Vaisala Oyj

I am Kai Österman, the CEO of the company, and I am joined here with Heli Lindfors, who is our CFO, our chairman of the board, Ville Voipio, and as well as Paolo Liimatta, who is our head of IR. As usual, I'll give a short presentation on the quarter, and then I'll open up the meeting for the questions you may have. So when looking at the first quarter, it's characterized in terms of weak sales, but at the same time record high order book. And diving deeper into the sales side first, it's partly explained by very high comparable. It's good to remember that the quarter that we are comparing the sales to was a record high in the industrial measurement at the first quarter of 2023. So comparable is very high. And the market activity last year dropped in the second half and then remained on a lower level. And as indicated for the first quarter and for the actually entire year, we do not expect a major improvement on the market itself. Slight improvement towards the second half, but no major improvement during this year. So the market environment was clearly more difficult in industrial measurement than what it was still in the first quarter of 23. Then we had internally two things that impacted on the net sales. One very much planned, which was our cutover in the ERP side, where we moved into the new ERP during the first week of January. And there was kind of a planned cutover week when we moved all the data and got the new ERP up and running and have been working on that ever since. But that meant otherwise a loss of, if you look at, for example, the factory perspective, there's a loss of a little bit more than a week in terms of not being able to produce And like I said, that was very much anticipated before and planned for. And what was not anticipated was the industrial actions during the first quarter, which after we had kind of gotten the new ERP up and running post-first week, there obviously was quite a bit of a learning curve. When you take a complicated system or systems and system integration, There's a lot to learn for different people, different functions, different jobs to operate in the new environment. No matter how much training you do, it's really then in the end, the efficiency comes from actually working with the new system. and then simultaneously having an industrial action altogether, a full working week, and in conjunction a constraint on overtime, so there's actually the overtime was forbidden by the industrial action at the same time. That meant two lost weeks in terms of manufacturing. And that meant also that while the efficiency was slower, especially during the first six, seven, eight weeks of the quarter with the ERP, kind of a climbing up and getting, kind of catching up what we lost in the efficiency was very difficult or actually impossible to do the simultaneous action through the industrial actions. And furthermore, the learning curve was slowed down as, you know, as I said, comes from repeated use of new tools. And when you work on the new tools, then you are on strike for three days, work for two days, strike for three days, work for two days. It actually puts you back into in your learning curve. So kind of a getting up the efficiencies obviously was impacted as well by the simultaneous ERP ramp up and the industrial actions. Then other things in terms of what happened in the first quarter, we launched a new purpose, new brand, new strategic priorities. And this is very important for the company and clarity on what we are doing and how we prioritize our business. our work, our strategy, our investments going forward and so on. I'll talk about that in a second. And the second big event I want to take up at this stage was the approval of the science-based targets for the company. which is reducing the greenhouse commitment and plan to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions directly and indirectly by the year 2030 was approved by the SBTI organization. And a little bit more on that later in the presentation as well. But first, let's start with the renewed purpose and the strategic priorities. The purpose for the company is taking every measure for the planet. What that speaks of is really the importance of being part of the solution for fighting climate change, bringing solutions to our customers and being very responsible in our own operations. Taking every measure for the planet I think describes extremely well what this company is really for, what is our purpose now and in the future. It's also reflected in the category, how we define what category we are in. We are in instruments and intelligence for climate action. And again, the climate action is very much highlighted here. We are determined to be on the right side of the history in climate action. We are going to be part of the solution. not part of the problem. In terms of megatrends, a slight update there as well. Climate change, for us, is not a megatrend. It actually is part of the purpose. It's way, way bigger than a megatrend. It's the biggest challenge that humanity is facing. But within that, energy transition and industrial decarbonization is actually a big megatrend as we see it. It's actually part of these kind of solutions on how companies are becoming more and more sustainable, both in energy production as well as in their own operations and own products and services. AI and process optimization is a very important trend for us, especially when you think about AI a little bit longer term. What AI runs on actually is uniform, excellent quality data, and that's exactly what we produce. So I think this is a very important megatrend impacting our environment for next years to come. And then the health and well-being, you may recall this from a past as well, very important as well, partly related to climate change, especially kind of from a reducing biodiversity perspective, as well as then aging population around the world. So the challenges in health and well-being are just going to increase. And again, we play an important part in creating solutions. The success drivers are much what you have seen before. In terms of strategic priorities, we clarified them. First one being growing in industrial measurements through breakthrough technologies. That's very familiar from the past. And then drive profitability as global leader in