Welcome to the Teqnion 2023 Q4 Q&A. As you can see, we are not at our home office today or at our friend's studio that we have borrowed a couple of times. Due to some coincidence, we were able to complete and welcome a new company, Nubis Solutions, in the UK today, which you have hopefully seen in the press release earlier today. The company is spearheaded by Richard and Leighton here in Cambridge, and we are super excited. Due to logistical reasons, we are therefore streaming from our laptops and here in the Nubis's office, so please bear with us regarding the video and sound quality. As usual, we will alternate between the questions we have received in advance and the live ones, but before we start the actual Q&A, Johan, would you like to say a few words about the quarter?
Yeah, hello everyone. Nice to see you in this forum. We have had a quarter where we continue to struggle with the house building companies. Our coworkers are really fighting there, doing a lot of calculations on potential businesses, but no one on the customer side makes any decision to build anything in Sweden, so it's really rough times for those guys. We have seen some decline when it comes to order intake from bigger industrial companies. It's still good on good levels, but I see the tendency there. And then we have a few companies that continue to really feel the demand for whatever they are supplying. And as I mentioned in the report, it's particularly electrical, electromechanical components, and defense industry systems and components. And overall, we are slowing down a bit. We mentioned the organic growth is down 8% in the last quarter of 2023.
I think we're down approximately 1% over the year, organic sales. Yeah, the overall market is tough, but it feels great that we are a diversified group and that we have so many good coworkers out there just fighting, and I'm confident that we're going to push through this as well. Yeah, maybe that isn't sufficient for this. You've seen the report, and hopefully you get a lot of answers from that.
Great. So if you have any more questions that you want to answer, please write directly in the chat. This quarter, for very natural reasons, there have been two questions that have been a little bit more popular than the rest. One is about my personal shareholding, and the second one regarding our CFO transition and our plan forward there. But let's start with the first. Many people have asked, "Daniel, have you or why have you sold so many shares? And what's the background to that?" The background is basically that during the autumn, we've had discussions with the larger shareholders regarding a program that would basically tie me closer to Teqnion because I really see my future here and want to build this together with Johan and the rest of the team. Then, for different reasons, it took a little bit longer than we first had anticipated.
We also got into a blackout period, which meant that we couldn't do anything or release anything. The blackout period, of course, ended now when the quarter was released, the quarter report was released. I absolutely understand, and we understand that a lot of confusion has arisen due to that for ourselves. We don't feel that anything has changed. We understand all the questions that have arisen, and it's unfortunate that this blackout period added to this confusion. As you probably or maybe have seen, there was also a press release going out not many minutes ago where I basically tripled down and acquired 100,000 shares directly through Juon. Would you like to add something to that?
I don't know. I mean, we do this for the long run. I really enjoy doing this with Daniel. I strongly believe he enjoys doing it with me as well and the rest of the team. And we decided to do something like this around Christmas, and we did operations. We did a lot of other stuff, and we didn't finalize it. So yeah, we did it today.
Good. The second question regarding the CFO change, what has happened and what is our plan going forward there?
Yeah, unfortunately, Carina decided to leave us just before christmas. She still works with us until she leaves in a few weeks. She's a very good CFO. Unfortunately, she doesn't like working with us. What we've done to solve that situation for the future is that we have now employed two people that are going to start in April, the first one beginning of April and the second one late April. So we're going to have a really strong team going forward on the financial side. We have decided not to call anyone of them CFO. It tends to be followed by bad luck here, so we try to employ really good people that hopefully will grow into the group and become a sustainable part of the Teqnion family in the future.
Good. I hope that our answer gives everyone a little bit more understanding on where we are and what we want to do forward. With that behind us, we're jumping into the rest of the questions, which are more of the operational kind of.
Maybe, sorry, Daniel. I think I saw another question on email. I don't know if you received that, but if you put we have had, is it, five CFOs since we were listed in 2019, and that's a lot. I definitely admit that. Two of those persons or individuals are still within the headquarters. It's Maria that's been working with me since 2009 and Daniel, who's been working with us since the beginning of 2021. So I got a question via email regarding if we put those three CFOs that have left the company in the same room and they come up with one single reason that's made them leave, what would that reason be? And I can honestly say I don't know. At least in my reality, it's three different reasons, totally different reasons. And yeah, it is how it is.
