Note AB (publ)

STO:NOTE

Earnings Call Transcript

[Johannes Lind-Widestam]

This is Johannes Lind-Widestam, CEO of NOTE. Starting with the Q4 report and 2019 as a whole. This was a record year. And what we can say is that we probably made record on all lines. That means that sales ended up at a new high level at SEK 1.76 billion, up with 28% and 17%, excluding acquisition. We also have a currency effect of that is just below 3%, and the currency effect was declining through the year since the Swedish currency gained some strength in the second half. So the Q4 numbers are a little bit less than 3% affected by currency. What we also see is that our operating profit ended up at SEK 124 million, also a new record level. We were 48% higher than last year, but if we exclude some nonrecurring costs, we were 37% up from last year. Our margin ended up at 7.1%, also a new record level. We had went up from 6.6% accounting in the same way. Yes. Profit of the financial 116, and the profit after tax went up with 44% to SEK 320 per share. We also had a very, very strong cash flow in the fourth quarter, ending up at SEK 75 million positive. For those of you that were present on this call after Q3, we were at a negative number here, and the cash flow in Q4 ended up at SEK 96 million isolated. We also guided you that we would have a strong cash flow due to that inventory levels were in much better control already at that point, but there are some lagging effects with the payment terms from suppliers and so on. So this was a little expected, but 11 was also a little surprising to us that it came in this strong. Q4, also similar numbers as for the year in whole. We also know that the acquisition of Speedboard took place at November 1, 2018. So we only had one month of acquired growth in this quarter, meaning that the difference between the total growth and the organic growth is much smaller. So the organic growth without acquisition was 20%, and the total growth was 22%. And as I mentioned on the last slide, the currency effect is a little bit less than 3% here, just over 2%, if we calculated it correctly. Order backlog continues to be very strong, 25% higher than last year. This number has been going between 25% and 30% for the year, and we believe this is a very good level for us going forward. Operating profit, up 27% from 28% to 35%, also a very good level. The margin, also the strongest margin we have presented for a single quarter at 7.4%. And here, we often discussed this. We did it also after Q3. What is the endgame of OP level? And I will get back to that question when we -- at the end of this presentation, but we believe 7.4% is a strong number. We also see profit after tax went up with SEK 2 million up to SEK 26 million, and we -- I also got some questions this morning that how the profit after tax only went up from SEK 83 to SEK 90.9. And the reason is that there is always some tax effects depending on where you earn the money. So it's -- we will -- some quarters are a little bit better, some are a little bit lower. But in average, we are around 20% of our profit of their financial items in profit after tax. It can go up 1 or 2 percentage units between the different quarters. And as I mentioned, cash flow very, very strong. We are now where we believe that we are quite well in shape. Our inventory turnover ended up at 4.5 at the end of the year. Last year, we were at 3.9, and we have been down to 3.6 at the worst month during the 2019. 4.5 in our industry with our mix is a fairly relevant number. We can go up to 5, but you should not expect us to increase this number a lot more from this level. We believe that we are in balance when it comes to inventory level at this point. Split between the different regions. Western Europe, as you all remember from last time, this means that the sites in Sweden, Finland and U.K. and rest of the world is partner -- and China or Estonia and China. What we see is that the sales in the Western Europe region has been very strong for the year, 34%, but we also have the acquired growth as part of this. So the level without the acquisition is around 17%, 18%. For the rest of world, the number is 18% growth, but here, we have the biggest impact of the currency. So the currency effect there is roughly 6%, and in the Western Europe, it's 1% to 2%. So the growth in -- the organic growth without currency is stronger in the Western Europe region compared to rest of the world. However, we had growth in all factories, and the growth was exceeding 5% organic in local currency in all our sites. And I think that is a really good strength for us to see that we're not only growing in a few sites, we are growing all over the line. And we also see that this has a good effect on our profitability. We see that our operating profit in the Western Europe region is up to 9.1%, also a record level for those sites. We have struggled a little bit for the rest-of-the-world, and a lot of that has to do with China and the restructuring of the Chinese site due -- a lot due to the tariffs, where we have had customers that have left us for other low-cost regions in the Asia region, but we have also moved back some production to Sweden internally. So still, we managed to grow the site in China with 4% in local currency. So that is very pleasing. But the restructuring has cost us some money, and therefore, we are showing -- seeing that the number is down to 4.1%. I expect that we will increase the operating profit in our rest-of-the-world sites for -- during 2020. We have done quite severe efficiency programs, and we expect those to pay off in 2020. Inventory, as I told, we ended up at the same level with inventory ending 2019 as 2018. But with the stronger growth, we see that the inventory turnover went up from 3.9 to 4.5. So that's very pleasing. And the headcount, we have been reducing the headcount a little bit in our low-cost sites, and we have increased in the high-cost side. And the reason is, of course, that the growth has been much stronger in the Western Europe sites compared to the rest of the world. We ended the year at 1,070 employees or 1,092, but 1,070 is the average number for the year. Okay. Segments. We talked about this last time, and I -- and we are offering questions why we have such a big part of our sales in the industrial segment. And as I told you at that time, the industrial segment is a huge segment, and we have a lot of different subsegments in the industrial segment. So there is not only 1 or 2 different customer types, it's a blend of a lot of customers in this part. But what we see is that the trend that we were describing in Q3 that we grow much faster in medtech, and defense is continuing. So for the year, we had a medtech growth of 56%, and the Defense segment grows 73%, while communication and industrial were growing roughly 20%. And therefore, the industrial segment has