Bouvet ASA

Good morning everyone. Welcome to the second quarter.

My name is Per Gunnar Tronsli, and I have with me Steffen Garder, the financial director. I will tell you a little bit about what we have been doing this quarter, and then Steffen will tell you a little bit more about the numbers. We run the presentation, and then we take the questions at the end, and then we have a mix, and everyone who is on stream and is here in the room gets the questions.

And the answers.

The second quarter, 2026, is a good quarter for BOV. It has been a quarter with enormous activity, development in many, many areas, good result development throughout the quarter, and in total, solid profitability. It has been a quarter where we have won a lot of contracts, and especially two that we highlighted in the report, which are Kystverket and Kartverket, which I will come back to and talk a little more about. We have also expanded the business with offices, and we are expanding now, with Kongsberg, Kongsberg og Ålesund. Og så er vi veldig glad for at vi vokser også med nye medarbeidere. Så det har også vært en veldig positiv utvikling gjennom kvartalet. Så jeg kommer tilbake til alt dette litt nærmere. The operating revenues came in at 975 million, slightly up from the same quarter last year. Steffen came back to that. It is fundamentally a little more positive, because the growth in our own consultants is even stronger. The operating revenues came in at 122 million, which gives us an EBIT margin of 12.5. And then we have, as I mentioned, with the number of employees, which we ended the quarter with 2,403 employees. So we rounded an important milestone, and then we had a growth from the same quarter last year to 66 employees. So that is again from the previous quarter. I'm going to talk a little bit about when I talk about how much has happened. I'm going to be in on some of those things. First, a little bit about the number of employees. As I said, we ended the quarter with 2,403 residents. That's 66 up from the same period last year, and that's 12 more than in the previous quarter. Q2 is traditionally not a very strong quarter. This is a positive idea. In this quarter, it is also important to note that a lot of experienced competence has been recruited. Experienced competence is something we have good use for, to build teams and fill in the big deliveries we have with people with experience. And then we have other quarters, the next quarter, which is a quarter where we recruit more of the newly trained and fresh competencies. But as I said, a good recruiting quarter in relation to experienced competencies. So, a little about the sectors. What we see there is that oil and gas are developing positively, with an increase of almost 8% and now exceeding 41% of our business. and Omsetningen. What drives this development is especially the tasks that I have talked about earlier here at Ake BP, also a part of our energy, and it is also stable and unchanged what is our activity at Equinor. In the public sector, public and defence, we have a very positive development, and it is exceeding 21% and growing exceeding 12%. It is especially the activity we have on the defence and UDI. The Directorate of Foreign Affairs, and a customer I have talked about several times here, a new customer we got about a year ago, which is the tax state. We deliver the tax state in many regions, so that is what drives the development of the public sector. And then we have a decline in energy. This is a decline, note the numbers, from the same period last year. I commented on this last quarter, and that is that there are several parallel suppliers on Statnet. So the development, the change that has been there, we saw took effect last quarter, and it has actually unchanged this quarter. And then we have the services out there. Good increase, accounts for 6%. There are special businesses that I have also talked about here, KS Digital, those who have an assignment to develop standardized services for the entire municipal sector. That has become a big customer of ours, and it is especially those who are driving that development, together with Offshore Norway and some other customers. And a little bit more about the customer collaboration and the customer mix. To the left of you, you can see that we collect more of our turnover under the top ten. So we have seen a decline in the top ten. When we increase in revenue, we see that there are not necessarily a lot of new customers, but several customers who buy more. The same effect is seen on the 20 largest, but the biggest effect is on the 10 largest. Publicly, some are going down from 47 to 44. That effect is mainly linked to the effect I talked about, the power sector. And then the increase in private, then we get exactly the opposite, which I talked about earlier, with the ACBP, especially which drives a lot of the increase in the private sector. And then there are existing customers. It's the same picture. We have a lot to do with current customers, both within the 10 largest and outside the 10 largest. So there are some new customers there, and that's what we didn't have 12 months ago, part of the numbers. And that's especially Bir, which we have lifted up here. It is the renovation company that delivers to 11 municipalities in the Bergen region, Nordtømmer, Aske municipality and some others. And then, what I'm looking forward to talking about, is the new contracts that we won in this quarter. It was, as I