delays.
Therefore, we think it's prudent to say that there is a risk that the timeline may stretch. This risk has not materialized yet, and if it will materialize, we will, of course, inform the market accordingly. This is more to say it is a rather massive task ahead of us. A number of things need to actually follow a very critical path, and we want to be prudent to say that clearly there are risks into the overall time plan, but so far we are tracking towards the time plan. If you also recall, in Q4, I mentioned that we also had initiated an initiative to look into the right- sizing of the future automotive and industrial business to create strong foundations for the future.
This work is now near completion, and we conclude that as we become less complex in our future setup, there are opportunities to design leaner organizational structures. We can push even more accountability out to our business areas. We can reduce some overlapping accountabilities or duties, and we can reduce the need for a large corporate head office. All in all, this will result in a sizable reduction of staff positions globally, but not at least within Europe.
As of now, we are now working with all our jurisdictions and our countries to assess how we can manage and the impact for each jurisdiction, and how much of this can be done through natural attrition, and what that at the end will be real redundancy. As we conclude this work, we intend to come back to you with more information of the entire size of this program when we report back to you in the Q2. Finally, before I hand over to Susanne, I wanted to bring your attention to some exciting new innovation that we brought to market, and this is important to us. Innovation is a vital part of our strategic work.
We work very, very closely with our customers and help them to solve their pain points, but also to support them in their sustainability journeys through sustainable innovation. This makes a lot of commercial sense for us. To bring some light to it, I'd like to highlight three areas or three industrial verticals where we have recently launched some rather impressive new products that are adding a lot of value to our customers. As you can see, the first example is from our railway industry, where our new bearings there are capable of reducing friction with some 20%, which clearly has a financial value to the operators, but also reduces their CO2 footprint.
Another example comes from the mining industry, where our sensor bearings are enabling the grinding mills to operate more effectively and closer to their full potential, and in this case has enabled our customers to increase their fill rates with some 20%. Clearly, again, a significant financial value for our customers, but also a very important step in their sustainability journey. Finally, I'd like to draw your attention to our ceramic bearings. Most often when we talk of ceramic bearings, we provide examples from the EV space, which is a very exciting application for our ceramic bearings, but it's not the only application.
Here's another example for industrial electrical motors, where our bearings, they actually can cope with 25% higher speed and up to 50% reduced friction compared to the same type of bearings based on steel rolling elements. Again, a significant value created supporting the sustainable innovation. Sustainability and innovation is key to us, as I mentioned, and the reason I bring this forward is I truly believe that our leading-edge technology and our innovation capacity is a clear market differentiator and a competitive edge for us, a little bit of the secret sauce of SKF. With that, I'd like to hand over to our new CFO, Susanne.
Warm welcome to SKF, and I'm sure you're keen to present yourself. Over to you.
Thank you, Rickard, and good morning, everyone. I'm super pleased to be back, and I've been at SKF now for the last two months. Before that, I spent 10 years outside, and before that, I actually spent 20 years with SKF in various finance, business control, and strategic change management initiatives. I know the company well, even if a lot of things have happened over the last 10 years. These last 10 years, I have held up two CFO positions. First, I was the CFO for Gunnebo Securities, back then a listed company. The last five years, I have been the CFO at Mölnlycke Health Care, a fully owned company by Investor AB. I am very pleased to be back.
Let's jump into the Q1 financials. This is an overview, and you have heard already Rickard talking about net sales coming down. We have a negative organic growth again, -3.5% for the seventh consecutive quarter, and I will elaborate a little bit more on the coming pages. Our gross profit and gross profit margins improved, and it's close to 30%, and I think this is truly illustrating our ongoing cost management initiatives, ensuring that we have a variable cost cake linked to the volume. The adjusted operating margin is also resilient, somewhat better even than last year, 13.5%, and it comes from industrial 16.9% and automotive 5.2%.
This quarter, we recorded items affecting comparability of SEK 348 million, and that is represented by some SEK 380 million of ongoing restructuring and the automotive separation costs. We have also taken an impairment charge of SEK 192 million, and that is partly then offset because as we have closed out our Luton manufacturing facility, we have now sold that facility and recorded a profit of SEK 224 million. Net net, this ends up with an operating margin of 12%. Let's look into the bridge instead. We talk about the sales and the profit on this one.