Good. There's a follow-up question regarding my shareholding, which makes a lot of sense. I forgot to talk about that. So the question is, "Did you sell shares?" The answer is yes, I did. Why? The reason was that during the autumn, when we discussed how the potential tying me closer to Teqnion would look, we discussed different programs. And one of the ideas that we had was that there would be an option program from the larger shareholders directly to me, which would mean that there would be no dilution to the rest of the shareholders in any way or any cost related to that. Those options would, of course, be needed to be paid for. And because I felt that I wanted to double down, triple down on Teqnion, it made sense for me to use the same money to get that leverage.
Then the Blackout Period happened. From a communications perspective, far from ideal, but sometimes it works out like that, unfortunately. All right, shall we move on?
Yeah, please.
Good. We have a question from Pedro Leon from X. By your, I guess, recently disclosed portfolio, it seems like you might understand where the world is heading. No, I absolutely do not. It seems like many of our companies can benefit from the AI picks and shovels like Income, InJobs, Surge, Elron, maybe Lundahl. Or you see this as a megatrend, as an opportunity? You want to start?
No, I don't want to look into the future. Yeah, those companies that were listed in the question, no, I don't think they would. They benefit more from society. They're going more towards electricity, all of them. And it's more basic electricity and those things in society and facilities. The only thing that if we're going to squeeze in the AI somewhere, it's maybe in this company where we're sitting now in Nubis, where they do enclosures of server racks to make sure that the environment for the servers is good and that you use as little as possible when it comes to cooling the servers down. This is what Nubis supports and designs themselves. So maybe if you want to look for that megatrend somewhere, it might be here, but that's not why we're looking into this company.
I think that is only one driver for this company going forward.
Yeah, we try to find companies that we believe act in a niche and have a product that we feel that will be relevant over the long, long time. We are, of course, human, but we try to not be swayed by what is the hottest topic in the financial times for the day or for the quarter. Yeah. We have another question from Nick Copper from X. So when you acquire companies, do you in any way help them restructure the debt? I believe Teqnion as a whole has a better credit rating in any bank's eyes than an average small company.
Yeah, I think I hope we have. Normally, we don't acquire any companies with debt. So if they need money, we support them with that and with our financial structure.
Yes. What we do with all of the companies that come into our group is that because I think every single one of them, I can say that without lying, don't think that it's super fun to have all the relationship with the banks. It's a thing that just needs to work. And as you say, we do have a better possibility of having good prices and other terms with the banks. So the companies that come into our group get consolidated into our group banking solution. Moving on, we have D. Markoulis from X. Why was the 2021, 20%+ return on equity target over the business cycle removed? Can Teqnion sustain an ROE that meets the previous target over the next decade in its current size?
Yeah, I think we discussed this before briefly or many times maybe. We decided on new financial targets maybe three years ago, somewhere around there, to make them facilitate more how we think and what we aim for. And the three-level targets that we have today, the stability target, the earnings target, and the margin target, and the earnings per share target is how we think and what we are chasing. And I hope over time that it will be equivalent to the old target if you want to look at that. But this is more how we think and how we structure ourselves.
Yes. We have a question here from Teams regarding Nubis. Peter Snowdon is wondering, "Why do you say Nubis is not expected to have any significant effect on Teqnion's 2024 fiscal year financials, but also that they have robust margins?
Yeah, good question. I think that in the total, it's hopefully going to affect it, but it's a small part of the entire group. And hopefully, at the end of the year, it will be an even smaller part because we have made hopefully a few more acquisitions. So it's more that this is our normal way of operating. Our business model is to acquire smaller technology-driven companies. And over time, it will accumulate to something big. But one individual is not important for us when it comes to these types of businesses.
Good. Further on from D. Markoulis from X, "When Teqnion does the valuation to acquire a business with the target of five years payback, is that on free cash flow terms?
