Good morning, welcome to Teqnion presentation of the Q1 report for 2023. I'm sitting here with my colleagues, Daniel and Carina, and we're gonna shortly present our report, and we're gonna focus, as we normally do, on a questions and answer session. Just to start everything out, I would like to thank Kanalgratis that very kindly let us sit here in their very flashy studio and do this. We also thank Rickard, who's behind the camera and live cutting this little live event. Hopefully we will do our best. As you know, we are beginners at this, but we'll see what happens. To start everything off, Carina will just briefly go through the report that we released this morning. Please, Carina.
Hi, everyone. I would like to present the report for the 1st quarter, 2023. It's a stable quarter. We're happy about that. We are up in the net sales with 15%. Half of it, around approximately is organically, which we think is a bit of inflation. We also have a strong EBITDA and also the result is up. We are also happy that the cash flow from operations is up compared to the same quarter last year, but we are not satisfied with that because it's a constant work with the working capital. If you define a working capital as accounts payable, accounts receivable, and inventory, we are constantly working with that.
It's a bit up this 1st quarter, and we have a lot of people in our companies working on a daily basis with this and you are, you will never be happy with it. It is satisfied with your working capital. It is a constant work with working capital always. That was really, really short about the 1st quarter. I think we just start off with our Q&A session, and we have some questions. I think Daniel will monitor that.
Thank you for that, Carina. We have received quite a lot of questions through email and Twitter, and some of them are similar. We have aggregated some of those to not bore you with the same questions and answers. We'll start off with those. If you come up with any new questions or things that you wonder about, please just write in the YouTube chat, and we'll try to address that and jump back and forth between old questions and live ones. To kick this off, we received quite a lot of questions about acquisition and growth. They come from Kip from the USA, Mates from Czech Republic, RM, Tom from email and Twitter, among others. Basically, the questions are: how will your growth journey look when it comes to M&A?
Will you buy more companies, larger companies, hire additional M&A people, decentralize M&A decisions or something else?
All of the above?
Exactly.
I don't know. No. As we work today with acquisitions, it's mainly Daniel that scouts for new objects. What we have done for a few years now is that we scout for ourselves. We approach good companies, quality companies with good entrepreneurs running them, owning them, and see if we can be a future owner of that company, which means that we approach companies that not maybe not are for sale from the beginning. It's a very, from our perspective, a slow but also reliable and sustainable way of working with a pipeline of potential acquisitions. We get to know the people. It's a very.
Since we're building relationships with the owners, we also know about when or if the company finally becomes for sale or something that we can buy, then we know both the people and the business really well at that stage. It's a way of doing business that we really like and enjoy and feel is robust. We would like to continue in that way. Of course, we also look at companies that are for sale, that are broked via brokers. How it's gonna be in the future, if we're gonna buy more, maybe we are at a pace right now where we feel that if we are lucky and find high quality companies, we can absorb approximately around five acquisitions a year.
That doesn't mean that we're gonna do five acquisitions every year. It's can be more, it can be less. But that's just to give you a figure about how we feel about our pace right now. What we constantly try to improve, even in this case, is that we try to find higher quality companies, meaning that the things that we look in a company, high earnings, high cash flow, and niche products and whatever, that we look at companies that are better in those aspects. Maybe in the future, we will look at bigger companies. Maybe we will feel that we can absorb more than what we absorb today.
As it is for now, we feel that the way we're doing things is really good, and we learn constantly, so we don't wanna step too much to the side and do much, too much error. We learn slowly, and we feel that we have a good pace at the moment.
Yeah. Maybe just to add to that, I like what you said regarding the learning part, because maybe three, five years ago we were buying, let's say, two companies a year on some kind of average. Now we are closer to five, and, how it will look in the future, we don't know. We try to become a little bit better for, every day, every year, and, during that process, we'll try to figure out how to do it better next time. We don't have a grand scheme or strategy on, you know, how the end game will look in 10 or 50 years. That we'll hopefully figure out a few years before that happens.
Absolutely.
Great. Jumping to the next question, we have some questions about incentives. They come from David in Spain, Oren from Twitter, among others. They wonder how does our incentive structure look? Do we have incentive schemes in place for key employees? Maybe it would be great if we can break this down on Teqnion mother company, daughter company CEOs, and also sellers of companies.