said, a quarter with high activity. We experience high activity in the market. I'll get back to that in a moment. But this was also a quarter where, for a long time, there have been some big supply processes. And we are incredibly happy that we won the agreement with Kartverket. And Kartverkets social mission is a bit like It's not always that you think about it, but kartverket is almost an essential cornerstone in digital Norway. So everything we can think and see of kart- and positional services, and everything that has to do with ownership, ownership transfers, all of that, all of that is in kartverkets samfunnsoppdrag. And then we can think a little bit about the time we are in with geopolitical uncertainty. We can think about what is happening with awareness around total defence. We are a society with great openness. What the map says is to balance this with also ensuring the value of information. Both on land, cable grids and everything, and to the sea with the installations on the base. Very exciting. As I said, the new contract is a contract that extends over eight years, including the options. So this will be a customer we will work with for a long time. And then we will work with the entire breadth. It is the requirements, as we wrote in our words, essential resources. from the government side, to modernize this, so it's a big activity, and we can deliver on the whole breadth. In addition, we deliver from our organizations, especially in the big eastern area, and Sørland, and Rogaland. So it will be very exciting. This starts now. It starts with that some have already started, and then we roll slowly out over the autumn, and then we get that full speed out over Q4 and Q1 next year. Og så er det å telle år. Så det gleder vi oss til. Og takk for tilliten. Another customer, important for us, a customer we have worked with for many, many years, therefore also important to continue and strengthen activity, is what we won at Baren Svårt. Baren Svårt is a subordinate coast office. They have as a social contribution to develop the Norwegian coast and the sea area as the safest and cleanest Barrens Watch delivers a set of information services, both for occupational transport and occupational fishing, but also for you and me who travel along the coast. If you go to our website you will find an AIS map of all ships that move along the Norwegian coast. You will find fishing information, where fishing installations are, where the nets are lost, about fishing health, where there are outbreaks of one or the other. And you will also find what might be my favorite, which is wave washing, so you get very specific information. So this is an important information service to make our coast even better to travel along. This is carried on as we speak, so we will work with this for many years to come. And again, the full breadth, and then there are several regions with us that also deliver on this. And then I would like to talk a little about a customer who this year is turning 70 years old. And then we mark 30 years that we have been allowed to work with this customer. And the reason I bring it up is that I think it is a good picture of the entire digitalization of Norway. Viking, the rescue service, we know that, and they started in 1956, and then it was a simple goal, to help motorists in need. And as the car park grew and the mobility in society increased, Viking grew. On the other hand, there is a shift. Viking goes from being a purely executive business, i.e. a rescue mission, to becoming a central collaboration partner with many actors in the entire mobility industry. And then we talk about insurance companies, car producers, importers, fleet actors, warehouse owners, car dealers, and you and me. And all of these need fast and good information. And then the service spectrum for Viking has developed. We often think of it as car rescue, but it has developed into a partner for assistance services for insurance companies. So when you are traveling and you have to use your health insurance, there is a high probability that you will walk through Viking services and meet Viking Call Center, and then they handle everything on the back side. In this development, IT has become central. It has gone from being a support tool to becoming crucial for the entire business model. These systems bind everything together, from customer contact, to partners, to the simultaneous update of tasks, to reporting and invoicing. This journey we have been allowed to take part in at Viking for 30 years. Everything we are building here, There are probably some standard components, but this is Screddersøm. This is about agile development. It is about adapting the solution to exactly what Viking needs to develop service spectrums as they have done. A fantastic story, and one we are incredibly grateful to have been part of for 30 years. We hope we can look forward to the new 30. We are opening new offices. We have always believed in being close to our customers. And now we are opening two new businesses that are close to two very exciting cities, Ålesund and Kongsberg. And in these cities we find exciting circles and environments within the defence. Thank you very much. and all the customers who have not yet met us. In addition, there is something important with these cities. They have significant educational institutions, so access to food competence is good. And they grow on technology areas that are important to us. We are looking forward