Note AB (publ)

STO:NOTE

Earnings Call Transcript 2023-Q1

[Johannes Lind-Widestam, executive]

Okay. Welcome, everyone, to NOTE Q1 Report. As usual, I try to summarize where we are and what happened in this quarter. And I would say that this quarter is a few steps towards more stability in our market. We see the shortages on the component side is getting better. We still have problems, where there's still a lot of [ supply ] on some of the variants of the semiconductors, but a step forward. Currencies, we talked a lot about currencies, the currency fluctuations last year. This quarter was fairly stable, not that much swings on the -- within the month and between the month, still not very stable, but more stability. So as I see it, this quarter was one step towards more how should I say, plannable and stable surrounding.Demand continues to be really strong, really solid. We are -- we could have delivered a lot more if we would have full availability on components. We still push maybe [ SEK200 million ], SEK250 million as backlog into the next quarter on delayed deliveries. We still have problems to get the new programs to ramp them up because we don't get the components. All that tells me that there's still a shortage that is causing some problems to us. This also has an effect of that we have to run more over time. We are a little bit overstaffed in some sites just to compensate for the late deliveries in. So there is still a lot of room for improvement.But if we summarize the quarter, I would say that this is, in my opinion, one of our best quarters. Demand is strong. Our delivery performance is slightly up. Our -- the plannable future is a bit longer. If you look at last year, we had maybe 1 or 2 days fixed orders in our SMD lines. This quarter, we are up to maybe a week or 2 in many factories. And that gives a lot of difference because then we can plan everything that happens afterwards. We still have some sites where we have these short planning periods. But it gets better, and this will also mean that we will gradually become more and more efficient and so on. So yes. One step towards a more plannable future, which is really, really pleasing to see. And we can also see that in the numbers, we are slightly less people this quarter with the same sales. That is the effect of the more plannable production is resulting in that. So I would say one stable quarter towards a more bright future, if I summarize it.So if we go into the numbers, sales, SEK1.051 billion, up 28%. Operating profit, yes, up 48%. In that number, we have SEK5 million that are about what we call as, yes, currency fluctuations or positive currency conversion. So underlying profit, [ 10.2% ], still a very good number. I think it's the second best we have done. Q4 was better, but otherwise, this is the second best. Profit after tax came in, yes, in line with the rest and so on. What is also pleasing is to see that the cash flow was very stable. We still increased the inventories in the quarter, but we managed to get a fairly decent cash flow.So SEK72 million in positive cash flow is something that we're really pleased of, that helps us to put ourselves in a positive position for what do we say, more offensive planning for when it comes to CapEx and investments and so on. Acquisition, we had an earnout for the Herrljunga factory in the quarter. As you have seen, we also announced last week that we acquired a small factory in Bulgaria. The factories is a bit larger than it looks, but in sales, it's not that big. I will come back to that later on in the presentation. But overall, very, very solid. Order backlog continued to increase 20% higher. This means that we are still getting more orders than we planned for the growth. That means that we are still seeing some challenges to get all the order backlog out in -- during this year.So we still are under guiding based on our order intake. That's very important to know. And order intake during this year, I expect that we will see that the order backlog will not increase in the same speed as it does because when the lead time on components goes down, our customers will place order on the shorter time horizon towards us. That's just how this works. For those that followed us 2 years ago, everyone had extremely high order intake because the length of the order was extending every quarter.We will, at this time, again, go back to a more normalized situation. I don't know exactly when that happens. We have not seen that yet, but I expect that to happen during this year. And this do not mean that our sales will go down. That's why we try to guide. So we don't only show the order intake because we have to net that out in length and so on. I can talk about this forever, so I'll move on. But very important to know that this is a number that -- it's important to look at it. We look at it, how does it look in the next, say, 2, 3 quarters than what happens afterwards, we don't pay that much attention to it.Okay. Segments, if you look at how our sales has been. Western Europe continues to perform very, very well. If you look under the hood, if you put it like that, we see that it's a big variation. Sweden still performs really strong. U.K. is a bit more challenging. But I would say U.K. had a fairly okay quarter as well. Finland is performing fairly much in line with our expectations. Rest of the world or China and Estonia, is also very strong and solid, 7.8% in profit. That's not the best we have done, but it's a big step-up from last year. We should know that Q1 always -- we have the Chinese New Year that restricts the Chinese profitability in the quarter, not that much any longer, but maybe 1 percentage unit or 2 percentage unit for that site, and that pushed down the rest of the world a little bit in Q1.But I would say 7.8% is also a strong number for Q1 in these regions. So I'm very pleased with what I see on the margin development side. Segments, this is -- if I go back 2 years ago, we had Greentech, we're growing 180%. This year, it actually goes down a little bit. And I mentioned that in the last quarter presentation that it should go down because we had the best quarter ever in U.K. This was the last quarter with the governmental contributions on the installation side. Then they took it away. And after that, we have seen that the U.K. market is basically halved in size in -- on the EV charging boxes.And given that we had that quarter to measure against, we could not got all the way up, so minus 13%. Medtech, we have talked about that many times, really solid numbers. We will see these strong numbers until we are meeting the fourth quarter sales, then