T

Troax Group AB (publ)
STO:TROAX

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Troax Group AB (publ)
STO:TROAX
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Price: 242 SEK -2.42% Market Closed
Updated: May 29, 2024

Earnings Call Transcript

Earnings Call Transcript
2020-Q1

from 0
Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Presentation Quarter 1 Report 2020 Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] And I must advise you that this conference is being recorded today.I'd now like to hand the call over to your speaker today, Thomas Widstrand. Please go ahead, sir.

T
Thomas Widstrand
CEO, President & Director

Thank you very much, and welcome, everyone, to the short-term description or comments around the first quarter and development for Troax. And I will, more or less -- for those of you who have been around before, follow the normal presentation mode. So we have something, which is called the presentation of Q1, which you will find under the -- at the troax.com web page. And in there, you will find it under the headline, Investors; And under Investors, you will find it then the reports for the quarter 1. This presentation starts with a brief introduction of Troax, which I will very quickly go through if there are any new comers to Troax. And this presentation just starts with a few pictures showing what we stand for, namely that we try to make the world safer, especially then within the industrial environment. And in that area, we try to do -- improve the safety in every aspects.After that, you will find a few brief introductory examples then of the segments where we are mainly working. First one, which is what we call machine guarding, which is approximately 60%, 65% of our turnover, here exemplified by picture from the car industry, which is an important segment for us. But obviously, for the first quarter 2020, was not as important as used to be in the past.The next one, which is called warehouse partitioning, and that's normally around 25%, something like that, of the turnover. And as the name implies, it's our solutions that mainly consists then of solutions that aim at making warehouses safe from the -- for the people who are working there and also, of course, from the purely process point of view.The third one and the smallest one, which is a little bit less than 15% normally. We are talking about property protection, which is quite important for Troax in the northern part of Europe, but of course, then much smaller than in other parts of the world. And as the name implies, it's basically not safety, in the same way you're protecting people, in the same way you more protect property in the [ cellular ] environment where you have done your luggage or baggage or skis or whatever you have got.Then comes automated warehouse, which is something which is growing very much. So we try to promote that a little bit. It's actually part both of the machine guarding, the products that we use for machine guarding, and also for the warehouse partitioning. And this automated warehouse is growing very much and has done so now for a couple of years. And it's, of course, driven a lot by the e-commerce. And as you will see, may probably have seen already from the figures from the first quarter, we had -- for this specific niche within the segments, we had a quite good development for this kind of applications.Next page, if you follow it by page-by-page, just explain a little bit to you in brief for Troax, talking about 2019. I won't go through that because you can read it. It more or less states what I already said about the division on the segments. And you will also see the geographic split. Where, of course, we are very strong in Europe, regardless, if you call it, Northern Europe or Continental Europe or whatever. And what we're trying to do right now is, of course, to achieve a much better market share, both in North America and in the far east.Next one shows the sales development long term, just to show that we should continue to grow. Troax is a growth company. But now in the last 2 years, it's been a little bit less of growth, mainly hampered then, of course, by a decline, not only in automated warehousing, other areas, and I will come back to that within a few minutes since, obviously, now we are hampering with a much bigger problem, which is, of course, the effects of the ongoing coronavirus unfortunately. But I'll come back to that.The next one is the financial targets. And just to make a brief introduction to that, we have 4 targets that we set up as a group to fight and fulfill. The first one is talking about organic growth. And normally then this -- what we're trying to say is we should have an organic growth, which is higher than the market growth. And historically, we've had a market growth of 4% to 6%. And we have been growing over some time, 8% to 10% per year, maybe some years even bigger. And this quarter, we were growing 4% on sales, which I would say is quite acceptable, being in line with all the turbulent quarter we went through. And actually the order intake was growing with 20%, which actually is quite a good figure, especially from bearing in mind the conditions that we were working with.There's been no acquisition or any further real changes in the group in the first quarter, except that we now, of course, include the figures also on the sales side from the Japanese distributor that we acquired on 1st of January. It doesn't really change the picture, but just for formality, it's part of the group now.Then we should have an operating margin of 20% or in excess of that. For the first quarter, we reached, let's say, 16% or just about. Now we have a little bit lower in the first quarter. And hopefully, it should improve during the year, even if now we see some clear problems with this going forward, besides -- which I will come back to you.Last year, we had approximately a little bit short of 20% operating margin. So we should reach 20% or in excess of that also in 2020. Now of course, we have to do better than '20 in the coming quarters.Next one is explaining then the net debt in relation to EBITDA, and we have a target to be below 2.5. And we are around 1.3 at the end of first quarter. So we have, as I call it, quite a stable balance sheet and a stable results development in comparison to the 3 loans that we have or the debt situation that