We want it to be. It's hard to tell. It differs a little bit what type of business they run and how much they need to reinvest in a specific series of time. If they are growing fast, we maybe can't foresee if they need to employ more people or if they need to buy some more equipment or whatever. But of course, we're trying to find and acquire companies that generate a lot of cash flow. And yeah, I don't even know if I answered the question, but in a perfect ideal world, we're hoping that we will get paid back in Free Cash Flow.
Yeah, actual money. So when we look at it, we try to look at companies where the profit net of tax more or less is very close to free cash flow over time. On a quarterly basis or on a yearly basis, it can, of course, differ a lot depending on receivables, inventory buildup, or release, etc. But over the five-year period, that is what we're aiming for. Minki on Teams says, "One, quarterly results can fluctuate, and I'm glad the block deal went well." Me too. "Looking forward to a long life together. Keep up the good work. Thank you." Two, are receivable impairment and counterparty bankruptcies unique to homebuilders, and if not, do they occur in other industries besides homebuilders?
Oh, this is not fun to talk about, but it's a reality, unfortunately. We have had a really surprising bankruptcy in a big industrial customer based in Europe this fall. It was really hard for us to foresee, and that cost us nearly SEK 1 million. We have had two big house-building companies that were customers of ours that also went bankrupt during the fall. There's a lot of housing or construction companies struggling in Sweden at the moment. So you definitely need to look out there in that type of industry. But overall, it's a special time. A lot of companies struggle with cash flow in many different industries. So we try to be really alert and really focus on not having more of these troubles going forward.
Yeah. To be very concrete, without mentioning any customer names, the majority comes from the two, as you have mentioned, on the homebuilding side. Then we have one industrial customer as well that actually has a good operational business but was unfortunately overlevered. From the same person, outside of homebuilders, are there any similar cyclical holdings?
Not that, not that very cyclical. I mean, we have a couple of contract manufacturing factories, and they are a bit cyclical, of course, but still, they are performing remarkably well. No, I mean, construction industry is very special. Yeah. Do you have?
I'm trying to think. I mean, all of our companies are cyclical in one way or another. And I think it's difficult to say a number because it's really difficult to know. But a lot of our companies, if the economy as a whole, which is going downward, which has in Sweden and in Europe and all over the world basically for a while, that will in one way or another impact our companies, which we have been writing about in our quarterly reports for a while. And that is, of course, also the reason for the decline in organic. It's not an organic growth. We had an organic decline now. So yes, there are others, but the construction companies or the homebuilders are the ones that are.
Standing out there, yeah.
Exactly. Exactly. You can also see on the page that we made on the whiteboard where we look at the different companies. I mean, what really brought down both organic income and profit is the homebuilders. We also have one company that we acquired roughly, I don't know, seven years ago that had a very, very good year last year. So organic growth, of course, becomes negative in comparison to that. Maybe just to put a few more words to explain our profit, we also had a couple of companies that are relocating at the moment, which means double cost, much lower productivity. Yeah, it kills margins, but we believe it's the right thing to do for the long term.
Yeah, it's good business decisions, but you're going to show, hopefully, you're going to see the effect in the future because we relocated to better facilities, which is more specialized for those types of businesses.
Yeah. Which is the percentage that Teqnion meets, exceeds, and fails on its target, judging from all its subsidiaries? Eloflex was an example of paying too much when viewed from a short time frame. Financial made point to acquisitions exceeding the target in general. My hypothesis?
We can talk two days about this. But yeah, we have some companies that pays us back really fast and some others that take a longer period of time, of course. And we talked a little bit today about Narva Skandinavien that maybe we had a couple of good years after we acquired it, and then we made a strategic error and targeted the wrong type of customers with the wrong type of products for a while. And more or less, they didn't earn so much money from it, maybe a little bit, but not much. And now, slowly, slowly, we have turned it around, and now we maybe get the money back in one and a half years, every year.