Maybe we can try to answer that together. When it comes to incentives for people selling companies to us, we normally pay the most of the money up front when we take over the shares. Then we have earn-outs. Normally, we have earn-outs over two years, which becomes an incentive for both us and the seller of the company that the company performs well, continues to performs well. So that's an incentive that we found is working really well for us. When it comes to how we are incentivized, maybe you can briefly talk about that because we have a way that works for us in the mother company as it is the same structure for all the CEOs of the subsidiaries.
Yeah. If I know the details. It's a very simple structure where we try to grow our profit. We have a model where we have a simple profit-sharing scheme where, if the profit for a calendar year is higher than the average versus the last three years, then we get a piece of that. The more we grow profit, the more incentive bonus there is to it. The bar always gets higher and higher.
It gets harder and harder, which it's, which is how life should be, right?
Yes.
Yeah. Good.
Good. Shall we move on then to valuation? We have some questions regarding valuation and how we value companies and if that has changed over time.
Yeah. We, this is, for us, a really important question. We believe that to be sustainable and be able to do this in, forever and ever, we need to be really good at valuating the companies that we acquire. We have found a way of doing that, which is for us at least, very simple and easy to understand. We try to get our money back or our investment back in five years, on a realistic forecast.
We talk with the seller of the company about a realistic forecast, and we, when we both have agreed on that, we see that there is a good chance for us to get our investment back in five years, and the seller feels that that's a fair value of their company, then we will proceed and do business together. We have had that approach since we started in 2006, and we still have the same approach, and it seems to be working. Yeah.
I think what's important in that is that philosophy or the way of valuing it has not changed. Maybe the quality of companies over time have changed. In the early days, where we bought companies where we thought that there would be very limited organic growth, getting our money back in five years meant more or less 5x earnings after tax. Nowadays, when we buy companies where we think that there is a higher growth potential, that multiple of course becomes higher, but we are not multiple-focused. We are cash flow focused, future cash flow focused. Good. The last aggregated question comes from Kyle at Royal Orange, where they are wondering regarding our resilience of the business. Basically, the question is, how resilient is Teqnion given the macro things going on in the world?
I wish I knew.
On a scale from zero to 10.
On a scale from five to 26. I mean, it's built into our business model that we want to be robust and resilient. It means that we have companies that work in a broad variety of industry niches.
Normally, it's nothing nice is normal, of course, but in general, we have a few companies that struggle because of they have some difficulty in their industrial niche at the moment. As we mentioned in the report, it's the house building business here in Sweden that struggles a lot. Normally we have a few companies that maybe runs a little bit better than normal because of whatever is happening in that niche. At the moment, it's a lot of electrification going on in society, and we have some companies that are active there. Then we have the broad middle, which normally is the broad middle, where it's more or less business as usual.
I mean, we have the, in theory, a group where we want to be robust and resilient for the fluctuation in the economy. I mean, we saw it in during COVID that it worked pretty well also in theory, and I think it will work even now when we see a recession coming or maybe we are right in it. If at least I believe it's gonna be worse in general, but I think we're pretty confident that we are good at what we do. We're fast, we're flexible, we can scale up and we can scale down, and we're willing to act fast and that's something that we both strongly believe in.
What we could add to that is that, we also focus very much on profit, not on net sales. As long as you do that, and if it gets tougher times and you focus on profit to be profitable, not to have just sale, that is an important thing, I also believe, when it comes to tougher times.
Yeah.
It's a really good point.
Yeah.
Just to exemplify that, we have in our internal reports, maybe we should start with that also quarterly.
Yeah.
We switch.
Yeah
The...
Width
We present the earnings first on top and, net sales at the bottom, just to emphasize that what we are in the business to earn money. That's why we do this.
Yeah.
Not just to grow sales. That is not important in-.
We don't care about that.
... as such.
It will happen. If we're good at earning money, sooner or later, the growth in sales will come, of course.
Related to that, we got a question, actually a very smart comment from Pedro Leon from YouTube, who is saying that we have a typo on page eight, and that is entirely my fault and that's why I am not the CFO and why we have Carina. We have shown there the percentage that the house building companies are of the total group. The absolute numbers that you see in the bars are correct, and all of the percentage points are correct except for the Q1 number, which should be 10%, which... The bars are right. The last numbers should be 10% instead of 7%, which gives you a little bit of view on how it is going for the, or how important construction or house building is for us at the moment.
How important it is that it's on a wiped page, so we can wipe out all the errors.
Exactly
Very easily. Good.