declined from 65% in '18 to 62% in this year. However, we do not see that industrial customers are worse or not as good as the others. So we don't have a fixed number of where we want to be, but of course, the wider the spread becomes the better it is for the group. But when it comes to margin and profitability, we don't see much differences between the segments here. The only one that stands out a little bit is the Defense segment where you have higher contribution margins, but a lot more manual work on the products. So that's the only trend we see in this. Okay. Our highlights. It's -- I would have to say that it's very hard to say what the highlights are because we have done so many good things, but what we can say is that we still deliver on quality and delivery performance, and we believe that we are best-in-class in this part. We continue to deliver on first confirmed date above 96% in average for our customers, and I believe that no one in the industry comes close to those numbers. So we're very pleased with the development in this part. We also see that the quality deviations that we see are declining year-over-year, and we do a lot of activities to ensure that this trend continues. We get a lot of appreciation from our customers in -- due to our performance, and this is one of the areas where we invest the most to ensure that this continues. We also received Best Quality Award from our largest customer in China. And along with that, we also received a much higher order intake from them that we will be producing for 2020. Of course, we talked about the strong organic growth, but what we -- if we drill down a little bit here, we see that we have the split that we are seeking for. We have a good growth of what we call share of wallet. We grow with the existing customers. We are winning the next generation of products at a very, very high level, but we also complement that with a lot of new customers that we win. We have announced Play charge amps DeLaval and among others for the year, and those accounts are in the start-up phases. We have started to produce for them, but we expect strong growth coming out of those accounts. And we also had a record of wins in 2019 as we measured, and our win level were more than 40% up for 2019 compared to 2018. And 2018 was already a record year for the group. So we are very successful on the market, both with winning new customers, but also winning more business for the existing customers. So we -- this long-term work that has been going on with the sales are paying off, and we see the result in our books now, but still, we can do even better in 2020. And the bigger we become, the more we need to win to facilitate a good growth number going forward. We also see that our order backlog remains at a very high level. We have 25% higher than last year, and this indicates that we will continue on a high level for the coming quarters. And I guess, sometimes question that, okay, you reported 30% higher order backlog in Q3, but you only delivered 20% higher sales. And we know that this is some lagging effects. I believe that the -- that 25% stronger order book will mean that we will beat our 10% target for the coming quarters in growth. So we are -- we look very positively upon the outlook for the near quarters. We have one site in China, and this site stands for roughly 20% of our sales. We are following the development of the coronavirus very, very closely. We have the site closed this week. It was planned to open last Monday, but it will open on next Monday, the 10. And if this outlook remains active, the effects of this will be very, very marginal. If we seek longer -- if we have to close the sites longer, then we will see bigger effects. But what we know from the government in China and how we read the information flow that we will open the site as planned on Monday next week. Our operational highlights continuing. We -- yes, we saw the operating margin. We will come back to that on next slide. But I would like to highlight that we are running efficiency projects. We have run them in our 2 low-cost country sites. We have closed it in China because we are through it. We are going into the second part of the program in Estonia, and we expect that this will have a good impact of our margins for the year to come. We also communicate that we have a target of our return on operating capital on 20%. Last year, we were beating that number to 21%. We still repeat that we have the target of 20% on this KPI. However, we are expecting that we will continue to beat the number for 2020. We are growing so our CapEx level is increasing. It's increasing fairly well in balance with the sales. I can also say for those of you that are questioning how much can we grow with the existing footprint that we are seeing that we have good growth capabilities in most of our sites. We are running out of space in our site in Torsby, and therefore, we have decided that the site will be extended over the year. So we have a plan that it should be extended in -- sometime in Q3. We will take the bigger premises in -- we will take over it. And with that increase, we have space for a 50% expansion in Torsby. And I would say that the group can grow with existing footprint when it comes to sizes, at least 50% from where we stand today with this increase. And we have possibilities to extend other sites as well, if needed. So we are in a good place for continued growth when it comes to our internal infrastructure. As I mentioned, inventory levels are now in balance, very, very good. We ended up with a good liquidity on hand. So we are feeling that we are very well-positioned for 2020 to come. The year also strengthened our equity ratio. We are at 41%. We have communicated target to never go below 30%. So we have a very nice headroom on this KPI. We're also pleased to say that our Board have proposed to increase the dividend from SEK 0.7 to SEK 1.2. We are always happy to give out dividend to our shareholders. And we feel that the strong cash that we have, that we can give this dividend, and we still have a good balance in our cash pool. I also repeat what I said. In the third quarter, we had a share buyback program in about a year ago, and we bought back 1 million shares. We have proposed to -- or we will propose to the AGM for approval that we will terminate those shares and reduce the number of outstanding shares with roughly 3.5%. Yes. Now our last slide, and I would say that the journey continues, if you put it like that. We are continuing to grow at a very, very good level. We were -- after Q3, we had a year-over-year growth that were at 11%. With the strong fourth quarter, we ended up at 12% for the last 5 years in average. And you can see that we had 70% growth in '18, 28% in '19, where 17 were organic. In '18, we had a slight effect of the Speedboard acquisition. It was maybe -- what was it, 3%, 4%?