So if you know how to run companies and over time make them sustainable and strong, yeah, I think for me, at least, this business model works in that way that we don't just acquire something and put it into the group and forget about it. We always look after it and try to make it better all the time. So we always get a second and a third and a fourth chance of everything.
Yeah. I think it's also interesting in the sense that because we acquire businesses that we run in the group compared to acquiring a listed equity. I mean, for a listed equity, you would be either right or wrong when it comes to the payback. In our case, we actually try to support the companies. And if we do something wrong, we can try to fix them, which makes a difference. And as you say, I mean, looking at our ROIC for the group as a whole, we exceed the target of getting the payback within five years. And part of that is, of course, that we're acquiring good companies. But the most important part when it comes to that is that we keep the companies healthy so that they deliver year after year and hopefully grow, which as a group, we did not this quarter.
This year, actually.
Another aspect to that is that over the very short time horizon, looking at five years, my guess would be that maybe four out of five are on target of getting the money back within five years, and one out of five is not. Unfortunately, that one out of five usually pulls down the rest. As you once said, it changes over time. We have Narva Skandinavien , which is one of our smallest companies, but where we get basically the acquisition price every year or every 18 months, roughly speaking. But unfortunately, we also have the homebuilders, which we paid good money for and are at the moment bleeding. Hopefully, when the cycle trends upwards, those companies are going to make this money back and much more. We have a question that is related to the homebuilders.
Håkan says, "Given the tough nature of the construction industry, why include it in the realm of companies to consider acquiring?
That's my fault. I think we touched this topic at least once before. But I love wooden houses, and I really became friends with one of the entrepreneurs. And one of them is actually working with us in Teqnion now. And fantastic people, fantastic entrepreneurs doing everything right, but they are locked up in a very cyclical business. We're not looking there anymore. Don't be scared about that. We know that we know what we're doing regarding those two companies. And in the future, we're going to try to make them more robust, even though we always have to suffer in the cyclical world of construction companies or house-building companies.
We learn things all the time. We try really hard to learn from others' mistakes, but unfortunately, we need sometimes to make our own mistakes.
Don't blame Daniel for the construction companies.
I learned from others' mistakes there. Jokes aside, they are not part of the realm. I mean, when we look at companies to acquire, we need to have good people, but we also want to acquire sound businesses in niches with trends where there is wind blowing from the right direction over a long, long term. That is what we're looking for. We try to fish where the fish are, as late Charlie Munger would say. All right. Sorry, I'm going to screw up this name.
I need to say this. Our coworkers at our two housing companies, they are fantastic people. They are so good at what they're doing. So I said it. I said it.
Good. We have a question here from Per Granat saying, "It's been six months and you took in new capital, and you have not done any major acquisitions." Any comment on that?
Yeah, we can comment on that. We felt that we work better than when we know that when we feel more confident and that we know that we have the financial strength to do an acquisition when it appears and when the seller is ready to sell and doesn't have to wait for us to make sure that we have the finances for it. So we didn't raise the money because we had something lined up for it. It's just that we're pretty confident that we are targeting better and better companies to acquire, and we wanted to have the power to make those acquisitions when the seller is already. And we will not force ourselves to buy something that we really don't like, learning from previous mistakes. We target different types of companies than we did five years ago and 10 years ago, of course.
Hopefully, constantly, we will become a little bit better in picking these companies with high quality. Yeah.
Yeah. And I think that we try to be stringent in the way that we communicate. We try to learn from our mistakes there as well. One thing that we keep is that for all the acquisitions that we do, we give you the numbers for the average of the last three years, which sums up to whatever number it is. That doesn't always mean that it's the run rate number. And I'll leave it maybe at that. We have a question regarding if you want to support Teqnion, buy a house from Näppähuus. We have a question regarding operating margin and price paid for Nubis. We do not disclose those numbers for a variety of reasons.
One reason is that for the entrepreneurs, it's not always very nice for these people that live in different places, sometimes quite small places, for all the neighbors to know how much money they have received. That's part of the reason. And the second reason is, of course, that we feel that there is some competitive advantage in that we keep the pricing structure and the prices paid. But what we always aim to do is that we try to get our money back within five years. And historically, it has worked out. So I think that you will have to either trust us on that or not. And it's similar regarding margins. For U.K. companies and Swedish companies, it's quite easy to find the disclosures by doing some digging in the public files.