Mm.
Good. We're jumping to a few other live questions. We have Marcus wondering, "What is your view on organic growth of the subsidiaries? Buffett once says that companies with low returns, that not every company needs to grow, which is why he charges holding companies for capital.
Organic growth is needed, of course over time. It's not we try to find the drive in all the subsidiaries where they want to be better at what they do and earn more money, which also, or even if it's ... If it might be a delay if in, if you need to fix something else first before selling more. The organic growth from sales will come if you do things right and you correct everything within, sooner or later you become better and you grow into that size that you achieved, and then you can take the next step up to a new size and work on that level. It's a normal thing for a healthy company is, of course, organic growth, and that's we ...
... something that we always strive for. Maybe we focus more on earning more money at the level that we are at to become a higher quality company at that level before we step up and take the next level.
Yeah. Maybe just to accentuate on that, all companies are expected to have some kind of organic growth because we believe that without any growth, they will sooner or later diminish and get eliminated, which is of course value destruction. Every single company have different targets depending on what type of company it is and who is driving the company. Some companies can grow very capital efficient, and we love that, and with low risk. Some companies cannot, and if they cannot, we would be happy and are happy to take that cash flow and acquire new great companies. Good. We have a question from Cristoforo, who says, "I have a question for the next Q&A, that comes from listening to a recent Bill Gurley interview with Tim Ferriss.
He says that Bill said that 80%-90% of the entrepreneurs he met would greatly benefit reading the first three chapters of Michael Porter's Competitive Strategy book." Very specific question. My question is, have you read the book? If yes, how has that modeled your strategic thinking for the business, and can you provide some example to that?
Are you asking me? No, I haven't read the book.
No.
I'm sorry, I can't help you.
Maybe I have read it when I was studying, not on recent time.
No.
You, Daniel?
Yes, I have read it.
Yeah.
I spend too much time reading, maybe too little doing things. I think it's a great book. We use it as in I have that in my framework. When we meet new companies, usually it's you wanna meet meeting entrepreneurs together. Obviously we have different backgrounds, different experiences, read different books, and listen to different podcasts. We get in there with different approaches. I think Johan is more of an inside out person, to use some lingo, focusing much more on the here and now, the people, the actual products, the technology, et cetera, while me, because I haven't been an entrepreneur and haven't worked with the actual products, are maybe more of a framework outside in person, and using Porter's force, five forces, to maybe nail down and try to understand the business.
Maybe that's a concrete example of when we try to evaluate different companies. For the entrepreneurs, I don't know how many of them that have read it, but maybe it, for us, it doesn't matter so much because what happens is that the companies that we find, they are companies that are very niched and have found a place in the market where they can have a higher, a higher, return on capital than competitors in similar or in the same industry at least. They have found that little niche due to trial and error, maybe not because of reading that book, but because they have tried over decades. Maybe that's some intersection and some kind of answer on that question.
Moving on, we have Matt from the United States, who is wondering, given that we actually had a dividend last year, how is our view between dividend and growth?
My view is I love growth. It's for the AGM and the shareholders to decide what to do, of course, but what we that work in this company, we love to reinvest all the cash flow into new businesses. That's what we live for.
Yes. As long as we have great opportunities. Following that, Matt is also wondering, have you thought about enacting an audit remuneration and nomination committee? I imagine this is probably in the works now that you have better professionalized your internal accounting system with the hiring of Carina.
Yes. Thank you.
Hiring.
We already have a nomination committee since the company was listed. That is already in place. We will start off with the two others, the audit committee and the, I can't pronounce it, renomination committee. That is a challenge. We will also start off working with those kind of committees going forward.
And we-
We have the annual general meeting today also, so that is a kind of kickoff for that kind of work.
Yes.
While you're at the mic, do you want to say something about potential list exchange, change?
Of course. Of course, as a natural step, we will like to be on the main list sooner or later. That has been a constant discussion since we were listed. When that will be, will happen, we will let you know. Sometime in the future, we hope we will change to main list.
Yeah.
Not now.
Uh-
We'll come back to that.
We have a live question from Kartik, who is saying, "As Teqnion is involved in the manufacture and sale of physical goods as opposed to software, is there scope to have some recurring revenues from the maintenance of this equipment or spare parts?" Question mark.