we're in.And finally, we have the target of paying our dividend of approximately 50%. And we have a proposal of paying out 47% of the net profit of 2019. However, we have, as a group, then told our shareholders that we postponed the Annual General Meeting with approximately 2 months, until 23rd of June, I think it is, where we then intend to keep our AGM. And this tend to give us time -- the Board to give more time to evaluate under difficult situation, which has come up based on the coronavirus situation. And we do think that if we will come through then in April, hopefully then coming into May, the Board will have a better decision and -- in fact to take a better decision for this dividend decision. That's how it looks today.If we then go to the development for the first quarter, the first page, that comes along is then, what we call some sort of summary of Q1 2020. And if I should try to summarize it, I can say then that despite the somewhat turbulent environment, I think we have generated a stable development during the quarter, also in orders, sales and in result, even if, which I have explained before, there has been some, let's say, issues during the quarter. We have reached a higher EBIT and margin in quarter 1, 2020 compared with first quarter 2019. And these are for mainly due to that we still -- was possible for us to increase our turnover. And we also have, I would say, rather good cost control despite the situation. It also -- we should also bear in mind that first quarter last year was not a very strong quarter, and we clearly had a negative impact on the falling of development in the U.S., which was substantially better in this first quarter, even if it's still not up to the standards where we wanted to be.So if we then talk more generally about geographical development, I can say then that we see -- despite all the issues, we see stable and good development in all areas, even if I would like to pinpoint in the U.K. development where we had maybe a little bit surprisingly very good development not only in U.K., but also in several and -- export orders from the U.K., both overseas and the other parts of Europe. And this is, of course, quite positive for us when we then compare with last year.There was an increase then not only of the profitability in absolute terms, but also in earnings per share. So even if it's early days, it's very good, I think, to have a good start of the year, especially bearing in mind that we do expect now much tougher quarters ahead due to the development of the coronavirus.Talking again a little bit on the Folding Guard, we saw some clear improvement in -- during Q1. But we still want to point out that on the order side, the U.S., these kind of segments where Folding Guard is mainly working with. we clearly saw then that in March, this was being hit by weaker demand by the customers. And this we expect to continue now also for some time. So even if we were improving the process, both result wise and then more operationally, processes in Folding Guard around the Q1, we saw clearly then that the order situation and the sale situation was on the weak side.Commenting on the working capital, it's more or less on expected level, even if we have increased inventory towards the end of the quarter to be able to prepare for probably some negative effect of the coronavirus, meaning that we increased a bit supply chain purchases in order then to comply with that there could be some disruption of the supply chain deliveries from different suppliers during the coming quarters. So we have tried at least, to a certain extent, to compensate for that.The investments are proceeding according to plan and are actually going into a more of a finalized phase. The big one during this quarter was the completely new factory in Italy, north of Milan, which was taken into full operation. It was, in principle, starts on 1st of January. And also some initial problems, which normally are connected and starting up the full factory. I think our organization there has done a tremendous good job, not only improving on the productivity and the inauguration, so to speak, on all the investments we've been doing, but they've also been able to keep the factory working during this whole problematic period where we always know that Italy has been, as you know, at least partly closed in many areas, but we've been managing on a day-by-day basis to keep the effect we're having. So I think this is something I would like to point out that's quite positive during the period.We then talk a few comments on the general marketing situation. We can say that it was considered very stable in January and February, business as usual. It was not really growing. It was showing a tendency like we already saw last year, meaning that customers were highly occupied what they were doing. So it was really on a high level, but the market was not really growing anymore. But then clearly, we saw a decrease of the demand and the interest from customers to get quotes during the second half of March, especially. It started a little bit earlier in [ southern ] countries, but it was clearly recognizable by the last 2 weeks of March.So what you see here in the order development and in the result development is only, to smaller extent, and affected by the implications or the consequences of the coronavirus, we've had then some factory closures during Q1, which obviously have had a negative impact on the result, but it has only been for limited amount of time. Or like in the Chinese case, it's rather small, which means it doesn't have this huge impact on the total group. But talking about this directly, I can say that the Chinese little factories that we have in Shanghai was closed then from February and January. And for approximately 2 months, was opening up at least in the smaller scale towards the end of March. So that was good. We can then see that, so to speak, this loop was coming to an end. And then we had the American factory, the Folding Guard factory, which now also produces Troax products based in Chicago, and that was, in principle, closed 21st of March, if I remember correctly, based then on clear guidelines or instructions from the government of the State of Illinois, where we are operating.And even if the Chinese factory now started again, the America one is starting to get a little bit work done. But in