We like to acquire companies that have high margins and that the margins are higher than the group average. But we don't really want to flaunt with those because, of course, all of our companies have customers. They have stakeholders. They have suppliers, etc., that might not like that some companies make a lot of money. Yes. It seems like we have a couple more questions regarding the shareholdings, so maybe we'll take that. As head of M&A or CXO, how come that you don't disclose your transactions?
Maybe I should answer. I mean, the regulation says that you have the CEO and the CFO there. I believe that we should change that and maybe put the entire Teqnion office in that group so you, in the future, will know exactly what we do with our shares. That might be something that we change very, very soon, maybe in days, so we don't have this situation again.
We got a question from Adam Smith from X. This is in Swedish, so I'll try to translate it. How do you think about going up a little bit in size and quality regarding your acquisitions? Yeah, that's the question.
Yeah, I think size-wise, yeah, we pay more and more because we buy more and more quality, and that's what we are targeting as well. We're looking for more profitable companies today than we did yesterday. For us, it's a natural way to go and constantly look for more and more niche companies with their own products, with their own brand names, making more money than the previous companies. When it comes to headcount or actual sales figures, maybe we don't need to go up that much. Naturally, the average of what we acquire now is bigger companies than it used to be.
Yes. Oskar from Teams is wondering, "Do you see a possibility that organic revenue decline leads to margin decline?
Depends on how long you look and how long you draw the line, of course. I mean, sometimes it's the right thing to do to decrease the sales in order to get your hand on the really profitable business and build on that from there. So it depends on where you look and what period you look at. Of course, we want companies or subsidiaries that grow their sales with sustainable margins or higher margins over time. But if you're in the wrong position with the product, maybe the right thing to do is to let that product go or that business go in order for something that's more profitable to flourish. So we constantly look at these things, and we target the high-margin businesses that generate a lot of cash flow because with that cash flow, we want to buy more companies like that.
So yeah, you can complicate the question a lot, or you can make it easy. We love selling things, but we need to sell things with high margins and good cash flow.
Yes. We focus on increasing cash flow and increasing profit, and we try to see revenue as a residual or a means to achieve that. Then, of course, having organic negative growth over time is not what we're looking for. OMX3000 is wondering, "Would you give some color on outlook for 2024? Are the subsidiaries seeing possibilities for growth?
I must disappoint you maybe, but no, we don't give any forecasts.
Yeah. We always try to grow. We always try to increase our cash flows and profit, as I said. But we are in an economic reality which is going in a direction that we don't know. But we always try to be better, and the results will tell. Good. Jumping back from the pre-sending questions, Himanshu from Exemplar Partners is wondering, "How do you think about free cash flow, i.e., free cash flow available to shareholders to pay out in dividend or make acquisitions with?
Yeah, what do you think about dividends, Daniel?
I don't really think it's good that dividends when we have a ROIC north of 20%.
No, we're trying to earn as much free cash flow as possible. With that, we try to find the best acquisition we can do with that cash flow in order to grow the group. That's our target. That's a long-term goal, and that's what we love to do.
We always try to be smart and roughly right when it comes to capital allocation. I mean, at every single point of time, of course, we don't think about this every single day. But we want the money to go where it makes the highest yield, which means that we think about how much we should reinvest in our current businesses. We think about how much we should use to acquire companies in order to get to higher ROICs. We think about how much we should pay back our debt, how much we should have in case of emergency. And I would love to think about share buyback, but we are not allowed to do that because we're not on the main exchange. And I mean, dividend would be the last tool in that toolbox.
But in our mind, it's very easy to see that dividend would probably be also the least effective use of cash.
Why are you so far out there? Can you come into the picture? Yeah. We need someone sitting across from us, just whipping us when we talk too much so we can get to the next question.
Good. Thank you. Himanshu is also wondering, "How are you thinking about earnings multiples you pay for acquisition?" Go ahead.