weather systems. This is just clarifying that our traditional weather and environment business for institutional customers. We play an extremely important role. The importance of this for the societies in terms of adapting to climate change is very important, saving lives, saving infrastructure, especially vis-a-vis the increasing extreme weather events. And we play a very, very important role in it. And we have a very strong position and we see it as a possibility to continue to improve on the profitability on kind of monetizing that position while recognizing that we also carry a very important role in that whole industry. expand an energy transition and build recurring revenue in data, speaking out the growth opportunities, utilizing the great knowledge that we have created over the years across the company in how to measure weather-related parameters, weather-related events forecast weather-related weather and different weather parameters and monetizing that then in renewable energy, which you can think about, if you think about wind and solar, weather really is the fuel for renewable energy. And then the recurring revenue, i.e., data software and solution as a service sales, which we also see as an important growth opportunity for us. And then very importantly, more internally than externally, is the simplifying scale. As we are a growth company, when we are looking for new things, we have to at the same time always be looking at our old ways of working, and challenge ourselves how can we be more scalable, how can we be more efficient, how can we do the working practices that have brought us here, do they still apply for the future or should we actually take a new look at it and simplify them as such. very important from a small actions to bigger actions and across the entire organization and I think very important part of the being a growth company story as well. When we talk about climate change and sometimes it gets to be a little bit abstract on how do we really as Vaisala, how do we contribute? What does it really mean in concrete terms? And there's plenty of these examples if you go to Vaisala.com and I've taken here three very different types of examples on how do we contribute into climate actions through our own products and solutions. through our customers. The first example on the left is a Finland-based startup, Carbonate, who transforms concrete from being an emission source to be an emission sink. It's sometimes overlooked that concrete is actually one of the single biggest greenhouse gas sources, and there has not been an efficient solution on how to turn that actually in absolute terms also a very big CO2 source to be not the source and in this case actually a sink and with our instrumentation we've been helping carbonate to actually move from great idea to actually into real scale production and providing a real solution for an important element on human society's carbon emissions. In the middle, very different example. This is very much about the use of data. It's a city of independence in Missouri, U.S., who actually uses and improves its response to snowstorms using real-time weather data provided by us. And here, again, extreme weather events are more and more frequent, and that means also in the wintertime. And being the response to snowstorms is an extremely important part. And if nothing else, if you think about first responders' ability to actually do their job in case of kind of extreme snowstorms, it's very important saving human lives and so on. And here we provide actually the great data based on which the city of Independence actually has greatly improved its capability to respond to these kind of challenges. On the right, shipment industry, sea freight actually is quite a big source of carbon dioxide emissions as well. And lots of different kinds of solutions have been proposed. And one of the most more promising is to actually use sails of different kinds. In here, it's actually a mechanical sail, wind-assisted propulsion through Norse power. And here, in combination of their kind of a mechanical sail and our data on wind, accurate data on wind, we can actually jointly create a solution which reduces the fuel consumption of a sea freighter from 5 to 25, up to 25%. So a very significant improvement in terms of reduction in fuel consumption, which is directly correlated into reduction on greenhouse gases. Then moving on to the science-based targets, where really what we, during this quarter, the news was that we got the approval on our plans for the reduction from science-based targets initiative. And Our commitment is reducing our direct and purchased energy-related emissions to half from the absolute level of 2021 to by the year 2030. Here we already are very, very far. Actually, only 1% of our greenhouse gas emissions actually falls into this category. Ninety-nine percent of our emissions actually fall in the category of scope three, which is the lifetime usage of our product solutions, as well as then all the components, materials, and so on used for creating our production solutions. And here, I think, Partly this reflects also our responsibility on this subject that we have been doing over the many years already. We have been 100% renewable energy for many, many years. Our efforts on this actually are things that many companies are going to be facing a little bit later. And I think it's quite suitable for us to be a trailblazer on showing how your the scope three emissions can be halved in relation to gross profit by the same timeframe, i.e. by 2030. A lot of work to be done, but I think it's a very important part of both the values of the company, and I think it will give us competitive advantage as we progress on this target. Then moving on to the financials. So as I said, slow start in the year in terms of net sales. The orders received, it reflected partly the continued lower market activity, especially on the industrial measurement side. And here we are, remember we are comparing to the first quarter of last year when the market activity was record high. The order book, on the other hand, ended end of first quarter to 190 million, which is record, I said record high, up 10% quarter on quarter, so from fourth quarter of last year. And if you look at how much of that order book is slated to be delivered during