it will come down a little bit. So I would expect Medtech to continue to show almost 100% growth in the second and third quarter. But also in the fourth quarter, I expect it to continue to grow, but not in like 100% wise. Communication continues to be strong. We have talked about it before, quite weak numbers, '21 and early '22. Now we see that, that goes up a lot.Industrial, very mixed picture. A lot of customers, some goes really, really well, and some are taking some steps backwards, but overall, it's a very solid picture. As always, I don't see that it would be easy for me to say that Medtech is our strength there. But I would say the mix is our strength or the balance. Again, our largest customer stands for roughly [ 6% ] of our sales. And our largest customer were actually going down in this quarter. We don't see that in the numbers. They were down maybe 10%, 15%. But since we have this big variance of customers and so many customers that are now big, I think last year, we had 10 customers exceeding SEK100 million in sales. So we don't have 1 or 2 customer dependencies. We have a balance of a lot of customers that are contributing and they are growing in, how should I say, in sequence.So I don't see that, yes, we could have suffered a lot with the EV charging box reduction in U.K., but that is compensated by other customers. So I think the -- our dependency of 1 or 2 customers has been reduced significantly over the last couple of years. And now the full strength is our big variation and our big split between customers. So I'm really pleased to see this. And also that if I take our largest 15 customers, they are growing in line with the NOTE Group, which is fantastic, even though we have 1 or 2 customers that are going down. But yes, the combination is our strength. It's very important to keep in mind, given what we saw yesterday with one of our peers being a bit negative with their large customer reductions. So I think that's very important to keep in mind when you look at NOTE, we don't see that this is a problem. We see this is a really good strength for us.So that's really pleasing to see. I expect that our 2 largest customers last year, they will be out of the top 5 this year because other customers are outgrowing them this year. I think that's a very good strength. And as always, I'm not allowed to speak about all the customer names, so that's why I don't mention them. But they are really, really nice customers, and I really -- I'm so proud that we can be their supplier.Looking at our highlights. Component market starts to get more balanced. Quality and delivery performance still really good. Quality is, as always, we are beating last year and we have done that ever since I started. So every year, we have improved our quality performance. New machines, more experienced staff, stability in our processes, all that plays very well into what our customers are requesting. Delivery performance still, I would say, top in the market, very big delays to some of the customers, depending on these component shortages, but still solid. We don't go down. We have improved the delivery performance slightly this quarter.Order backlog continues to go up. As again -- once again, timing considerations, keep this in mind when you look at us in the future. We have been discussing how do we present this in the most understandable way, because now we present it as the full value. And some companies are looking at the next quarter, the next 2 quarters because that could be more representative, but we believe that this gives the best picture, but then we have to understand that the length of this order backlog may vary over time. But we will try to be transparent in this as we try to be in all other questions.CapEx, one area that I think is where we different ourselves from our peers. We invest in our production. The production is our heart and engine that has to work. It has to be top class. That's why we win customers. If I were a customer to NOTE, I would be so pleased to see that we continue to increase our value of our investments. If you go to our sites, they are -- we can -- basically, all our sites, we can increase 20%, 30% next quarter if the customers request that. That's how well invested we are in capacity. That's so important to keep in mind that this slight overcapacity is quite. The cost of that is very insignificant compared to the value of being able to grow.So for me, this is so important, and this has really changed over the last 4, 5 years that we don't give out dividend. We invest that money in to improve our operations. And the customers are telling us that this is one of the reasons why they continue to grow with us, why they continue to put more business in our direction. And I don't see that change. I think we can do so much more here. As I continue to talk about it, I might repeat myself, but it's very, very important. Also, we acquired the property in Torsby, [ Torsby have been ], extremely nice. Our order backlog in Torsby is extraordinary. We will have to extend the building once again in the next 2, 3 years. And that's fantastic.We have a site that now we have 8,000 square meters, very high automation level, but we cannot fit all the business that we have won into that business in, say, 2 years' time. Very, very pleasing problems to be facing. Return on operating capital, 24%. That's actually a bit below my expectations. With the profit level we have, we should be able to perform better and we will perform better during this year, that's my firm belief. But still 24% is not bad, but we can do even better. As always, balance sheet looks solid, 40% equity rate. Liquidity position is even stronger. I think we increased our liquidity with maybe 20%, 25% this quarter, even though we did some earn-out payments and so on. So extremely pleasing to be CEO of a company to have this financial strength to seize the opportunities that occurs, and we will continue with that.Moving over to the acquisition of Bulgaria. This is a fantastic plant. It's -- the building is from 2015 or '16, 2 floors, 4,000 square meters of production area, low utilization level, solar panels on the roof, I think they produce like 60% of the energy they consume. Everything looks really, really solid, nice layout, good building, strong customers. As always, we cannot talk about them, but strong big Industrial and Medtech customers. We can do a lot more. Why this site on the surface looks a little bit smaller is that they are selling what we call value-add sales. That means that the customers have to provide them with material, and that reduces the sales. As you know, our sales, we