principle, the guidelines and instructions from the government there is still that we should maintain this closed until at least the end of April. So we are literally waiting for the instructions for how to do within May.Also, the U.K. factory, which also is a rather small one from the group perspective, was closed here during a certain period of time and is expected to be closed also at least until the end of April, probably a little longer based on the situation in the U.K. The main production plant, besides the Italy one, which is the Swedish one, has been more or less operative in a more or less normal way during the complete period that we were talking about. So no real effect there.Talk about the segments. The automotive is continuing to be a weak segment, just as has been in the last, you can say, 2 years. There has been, and I think still are, some indications that the automotive will, at a certain step, come back and start to invest further, which will help us and probably some others as well. But due to the COVID or the coronavirus, we do expect that the possible start-up of further investments will be further delayed, not changed or not put in a stock box or anything like that, but probably delayed for some time further due to this problems caused by the coronavirus.On the other hand, you can then say that the positive development we've had in this quarter comes then primarily from the automated warehouse business from, as you all are well aware of, is driven in by mainly from the e-commerce business one way or another. And is -- I think, despite of the coronavirus development, there will be continuous investments in this area, which we also saw during the first quarter.I'm sure there will be some ups and downs for this type of development. We were lucky in the first quarter to get a number of these products as orders, which means then that especially for the main production unit in Sweden, in Hillerstorp, we have -- as the quarter then was ending, we had actually quite a good order backlog, which to a certain extent, we think can offset then the troublesome times that we are expecting for quarter 2 and quarter 3, at least from a manufacturing point of view.So as a conclusion, what I already said, we do expect that based on that customers who are already sitting at home, they are postponing projects or they are not -- at least not deciding something, which are not inevitable that they have to do, we are, therefore, experiencing and we are expecting a clearly decreased demand in quarter 2 and probably also in quarter 3. And it depends on, of course, as you all know, how fast the market will pick up. But we can clearly say that definitely for quarter 2 and most probably for quarter 3, we expect a significant lowering of the orders from the customers.If you then go to the next page, you will find then the summary of the financial highlights. And I think you've read this, so I will very briefly go through it, saying then again that on the order side, it was very positive. We had a 12% increase of orders, which is very good for us then based on, as I said, that we have some backlog then that we could turn into invoicing in the next coming months. Sales were increasing with 4%. We had a slight increase of the gross margin. And I think that's based on the -- we had a slight increase of the turnover and good cost control on many items. It could actually have been even better then if the volumes produced and the factories not opening affected then by this closure, [ thereby ] expand on this -- especially in China, U.K. and following launch and during the quarter.So I think seeing from that level, it is quite an okay margin. The operating profit then is higher last year and hence, also the margin is higher as well as the profit after tax. Net debt compared to EBITDA is on the same level, 1.3, and no changes there. So I think those are the main ones that's really worth noting down for the first quarter.Going to the next one, which is: The regional development order intake and sales. You will then find a more specification or more detailed specification or the order intake and the sales invoice of the different regions that we report. And you will see then that based from our order intake point of view, quite a stable development, I would say, in the Continental Europe and Nordic region. A very good development in the quarter than in United Kingdom. And despite [indiscernible] is not moving, it has the same development, I would say, that the European countries which are hampered by the coronavirus. We also have a good development in North America, mainly driven then by the Troax brand, who has had a continuous good development also in the first quarter, and it was a little bit weaker then for coronavirus, like explained before.On the new markets, we've seen and it's a little bit too early days to say something conclusive, but we do see a little better activity, and we do see clearly a much better performance from our own organization. Also, especially in China, based on the actions that we were doing during last year. So I'm sure also here, we go a little bit up and down, but I have full faith in that new markets should step-by-step go to higher levels as we proceed quarter-by-quarter.So in total, then, we've had 12% increase of orders, which is a quite good figure, I think, especially bearing in mind the troublesome period that's worse, especially during the last months of the quarter.Going to sales, you will see not really, maybe the same development. You will see then in Continental Europe had quite a good development in sales. And actually it was minus than in the Nordic region. Whereas in U.K., we've had a very good increase of the order intake. Didn't have the same development on the sales side. So obviously, we can say then that probably U.K. would have a much improved sales figure in the coming quarter.And then on North America, you can also see there that the good order intake in the first quarter didn't really manifest so much in a higher invoice sale, so that is still yet to come. And you also see the same in new markets. So you can say then that a lot of the good order intake that we had in different areas still should be invoiced in the quarter 2 mainly and a little bit also in quarter 3. If we then try to do some conclusion on the next page, which is a little bit repeating what was