Hello, and good morning, and welcome to today's webcast presentation with Volati. With us presenting today, we have the CEO, Andreas Stenbäck, and CFO, Martin Aronsson. We'll do a Q&A after the presentation, and you can either type in your question using the form that is located to the right. If you're calling in and would like to ask a question, please press star nine to raise your hand. With that said, I'll give the floor to you guys. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Glad to have you all listening in. Let's dig into today's presentation. Volati, we're growing an acquisitive group of six well-managed platforms with strong growth, earnings, and cash flows. We're now showing net sales grow over SEK 8 billion, close to 10% EBITDA margin. As said, we have six platforms. Two of those platforms are our national business areas, Salix Group and Ettiketto Group. Four of the platforms are within the business area Industry. Before digging into our most recent quarter, I would like to take a step back and look at the longer trend. On this slide, you can see our 10-year development. As our overriding goal, Volati's overriding goal is to generate long-term value growth.
I think we are best evaluated on a long-term perspective. Looking at the last 10 years, we have shown an average EBITDA growth, a CAGR of 23%, and that's our reported numbers. If we look at our continued operations, meaning the operations of the businesses that we consist of today, the average growth the last five years are 39% in EBITDA. Roughly half of that growth has been achieved organically, and the other half is through add-on acquisition or acquisitions. I think it's important to point out that this growth has been funded with our own cash flow. Now I will give you a sneak peek into our most recent quarterly re-result. We are very proud of the EBITDA growth of 55%.
We managed to achieve an organic net sales growth, and an even more impressive than organic EBITDA growth of 12%. Again, we are best evaluated on a long-term perspective, so we are even more proud of the staples to the right on these slides. Meaning that we've had an average EBITDA growth again of 39% the last five years. We had an average organic net sales growth of 5% the last five years, and an average organic EBITDA growth of 19% the last five years. Even though we're not maybe best evaluated based on just a quarter, but we're, I still want to dig into this last quarter, which we're then of course, very proud of.
Already mentioned that we've had a strong growth, basically in all aspects, particularly proud of the EBITDA growth of 55% compared to the first quarter last year. Our earnings per ordinary share grew with 63%, also very strong. Basically we are developing well, I would say, across all our platforms and business area. Industry delivers a strong first quarter and we see a growth in all our platforms, both in terms of top line and EBITDA. Ettiketto Group, we haven't had done any acquisitions within the last 12 months in Ettiketto Group. The figures that you see in Ettiketto Group, those are in organic. We're growing organically. We also see that the strategy of realizing synergies from acquisitions are successful.
We're increasing the EBITDA margin in the quarter quite significantly with 2 percentage points. It's also a solid quarter for Salix Group. Salix Group are operating in challenging markets right now. We've had a sales decline of 3%. If you look at that on a 12-month basis, we're still growing also on top line. We have also slightly lower margins in this quarter compared to the year before, but we have actions in place, and we expect to see those showing effect during the course of this year. The cash flow is developing very strong. We actually had a SEK 275 million Swedish crowns of higher cash flow in this quarter compared to last year.
That shows that, and we've told you this previously, that the efforts that we're putting into lowering our working capital is showing effect. Also, we've done one acquisition. I will get into that a bit later. I done an add-on acquisition in the U.K. In early April, we signed a new banking agreement inviting SEB along our long-term partner, Nordea. We now have two banks, and a new agreement in place with both of them. On this slide, basically, I've already gone through those numbers. What I would like to point out, though, is the net debt to adjusted EBITDA.
The strong cash flow that we've had in Q1 also leaves us with a net debt to adjusted EBITDA, leaving a lot of room for acquisition. Looking at the rolling 12 months figures, we're now at 15% EBITDA growth per common share. That's our financial goal with which Martin will get into later on. We're also showing improved margin in the first quarter compared to last year, so we're now close to 10% EBITDA margin. The operating cash flow, which can be seen on this slide. You can see it's significantly better than the same period last year. With that, I leave the word to Martin.