to it. We are looking forward to the possibility of Bovet, and the possibility of people in Bovet with interesting tasks. We hope that many existing and new customers will use the opportunity that this will give them. We are looking forward to this. Vi avsluttet kvartalet. Mange av oss reiste på ferie. Men da kommer sommerstudentene inn i BoVM. Og dette var jo... and many more in our offices. This is very important. It is important for us to use the power we have to give young people the opportunity to get into the industry and into the working life. And it is actually the case that in the time we are in now, we will need more people. And then it is a pleasure to welcome you here. We are lucky to work with the customers who create real tasks, so they come in and work all summer, and they work with real project tasks. And that is the health association, the foreign affairs department, Stavanger Hospital, Lyse, Husbanken, Venn Property, and several others. So we really appreciate that we have customers who want to be part of this, and then it is we who take them in and guide them and help them to build solutions that are actually used by these customers when people come back from vacation. So that is STAS, and I am also very happy that after a while there are many of these that we see again as bovere, and we need that. I have one last point that I would like to touch on. If you reflect on what BOV delivers, we deliver socially critical solutions within energy, energy production, power, power supply. in defense and security, and social services in various parts of public and private businesses. It is extremely important that we are a supplier that has quality and security at the highest level in everything we do. Many of the customers we work with are quality and security. That is what we talk about first. And that means that we are through our quality systems and revisions, and we were through that before this summer. And that is ISO 9001, ISO 27001, and the environment, and the working environment. In addition, we were, as we wrote in our report, one of the first companies in Norway that also certified us after ISO 42001. And that is an international standard for management systems for artificial intelligence. That is important for us. It is important for how we work with artificial intelligence and have security and good control over how we use it internally. And it is also very important for our customers that The same applies when we use the technology and the tools with the customers. That is why this is important for us, also for competitive purposes. Winning in competition on quality and safety. There was a lot that happened this quarter. This summarizes some of it. And then Steffen will go a little deeper with the numbers. Then I will come back and tell you a little about what we think about the future. I'm going to go through the second quarter and the first half of the year.

As usual, we'll start with the second quarter. As you can see, BOV's operating revenues were 975 million kroner per quarter. That's an increase of 0.6%, compared to the same quarter last year. EBIT was 122 million kroner, corresponding to an EBIT margin of 12.5%, against 12.7% in the second quarter of 2025. Resultatet etter skatt ble 93 millioner kroner, og resultatet på aksje endte på 90 øre. Hvis vi ser på broanalysen der nede, så ser vi at kvartalet er i praksis på samme nivå som samme kvartal i fjor. Men vi ser at de positive og de negative forholdene gjennom kvartalet utligner hverandre. Den største positive driveren er økningen i timprisen. Tidprisen økte med 2,3 prosent sammenlignet med samme period i fjor, og det bidro da positivt med omlag 20 millioner kroner. Samtidig økte gjennomsnittlig antall ansatte med 2,5 prosent, som styrket resultatet med omlag 6 millioner kroner. On the negative side, we see a reduction in the interest rate by 0.9%. This reduced the EBIT by 12 million kroner. The interest rate is still lower than it was last year, but the development through the quarter has been positive and shows a clear improvement compared to the start of the year. The quarter was at the same time positively affected by lower interest rates and ASA basing than in the same period last year. An important explanation is that a large part of the interest rate related to the Easter this year fell in the first quarter, while the interest rate in the second quarter became lower. The effect on the results was around 11 million kroner. So, the number of working days was identical with the same quarter last year, and we therefore have no calendar effect between the periods. Samlet sett viser kvartalen stabil underliggende utvikling, med et driftsresultat som i hovedsak er på nivå med fjoråret, til tross for en lavere faktoringsgrad. Og så ser du at skjermen blinker her, men vi blir fortalt at det skjer ikke på sendingen, ikke sant? Da går vi videre, så ser vi på de akkumulerte tallene etter første halvår, og da ser vi igjen at driftsintektene endte på 2 milliarder kroner, 1,5% lavere enn i første halvår i fjor. EBIT på 249 millioner kroner mot 279 millioner kroner året før. Det gir deg en ebit margin på 12,4% mot 13,6% i første halvår 2025. Resultatet etter skatt på 190 millioner kroner, tilsvarende 1 kroner og 83 øre per aksje. Broanalysen viser at prisveksten og økt antall ansatte er de viktigste positive bidragshyterne hittil i år. Timeprisen økte med 2,2% og løftet debit med omlag 40 millioner kroner. Og økt bemanning på 