this year, that's 75% is planned to be delivered during 2024. So that actually gives us a good confidence for second half. Net sales wise, first quarter down by 15% year on year. And I already talked about the things that impacted on net sales. On one hand, high comparable, that's what the slow market indicates for And then simultaneously industrial actions in Finland and the ramp up of the ERP system, especially the six, seven weeks beginning of the quarter actually were impacted towards the end of the quarter actually in terms of our own efficiency to take orders, to deliver, to turn orders to sales. I think we are pretty much back to normal already by now. Then the decrease on net sales, we partly were able to mitigate by lowering the operating expenses during the quarter as well. The gross margin, slight decline from 56% to 54 percentage points. That's reflecting the lower volumes in the manufacturing side. So if I look at how well did we manage to get the pricing, for example, through, we were kind of quite successful. When we look at isolated debt, we were very much able to mitigate increase in inflation in the components and services that we buy. But the lower than planned volumes during the quarter meant that the factory overheads since the only subscale usage of the manufacturing was used that meant that that was then reflected in the gross margin as you can see. Then looking at more into industrial measurement, the EBIT margin was 13.5 percentage points despite the clear drop on net sales. So the net sales was actually decreased when you look at year-on-year, almost a quarter. Orders received decreased by 14% when you look at year-on-year. The order book, on the other hand, by end of the quarter actually was up by 5%. When you look at the orders received decline on year-on-year, the one thing which, apart from all the things that I already explained, one specific thing in industry measurement side was also that we took some orders in in anticipation on the on the ERP change already in December of last year, which otherwise would have been kind of recorded in the quarter. And we are talking about in order of magnitude, four or five million in terms of orders as such. Again, it was the same things in terms of a gross margin side here, very much so that the lower delivery volumes, lower level of business led into lower utilization rate of the factory that impacted the gross margin side. One highlight I want to take on the industrial measurement side is the services sale, which I'm very happy to report that that grew by 30% despite the weak top line development otherwise. Moving on to weather environment, here the top line decline, which was 7% when we look at year on year, I would put that more in terms of that's kind of within the normal changes between the quarters that we typically have in the weather environment, taking into account the project type deliveries, the timing of recognizing revenue and so on. where do certain deliveries fall, whether they fall in the quarter or whether they don't and so on. So here, the net sales decline was not really that much impacted by lower market, nor that much by all the ERP changes and the strikes. The difference also between the industrial measurements and weather environment is that the time from purchase or the order to delivery is completely different. Typically, in industrial measurement, you can think about from order to delivery is three weeks, order magnitude, whereas in weather environments, it's three months. So there's more time to kind of catch up, despite the same impacts on ERP and the strikes. there's more time to kind of catch up and, and less prone to in quarter quarter incidents in, in, in, in weather environment, the gross margin continued to improve. So, so that that was now 51%. That's very happy to happy to report that as well. That's a continuation kind of, and that reflects the continue, the success of continuation of implementation of our strategy, where we drive the profitability in the, in the traditional side of the business as, as, as, At the same time, we look for growth both in the renewable energy and in the data sales. And the subscription sales actually did grow by 50% when we look at the year-on-year number on that. EBIT also reflects the successful continuation of the implementation of the strategy, reflects the improvement on the gross margin as well. Typically in weather environment, the EBIT is very heavily in the second half of the year. And now being kind of a clear, when you look at that, despite it's a very low number in absolute terms, it's clear improvement from, from the year before. And when you look at the kind of first quarters or time actually years before. Cashflow wise continued on, on good level. Some decline due to the fact of lower net sales, but overall in terms of cash conversion and so on, very good level cash conversion on 2.4. And then if you look at the free cash flow, about 15 million in the quarter. Leading also into this very strong financial position, the title, as I said, I think on past couple of quarterly calls, the title of this slide has been the same for a long time and I'm very satisfied that it stays that way. So we have very low leverage on the balance sheet and it reflects the asset-light business model that we have. The cash that we have had at hand, it's good to remember that we do have a post-quarter, we have the dividends payout and so on. And then maybe the other news here worth noting is the new capex investment, 10 million euros over a few years, where we are investing in new automated logistics center here in Vantaa, whereby we can automate and get much more efficient handling of our warehouse. And at the same time, we anticipate that that will give us further improvement in efficiency in the factory itself as well. And we now anticipate in the early summer when the estimated start on this project happens. Moving on to the market and business outlook, no change in the market outlook, exactly the same as what you saw in our fourth quarter anticipation for 424. and likewise for business outlook remains unchanged. Net sales we anticipate being between 530 to 570 million euros and operating margin between 63 and 78 million euros. And I would like to conclude the prepared remarks here and open up for any questions you may have.