have maybe 65% material content in our sales price, in Bulgaria, they have maybe 25%.And when we take over the material sourcing, the site will grow in size even though -- even if we don't even grow the production. And we will do that, the customers are really eager to move in to a full service site. So I would say that the value in sales of the current business will be in the range of SEK120 million to SEK140 million instead of SEK40 million when we have implemented the sales of material in this. And we -- the margin of this is very hard to put a number on, but it will increase the profit level at least because we will tie up capital and we will charge the customers for that.But on top of that, we have -- my view is that this site can do maybe SEK300 million to SEK400 million in sales in the current building. So a lot of growth potential, high interest from customers. So I expect a lot of good things to come out of this site. We have been looking for a good site in the southern part of Eastern Europe. The seller levels are lower. We know that this is a request from the customers, we can balance out the Estonia site that is running on a fairly high utilization level. So also very pleasing to see. We have been in dialogue with this company for about a year. We -- it was not out for sales. It was a discussion we initiated and then it takes some time, it has to mature. But yes, we look forward to the cooperation with the Bulgarian team. So big opportunities.Outlook, I always get the question, aren't you a bit too modest in your outlook. Someone said that if you take the Q1 sales, multiply it with 4, you get to SEK4.2 billion. So we're not expecting to continue your increase. I would put it like this that it's -- as you know, we put our guidance as what we believe is our lowest estimate instead of giving a interval, we put the lowest number and then we may overachieve. We are also saying that our Q2 will be 20% higher than last year. If we reach that, the last 2 quarters would be fairly limited growth, so we might come back in the second -- after the second quarter report and give you a new view of the year. But this is how we act. We want to be -- we feel confident that we will reach at least the SEK4.2 billion, if I put it like that.Margin, I would say that we are -- as we talked about in the fourth quarter, we are running at the 10% level. We are not expecting to go down. We are expecting that our margins will continue to improve. We don't see any reason why not we grow. We know that the fall-through is fairly strong. That should give better margins over time as well. Very simple formula, but it has been working very well. So we are looking at a very solid year. You can argue this to -- some say it's pessimistic, some would say it's quite bold to put out a growth level with this inflation and the interest rate and how will the economy look in the second half of the year. Yes, that could be, but we can only look at what our customer tells us. We look at our forecast. We look at our order intake. We look at our build plans that we have together with the customers. We look at the new wins that we have when we can implement them and so on and so on.And if we summarize that, I see a very good year. I see a very good 2024 as well. And yes, if the economy slows down a little bit, that would, of course, push down the -- our growth, but we are still confident that we will meet the guidance that we do. So that's how we should read this. If the economy does not slow down, we will come back with an increased guidance. But that's how you should read it. So this is not like a hoped level. This is what we believe as the lower level. Yes. And of course, we are well positioned to reach SEK5 billion in 2025 at latest. 1 or 2 more acquisitions, and we will reach it maybe a year ahead, but we will see about that.As always, acquisitions, we are in dialogue with one or a few companies at any given time. Some we are pursuing, some we are dropping, but that's -- and some we don't agree on pricing of course. So there might be a lot of discussions. But we get a lot of companies that calls us today that wants to sell to us because they feel that we are -- we as owners are investing in the business, we are trying to push the business out and run the business locally. So many independent companies feels that NOTE should be a good owner for them because they share the same values as we do. And that's also very pleasing, then we don't need any agents to try to find new companies, they find us instead. So that's also a little bit new. We have not been in that situation before. That's also in my opinion a good -- that tells me that several of the independent companies have seen that what we have done and that we're a company to be trusted in this.My last picture, I think this is -- it's very nice to look at these numbers and see that we had a dip in profitability last year. We all know where that came from, all the spot buys that were diluting our margins, also negative currencies. Now we see that those are more stable, and we see that the profitability continues to follow our sales trend. And we are so convinced that growth -- organic growth will continue to drive profitability. That's how we see it. That's why we are so eager to grow organically. 14% could be seen as a low number. I think it's a quite good number given that we are actually in -- on the EV market in U.K., we [ half ] that, that adds up to maybe 4% of negative growth for the group.Excluding that, we're almost at 20%, which is where we want to be. There will always be swings up and down. But as I said before, the full value of all our customers are what are driving our growth in this nice numbers. So that's what we see. Operating margin, how far can we get? I think that's a very tricky question because there is -- as I said before, some of the larger programs that we quote on, we are quoting them with a lower profit margin. But -- so it might not follow these linear trends as you can say that we are doing today, but over time, we will continue to improve our operating margin, that's our firm belief. We will most likely run a new Capital Market Day, and then we will come back with new objectives, both on sales and on margin.So that's basically what I wanted to share with you, very solid quarter, very solid outlook, more stability in the market, even though we still see shortages on the component side. Still fairly, fairly low impact of the inflation and the interest increases. Yes. So I'm looking forward to the next quarter and the rest of this year.Okay. Any questions in the room or should I start with some on the web? Yes.