Again, our organic net sales grew negatively 3.5%, and it is certainly caused then by a weak demand across our industries, partly then offset by strong price and mix management. FX was negligible, while the structure that we see here is derived from the acquisition we did from John Sample Group that we closed in October last year. The adjusted operating margin remained resilient, and while volumes were down, the result impact was very much compensated by positive price mix, and you can also see the cost is almost flat year over year, and that certainly demonstrates a good cost management procedure across our businesses.
Finally, FX was positive year- over- year, so Q1 over Q1 last year, we had a strong dollar vis-à-vis the SEK that gave us the $90 million you see here. Moving into cash flow. As Rickard said, it's a slightly disappointing operating cash flow ending at SEK 1 billion compared to the SEK 1.8 billion we had Q1 last year. We can explain that a lot in increased of the working capital, realized negative FX effect, and change in provisions. Talking about the networking capital, the accounts receivable have contributed negatively as a result of a strong quarter end then, increasing our sales sitting then in the accounts receivable by the quarter end.
Inventories also increased, and as Rickard said again, it remains a key focus for us. We have a lot of actions ongoing, and it's a focus on this from management all the way down into all our entities. We are certainly following this through. When it comes to the operating profit, that is again then impacted by the gain of the sales of the Luton facilities, the SEK 224 million. That is later then deducted in the non-cash items and other to instead be included net in the investing activities. If you look at the cash flow after investment, that ended for the quarter at SEK 374 million. Balance sheet then. We see a net debt excluding pensions that has decreased further.
By year end, we had EUR 8.7 billion, and now we have EUR 7.8 billion. That reduction is mainly explained by translation effects of currency. Our net debt divided by equity ended at 13.1%, and that is certainly well below the target. Net debt in relation to adjusted EBITDA remained low at 0.9. Our adjusted return on capital employed amounted to 14% by the end of the quarter, where we can see a capital employed that has remained on the same level as last year, sorry, at year end, while the result in absolute amounts have come down. My last slide here, the outlook.
While we have seen signs of markets bottoming out, we plan for another quarter with negative volume development, and we do that a lot considering the macro environment we operate within. For the Q2 now, we assume the organic sales to be weakening somewhat year over year. If we look into Q2 and the currency impact, we anticipate that to be some negative SEK 400 million compared to Q2 last year, and we say that based on the rates that existed by the end of March last month.
The full year guidance around tax and investments remained the same. By that, I hand it over to you, Rickard.
Thank you very much, Susanne. Let's wrap this up before we go into the Q&A session. I think these are the key messages I'd like to leave you with today. Yes, we do operate in a continued weak demand. There are tough market conditions, and we are navigating in a very volatile geopolitical world. With that said though, we have seen signs, and especially in Europe, of markets bottoming out. We continue to demonstrate strong resilience in our performance, and I think due to a good execution of our strategy, we have improved our commercial and operational capabilities.
We continue with our automotive separation at high pace, and we have now achieved some critical and important milestones in the quarter, as I mentioned, especially related to the future automotive setup in terms of manufacturing, organizational design, and operating model. We are during the Q2 going to finalize our organizational review to ensure that we build two strong, competitive, fit-for-purpose businesses, one for industrial and one for automotive, and that are based on a lean and effective organizational structure. With this, I hand over to Sophie to manage Q&A.
We will now open up for your questions, and let me just remind you on how to ask a question. If you are joining via the telephone line, you press star and one. If you wish to withdraw it, you press star and two. We are also taking questions from our webcast audience, and you type your questions in the tab that you find just above the slides. Let's start with a question from the telephone line, and it comes from Daniela Costa at Goldman Sachs. Please, Daniela.
Hi, good morning. Thank you for taking my questions. If I may, I want to ask two things if possible. The first one, just in terms of any color you can give how, since tariffs have been announced, I guess since the beginning of April, things have evolved. I know you mentioned on your receivable comments that the activity has been strong towards the end of Q1, whether that has continued and there was any sort of sense of customers pre-buying. That's the first question, and then I have a second question. I can ask it right after he's on free cash flow, but I'll let you answer this one first.