Thank you, Andreas. Let's look into our three financial targets. We'll start with the first financial target of our EBITDA growth per ordinary common share, which is evaluated on a last 12 months basis. This quarter, we're back on track with a growth of 15% after a strong quarter. We're now in line with our financial target of 15%. The second financial target is our return on adjusted equity, which continues at high levels of 32%, which is then significantly exceeding the financial target of 20% that we have. To us, this is proving our ability to create a long-term shareholder value.
Lastly, our last financial target is the target on our capital structure, where the target is to have a net debt to adjusted EBITDA ratio of 2-3 times and never exceeding 3.5 times. In this quarter, we are ending this ratio of 2.0 times, which is in the lower range of the target interval. That means also that we have a substantial capacity for acquisitions going forward. Let's look at how our three business areas are performing, and we can start with Salix Group. Salix Group had a sales decline of 3% in the quarter.
Looking at a little bit of longer term, they have shown a sales growth of 5% over the last 12 months. Zooming out even further, we have 16% growth on average per annum over the last 5 years. In the quarter, we decreased the margins compared to last year, partly due to tough comparables, but also due to difficult market. However, when you look at the decline, the decline in the quarter was lower compared to Q3 and Q4, so we're on a better trajectory now. Regarding the demand, we have a relatively good demand in the industrial and professional segments, but we continue to see a weaker demand in the consumer segment.
Also since the beginning of the year, we have Salix Group has seen a weakening market in Norway. Overall, the market situation is quite challenging for Salix Group with high inflation and unfavorable currency. We do have some positives with, for example, the freight costs are declining and also some costs of some raw materials that Salix Group are purchasing. As Andreas mentioned, we have Salix Group has taken substantial efforts to take costs out of the organization, which is increasingly positively affecting the results, and we expect this to continue to do so over the year. Going forward, we see good opportunities for further acquisition driven growth in Salix Group.
Let's then look at Ettiketto Group, which is starting the year with a very good quarter. We have a growth of 2% in the quarter, really showing the ability to grow organically, even in the current macroeconomic environment we see right now. Longer term, Ettiketto Group is a rapidly growing business area with 23% of sales growth in the last 12 months and 29% in the last five years. We see a good demand in the business area for the products, and as we said in previous discussions, the demand is not very sensitive to the general economy. We're also happy with the EBITDA margin trajectory, and the EBITDA margin increased with 2 percentage units in the quarter.
To us, this really proves that the strategy of acquiring companies with a lower margin and then extracting synergies and working with operational improvements is really paying off. The last 12 months margins are now up with +0.6 percentage points. Ettiketto Group is working its way towards historical margins of 20%. Ettiketto Group is looking for further acquisitions, both in the Nordics and in the rest of Europe, and we see a significant potential for further acquired growth in Ettiketto Group. Let's look at our last business area Industry, which is a diversified business area with four platforms that are less affected by the general economy in general.
They met a good demand in the quarter in general. However, the platform, S:t Eriks, is experiencing some cautiousness in the retail and construction segments. Overall, they're performing very well in the quarter with a 43% sales growth and also 36% last 12-month growth and 44% in the past five years. The quarterly growth of 43% is not the one-off. It's a consistent growth. EBITDA increased by a staggering 350% in the quarter with significant margin increase, which means that the last 12 months margins now are at 11.9%, which is up one percentage point in only one quarter.
What is very encouraging for us to see is that all four platforms in the business areas showing growth in sales, but also at the same time improving EBITDA margins. It's probably worth especially mentioning communications, which continues to see a very good demand for more of these products in the platform. I also want to mention Tornum Group, which had a difficult Q1 last year, and lost a lot of volumes due to Russia's invasion war, the war in Ukraine. They have successfully replaced those volumes over the year. During the quarter, we have made one acquisition in Tornum Group through JWI. Andreas will talk a little bit more about that later.