[Unknown Analyst]

So I have a question, if you maybe could elaborate a bit on the -- you mentioned the order intake, but I'm just wondering a bit on the -- maybe the trend. Are you seeing order intake in line with net sales now or is it still at a higher level or -- because you mentioned the order backlog is up 20% organically year-over-year. So I'm just wondering...

[Johannes Lind-Widestam, executive]

Order intake is still a little bit stronger than our sales and our guidance. That is correct.

[Unknown Analyst]

Okay. And then I have a question on -- if you look on the -- your new guidance, you -- it seems like the organic growth figure should be a bit lower in the second half of the year. And I mean you mentioned yourself as one of your peers guided for one of the large customers seeing inventory reductions in the upcoming quarters. Are you seeing any signs of that or what can you give us any kind of flavor on what your customers are seeing because I think it's a pretty big topic in the general economy?

[Johannes Lind-Widestam, executive]

I think this is a very good question. And we can say that our largest customer last year, they are going through an inventory reduction at the moment. So our sales is a bit down towards that. But in general, we're still seeing that the backlog is a more problem to our customer than an overstock situation. So I would say that it's -- we're still seeing that the demand is higher than the inventory reduction. So I don't see that, that will have a big impact in the near future, say, the next 2, 3 quarters. I don't see that -- I don't see that our customers have built that much inventory. We still have more customers are struggling with getting the boards in for their customers rather than building an inventory due to the component shortages. If you're buying on the spot market, you only buy exactly what you need, never to build inventory because they're so expensive.

[Unknown Analyst]

Yes. And then maybe one question on your own inventory. I mean it continues to increase, but the cash flow was for the first time in a while quite good, I would say.

[Johannes Lind-Widestam, executive]

Yes. Thank you.

[Unknown Analyst]

So I'm just curious about hearing what do you think about the future? Are you going to start to reduce inventories now going forward or...