said before. But we may say something like this, that there was a substantially weaker activity in the market towards the end of the first quarter. But as I said before, it was quite okay, January and February. And we expect this negative trend -- short-term trend unfortunately to continue, especially in the second quarter. We've had a continued low demand from the automotive industry in this quarter, which has been offset then by the good development in the automated warehouse business and actually more than that. And to repeat myself, we think that the possible demand or increase of demand that we sooner or later are expecting from the automotive industry, it will still come, but I do see now that it's been further postponed of the problems with the coronavirus.Talking briefly then the summary of the U.S. operations. The Troax Inc. is continuing to develop very well. And the Folding Guard is improving compared with the same quarter last year, but we do need some further increasing volumes to get up to the levels where we want it to be. Very good and stable development in all our European operations. The new factory in Italy was quite successfully started up. And we've had some extra cost, both in Q4 and in we had [ indirectly over ] also in Q1, but we don't want to put that up as anything extraordinary. But some of the costs that we had in Q1 was, for instance, then sums of the cost for the rent of 2 premises and that has faded away after first quarter. So I think we can see that. From a cost point of view, that is quite under control, even if we expect, of course, like I wrote in my comments also that, unfortunately, the bottleneck of the factory in Italy won't be the production capacity short term. It will be the demand because Italy is one of the countries, obviously, that has been hit, of course, by the lowering demand from customers.I mentioned also, the next bullet, same thing, which I said before. So the factories in U.K., in U.S.A -- United States was, in principle, closed from sometime during the end of March and it will at least be closed until the end of April. And the small Chinese operations has resumed operation in March, after having been closed for approximately 2 months. I think those were the main conclusions then of the first quarter. And then follows then a number of presentations of the growth factors, which really still have not really changed for us. If anything, we can see that with these problems of coronavirus, wherever it will take us from a human point of view or social point of view. But from automatization point of view, we can do see that, if anything, this puts even higher pressure than, I think, on many customers to continue the automatization in order to make the factories not so reliable, so to speak, on [ your remaining ] workforces. And this, in principle, is good for us, even if, of course, we don't want this to be caused by a negative effect of the coronavirus. This is obvious.In this niche market, we are the market leader. We expect we have some 25% of the European market, and maybe we are close to some 15% worldwide. And where we take market shares on is a lot -- especially when you come to the southern part of Europe, you come to United States and you come to the far east, is what we take, of course, a little market share from small local competitors. Whether we call them for blacksmiths or not is really relevant, our small local competitors. And I'm happy to say that the development is still continuing, that we can see then that customers are demanding highly -- more higher level of safety. And then, of course, Troax and it's professional competitors can supply that to these kind of customers, which means that the local suppliers are fading out still step-by-step...We tried to make assessment of the competitive situation. And you will find it also in our web page, our home page, which we have included. It's our best assessment, but it's really just an assessment. There are no official figures, which are really supporting this. You have to take it as it is.Next one shows our production units that I have already talked about that. So even if we had some problems then during March and it's obviously continuing, as I already said during April, I think we are still very good geared now for a possible increase of volumes, which will come sooner or later. Maybe now 2020 will be, of course, a problematic year without giving any figures. But I am very confident over that, over time, these general trends that we are working with will help our production unit to increase the volumes. And we have a very good sales situation now with substantial increase of capacities in this main unit in Sweden. We have a new unit -- completing new unit in Italy. And also during the year, there was some improvement in the American factory. We have a quite good base then for the future development.So for a safer tomorrow, we have some examples then of what we are doing. And what we're focusing on is a lot, of course, on the environmental issues. I've talked partly about this before. But just as one example, the new factory then in Italy is equipped with solar panels, and that will approximately cover 50% of the energy consumption of that new factory already from this summer, we think. But it's a day-to-day work to reduce the total energy consumption, which is one of the major factors that we're working with.Right after this, we had some explanation on the Troax Innovation Center, which is where we do -- try to do our development. And as an example, you see that on the next page, which is called a Uni-bracket, which is a quite unique kind of bracket which then really helps for different kind of applications within the warehouse business. All products are certified or rather the processes and some part of the product are certified by the TÜV Rheinland, meaning then that we give the customer the reassurance that it's not only Troax, we're saying that Troax is following a certain procedure. We are really then making sure that a third-party, a reliable third-party, can then certify any of our products, so following this procedure, and we think this is quite good for our customers.All right. I think this concludes then the presentation from my side. I'm trying to be prepared now for your questions. So please, if you would allow then the listeners to ask the questions. Thank you.