We, thankfully, we are in many different industrial niches, and normally, when we describe what we do, we have companies that sell a physical product. We always have exceptions also in this case. I don't really know if I dare to tell you this, but we actually have a company that's only is doing service, but they do service on physical products. They do it on engines. That's something that we absolutely always look into and see if we can increase that part of every subsidiary's business, if we can include more recurring services on the products or the goods that's what, or the projects, with that we sell, the systems that we sell.
Some of our companies, it's natural. We sell different type of solutions and systems where the customers usually they are getting worn or they need update, and then we are of course a natural partner to make sure that system is functional and reliable also in the future. We have recurring service work in some of our companies. Other companies in our group don't have that natural business, there is more or less just selling a physical thing. That works fine as well. It adds to our diversity that we have some recurring service work and some of our subsidiaries have a lot of it and some has none. It's just add to our diversification.
Yeah. Also when it comes to the actual physical products, some of the products are more of, let's call it one-off nature, like buying a home. It's quite seldom that you buy homes every year. Some of the companies, quite a lot of them are selling products to customers that they've had for decades and decades, and where these products are used in all or maybe very many of their products that they are selling. Of course, it's not recurring in that they come automatically. So far at least, as long as we're delivering quality and service, they continue to be bought.
I mean, we sell. That's maybe just to add some more comments on that when it comes to how we do business, we are relationship builders. We try to have our customers for a long time. We try to have our suppliers for a long time. We love businesses where all parties can benefit from it. It's a sustainable business that goes on and that the relationship can be just stronger and stronger over time. That's the type of businesses we try to find and live for.
Yeah. Following that, Moose on YouTube is wondering,
If you think I jump a lot, it's because I'm sitting on a couple of pillows because my chair is so low, so it's fluffy.
What are our thoughts on the estimates in Affärsvärlden's article? Are they in line with our expectations?
Uh, well-
I mean, we shouldn't give him forecasts.
No, we don't give forecasts, but we have financial-
Stop with that.
We have financial targets.
Yes.
Yeah.
Our financial target, the most fun of them, or the one that's fun maybe is, the one that says that we should double the EPS every five years. That's a target that we aiming to fulfill.
Yep. Great. One more YouTube question before we jump back to the mails. David Henry is wondering, do we have a formal post-acquisition analysis after one, two, or three years? If so, what does it look like?
No. I think we should have it.
Yes.
That would be good.
We will have to work it out.
I mean, we have a lot to learn from Carina, and there's the, just in these cases, she can be really helpful to help us just look at what we've done and evaluate everything so we can become better and iterate towards something that works better. We have done this analysis a few times over the years when we feel that we should have done it sooner, and it looks good. I'm happy with how our acquisitions have performed and how we are managed to work with them over time. I mean, the companies that were the first companies into the group are today really robust and profitable companies. I mean, we are pretty confident in that we know how to run these small technology-driven companies.
Yeah
If we have the time to do it. We're not fast, but we know how to do it.
Maybe just two things to add to that. One is that, we don't have a formal process of that, but that doesn't mean that we don't do an evaluation. We talk about these things constantly.
That's right.
We don't have a set framework for it. We should. We'll figure that out. The second thing to that is, we will do it, but I also think that it's a little bit different from buying listed companies where this is of course super important because buying a small piece of a listed company, either you're right or you're wrong. Of course, there's maybe something in between as well. For us, even if we are right, we can do stupid mistakes when it comes to operation and screw it up. That doesn't have anything to do with the actual acquisition.
The other way around, when we buy something that maybe was a mistake looking at the actual acquisition, we can do things with the company together with the management team, so it becomes a great company. It doesn't mean that it's less important to do the evaluation.
One part of it is a minor part of it that we follow up because we pay most part in cash when we acquire, and then we have the continuing considerations paid out one, two, or three year after the acquisition. That is one kind of follow-up because that is dependent on the profit after our acquisitions.
We spread the risk a little bit also.
Yeah, yeah.
Insurance that we have done something that is okay. I mean, for me, it's the. I mean, one question is how we maybe we are seemed as a young and fresh and I don't know, unproven, nowadays it's called serial acquirer. I mean, we've been doing this since 2006. Hopefully we learn something along the way. I'm absolutely willing to call myself a beginner at this. Still it feels we have some confidence that we are know how to handle difficult times and to fix broken things.
Kip from the United States is wondering, the combined operating margins of the companies that we acquired during the 2nd half of 2021 and all of 2022 were significantly higher than company-wide margins at the time, which suggests that we should see an increase in overall Teqnion margins, all else equal. However, the overall margins actually decreased 2022 versus 2021. Why?