If you wish to ask a question, please dial pound key five on your telephone keypad to enter the queue. If you wish to withdraw your question, please dial pound key six on your telephone keypad. The next question comes from Pauli Lohi from Indears. Please go ahead.

Hello, Kai, and thank you for the presentation. I would like to first ask about fixed costs, which declined by 7 million euros, or 12% from the comparison period. Was there any one-off savings, for example, related to strikes in terms of your own company, or should we see this as a valid run rate in the future?

So, no one-offs would be the answer. Actually, On the contrary, due to the strikes, we actually had probably a little bit higher operating costs since we had to post-strike time, we had to use overtime. It's a marginal cost increase, but nevertheless, The net of that actually is probably a net increase rather than a net decrease in OPEX. But it's more we post some project, we control very much the both hiring of new people as well as then especially external projects that we had and that's what draw it. Now, I would not anticipate that we kind of set the new level in terms of where we were in the first quarter. As I said in my remarks, it was more done for the mitigation as we saw the top line coming lower. And we managed that OPEX as the business moves. Okay, that's clear.

Do you think you lost any orders to the operational challenges and maybe postponed delivery? We did.

So back to what I said in industrial measurement side, not in weather environment. And in industrial measurement, there's two kinds of orders. There's things that are typically very small and very fast moving orders. And if I said on average, You know, from order to delivery is three weeks in this kind of a very fast moving, kind of a small order, kind of a order flow. It's actually faster than that. and it comes in and we deliver in the end of the following week, that's the promise, and that business we lost somewhat. I don't think it's any of permanent loss of market share, but think about it this way, that probably two weeks of net sales order of magnitude were lost. due to the fact that we were unable to deliver for, or the delivery capability was limited for a period of time. But that was kind of limited to that very period where we had the limitations on our capability to deliver.

Okay. Then about renewable energy, the new orders didn't increase from the comparison period but you still see it growing. So would you consider this order of not growing a sign of weakness or do you have a strong outlook?

I would say this way that it's a reflection partly on changing the geography where the growth happens. I think we've spelled out in the past years, especially Japan, which is the financial year is actually ends in end of March. And even if no company admits to being on the budget cycle, nevertheless, somehow the fourth quarters tend to be higher in activity in the annual years, and the relative weight on Japan is a little bit less than, it doesn't mean that it's dried up in any way or fashion, but it's a little bit less than what it was in the past. So it's more of a mix in terms of geographies. And when I look at the pipeline, you know, I'm confident on the outlook.

So the rate of Japan has decreased?

Yeah, relative weight on Japan has decreased.

Okay, okay.

Probably not, so we're still probably, so it's an example of things rather than the only explanation, but if I look at overall the pipeline as you indicated yourself, it actually makes me confident on the annual outlook.

Okay, that's clear. Thank you very much. That was all from me.

The next question comes from from Evli. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon. This is from Evli. First still on the ERP and industrial actions. So those were obviously flagged already in the year end report. Were the kind of effects more or less what you already then kind of assumed?

When we gave out the year-end report, the full scale of the industrial action was not, we were anticipating it, but we were not, it was not clear to us what the scale of that was, and so probably was not fully visible. But to a large extent, we knew it, and that's why we flagged it.

Yeah. then do you see any kind of sales spill to Q2 because of these issues in Q1?