The Industry is also very well positioned to grow further through acquisitions going forward. With that, I leave the word to you, Andreas, again.
Thank you. Now we're gonna talk about acquisitions, something that I love. We've done 19 acquisitions since 2020. 17 of these has been value-adding add-on acquisitions. That's a important part of our acquisitions strategy. We also added a new platform through the acquisitions of Scanmast and MAFI, and they now constitute the platform Communication. The last 12 months, we've done 5 acquisitions, adding SEK 750 million of annual turnover. If we look at that, those numbers indicates a slightly slower acquisition pace, compared to what we've had the last two years or so. We have discussed that on previous quarterly calls that we saw a slower second half of last year. That's part of the reason.
Another reason is that we have a natural fluctuation to our acquisition work. I would say a third important point is that we need to remain disciplined. We've had some cases during the second half of last year in particular, where we had problems meeting the sellers in terms of valuation. Now, I would say that we see the M&A market pleasing up. We see sales expectations coming down, and we see more activity. We can see that through the M&A pipeline that we have in our platform, and that is bigger now compared to what we see in the last couple of quarters. That's a good sign for us going forward.
As said, we did one acquisition in Q1, a very nice one. It's an add-on acquisition to our platform, Tornum. Tornum makes grain handling equipment. They are a big provider on the European market. They have worked with JW Installations, or JVI, as we call them, as a partner for many years. Now, we have acquired that company, meaning that we have our own staff on the ground on one of the largest grain handling equipment markets in Europe, namely U.K. It's good for us to have our own people on the ground.
We can also bring or add value to JWI by basically providing them with Tornum's broader product portfolio compared to what they have been able to provide before. Also, I think this is a good example of a platform where we see potential for acquisitive growth also outside our home markets. We consider Sweden, Norway, and Finland our home markets, but as you have seen, we have started to make acquisitions also outside of these markets. This is a very good example of that. We also have a number of other platforms looking into the same type of international growth. In order to make acquisitions, you need to have the financial capacity to do so. Both Martin and I have already mentioned operating cash flow.
We're very happy with how we see the trend in that, and in particular, the development in Q1. Despite the good operating cash flow, we actually increased the net debt slightly. Typically, we increase net debt more during Q1 than we've done this year. It increased slightly. One of the reason is the M&A-related cash outflow. That relates to actually two acquisitions, [Ambu] that we did end of last year. We had that payment during the beginning of this year. It's not very typical for us to have an earn-out, we have actually had one earn-out payment during this Q1 as well. Two acquisitions and plus an earn-out affects the M&A-related cash outflow.
Already mentioned the new credit agreement with Nordea and SEB. We now have a greater capacity than we had before, we basically have SEK 1.2 billion of liquidity. As already told you, the net debt to EBITDA levels are at the levels where we see that we have significant room for acquisitions. To summarize, very good start of the year, growth in many aspects, and we see the cash flow coming through, so very happy with that. Again, don't forget to evaluate us on a longer term. Looking at the last five years, we've grown almost 40% in EBITDA, on half of that organic and half through acquisitions.
We have a very strong position to actually continue on this growth as we have the six platforms in place. We have the financial capacity and the processes and structures in place to support them, not only in their organic growth, but also in their M&A driven growth. That was what we had planned to say for today. We open up for questions.
Thank you very much for that presentation. Now we'll jump into the Q&A section. If you have a question for Andreas and Martin, you can either use the form that is located to the right and type in your question. If you're calling in and would like to ask a question, please press star nine to raise your hand. We got the first question with a person calling in with a number ending in 27. You have the word. Please go ahead.
Hi. Can you hear me now?
Yes, we can.
Wonderful. Morning, Andreas Stenbäck and Martin Aronsson. It's Victor Hansen here from Nordea. I have to say it's fun to do this in English this time. A couple of questions from me. First off, very strong numbers in Industry. I'm wondering if you can tell us more about MAFI. Is this business as usual, or are there any extra large temporary orders that you have been delivering on since, yeah, the company is running on a much higher EBITDA than when you acquired it?