Good question. I looked into that and one way to answer it that I looked into the companies, we are quite on the same level. When it also come to EBITDA, there are other parts of EBITDA, and one part is that if we have to revalue, like, the continuing considerations or we have a bargain purchase or something, we have other parts. In 2021 we had one bargain purchase that affected the EBITDA positively. I don't really like to speak about, "Oh, we had that special," it's like you try to.
We don't do adjusted things.
I don't like adjusted things, so I don't want to go there. I just say that keep in mind that we also, and we will have going forward as well, have those kind of revaluation of continuing consideration that will be included in EBITDA and that will affect EBITDA on the group's level. Therefore it will be that we have also effects in EBITDA margin.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Hopefully that component should the effect of that component should hopefully decrease over time as we grow as a group as well. I mean, another things to consider during for the 2022 figures is of course that the world was struggling with inflation and higher interest rates and price increases. It was tough and difficult to work, to try to keep and increase our margins overall, and I think we did it pretty well. A lot of our coworkers really struggled and worked hard with that and fought really good. Over time, as we grow, our ambition is that the overall EBITDA margin should increase. Of course, that's what we're aiming for.
Yeah. Going on, Royal Orange from Twitter says, "Teqnion seems to focus on very niche products, usually aligned with trends. How do you see its capacity to innovate once if those fads shift?
Aligned with trends. I like it. We try to find things that are really unsexy and not aligned with trends. Sometimes, of course, it happens to that anyway. No, but we try to find companies that offer something to their clients that should be needed also in a decade or two. We don't try to find what's hot at the moment or trending at this time. It's we try to find things that we believe is gonna be something that's needed in a long way.
Yeah
And maybe in the, in the future.
I mean, the world is changing maybe faster and faster, and when you look at AI technology, for example, ChatGPT-3.5 is already out. ChatGPT-4 is maybe new, but AutoGPT is the new thing. We don't want to be in that kind of business. We try to find things where things change very, very slowly, where we can build the business on having great relationships. Hopefully, as Johan said, the product or the product platform at least is needed even in decades, because a lot of physical products are difficult to substitute with digital things.
What is very, very important is that if we have the right teams that want to do the right thing and they have great relationships with their customers, it can change over time, where they keep the customers, but the needs maybe change and the products with it.
I don't know if it's worth saying also that, I mean, whatever we're offering, the product portfolio is changing over time, of course.
Yeah.
Since we have deep relationships with our clients, we know what they have and what, and we try to solve their problems every day. I mean, the companies that offered something or had a product portfolio 10 years ago is of course not the same product offering today.
No.
It's constantly changing and we love that because, I mean, that's one of the fun-funnest, most fun part of doing business is constantly to develop your offering towards the client.
Yes. Maybe this is a question to our CFO. Oscar is saying, "Nice to see improved operating cash flow." How are we thinking about inventory levels and the build-up during the quarter? Is there any seasonal effects in there?
The inventory level is almost the same as it was at year-end, so we have not built inventory during the quarter. The accounts receivable has increased during the quarter. That could also be a good effect. I mean, if you deliver something in the, close to the end of the quarter, of course, it's accounts receivable, and that could also be a good thing. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but as I started off, it's always important to, on a daily basis, have that in mind when you're doing business, when you are. All the people in our companies, when they work, they have to constantly focus on that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Our raw material is cash. We love cash.
Mm.
We want cash.
Yeah. Christopher O have a fun question. What do we expect to bring home intellectually and culturally from the Berkshire annual meeting? Yes, we are going to attend that in a couple of weeks, so that's, I guess, why there is that question.
It's ... To be totally honest with regarding that, I enjoy spending a lot of time with Daniel. We complement each other, I believe, very much, and we have fun, and he's been doing a whole lot for Teqnion. He, I think he should go there before the guys are gone. So-
Will never happen.
It's more like we're gonna go there, and we're gonna have a good time, and hopefully we can. We always learn when we are out traveling.
Yeah.
While discussing amongst ourselves or finding new people or a combination. I'm really looking forward to the trip, and I strongly believe that it's gonna be inspirational and fun.
Yeah. I always learn something from when they have their Q&As, of course, and, I think most of the times when we learn something, we never know what we will learn beforehand, so just having that curious mind, asking questions, meeting interesting people. We can let you know when we get back. Nathan is saying, "What has the team done in the last quarter to improve our competitive advantage? Could you please share some examples?