We tried once again. We try to get our money back in five years. Normally, if the company has a solid history, normally that will be 5x earnings is what we pay. And if it's a growing company, it becomes a little bit more complex. But still, that's the basis of everything that we do.
Yes. Got a really good question here from Carl-Henrik Söderberg, who says, "Great job, guys, as always. Thank you. Makes us happy." "Have you thought about or discussed to educate subsidiaries in a more structured long-term way in your and Daniel Zhang's process for new acquisitions, that is, money back in five years? My point here, doing this over the long term might raise the odds of you guys finding more companies to acquire as well as slowly manage the fact that one day you two might not be able to do the job by yourself when Teqnion is a lot bigger. Look at, for example, how Constellation Software does it. Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Very good ideas and thoughts. We gather all the subsidiary CEOs a couple of times every year and talk about these things and others. We love being a big family because we can always learn from each other and gain experience from each other. That's an organic thing that constantly grows in a good way. We become more and more friends, and we learn from each other. This is absolutely something that I will hope we can see in the future.
Yeah. We try to involve, and we ask the CEOs that we feel are skilled and willing to talk about acquisitions and have the energy directed a little bit in that direction and try to ask them for ideas. Sometimes we'll get introduced to suppliers or maybe customers as well. But overall, the CEOs that we have really love to run their own businesses. And few are actually as energetic when it comes to acquisitions as I am, which I feel is strange because I feel that's the most fun thing in the world. But yes, over time, it's good if we have more people, more eyes, more brains thinking about these things as long as it doesn't take their focus away from running their own company.
We have Keep on the email asking, "Looking at the allocation of purchase price for acquisitions, Teqnion allocates a lot more to goodwill than to intangible assets, both on an absolute basis and relative to many other Swedish acquirers. Why? Is all or any of the goodwill tax deductible?
No, goodwill is an IFRS.
IFRS.
Something. Yeah, I don't really know what to say about that. Goodwill, of course, arises when we pay more than the tangible assets. It tends to happen every time, of course, since we buy really good companies. What we do is that we every year look at the goodwill, and we see, "Can we defend this goodwill?" Yeah, we can. Then we just leave it there. I don't really know what to say about that.
Yeah. I mean, we talk about this not a lot because it's quite boring. We have a process of doing it, which is accepted by the different laws and standards. It's a relatively simple way, which we feel gives a pretty good view of our business. To be honest, we don't really know how the other CEO acquirers do it and why they do it in their way on the accounting side of things. Another question from Keep, "Bad debt was SEK 3.8 million impact in the quarter. What steps, if any, are being done to better protect against similar things in the future?
Yeah, good. You must hate when that happens, especially since we talk about it every now and then. We have routines out. I know that all our coworkers always look into those risks. But the economy at the moment is more risky than normal. We need to pay closer attention to everything that seems to be abnormal or scary and give that extra phone call and check one extra time and yeah, just be more on our toes when it comes to following our own procedures.
We try to educate everyone that the best protection for bad things happening is to have high margins and a good cash flow, especially upfront cash flow. So that more and more CEOs are trying to get more of the money upfront. And of course, by having those high margins, which we hope will be higher over time, it creates some kind of cushion or insurance if things go bad.
I become depressed thinking about this. Bad, sad, bad.
Joel Forbes on Teams is wondering, "Is any of the cash from the last capital raise being used for non-investing/operational purposes?" It's a little bit difficult to answer. I mean, our companies are, as a group, self-sufficient, and they spit out capital, cash flow to the major company so that we can acquire companies with it. Then, of course, the money that we raised is not put into a separate account. It goes into the pool of cash with all the other cash that we have, which is used for both general purposes. But as I said, because our companies are self-sufficient, I guess the answer would be that that goes towards acquisitions.
Absolutely.
Keep has another very interesting question. "If price expectations for the acquisitions in Sweden stay high for a long time, what do you do?