Yeah. A few words on MAFI. I think you have to remember two aspects of MAFI. One is that we acquired it in April last year, we basically have a full year effect of that group coming into Volati or that company coming into our group in Q1 this year. As said, also taking that into consideration, they are performing very well. I think they are generally performing in line or better than we anticipated when doing the acquisition. We're very happy with the development that they've showed. They have a strong demand, and they do the features for the telecom market, but also for solar panels. Both those sectors are, as you're probably aware of, developing in our favor.
They've just been successful taking, you know, new customers and taking orders in that segment. We don't give any kind of forward guidelines on not on Volati and not on in individual companies. you know, It's the result of hard work of the colleagues in MAFI.
Yeah. Understood. The next question here, on Ettiketto. I'm wondering if you could tell us more about the synergies that you achieved here in the quarter, maybe also on the timing for the synergies ahead. Also if you would say the entire margin uplift here is synergies or any operating leverage or that sort.
Basically we've done five acquisitions in the last now probably 2.5 years or so in Ettiketto. We typically, when we do acquisitions, we want them to be realized within two years from the time of acquisition. Meaning that we have a fairly high pace already from the start, already when have acquired the company, to realize the synergies. Basically what's happened now is that we started to really see the effect of the acquisitions that we did one or two years back. Where they come from, it differs. We have consolidated a couple of production sites.
When you do that, you're left with rental costs for a while, you're left with excess personnel and things like that. As they come out from the P&L, we see the effects on margins. We have similar effects that we will see effects from also going forward. I think the guidelines that we've given or what we've said about Ettiketto is that we know what type of margins we have achieved in the past, and our goal is to basically bring the acquired companies up to those same levels. The historical levels, I would say, is the best indicator. Of course, when we bring new acquisitions into that group, they will dilute the margin.
We'll have effect on that short-term as well.
Yeah. Okay. Understood. And then for Salix here, it was quite strong. It declined less than in Q4 in a very tough market. I'm wondering here, what parts of Salix are driving the good demand here, and what parts are performing worse in Salix? Then also if you've done any price hikes lately in Salix and, yeah, maybe it's fair to assume 10% in price hike year-on-year, if that's fair.
Yeah. You know, so let's spend a couple of minutes on Salix Group. Salix Group They're doing a great work. I think one thing important mentioning is we're not surprised of the tough market that we're experiencing. The decline went down very rapidly during the course of last year. We had plans in place, but it takes time to effectuate those. And now we're starting to see the effects of the plans that we took in place already during last year.
In terms of decline, I think we've, or segments that experience a tougher market, we've actually, you know, we've said that now for quite some time, but it's still the more consumer-oriented parts that see a tougher market compared to the professional sides where we still see a, you know, okay demand. The business areas and the companies within Salix that works more, more towards the consumer side, they have a even more challenging market. Yeah.
Okay. Maybe some flavor on the cost savings. Perhaps if you could quantify anything or at least tell us more about them and maybe give some details on what measures you are taking in Salix here?
We haven't given any numbers. I would say it's typically, you know, three different things. One is that we're now for quite some time known that we're operating in a tougher market, meaning that adding or replacing people that leave, you know, you can definitely do that at a slower pace or don't do it at all. Then we have some of our businesses within that business area which have had really, you know, challenging markets. Yeah, then you have to let people go. You know, yeah, let people go.
If you look at the number of employees within the Salix Group, it's lower now than compared to a year ago. Thirdly, now I forgot about that.
Investment.
Yeah. No, no. Yeah. No, let's leave that. Basically it's much on the personnel side. Yeah, sorry. The third one. Yeah, the third one is that we have a couple of strategic initiatives within the business area. Basically, and that is synergies between the companies within that business areas. That could be synergies within logistics, or that could be synergies within supply chain, sourcing. We've set up a sourcing office in Far East Asia, for example. We have those different initiatives which over time will drive in cost because we get synergies between the companies within Salix. That is also now starting to show effect.