Operator

[Operator Instructions] We have one question come through already. Two questions. One moment. First question comes from Kenneth Toll.

K
Kenneth Toll Johansson
Financial Analyst

So I was wondering a little bit. I was surprised by the strong order intake. And also, as we enter Q2 now, how big is the order book? Because I guess that some of the orders you got in Q1, you managed to deliver in Q1. So how much sales do you have left in your order book as we enter Q2?

T
Thomas Widstrand
CEO, President & Director

That's a good question, Kenneth. We don't give out exactly the order book in the figures. But I can say that most of these orders that we got during the first quarter, which you might explain as a little bit of a project order, I don't like to take the word [indiscernible], but you understand what I mean. Those are for deliveries. And the absolute chunk of those are for deliveries in quarter 2 have not really been delivered in quarter 1. And I think there are some parts still remaining for deliveries in quarter 3 also. So a big part of it seems coming in quarter 2. And we have -- compared with our normal quarters, we have, especially for the Swedish manufacturing plant, we have an order book which is -- just to give you a sense of it is, it's not double the size of what normally it is, but it's approximately 50% higher than what it normally is at this time on the year.

K
Kenneth Toll Johansson
Financial Analyst

Okay. Amazing. And also, you talked a lot about factories being closed and some operational and so on. But where you have open factories, so to say, do you experience a lot of hassle, a lot of disturbance and then disturbances and extra costs and so on for logistics and running the operations?