What do we do? We do everything we can to find companies that fit our way of thinking. And right now, we look into the U.K. market, and we're starting to get a lot of friends here. And it seems like there's plenty to do and plenty to find. And we are in it for the long run. So we are pretty certain that we're going to start finding really good companies in Sweden again. And maybe when we feel that we have enough footprint in the U.K., maybe we dare to find another geography to start to engage in. So we have the world, finally. But we take it one step at a time to learn and don't force ourselves to make too many mistakes, too big mistakes. So I think that we will continue finding really good acquisitions in Sweden and maybe in the close time as well.
But right now, we have plenty to do here, so.
Yeah. We have a question from Paul regarding the company we acquired today, Nubis Solutions. "It seems that it's a service company and not a product company, correct?" The way we see it and the way they actually charge and create value is not on the service side of things. So what this company do is that they design and let other people manufacture data center containment systems. So it's basically sheet metals that are bent in a shape that makes airflow much more efficient so that the graphic cards mostly, but also CPU use, work efficiently at the temperature that they should be working at. And it becomes more energy efficient and leaves less carbon footprint as well. So this design, which is under their own brand, is where the value is being created. But they also do the installation of these.
Of their own products.
Of their own products so that the service side of things. But that's more of an add-on service than anything else. Then we have a question from Galatian Investor on X, "Do you think that some of the businesses are not as resilient or maybe more cyclical than you thought? What percentage of the total are cyclical?
Tough. Can't tell. I think we touched the topic before. Everything, if you look into it, you can see this.
Cyclicality.
Cyclicality, difficult word in everything. But from my viewpoint anyway, most of it is not very cyclical. Yeah.
Further on, Galatian is wondering, "Do you have any deals in the near future month?" Can't say. We had one today. So I guess that was yes because this question came yesterday, I think.
I would say we have a normal inflow of leads, and it feels good.
Yeah. Yeah. We had that question later on regarding pacing of acquisitions. I mean, we acquire companies in the pace that we feel comfortable. But also, it's very stochastic, right? So we talk with people, entrepreneurs all the time. We try to find the right companies, the right people at the right price. Timing is something that we can, of course, help to push and pull. But it has to feel right for the entrepreneur. As Johan touched upon in the CEO words, comments, price expectations for companies in Sweden, we felt that they have been higher. I mean, we don't want to do bad deals. So we rather walk away or just wait compared to keeping a higher pace for the sake of that. One more question from Galatian Investor, "Are you finding good companies but maybe waiting for better prices? If Mr.
Market turns crazy and price is attractive, are repurchases in your mind?" We cannot do repurchases, unfortunately, because we're listed on the First North in Sweden, which is not a regulated market, which is needed for doing repurchases. Regarding the other question, waiting for attractive prices, I think this is an interesting distinction. Sorry, this is going to take 35 seconds. Between unlisted and listed companies, is that I think listed companies' share prices can swing a lot between high and very low. When it comes to really nice, high-quality private companies, they seldom become cheap or extremely cheap because the alternative that the entrepreneur has is always to just continue for a few more years and get the cash flow of EUR 1 million-EUR 3 million every year. There's no reason to sell that company at P2, P3.
So there's more of a bottom to what kind of prices there are. And at the same time, when they receive maybe letters or phone calls from other people that were willing to pay 10x earnings, it's going to take a long time before they forget about that and move on. Shall we take one more question? Short question. Where are we? We're here. Okay. "To what extent are you willing to fund expansion plans of our portfolio companies? How do you decide between acquisition and CapEx spending?" We talked a little bit about sorry. We talked a little bit about capital allocation before. So I mean, we always want to allocate capital where it makes the highest yield. I mean, that's rule number one, two, and three. At the same time, maybe at priority four, but still important.
So, companies that we have acquired that need CapEx to survive, I mean, that's companies that we would today maybe not acquire. We don't like companies that have a lot of CapEx. And if you look at what we have acquired for the last few years, they have all had very light balance sheets. But we also have made commitments to make the companies survive. That's also one of the reasons why we are able to buy the companies cheaper than our competitors. So if they need CapEx to survive, maintenance CapEx, we let them have that. But if they need more.
After that, we challenge them.