Okay. Understood. Finally here on M&A. In my view, your M&A pace is significantly lower, at least year to date, than compared to last year. You've only done two smaller deals since May. I know you spent some time on this, Andreas Stenbäck, and you also wrote about it in the CEO letter here. What should we expect looking ahead here? For instance, how much larger is the M&A pipeline that you mentioned now compared to previously? Or would you say that you are less inclined to pay up for this now with the macro weakness than you were before? How should we see this?
Yeah. I don't have any numbers to share, but of course, we're following our M&A pipeline and it is. It's two aspect to that. One is size. It's bigger now. The second might, you know, it's even more important, that's probability. What's the quality of the pipeline? What's the probability of actually reaching to a transaction? What we experienced during the fall was that there were a price gap. There were a price gap between what we were willing to pay and what the sellers wanted for their businesses. We're experiencing right now that price gap is getting lower or closing. That means that the probability for us goes up.
It's both bigger and it's a high probability. Then again, you know that because you've been following us for quite some time now, Viktor, it's really hard to predict the M&A pace because you know, you have 1 quarter, we make two or three acquisitions and we're successful with that. That, you know, affects us quite a lot. Then we have 1 or 2 quarters where we have a slower pace. I think it's best to evaluate us over time. What we've said is that we want to acquire, you know, at least between SEK 800 million and SEK 1.2 billion of annual turnover on a rolling 12-month basis. That's kind of our guideline.
Again, it will fluctuate over quarters and even half years, sometimes.
Yeah. Thanks for all the answers. That's all from me.
Thanks, Viktor.
Okay. We'll take the next question from a person calling in with a number ending in 5 and 9. Please go ahead. You have the word.
Hi, Andreas.
Hi.
It's Bosse here from Redeye.
Hi.
Hello. I wanna start with a question about sales growth. You mentioned that you're really happy about the report in general, you posted 1% organic growth-
Yeah.
while inflation should have been a tailwind for sales growth. I just wanna check. I mean, profit margins were up, is this a factor of you prioritizing profit over sales growth?
I would say it's. To answer to that, 1 is if you look at the 1% number, I agree with that. I agree with you that, from an outside perspective, that might not be a very high number. You know, keeping in mind that we have one of our business areas also contributing with a fairly high portion of total sales to our group, which is working in more challenging market. That is Salix Group I'm talking about. They are actually having a decline in organic sales, while we see a strong or a stable organic growth, I would say, in Ettiketto. Then in Industry we see a very strong organic growth.
That mix brings us to one percent and, compared to, you know... That's a number then that we're very happy with. On with regards to, you know, profit and, you know, margins, I think it's... We've always been focusing on EBITDA growth, you know, growing the profit in terms of absolute numbers. Why are we that? Because that's what brings, or, we're mostly important by the cash flow. I think where we are right now in the markets, we are putting quite significant efforts on securing cash flow, growing cash flow. That's what's mostly important now. That means that we, you know, probably look more, even more at cost, than we typically do.
we look even more on possibility than we typically do, but that's just to secure that we have the necessary cash flow to continue growing.
Thank you. That makes a lot of sense. I'd also wanna ask a question on, I mean, follow up on that. In Salix, you have both B2B and B2C exposure. I mean, overall, in Volati, my view is that direct to consumer is quite a small share. I still wanna ask you, because we have seen other reports on that. I mean, what do you think is the health of the Nordic consumer today?
It's a, it's a tricky question. I actually don't have any very... You know, my guess is as good as anyone's, but it's definitely, you know, a tougher market right now. We all see that. It also differs compared, you know, what kind of sectors you have exposure to. I think our leaders out there, we have a decentralized model, and our leaders out there, they are the ones, they are closest to their customers, their respective customers. I have a big trust in that they, you know, they run their operations successfully. Yeah.