Okay, thank you and good morning. Clearly, the Liberation Day happened on April 2, and so that was not really reflected in March, as you know, and that's also part of your question. Maybe some of the effects that we talked about that had a strong end of last quarter, I think they're twofold. One is that the magnitude of Liberation Day was not known, and we should not also forget that we have a little bit of an Easter effect, that Easter happened a little bit earlier last year and had a larger impact in March than it had this year. I think we should be a bit balanced in how we see the strength of the end of that quarter.
To try to answer your question after Liberation Day, I think we have all experienced significant turmoil. I do believe that we see a lot of signs that many of our customers, they take a sit-and-wait approach, trying to assess what is the firm ground here before they dare to make a decision. That has actually made it have a little bit negative impact in that regard. We have not seen a lot of activities that people are pre-buying or trying to circumvent tariffs by pushing orders or stocking up or anything like that. Very limited of that type of activity that we have noticed. I think that's the best answer I can give to you, Daniela.
Perfect, very clear, thank you. Just thinking about this year in terms of free cash flow, I guess given all that's going on, you have the spin and the expenses related and the cash out, I guess related to the restructuring. You also have, I wonder if you have to build up inventories yourself given all the turmoil and not knowing how tariffs are going to end and the regional mismatches. Do you think this year is fundamentally like a year where cash conversion is disturbed versus normalized, or how shall we think about the remaining of the year given you normally have a very high sea sonality to the second half?
Is this still going to be the case, and should we think just, yeah, how we think about cash?
Susanne, do you want to comment on that?
Good morning, Daniela. Nice to talk to you. I would say that we typically have a seasonal cash flow, and I think that's what you can expect again. I think as you might know, we will actually have some extra cash in in the Q2 as a consequence of our divestment on our aero business, so that will provide both profits and cash to us. I think that we will have slightly more of restructuring costs this year considering that we are running the separation initiatives followed also by sizable restructuring initiatives coming through as a right-sizing of our businesses. I think that we have a good underlying cash generation, and on top of that, we have very strong finances.
Got it. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you. We will continue with a question from Magnus Kruber at Nordea. Please go ahead.
Hi, Rickard, Susanne, Sophie, Magnus at Nordea. When you plan to push prices through in the U.S. in particular, do you expect to increase prices across the entire portfolio to compensate for tariff, or will you do selectively on the imports?
Rickard, please.
It's a little bit mix of both. For part of the assortment, actually, we are pushing up prices generally. For other parts of assortment, it's more surcharges that we put through, and they are then very specific in nature. I think you will find a little bit of both that's going on. As I said, the main issue is the flows that we have from China to the U.S. As I presented, they are limited, but they are still there, and we're working hard to mitigate those. There, we're pushing hard using price and primarily surcharges.
With tariffs touching 200%, there will be probably parts of the assortment that will cease to exist, that will be impossible to sell. That will also be part of the equation, but that is a minority and will not have any impact on the group's numbers as such. Clearly, it is a difficult environment to navigate in.
Got it. That is very clear. Can you also help us a little bit with the timing effect of the tariff compared to the phasing of the surcharges and the price hikes? Should we expect any sort of gap there, particularly on the OEM part of the portfolio where pricing might sort of lag the surcharges and the tariffs a bit? Sorry, the tariffs.
Yeah. When it comes to surcharges, I do not foresee a significant lag there. They are more instant. You are right when it comes to prices, though. There might be some lag there. Clearly, it depends on when customers place their orders, if they place the order before we raise the prices or after and so forth, and when they replenish. These things happen. We know there is some delay. That said, though, I think that we demonstrated our ability to navigate in this territory and this volatility in Q1, because this has had a very limited impact on our financials in Q1.
Given, again, with the caveat, what we know right now, I think we all have to say that we expect that will be the case also in Q2, as I mentioned.
Can you ask one final question?
Thank you, Magnus. Unfortunately, we will need to take the next question from the next person in line here. We have a long queue, I can see. Let's limit ourselves now to one question per person. If time allows, you are happy to enter the question queue again. We will continue with a question from James Moore at Redburn. Please go ahead.