T
Thomas Widstrand
CEO, President & Director

We have experienced some of that, yes, Kenneth. I wouldn't say that there are substantial, but they -- all they have both in case of freight cost to get some material into the factories in time and obviously, to deliver to customers. We've also experienced, of course, some turbulence because people have been sick and you have to have other people and all these things. So we've had some extra costs, yes. But I wouldn't like to say that these are really substantial costs. But during Q2, you will probably notice some of it in the gross margin. That's probably inevitable. But in Q1, you haven't had too much of that. Some of it, especially in the Italian one, and you would have seen it. But on the total, for the group, it's not been significant money for Q1.

K
Kenneth Toll Johansson
Financial Analyst

And also the -- your balance sheet remains strong, and a lot of your CapEx needs have now come down significantly. So I was wondering now when there is turbulent times, I mean over the years, you have said that you might be interested in acquiring a competitor or so on. So do you think those opportunities might open up now? And would you dare to act in such a marketing environment in such a case?

T
Thomas Widstrand
CEO, President & Director

To answer your first question, if I think that these competitors or if there will be more possibilities for the M&A openings? I can clearly say, yes. I think there clearly will be more openings because some of our competitors or some of the interested companies, as we are interested in looking into. We'll probably see that there will be troublesome times. So they probably will be interested to discuss. So I clearly see that coming up. Whether it would be this month or next year, we don't know. But I would think that it will come up.And to answer your question, yes, we are, of course, following this from -- not maybe daily, but on a very close basis. And of course, we have to be careful to see this -- we don't want to end up in a situation where we make rather big acquisition and then find ourselves that the market is going down in such a way that we might have our own liquidity problems. So we have to find a balance, and that's really why also the Board is, of course, postponing a little bit in AGM in order to see if we can find some tendencies, which we can rely on. Otherwise, we have to take it case by case. But we are still open to do acquisition. But of course, we will look very closely not to endanger the total operations and bearing in mind that what we're today seeing with corona might not be the worst situation coming in the coming months.

Operator

I have another question here from David -- sorry, Daniel [ Lindquist ].

U
Unknown Analyst

So just a few short questions. You touched upon the gross margin with Kenneth. But if we look at it, should -- would you say that's mainly factory shutdowns? Or is there also product mix effects and price pressure in the quite pressured gross margin this quarter?

T
Thomas Widstrand
CEO, President & Director

Yes. We haven't seen actually during the first quarter any major effects worth mentioning, so to speak, on the pricing side. So I can say that during the first quarter, it was rather stable. So we can more or less take that out of the equation. There were a little bit of a negative product mix side. I wouldn't like to -- whether that was a big one. But if there was anything, it was a little bit on the negative side. So it could have been better if the product mix would have been slightly different. But nothing extraordinary. Nothing to, let's say, that you really want to pinpoint to explain this. So I would say that from my point of view, I see then that the factories working at, let's say, more optimal level, should have had a little more volume than during -- especially in March. And that I would say was the major, if anything, influencer of that margin and could have been slightly higher.

U
Unknown Analyst

Okay. So that means basically that for the Q2, we will have pressure as well then from the closures in the U.K. and U.S.?

T
Thomas Widstrand
CEO, President & Director

Yes. That is correct.

D
Daniel Lindquist

And then just looking further down the income statement, on the sales costs, they're popping up as it's a bit high in this quarter. Could you elaborate on those?

T
Thomas Widstrand
CEO, President & Director

Yes. The sales cost has, of course, been influenced then by the very small acquisitions we did last year or beginning of this year, meaning the Japanese operation. And we also then included our Indian operations, which previously was also working as a distributor. So if you take away that hypothetically and you also take away [indiscernible], we've increased [indiscernible] accrual and for bad debt. Not that they have happened, but we've just taken some precaution because we now understand that people in general and are increasing the payment days at this very moment or at the end of the quarter. So if you take away those influences, the sales costs were on the same level as last year. And when you compare apple to apple, then of course, under the present circumstances, we are going to be very cautious until we see how things are developing to further increase the sales cost, but we're also very, let's say, cautious not to do anything stupid because the main part of the cost, of course, in the sales cost for our salespeople, whether they are outside salespeople or inside salespeople. And mostly, they are very good and very important for -- to the group. We have -- they've been with us generally for many years, and we've tried to educate them step by step. So we will try to keep them as long as possible. But of course, if the worst will come to worst, we will also look into cost reductions in those areas.