Hard to answer. We try to be a little bit better all the time. I think that in, during the last quarter, One thing that comes to mind is this, that we upgraded the monthly report on our internal monthly report that the CEOs fill in and send to us at the mother company. It should be, It consist of figures from their books that we believe that they should look at at least once a month. Of course, it can be good to look at it more often, but at least once a month you should look at these figures.
Also we make sure that they, take care of their staff and their coworkers so everyone is happy, and because happy people tends to do a better job and stay on. That's something that we improved.
Yeah. I mean, the companies, it's very difficult to really point at one thing because, the companies that we have in the group and the business model that we have, it's not something that is usually revolutionary, that is extremely different and unique compared to anything else. Every company have maybe 100 things that they do very well, and together becomes better than the competitors, and it's the small steps for one of the 100 things that increases competitive advantage, I think.
We try to educate each other to take small steps and constantly improve and not to do, like, big leaps towards something new. It's more like baby steps, ant steps towards something better. Another thing is that Carina has gotten more into her role and you had the opportunity to go out and travel and visit more of the subsidiaries, which we discussed this just the other day. It's gonna help a lot because we have someone with Carina's background and her knowledge to just improve ways of following up on business, following up of, how we do things.
That is really fun work, I think.
Yeah.
Great. Tom Gunkel says, "Thanks for running the quarterly call in the format. Great questions and answer that help us understand how Teqnion works, unlike many calls with analysts just trying to guess the next quarter." That was not the question. We're also very happy about that, I think the analysts may be, they got bored because we never answer about next quarter.
No, we try to just improve, of course.
Yeah.
Mm.
Yeah.
David Henry says, "Can you talk about some recent potential acquisition targets you looked at but declined? What were the main reasons for passing on the deal?
Do you wanna answer it or?
Yeah, maybe I can start.
Yeah.
Of course, we won't point at any names, but we always have discussions with a lot of companies. Sometimes we get quite far in the discussions and even sign non-binding LOIs and go into the due diligence process, but not all of those actually fall out. As you know, the private smaller companies, there is very limited information about those companies. There. You can of course Google and try to find different angles, but it really comes down for us at least to talk with the people, and over some time, get to know them better.
Of course, when we look at some companies, when we look at the numbers and what, guessing a little bit what they are doing, we have a view, and maybe we get as far as signing the LOI, and we still have one view. One recent example was that, when we dug deeper into it, we felt that maybe the company wasn't as robust as we thought, and the financial numbers was maybe a tiny bit inflated, and that the internal administration was heavily reliant on one or two people that were of age as well. Of course, we can buy something like that, and we can help them do together, become better. It would be a lot of work, and we also never renegotiate our prices during the process.
If we knew what we knew by the mid of the due diligence process, maybe it should have been another price. We basically just said, "Thank you very much. Good luck.
Well, the last bit there, everything you said is of course important, but the last bit I think is something maybe you can understand a little bit more about how we work, because we know that we can take care of such a company and make it good. When we found it, we see the figures, we know what they do, we thought about how is this gonna be something that's needed in the future and so forth. We have done that brief process. We see when we start talking to the people and get to know them better, we realize that the workload for us will be too big at this stage in our position.
We'd rather look at something that is less work, more profit, less work, higher quality. For that, we're willing to pay a higher price. It's the same multiples, so this, we want the money back in the same amount of time. We can look at more expensive companies that tends to take less work from us.
Yeah.
That's how we look at higher quality subsidiaries, higher quality acquisitions, is maybe the same size of the company, the same earnings, the same type of cash flow, but everything is just working as clockwork in that company. We don't have to fix anything. We see that there's management in place that will be there for at least five years plus. They have everything, all the policies, all the everything that they need in place, and that is of course more worth to us. Yeah.
Yes. Matoš Batak from Twitter is wondering, "Is there a company you acquired that you see was a bad investment in hindsight?
Phew. I sigh because I'm very lucky in that way that I don't look so much, I don't get grumpy about things that has happened, at least not for a very long time. I think that's healthy in doing business for this long, long time. I mean, everything that is Teqnion today needed to happen to become to this place.
It's so easy to sit with all the results that happened in the past and say, "We shouldn't have done that," or, "We should have bought that instead." I mean, we did what we did, and for that, we learned what we learned, and today we are a much better company than we were five years ago, than we were 10 years ago, and than we were 15 years ago.