Good morning, everyone, and nice to meet you, Susanne. Thanks for all the tariff details. Really helpful. I estimate you need a 20% price hike in the U.S. to be margin neutral. My question is, how much of that have you done? Have you put the full 145% Chinese fully through? If I could tag it to that as part of the same question, how much of the 10% of China imports will you, one, reroute, two, continue with, and three, will cease to exist? If you could help with any of that, it'd be great.
Rickard, please support James here.
Yeah, James, I'm afraid I'm going to be a little bit of a disappointment to you today, even though it's always good to hear you. I can't provide those details. I'm going to stay with what we now provided, and I'm happy to hear that you found it helpful, because that was actually the intention. We are constantly working with prices in Americas to make sure that we are compensating ourselves. Again, my best proof point is the Q1 result, where I say that had a limited impact.
To your question about what part of the assortment of the 10% that inflow from China to North America, again, I can't be very specific, but we are working on pieces or parts of the assortment that we do see an opportunity to maybe move around in our global footprint, and that could be done in a fairly quick way. They were talking maybe a couple of months to navigate and move assortment around. There are other parts of the assortment that are going to take us longer to mitigate, given that we may not have that capacity for that particular assortment anywhere else at the moment and need to build it up elsewhere.
If that is the case, then it is going to be a little bit of a longer journey. I have to be vague here, and I cannot give you any exact percentages, but I think the important message today is that it is a limited flow between China and the U.S. in our kind of value chain setup.
I appreciate the color. Thank you.
Thank you.
We will continue with a question from Andre Kukhnin at UBS. Please go ahead.
Good morning. Thank you very much for taking my question. I could ask one more on tariffs, but I think I'll just move on to the right-sizing program. I think that's quite an interesting development this morning. Could you help us with any numbers on this? Could you help us maybe put it in the context of maybe the total addressable size of headcount that this presents the opportunity in? Are we talking about hundreds, thousands, or more?
Yeah, Rickard.
Right. We deliberately took the decision not to give a number today, but talk about sizable due to the fact that the discussions are ongoing and we need to get our arms around by country how much of this can be natural attrition, how much is real redundancy. We will come back to you with the accurate numbers once we have them, and that is when we present Q2. I can give you the base, though. We have roughly 13,000 employees classified as staff across SKF globally. That is the base that when we say from that, we are going to have a sizable reduction.
Got it. Thank you.
Thanks.
The next question will come from the line of Andreas Koski at Exane BNP Paribas. Please go ahead.
Thank you, Sophie, and good morning. Yeah, my questions were also about tariffs and the right-sizing program. On the tariffs, you just comment on Q2, you do not comment on Q3 and onwards. I guess that the 145% tariffs from China and the other tariffs will not start to impact your P&L until the second half of this year as you have inventories that should last for at least one quarter. How are you viewing the impact from the tariffs in the second half of 2025 and going forward if they stand as they are today?
Thank you. Rickard, do you want to continue on the theme of tariffs here?
I'll be delighted. Yeah. It is a very tricky question, and we do not really guide for more than the next quarter, so I am going to stick there and not try to open up that. We all know it is hard to predict because what happened on Liberation Day, a couple of weeks later, they were paused and paused for 90 days. What will they actually be in the second half of the year? I am not sure. We also hear now, at least I read in the news, that there are discussions both from China and from the U.S. that are talking about maybe relaxing some of the tariffs that are now in force between China and the U.S. Is that for real, or if it's just noise?
I don't know. It is very hard to predict. I can't give any specifics for the second half. As I said, since we don't guide for it, I have to refrain from providing any further details.
Okay, yeah, okay, then I read that as you might not, that you might be more impacted than in Q1 and Q2 at least.
The second question on sizing because you mentioned.
Sorry, Andreas. I will be tough here and just say one question per person because there is a long queue of people that wants to ask a question. Hopefully we can answer your additional questions from IR later today. We will continue with a question from Erik Golrang at SEB. Erik, please go ahead.
Thanks. I'd like to talk about tariffs, but I'll stay away from that topic. I just wanted to understand what you talked about there in terms of the complexity with the separation, the infrastructure, the risk for a delay here. What's the magnitude we're talking about? Is it a month that it could be pushed, or is it six months? How much of a delay should we be thinking about? Thank you.
Rickard, please.