No. I think from an operations perspective, if you look at that from a company perspective, we are back to normal. There's a whole host of items still to be ironed out in the ERP as usual, but it's not limiting our performance anymore. Industrial actions? Who knows what happens in the future?

Yeah, sure. Okay, thanks. Then on veteran environment, can you still open a bit more on the business mix? So, was it just basically, driven by higher services and subscription sales and lower amount of projects.

So that's basically where it comes from. So the mix was more favorable.

Yeah. And just making sure. So you had something around 1% negative effect. for cross margin from spot purchases last year to one. So now you had nothing.

That's correct.

Yeah. Then lastly, from my side, just a quick update on the airport surface observation system project. Has it started as you previously said? assumed, and should we expect that to deliver project sales now?

Yeah, it started already, and it's a multi-year project, so there's a certain amount of that will come to this year, but majority is actually for the future years.

Okay, that's all from me. Thank you very much.

Thank you.

The next question comes from Walt Terry Rossi from Danske Bank. Please go ahead.

Hi Kai, thanks for the presentation. First on the industrial measurements, adjusting for the upfront orders in Q4 due to the ERP implementation, can you say what would have been the kind of real decrease in Q and Q order intake?

I actually didn't do the math. It's a good question. In a way, as I said, 4 to 5 million would have been in other situations probably been in the first quarter rather than in December. And that's the order of magnitude. Actually the second thing impacting this order intake for the first quarter, since you asked the question and I forgot to say it in the prepared remarks, was that, There was some shift in terms of kind of annual blanket orders, where kind of especially over the past couple of years when there has been a kind of constraints in the component side that has given incentive for our customers to give us blanket orders, which were all recorded in the first quarter. And this year, that again was... significantly lower since there are no constraints as we just discussed. And our delivery promise is what it is. So the incentive of actually making kind of a commitment in the year, there's a kind of a question is that why would anybody We really want to do that in the beginning of the year, at least not to the same extent. So I think it's a normal thing. The market is more back to normal. And when you compare it to the last year first quarter, there's another five, maybe a little bit more. That order of magnitude takes five million when you compare it to the first quarter last year. that 5 million I see more spread out during this year rather than all coming in in the first quarter.

Okay. All right. Thank you. That's very helpful. Then on the weather and environment segment, just an overall question. What's the most important thing in improving the segment profitability in the longer term?

MR. Huh. I'll answer it. Even if you ask the most important, I'll still answer it. As I will. So it is both improving the profitability of the traditional side of the business, as well as driving scale, especially on the digital business side, improving the profitability and getting the profitability really through in the digital subscription sales. It has been still subscale in the past, but we are clearly seeing and we have an internal target when that will start to contribute also on the bottom line. And so that will be another one of a significant opportunity compared to last year and the years before.

Okay, thank you. I actually missed the first part. I heard the driving scaling in digital. What was the first?

The first one was the profitability on driving. Continue to drive profitability on the traditional side of the business.

Okay, okay. All right, thanks. Then two more. On the industrial measurements, what's then the most important thing driving the growth in there? Is it gaining new verticals or growing in existing ones?

I think short-term it's growing in existing ones, clearly. And I think short-term, if you look at this year, really the growth will come from more activity, more investments in segments that we are in, where investments around different kinds of industries have been on hold to a large extent. very cautious kind of a small scale if if anything uh around the world and and we are we do expect that that situation should be starting to improve during the second half uh long term obviously the new verticals are going to be important as well yeah yeah great uh then last lesson for me um

How has the data center solutions been growing within the segment? Can you give any color on that?

I have not, to be honest, I have not looked into it. It's not a material, but I don't see why there wouldn't have been any change in the trend that we have experienced over the past year on that specific thing.

Can you remind what the trend was?

The trend was obviously investments into data centers. It was one of the few exceptions to the rule of investments, new investments in our customer base. So people are still building new data centers and so on. So I don't see any change in activity level on that side.

All right. Okay, thanks. That's it from me for now.

Thank you.

As a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, please dial pound key five on your telephone keypad. The next question comes from Matti Rikkonen from Carnegie. Please go ahead.

Hi, it's Matti Rikkonen, Carnegie. Good afternoon. A couple of questions from my side. First of all, you had 15% growth in the subscription sales. I was just wondering, was there any seasonal or some unusual support behind that growth or was the growth kind of representative of the normal underlying trend that you see in the business?