I think you should look upon it as did we take the best decision we could at that point of time with the knowledge we had then?
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
If the answer is no, then we have a problem.
Yeah.
If the answer is yes, then we did the best decision we could, and with the knowledge we possibly could have had at that time.
Yeah, definitely.
Uh...
Yeah.
I mean, it's so easy to look back when you know what happens. I mean.
Absolutely. I mean, everyone that is listening to this knows that rule number one for building a group like this is to buy high quality companies that needs very, very little work from the mother company. We of course, or you, Johan, was the only one out of us three that were here in the beginning, knew that as well. If you don't have enough cash, I mean, turnaround is what you get.
You get a lot of knowledge from doing turnaround, actually.
Yeah.
Maybe just, maybe we just said obvious things as we normally do. Another thing maybe just when I think about it is, it's easy to get carried away because we love this very much, doing this. It's a lot of feelings as well, and feelings, it's, you cannot control what you feel. You feel what you feel. You can, your intellect can of course override it most of the times, but sometimes you just fall in love with a particular company or a particular entrepreneur or whatever, and maybe you go too far into building a relationship with something that we normally shouldn't do, if you look at it from a more crunching number perspective and not mixing up feelings into it. That we always tend to be.
We have to look out for that so we don't let feelings take too much into considerations.
Yes. Brandon from Twitter is wondering, "Will Teqnion ever consider buying a publicly listed companies?
I'm just quiet.
Ever.
What do you think?
I mean, ever is a very long time.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah. I mean, and we always say never say never. I mean, we have, yeah, we are called a serial acquirer, which is, of course, a term that works out well. I mean, the foundation of what we do is hopefully good capital allocation. That is what we strive for. Currently doing what we do now, given the people that we are and what we have built up, works very well, and buying unlisted private companies of this size is probably the best allocation of capital that we can think of. I mean, if we see something, I mean, if, I don't know, if Microsoft would be 95% discount today... that seems like a bargain.
Couldn't we exchange this, Teqnion for SAS just the other day?
Yes. I think we still can.
Let's not do that.
No. We think very little about that because on a risk-adjusted basis, we think that, trying to find those cases is way too difficult compared to what we are doing currently.
I think we're kind of running out of time.
Yes.
Yeah, it's-
Can we squeeze in three quick questions?
Three fast ones.
The three last one.
Yes. This is difficult. What positive and negative surprises did you find about 2022?
Oh, well.
One sentence.
Oh, the war. The Russian aggression war towards Ukraine.
Yeah.
That was terrible.
Yeah.
It's still terrible.
Positive surprise. We found Carina.
Very positive surprise. That was a summer surprise. It was really good. Yeah. Very good.
Let's see. We have a question regarding, I wonder if you consider the business stable enough and predictable enough to, in the future, start buying the companies with cash only and start doing buybacks instead? Question from Jay through email.
I hope that we will be better at capital allocation than doing buybacks.
Mm.
I also, I let you answer it, I guess, because I think that we will find better capital allocation than doing buybacks. If not, we're not good at our jobs.
Yeah.
Yeah. Maybe also just to add, we get this question sometimes. We're listed on something called First North, Nasdaq here in Sweden, and on this list, buybacks are not allowed.
That's also.
Yeah.
That's also reason.
We won't do that, of course.
No, no. No, no.
Good. last question from Pengabonden, Twitter. are you still a solid buyer after last three months house of the stock?
That's a question for you.
I think it's for all of us.
Really?
Yeah.
I normally don't buy a lot of stock. I have said to one of the board members, Mikael Vaezi, if he wants to sell, I always buy his stock. That's a thing between him and me, no, I pass on that one.
I think the highest I've bought is at around SEK 180, as I publicly proclaimed many times and continue to do, is that I will regularly buy from my, for the salary that I get, no matter the price. I mean, don't look at me if you want to guess on next quarter. Maybe if I'm right, it can be good over decades.
We have five year increments in our financial targets.
Yes.
Yeah. That's the short term for us.
Exactly.
Mm.
Good. All questions.
Thank you so much for attending this live stream. Thank you so much, Kanalgratis, for having us. Really appreciate it. Hope to see you soon. I guess we will not have a Q&A, live, in the summer for Q2, so we will be back in Q3 with, hopefully something similar to this. In the meantime, have a good one. Hope to see you soon.