Vaisala Oyj

Hello and welcome to Vaisala Financial Statement Release 2022 conference call. My name is Priscilla and I'll be your coordinator for today's event. Please note this call is being recorded and I will now hand you over to your host, Mr. Kayo Stamo, to begin today's conference. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you. I'm the president and CEO of Vaisala. Welcome, everybody. I'm joined here with our chairman of the board, Ville Voitio, our CFO, Karina Mourinen, and our head of IR, Paula Liimatta. Vaisala's fourth quarter, I would characterize it that the strong net sales growth was the characteristic of our fourth quarter as it was for the entire year. We had a solid performance during the quarter which ended a good year. The growth of orders received continued strong in both business areas and especially so in weather and environment business And I'll go deeper into the details in the two business areas in a little while. The net sales grew by 13%, and order book ended over 180 million euros, which gives obviously a very good start for the year 2023. And reflecting the performance in the year, board of directors is proposing 72 euro cents of dividend. That's your four euro cents increase from last year to the annual general meeting later in the spring. Before I go into the numbers, I thought that I would give you a little bit of a highlight on 2022 on some of the key areas from Vaisala. In terms of a strategy, product and technology leadership from sensors to digital solutions is extremely important for us. We had several key product launches in both industrial measurements and in weather environment. On top of that, I would like to highlight the acquisition of Aeris Weather, which is a subscription-based software company providing weather and environmental information, which we acquired and closed the acquisition almost exactly a year ago and now it's fully integrated in our data business and we are very happy with the acquisition as well as the progress that we've made on the digital business side as well. Speaking of that, the other key event during the year obviously was the launch of Paisala XWeather, which is a product family brand for our digital offering. It's a forecast and observation suite of services using a combination of intelligent hardware and software, and business models are software as a service and data as a service. And very much with the developers in focus. And as said, very happy with the progress during the year. The second key topic, which I've talked about to you in the previous quarterly releases as well, is the sustainability leadership. And if I think back to the year 2022, I'd raise two events during the year. One thing is the accolades that we got again from Financial Times. We were selected in top five. which is top five public companies out of, if I recall right, 1,600 public companies in Europe, in terms of ability to reduce or their track record of reducing greenhouse gases during the past years. Very proud of that. And the second highlight on the same sustainability topic is our commitment to set science-based targets, which we will send now for validation to SPPI in 2023. And then lastly, You all are probably very aware that reliability and quality are very much the words that are associated to our products and solutions. They are key elements on our offering. And as the Mars rover in the picture shows, We have been part of the Mars missions now for quite some time. An interesting story now is that we have actually been in Mars providing a weather forecasting or observation network in Mars for 10 years. The whole design was supposed to be lasting minimum two years. Now it's been 10 years and still going strong. And I think it speaks highly of the capabilities, technologies, and the commitment that the company has on the reliability and quality of our offering. Moving on to the numbers on fourth quarter. Growth of orders received continued strong in both business areas, and especially in weather environment business area, as I said earlier. The orders received grew 17%, and if we look at in constant currencies, that translates to 13% in constant currencies. And if we look at the market segments where that growth came from, meteorology, aviation, and industrial instruments would be the ones that I would highlight. They had the strongest demand growth. There were other ones as well, but the strongest ones were these three. Then if we look at the ending order book for 2022, We ended the order book with 181.5 million. The order book itself grew from third quarter 21 by 13%. And obviously, as I said earlier, it gives us a very strong starting point for 2023. And on the right, you can see the analysis on how much of that that's 80% of the order book that we have, starting order book that we have, actually is for the current year, i.e. 2023, and the 20% is then for the out years.

It's a similar ratio as what we have had already some time in previous year as well.