Right now, I don't think you should think about a delay at all. As I tried to describe, we are tracking towards our overall project plan. It is a very large program that we run. We're talking of thousands and thousands of activities where many of them, especially related to IT structure, are on a critical path. If one of them, for one reason, would enter into some issues or would be delayed, that will have a domino effect on a number of other activities in this program. What I'm trying to say here is that we run this program, and it actually contains some risks in terms of timing.
I wanted to be transparent and share that because if that risk materializes, we would then naturally come back and explain and provide you with information. I don't want you, if that happens, to be surprised. That's the reason why we brought it up, because we do see that this critical path is really a critical path.
Thank you.
Thank you. Let's continue with a question from Tore Fangmann at Bank of America. Please go ahead.
Good morning, and thank you for taking my question. You were commenting that you've seen some signs of the markets bottoming out, especially in industrials. Could you give us any color on what markets and a little bit on the timing around this? Thank you.
Rickard, you made that comment. Would you like to clarify a little bit?
Yeah, to the extent that I can. It's true. When we look into our EMEA business, industrial business, for example, we have seen that the order book, even though we do not disclose it into the market, but when we look into it internally, we have seen that that has shown a positive trajectory for a number of months in a row. That, to us, is a positive sign and indicates that maybe we are seeing that the markets are bottomed out. Also, I must stress that before Liberation Day, we sensed that in many of the geographies in North America, in Europe, and to some extent also in India and other regions, the activity level was rather high.
What I mean by activity level is not actually orders and sales, but customer inquiries, customers talking about new projects, new initiatives where they seek our guidance, our engineering capacity to support them. That is also a sign of things starting to kind of—the wheels are starting to turn again. That is what we saw during Q1, and that is also why we made this comment. After Liberation Day and up till now, I do not say that everything has changed.
I think we still have roughly the same situation, but we also hear a number of our customers saying, you know what, that initiative that we talked to you about a couple of weeks ago, it is still here, but we are going to sit and wait for a while and see where things are going to move before we take the final decision. We hear a little bit of that as well. It is hard to read the tea leaves at the moment.
Yes, understood. Which end markets within industrial are the ones that are working good for you?
We do have a couple of ones that are highly, we see already now, high activity and strong growth. I mentioned a few already during this call, aerospace being one, EVs in China being a very particular one. We do see in certain geographies that we continue to see good momentum in rail, for example, on a smaller niche product, our magnetic bearings that are growing massively. There are a lot of good pockets and signs. Also in many other industrial verticals, the activity levels have started to ramp up.
Great. Thank you.
Thank you. Let's continue with a question from Rory Smith at Oxcap. Please go ahead.
Good morning, Sophie, Rickard, and Susanne. It's Rory from Oxcap. Thank you for taking my question. I just wanted to come back to the auto separation. I really, really asked today, given what you see, if the IT complexity part of the project is the only thing that would cause you to delay the timeline for auto separation. I ask that because you've talked about the outlook for margins in automotive and the sort of the as yet unknown tariff impact in automotive. You have got a war room set up for tariffs. That is all great. That is fantastic. Are there any outcomes, any scenarios that you are currently wargaming that would ultimately cause you to delay that separation?
That is my question. Thank you.
Rickard.
Thank you. I think I got your question. There was a little bit of a bad line, but I think I got it. If not, you have to correct me. Right now, all my comments related to timing and the project, all project-related, pure practical project management. We see all of these thousands and thousands of activities that need to happen. Many of them have dependencies. They are on a critical path, and we're trying to manage this. Clearly, as in any large project, there are some risks to it. My comments have nothing to do with what we believe might the market conditions be at the point of departure.
I can't guess, and I don't really spend a lot of time and effort at the moment trying to second-guess that. I think when we get to that point, when we're getting closer to the time when we may do the spin, I'm sure that the board and management at that time will carefully consider what is the optimal timing to do the launch. But right now, I have no comments or can give no other color to this. All my comments related to the timing was just pure kind of project management-based.
Very good.
Thank you.
Let's continue with a question from John Kim at Deutsche Bank. John, your line should be open.
Hi, good morning. Thanks for the opportunity. I hear what you're saying on tariffs or charges and the rest of it. Can you put that in the context of your automotive contract, which tends to be multi-year? Are there generally provisions in place? Are you having to go back and renegotiate these? What is more true for the division?