U
Unknown Analyst

Okay. Perfect. And then just on the e-commerce orders, you had a few, if I understand correctly in the quarter. And were they from the same customers? Or was there a split among many customers?

T
Thomas Widstrand
CEO, President & Director

Well, there were several customers. We had 3, 4, which were standing out as bigger than normal or at least not -- the sizes that we get every quarter, but they came from different sources, I can say.

U
Unknown Analyst

Perfect. And then just finally, with the blacksmiths that you often talk about as competitors in the local markets, what kind of the shape are those in? What kind of -- did they survive in this environment? Or will you have a bigger market once this opens up?

T
Thomas Widstrand
CEO, President & Director

Sure. It's a very good question, Daniel. It's very difficult to give you a straight and honest answer. We secured all of these blacksmiths that we see all over the place. I would say, generally, that my gut feeling, and you have to take it as studies that the smaller ones, we clearly have more problems during this problematic period. And there's clearly opportunity for Troax as well as drive competitors, of course, to take market share. And based on that, some of these smaller local competitors will have problems.

Operator

Yes, it seems natural with that kind of...

T
Thomas Widstrand
CEO, President & Director

It's straight -- quite logical as it should be.

Operator

And we have a question from John Hill, sorry I might not pronounce this correctly, John [ Hiltner ].

U
Unknown Analyst

Just a question on the good orders you had in -- well, it was mainly U.K., North America and new markets. And then just wondering if you can deliver on those from the Hillerstorp factory? Or if you will be limited by any way of the factories that are closed down now and if that will be prolonged?

T
Thomas Widstrand
CEO, President & Director

We don't see today that these orders that we have got will have any problem being delivered from mainly the Hillerstorp factory. And we have delivery schedules that was all confirmed, et cetera, et cetera. So it should all be possible to do. However, of course, with the present situation, we, of course, assume then that the confirmed deliveries from our sub-suppliers will continue to come in according to plan. But that is, of course, one source of a bit uncertainty. But I think that these deliveries will be at least on an overall basis and be possible to deliver according to plan.

U
Unknown Analyst

And that go even for the regular business in the U.K. and in the U.S. where you have closed down the factory. Will you be able to switch to the deliveries from Hillerstorp instead? Or will you have some issues here before you open up?

T
Thomas Widstrand
CEO, President & Director

Yes. I don't say, yes, we will have some issues. But we do -- we are allowed according to -- for instance, the government in the U.S. to deliver to some of these, what is called, critical companies from a government point of view. So it's not entirely closed, and we can do something there. And that means then that we can do in good cooperation with customers who, of course, stand in the same situation, postponing some cases and deliveries. Then I'm not talking about this huge project. I'm not talking about the day-to-day business. So there will clearly be a lot lower volume produced in these kind of production facilities, especially during April. But I think from a customer point of view, we won't upset so many customers because of this, as far as I know. There will only be a limited number of people who will be, let's say, whether the orders will be postponed in such a way where they will be hit negatively.

Operator

And there are no further questions at this time. Please continue.

T
Thomas Widstrand
CEO, President & Director

Thank you very much. I appreciate both your listening in and, of course, to your questions. I appreciate your interest. And I look forward to talk to you again.I think there will be a little bit more maybe gloomy situation then from a figures point of view, but let's see how it goes. We are only into April yet, and a lot of things can happen. So thank you again, and talk to you then. It will be then in August. Bye-bye.

Operator

That does conclude your conference for today and for participating. You may all disconnect.