[Johannes Lind-Widestam, executive]

Well, that's what do you call it, a million-dollar question. It's -- I would say the inventory level is too high if we start there, if we're going to start to deplete it or not, it's very hard to say. We're still seeing that our ambition is always to meet the customers' requirement on deliveries rather than having a balanced inventory. We push over some of the risk to our customers just to share that, but we're still going to push for to ensure that we can supply our customers. But I will say that our inventory level compared to where we want to be is maybe in the range of SEK300 million too high. So it's a big over inventory at the moment. But if we continue to grow, we might grow into the new inventory level. So it's -- but...

[Unknown Analyst]

[ So we should just expect then the ] cash flow to be at like similar levels as a percentage of EBIT in Q -- in the coming quarters as in Q1 or even better, I guess?

[Johannes Lind-Widestam, executive]

I would put it like this that for the year, I expect the cash flow to continue to be good, but it will be big swings between the quarters. That's how I see it because it's not a linear trend. This is going to be a lot of swings on this. But yes, the cash flow should continue to be solid.

[Unknown Analyst]

And then is the last one on the acquisition of ATM, is it possible to say when you expect that you take care of all of the material when that is expected to be fully implemented?

[Johannes Lind-Widestam, executive]

Very good question. We are initiating the discussions with the customers as we speak. So in their view, as soon as possible, but what that means it's very hard to say. I would say, during the year, I hope that we will be there.

[Unknown Analyst]

Okay. Thank you.

[Johannes Lind-Widestam, executive]

Thank you. Any other questions or should I do a few from the web? Okay. I start from [ Andreas Morini ]. How will your inventory level develop over coming periods? You have had a building inventory situation for a while.I think I almost answered that with your question here, but to be -- yes, we expect the inventory to that we have. We expect that we have reached the top of the inventory buildup at least. So we expect that the inventory will start to go down slightly or that we grow into the new inventory levels. So that's basically how I see it.Dividend, how -- what about dividend? How is cash flow developing? I would say that we're still making good use of the earnings that we do in terms of CapEx and new acquisitions. So at the moment, I don't expect that the Board will change the view that we are seeing good opportunities to continue to put the earnings into good use internally. But this is a question for the Board, but that's how I see it. That was also from Andreas.From [ Ricard Divat ], your competitor, Incap shares dropped 40% yesterday on bad news from its larger customers, how is NOTE different? I think I mentioned that in the presentation. If I read Incap correctly, I think this customer that went down, they stood for like 60% of the sales. And if that customer drops, say, 20%, that affects the overall company to lose 12%. So our biggest customer last year was 6.5%. And if that drops 20%, it corresponds to maybe 1.2% overall in the group, and that would be not even noticeable in our numbers.So I would say that we defer a lot. We have 25 customers build up the same size as Incap do or that is one customer do for Incap. So it's not even comparable in my opinion. So that's how we are different. So those are the 3 questions I have from the web. One question back there.

[Unknown Analyst]

Yes. Thank you. I was wondering about margins on the new business. Is that improving due to the scramble for manufacturing capacity we have seen over recent years or...

[Johannes Lind-Widestam, executive]

I would say that our margin on new business and all business is fairly the same. We don't see any measurable change of that. I would say margins are much more depending on the value of the boom. If we produce products for customers with really expensive material, then the margin goes down in percentage because we handle much more material. If it's more manual labor, the margins goes -- have a tendency to go up. So I would say that the same mix applies to new business as to all business. We are fairly transparent in that. And as you know, we are showing our bill of materials to our customers, so they know what they pay for on the material side. And that's also one thing where we differentiate ourselves a bit from our peers. We think that's a good information for the customers when they want to drive cost out of the products.

[Unknown Analyst]

Okay. And you mentioned that you expected Greentech to bounce back in the second half. What makes you confident?

[Johannes Lind-Widestam, executive]

I would say that if I'm confident that's probably not -- that's my expectation. We are expecting that we are in the trend of that electrification is continuing. We see a slight reduction of that trend at the moment, but we expect that to come back. So it's not that we have solid proof that this will happen, but that's our expectation of where the society is heading. So that's how we see it. Our order intake looks like that we will bounce back, but it's a shaky area as I see it. It's the only segment that I see that we have more swings than the others because it has -- it impacts a little bit of how governments and so on are contributing to the installations and so on. But the view that we have is that this is a solid area that will bounce back during this year.Any other questions? If not, I will say thank you, and I look forward meeting you again after second quarter. Second quarter, we will not have this -- we will only have a web presentation. So you will meet me at the web at that time. Thank you all, and thank you for listening.