Just to add on that also, this,
Great. Yeah.
... it's a fairly small portion of our business that is directed to retail customers or consumer segments. For example, out of Salix Group, only 20% is a consumer segment, and the rest is professional or industry segment.
Okay.
It's a fair small portion of our sales that go to those segments.
What I get from that then is that the sales decline within those 20% is quite significant. As you said, that professional segment is performing quite well still.
Yeah. Professional segment is still performing okay, or is performing okay. The sales decline in the consumer segment has been, yeah, it's been hefty. You can, you know, just look at the other companies, providing services and products to us, that segment. It's a challenging market.
On Ettiketto Group, you described that a large share of its sales is against consumer goods, groceries, and Industry. I'm just curious to know what's roughly the share in each of these categories. It seems like I mean, my thought on this was that some customers should have built up inventories, maybe don't have the same need for these labels now. I mean, my view from that is that the share on, for example, groceries and Industry should be quite large. Is that the correct assumption?
Yeah. We don't have that exact distribution, but there are a couple of dynamics that we kept on their demand. One is that the amount of products going out is roughly the same, all similar times. What happens is that consumers that are often the end users, they shift to other cheaper products. Then the value on of the label on that cheaper product compared to the more exclusive products, yes, the value is slightly lower, but not to the same extent as as one would expect. Basically in terms of number of labels going out, it's fairly stable when you get into these kind of environments. The.
The consumer rather shift their kind of behavior, what products they buy, rather than buying a lot fewer. I don't know if that answered your questions. I didn't really.
No, I think so. I mean, I didn't expect you to tell me the exact share. I just wanted to understand the dynamics there, and I think you were spot on. On the credit line that you secured, I'm just curious to know more about your thought process here on setting that up. I mean, are you building sort of a war chest in order to be able to be on the offense when others are maybe on more of a defense? Is this actually you taking advantage of the situation that you see now and not maybe a further worsening? Maybe you can elaborate a bit on that.
Yeah. I wouldn't say it's definitely not a defensive move. It's, you know, we expect to continue growing and what we've showed in the past is quite significant growth, meaning that, okay, if we also do that going forward, we're gonna be double the size in, you know, four or five years or something like that, if you are putting in those historical growth numbers. In order to, you know, prepare for that growth, we need to make sure that we also have the financial capacities to support it. We've had a very close and good relation with Nordea for many, many years. We also felt it's a good time to bring in another second financial partner supporting us in that growth.
Yeah, it was a good timing to do that now. That also leaves us with that, as we said, the liquidity capacity, that we want to have in order to execute on the acquisition growth path.
Great. A final question then. I think you've been really transparent in saying that it's been an acquisition market where buyers and sellers have had sort of a hard time meeting. I just wanted to ask you a question on the buyer side, where you stand. I mean, do you think the competition has changed as of late? Or, I mean, because I've seen from others that sellers haven't maybe brought down their expectations, but also that buyers have actually moved out and become more hesitant. Is that still the case or have they come back? How is the competition on the buyer side now?
Yeah. I would say the general question is that the competition is lower. There are fewer players, and the players or many players are a bit more passive. At the same time, you know, with our platforms, we rather consider ourselves industrial buyers. The main group of buyers that we meet are other industrial buyers, meaning that, you know, we. Generally speaking, also operating in industries which are fairly healthy, with companies that are doing well. When we talk about our value-adding acquisitions, yes, the financial players or the more, general buyers, they're not there to the same extent. The industrial buyers, I would say to a certain extent they are still there.
You know, still, you know, having said all that, I, you know, I think we have a better position today than one year ago because it was, generally speaking, more competitive a year ago.
Okay, perfect. That's all for me. Thank you so much, Andreas, and good luck for the quarter ahead.
Thank you.
Okay, thank you. We'll follow on with some more questions that has come in. The next question is: What were the main drivers of Volati's net sales growth in Q1, and how did you perform in different geographic regions?