There was no single deals, no seasonality, nothing like that. So it's the latter one.

All right, good. Then was there any particular reason behind the weather and environment order backlog which grew fairly fairly well or is it just kind of healthy new orders and less deliveries in q1 kind of boosting the backlog yes it's still it's the latter one it's a healthy backlog and we are seeing a good market market activity nothing nothing extraordinary in a sense all right then You mentioned that you had temporarily lower fixed costs in R&D and marketing, particularly in the industrial measurement side. When do you think that you will increase the costs again? Do you actually have external R&D which can be kind of scaled up or down because having kind of internal resources is it's quite difficult to save from them, I assume.

Yeah, completely right. And so if I start from a kind of second part, absolutely. So it's all coming from external, kind of slowing down external projects. And to some extent, slowing a little bit higher inside. But materially, it's all, I think about it, from external projects and external R&D and so on. And then when do we start to invest again? We manage the business in such a way that as we see the top line supporting the investment and we invest. Top line and the profitability supporting them and we invest. That all being said, we are in a long-term business. So we are very comfortable with our long-term outlook. and we do see a good return on investment on our long-term investments, especially on the R&D side.

Okay. Then regarding your guidance now after soft Q1, are your internal forecasts for topline and EBIT for Q2, Q3 and Q4 basically the same today as they were in mid-February, so that only Q1 would have been weaker?

Without going into exact numbers, I think the overall picture is exactly like you said. It really is the weakness If you think about it, and as I said in the remarks as well, so you've got strikes, ERP, like all things happening at the same time. That actually happened in a relatively limited timeframe. I think if I look at it, it's a number of weeks when the weakness happened rather than the number of months.

Okay. Let me rephrase. If we think that you had some figures, the most likely figures in front of you or the midpoint figures in the guidance when you entered the year, and now Q1 was weaker than your internal expectations, then if Q2, Q3 and Q4 are pretty much the same as your internal expectations were, then obviously the full year internal expectation should be lower because Q1 was lower. So is that what you are kind of looking for?

I follow the logic that you had. And I would answer this this way, that short-term outlook, meaning like if I look at this quarter has not changed at all, but then the ongoing quarter, but then if I look at the entire year, remember that what we are saying as well, that we are anticipating that the market starts to improve in the industrial measurement side towards the second half of the year. And there's obviously quite a bit of uncertainty and the capability to predict very accurately. Given the very short business that we are in, the accuracies of our forecast and the way we work is... I follow your logic in the math, but we... the tolerances of our models are bigger.

All right. I think you have received the question already beforehand, but I'll ask it anyway. Do you have any concrete evidence of improving industrial measurement demand in the second half?

Yeah, that's the anticipation. It goes back to what I said in the prepared remarks. Remember, the average time from order to delivery is three weeks, so we are not even close to taking orders in any meaningful way for what they can have at the moment. At the same time, obviously, we talk to the customers, we see the industry activity, and then we combine that with all the macro side, the PMI indications and everything else. And I would say this way, that I would be cautiously optimistic that our outlook should be realistic. the various indicators and the combination of them should serve, I think, to support the outlook that we are giving on the market side.

All right. Thank you. That was all from me.

Thank you, Matti.

The next question comes from Walt Terry Rossi from Danske Bank. Please go ahead.

Hi, Valtteri Rossi from Danske Bank again. Maybe it was actually answered just before, but follow up question on what makes you believe that the industrial measurements will improve in H2 and kind of what gives you confidence. But yeah.

I did answer that. You're right. I just answered that question. So if I look at really the kind of what we hear from customers, what we see, what their activities are, and combine that with what they say in public as well as in private as well as then what the macro indicators are, that's it.

All right, thanks. Maybe just a quick follow-up. Any ideas what next year might look like in industrial measurements? Is it full swing from the start?

We better come back to it a little bit more when we get into the second half of the year. I think it's a bit too early to speculate on that.

Okay, thanks.

There are no more questions at this time, so I hand the conference back to the speakers.

All right. Thank you, everybody who listened, and thank you for the great questions. So any further questions, you know where to contact us, and we are happy to jump on another call if you have any further questions. So thank you very much, and have a great weekend.