[Henrik Nygren, Chief Financial Officer]

SEK 31 million. Yes. 2%.

[Johannes Lind-Widestam]

2%, 2.5%. So we are increasing the Speed with the organic growth in 2019. And when we look at margins, we see that some say, okay, it flattens out. Yes, it flattens out a bit, but it's much easier to grow from 1% to 4% and from 7% to 10%. It will be -- the increase will be slower, but we believe that there is a good room for improvement here. If we can run the Western Europe sites at 9.1%, why shouldn't we be able to push up the low-cost sites to at least 7%. And then we would reach level that are above 8%. So we are expecting that we will continue to increase or grow our operating profit. It's always a question how far you get because you come into this -- how should I say, you need to make a decision. We can get more growth if we price a little lower, but we -- but that would push the margins in the wrong direction. So we try to have balance there, and we try to work with our cost base to be able to win new businesses at the right price level and grow both top and bottom line. That is our intention. And I would say that the last couple of quarters, we are showing that this is possible and that we still have a lot more to do here. So I would summarize 2019 with that it's a very good year, but I expect much more to come. We are not ready with the build of the new NOTE, we are just starting. With that, I open up the floor for questions.

[Thomas Tang]

This is Thomas Tang from [indiscernible]. First of all, congratulations on yet another amazing quarter. And thank you for a very good presentation. You have actually managed to answer all of my questions, but one. So I would just ask if you could expand on this migration of the supply lines from the east to the west, and how NOTE stands to profit from that?

[Johannes Lind-Widestam]

Okay. Yes. What we have seen is that with the increased tariffs from U.S., we are producing quite a lot of products in China that ends up on the American market. What we saw was a big trend, at least, especially for the first half year -- this year that customer wanted to move out of China to reduce their exposure to the tariffs and especially, to the coming tariffs. Now when the trade war has -- how should I say, it has declined in value a little bit, and there is market understanding that we are where we are, but we don't expect much worse to come. Then this trend has declined in importance for the customers. But what we have seen is that we have 2 customers that we have transferred some production maybe, I would say, SEK 30 million, SEK 40 million from the Chinese factory into our Western Europe factories to avoid the tariffs for our customers. Those moves were done already in the first half year, and the second half, we have not seen this trend continuing. However, we have seen that customers that were heavily affected of the tariffs in the first half have came back with stronger orders in China. So we are expecting that China is -- the effect of China will be lower and lower going forward. But what we see is, on the quotations that we receive is that we have a reduced number that wants to go to China. More and more of the customer wants to stay in the Western Europe and [indiscernible] region. So we are changing our sales efforts a little bit to better reflect that we -- the products that we make in China will stay more and more in Asia, and we will supply Asian factories with the production in China. So the demand has changed a little bit, but this trend had already started in '18, but the tariffs were more underlining the trend. Does this answer your question, Thomas?

[Thomas Tang]

Yes, it does. Keep up the great work.

[Johannes Lind-Widestam]

Thank you. Any other questions?

[Unknown Analyst]

Yes. My name is Martin. [Foreign Language]

[Johannes Lind-Widestam]

Okay. [Foreign Language] The question was, how we look upon Brexit? What do we expect from the market? Do we have capacity to grow, if the market becomes more closed? That's how I interpreted the question. And the answer is, I don't know. On the first one, depend, that means what happens with the market. It's very, very difficult to say. It's -- the outlook is that the U.K. economy is growing. It's not in recession. We had a quite weak fourth quarter in U.K., in general economy, but we expect that the market will be fairly decent. And we are forecasting that we will grow our factories, maybe not on a 20% level, but somewhere between 5% and 10% is our expectation. That's what the order intake is looking. We can increase the production in our existing sites in U.K. with -- yes, with roughly the same number as we have for the group, 40%, 50% is doable in the factories that we have. And those factories are harder to extend the floor space in because they are quite squeezed into the buildings that they are in, but we can also utilize more shifts, if needed. So maybe I will restate that number. But say that we can grow at least 50% from where we stand in U.K. The customers are fairly optimistic. I would say that the Brexit became as soft as possible given the circumstances. We're not seeing any limitations in getting material in and out. We have not seen any tariffs on any goods yet, and they give themselves one year to sort out all the issues. So I would say that any changes in how the business is conducted, we will see that at the later part of 2020 is what I expect. So I will say that a lot of discussions, and it was a little bit okay. What now? And all the questions are remaining as unsold as I see it. But we -- the market is fairly elastic, and we are fairly optimistic when we look at the U.K. market. Any other questions? If not, we are thanking all of our shareholders for their patience with us, and we hope that you have had an enjoyable 2019, and we hope that we can continue to deliver a good result for 2020 and onwards.