Oh. Whole question. The main drivers were, as we pointed out, business area Industry, and in particular, some of our platforms within business area Industry, where we highlighted the platform communication of MAFI. Generally speaking, both Ettiketto and Industry, all showed, you know, all platforms there showed a sales growth, but I would say the main driver was the that we've been detailing is the communication platform. With regards to geography, we don't actually, you know, we don't think we provide that split. Generally speaking, MAFI, its most of their sales goes outside of Sweden, so they're an export company. Much of it I would just guess it's outside of Sweden.
Okay, thank you. Let's take the next question here. What's your strategy for expanding your market share, and how does this align with the company's long-term growth goals?
Good question, that, it's not a very easy question to answer on a Volati level 'cause that's, that depends on which platform you're talking to. Where the centralize model, we have our overall financial goal of EBITDA growth of 15% per common share per year. But that is then split into our platforms, and they all have their own routes of how to execute on that. I'm unfortunately, I can't give you a generic answer to that.
Okay, thank you very much. We'll take the next question here. What are the main risks facing Volati, and how are you managing this risk to protect shareholder value and ensure sustainable growth over the long term?
Well, another good question. I think we're, you know, leading this kind of group, you're always thinking about the next big risks or evaluating the risks. I think we, as said, we've put a lot of time and efforts in preparing, for example, business area Salix now for a more challenging market. The team of Salix has done that in a great way. Which, you know, leaves me and us at Volati with a lot of comfort that, you know, we're handling that in a good way. That's one of the risks, I would say. The same counts for the rest of our platforms. we have to...
You know, we have already last year, we initiated the, you know, task of having plans for tougher times, more challenging times. Right now I'm really comfortable that, you know, would we meet that in our platforms, in our platforms that are still performing very well. We have the plans in place to execute on. Again, it's all about long-term growth or long-term value creation.
Typically, you know, we don't focus on maximizing the individual quarter, meaning that, if we feel that, you know, short-term decisions, creates, you know, too much long-term damage, you know, then we're fairly inclined to maybe not do that, just to secure the long-term value creation.
Okay, thank you. Next question. If we're looking at acquisitions, can you comment on anything today that's in your pipeline?
No. That would be bad for the dynamics in that discussion as well. No, but a good question. Yeah, I wouldn't want to give any exact examples as we are in, you know, ongoing discussions with a number of targets. I'll be happy to present those once they are done and ready to be published.
Understood. We'll take the next question here. Did you face any significant supply chain or operational challenges during Q1? If so, how did you address them?
Good question. Basically, we've been operating now, since the pandemic in, you know, in a, in a environment where we, you know, have had challenges for our supply chain, you know, occurring very frequently. I would say it's much better now than it was one or one and half or even two years ago. It's definitely improving. You still have a problem of getting certain components to certain companies at exact the right time. On a case-by-case basis, we're of course experiencing that. I know we had it in. Yeah. Generally speaking, it's much better now than it used to be.
Okay, we'll take one final question here. What milestones should investors look out for in the coming quarters?
Good milestones. You know what? I think our financial goals, I think that's good looking at. We want to continue our EBITDA growth. That could be achieved organically and through acquisitions, and we want to grow both ways. Then we want to do that by doing the right type of acquisitions and right type of investments, not ending in a position where we get a negative or too much negative trend in our return on equity, which our second financial goal. Then we also always keep an eye on our net debt ratio. We don't want that to be from.
You know, we feel that we have a lot of capacity, but at the same time, you don't want to end up in a situation having too much leverage in this type of market. Probably not a very good answer to that question, but that's really where, you know, where we're focusing long term. Not on individual quarter, but, you know, over time.
Okay. Thank you very much, Andreas and Martin, for presenting today and answering all of our questions. A big thanks to all of you who follow along Volati's webcast today. I hope you have a great rest of the day, and until next time, thank you and goodbye.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
See you next quarter.