Yes. Yes. Yes. Because everyone thinks everything is maintenance CapEx. So true maintenance CapEx, we let that continue. And over time, there's going to be a smaller and smaller part of our free cash flow. But we are very, very, very careful when it comes to people, companies that want to invest in CapEx because they want to grow the business. And we say that is fine. But we get our money back within five years. So show us.
That you beat that.
You get all the money.
Yeah. You take our share.
Yes. I see that the time is 4:02 P.M., at least here in Cambridge. We still have many questions left. But unfortunately, we try to do this as efficiently as possible within this one hour. Do you have any concluding remarks, my friend?
Can we try to just do five quick questions? Do you think we have that in us, or is it always?
Maybe not me. I cannot talk that.
No, no. We are the same there. We should have someone here just with us.
Okay. There's no one here. Everyone is going home.
Yeah.
Arjun on mail, "If you look back at each of your acquisitions, what proportion of them delivered the 20% expected returns?
I think you answered all of them, right?
Yeah. I think so. Doug, Samaritan Capital, "You raised equity capital to consummate acquisitions, but not much was done. What prevented you from acquiring the businesses you likely had your sights on?
That's, we also covered already in this session. It's quick.
Moritz on mail, "I understand organic growth is around zero due to weak housing market. What is your goal? What do you think about the long-term rate of organic growth under normal market conditions?
I hope that there is such a thing as a normal market condition. I think we should look at single-digit % growth in such conditions. I only have that figure from when I looked at Indutrade and Addtech. Back in the days, it seems to be what they were doing back then.
Yeah. I like this question from Xavier Gonzalez on X, "What EBITA margin are you aiming for organically? For comparison, Lifco were at 10% in 2006 and have improved year by year and are currently at 23%, which is amazing. I agree." Do you see a similar path for Teqnion?
In 2006, we had 0% EBITDA. Now we have a little bit more. I think that if you just keep doing this and trying to be better all the time, I wouldn't see that the margins would keep increasing. That's at least what we're aiming for. Both when it comes to the subsidiaries that we own today and the ones that we acquire in the future will always be a little bit better than the average that we have. So hopefully, yes. Just need time.
Mond at X is saying and asking, "As a shareholder, I'm particularly interested in exploring the possibility of implementing a bonus structure similar to Constellation Software, where 70% of the bonuses are used to purchase company stock with a four-year lock-in period. I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this proposal and whether you see it's feasible for our company.
I would love to find something like that for Teqnion. I would definitely, if I had control over all the votes, I would make sure that we have something in that direction.
David Barbato, "If you were only able to look at one KPI to assess Teqnion's results for the next 20 years, what would it be?" Tricky question to do quick, but maybe FCF, free cash flow, less acquisitions per share over the long term. One more.
One more, please.
Hi guys. How does 2024 look like in terms of acquisitions compared to 2023 and previous years? Maybe new industries insights? Thanks.
We will see. We hope that we will find better and better companies. I hope that we will continue doing what we're doing. It feels good. I think that we have, as always, a lot of meetings with fantastic entrepreneurs. It gives us energy to just continue searching. Every now and then, we find a perfect match, and then we continue building the relationship with those entrepreneurs and potential future sellers. Yeah. You never know because we don't know when these acquisitions are going to happen or if they're going to happen. We believe that we are in a pace and in a mode that will make us find better and better companies and hopefully more and more often.
Yeah. I think the acquisition cycle and the process is overall very long. Sometimes we're lucky and we find the right people at the right place at the right time. Maybe that takes only 6 months or so. But a lot of the relationships we've had for a long time, and we bought a company that took 9 years. So it's a very boring answer, but we don't really think about the pace per year. We work as efficiently as we can, and then they happen when they happen. Hopefully, it's going to be good. Great. Now, concluding remarks, if any.
Thank you so much for listening in. We hope that you got some answers from us, even though that maybe we need a coach sitting opposite us and tell us when to move on in the future. We'll see about that. We continue doing what we love, and we're going to do it for a long time. Thank you so much.
Thank you. Have a good day.