Rickard.
Right. Clearly, the automotive space, as always, is a tough market to navigate in, and we have strong customers. I think the situation is so unique and so special. Our sense is that we have engaged with all of our customers in a constructive and productive dialogue. They all see that there is a kind of understanding that we have to do something to compensate for these things. Sometimes we open up discussions. Sometimes we have the right to do it in the contracts.
Otherwise, it is a little bit kind of force majeure type of discussion that is also happening. In general terms, I do believe that there is a constructive and productive dialogue. Clearly, it is not a walk in the park, and it is a lot of hard work, but it is based on a constructive dialogue.
Okay. Thank you.
Very good. We will continue with a question from Tim Lee at Barclays. Please go ahead.
Hi. Thanks for taking my question. Actually, I just want to come back a little bit on tariffs. You mentioned in last year, you have around 50% of your U.S. sales being local for local. Do you have a timetable for further localization of your U.S. business? What percentage do you think you will be able to achieve and target in this timeline for that? I think previously you also mentioned it would not be 100% localized for the U.S. business or the other regions. Any colors that you can help us on the timeframe that you will be achieving a further localization therefore that would be super helpful.
Yeah, Rickard, let's talk about the regionalization here.
Right. Let's try to start by reminding ourselves about our regionalization journey. When we talk about regionalization in Americas, we talk about America as the two continents in America, i.e., including Mexico in that as well, supporting both South and North America. There we have, I think it was in last quarter, we shared with you our journey there, and we are now at roughly close to 70% regionalization, i.e., 70% or 69% thereabout, or what we sell in Americas is also manufactured in Americas. Today, I gave you a little bit of insight to the U.S. and the market there.
As I mentioned, right now, some 50% of what is sold in Americas comes from imports from Mexico, where the vast majority of our products there are USMCA compliant. That is the whole intention. We have this project where we are building up capacity in Monterrey, and the main ambition has always been trying to move as much of the current assortment in China over to Monterrey. That journey will continue. Over time, and I can't give you a hard timeline here, but over time, the intention is that that 10% that is imported from China will diminish.
Thank you. We have received a question from the webcast here on currency impact for the full year. I should just say that we don't really guide on that. We have it for Q2, and it's more of a calculation based on the end rates of March. With that, let's continue with a question from the telephone line. That's also our final question before we wrap up here. It comes from the line of Rizk Maidi at Jefferies. Please go ahead, Rizk.
Yes, good morning. Just perhaps a quick one on whether this working capital build or inventory build had any impact on the EBIT in Q2 and how you're expecting to manage inventories now in the Q2 given the tariffs.
Susanne, would you like to comment on that?
Yeah. I think we have a negative development, as you said, in the cash flow. We have built some inventory from year-end then. That is now, I mean, it's not finished goods, so it's coming in as raw material and work in process. That is where we have that addition. As we also talked about, we have a strong focus on managing down our inventory level and have a lot of activities in each of the business areas ongoing. I do not see that there is a significant impact in the EBIT at all around these matters on inventory in the quarter we just left behind.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you. That was the last question we had time for. Of course, if you have more questions, you can dial into the Investor Relations Department. With that, Rickard, would you like to sum up the quarter here?
Yeah, I would love to. Thank you so much. Again, thank you for your attention and for your insightful questions. Again, as I said, I think we have once again demonstrated that we are on a journey creating an even stronger and more competitive SKF, capable of managing also in rather difficult market conditions. Yes, it is painful to report seven consecutive quarters of negative organic growth and guide for another one in Q2. We are working extremely hard across our organization to change this, to find growth opportunities and hunt for profitable growth.
Even though we may not talk that much about that in our discussions today, we should not forget that clearly that is high on our radar as well. With that said, all the activities that were done during this downturn in improving our commercial and operational capabilities, investing into our future, daring to stick to our strategic intent, and also driving a rather exciting project forward by creating two independent and globally leading business units, I am convinced will create a fantastic platform for SKF longer term. We are well positioned to take advantage of profitable growth once demand turns back up again.
With this, I thank you so much for your attention and wish you a wonderful weekend once you get to it. Thank you so much.