1,9% bidro med ytterligere 8 millioner kroner. The biggest negative driver is the factoring rate, which is reduced by 1.4 percentage points compared to the first half of last year. At the same time, the factoring rate has developed positively throughout the year, with a gradual improvement from month to month. As for the quarter, there is no calendar effect in the first half of the year. The number of working days is identical to last year. Let's move on and take a closer look at the revenue and result development. The revenue increased by 6 million kroner per quarter, but the underlying development is stronger than what the total revenue alone indicates. The revenue from our own assets increased by 3.8% to 908 million kroner, and is one of the company's most important revenue indicators. This still reflects good activity among existing customers and good demand for BV's competence and services. At the same time, we have significantly reduced the use of subconsultants. The turnover from subconsultants fell by 31%, and now only 5.5% of the total turnover is allocated to 8.1% at the same time last year. This is in line with our strategy to prioritize deliveries with our own employees. Kostnadssiden økte totale driftskostnader med 0,9%. Personalkostnadene økte med 4,8%, som følger flere ansatte, og en generell lønnsvekst på 3,9% de siste 12 månedene. Samtidig falt kostnadene til underkonsulenter med mer enn 31%, noe som bidro til å dempe den samlede kostnadsveksten. In spite of wage growth and lower rate of return, the company delivered an EBIT margin of 12.5%. This underscores that the company has good control of the costs and that the business has good competitiveness in a competitive market. Cash flow The cash law from the operation was minus 55 million kroner per quarter against the positive 6 million kroner in the same quarter last year. This is mainly due to the development of the working capital, and especially the new order for the payment of employees' tax deductions that was introduced in 2026. This affects the cash flow during the period, but not the underlying cash generation in the business. Contantstrøm fra investeringsaktiviteter var minus 6 millioner kroner og knyttet til ordinære investeringer, driftsmidler og egenutviklede programvarer. Contantstrøm fra finansieringsaktiviteter var minus 331 millioner kroner, og den klart største posten er utbetaling av ordinært utbytte på 307 millioner kroner til aksjonærene. Likviditetsutviklingen i kvartalet må derfor også ses i sammenheng med utbytteutbetalingen. Over the past 12 months, the company has generated 272 million kroner in operational content flow. This still supports the company's strong content-generating ability. As usual, we conclude with some words about the balance. It looks like this. And then it's just to repeat that we still have a strong financial position, with significant financial freedom of trade, no interest in cash, and unused credit trams. At the beginning of the quarter, the bank had a cut of 160 million kroner, In comparison with last year, the content modeling is affected by the fact that employees' tax deductions from 2026 are paid monthly to the tax state towards earlier each term. The one-capital ratio was 1.9 percent, up from 18.7 percent at the same time last year, and shows that the corporation maintains a solid financial platform. Likviditetsgraden var 1,08, og det er på nivå med fjoråret, og konsernet har i tillegg en ubenyttet kassekredit på 100 millioner kroner. Kapitalallokeringstrategien ligger fast. Vi skal fortsatt balansere en attraktiv og forutsigbar utbyttepolitikk med finansielle fleksibilitet for viderevekst og selektive oppkjøpsmuligheter. That was what I was going to say about the numbers, Per Gunnar.

Then I will just say a little about how we see the future. I think you can summarize from this report. We are on a positive optimistic tone for what we see coming forward. I'm going to go over some of the conditions we see. We have been in this industry for a few years, and we have been through a time where we have experienced reduced activity. There is no doubt that in the last quarter, and this quarter in particular, we saw what we call high activity in the market, i.e. pre-questions and needs from the customers. So that has had a very positive development for us. We are still writing this with a need for AI. It is, at least in two dimensions, of course there is a need for advice and guidance from the customers, but all these deliveries I am talking about, it is a misunderstood thing. This is something we have taken into our deliveries, we use it daily, people at us work with it, so it has become a part of our business. There is a lot of awareness, a lot of interest from the customer side, how we use it, how safe we use it, and what benefits we get from it. So, yes, a big question mark, a big focus around artificial intelligence. Again, and we have taken this up a few times, it is still the case that customers are, and they will always be, concerned about the business value that is created. And especially with the previous point, that we use tools in a good way that creates real business value. The theme there is a theme that underlies a lot of the composition in our service spectrum. We make digital solutions, but we also work a lot with the organizational and change management to get solutions into the business and create real business value. So we work a lot, of course, in the IT industry, and we are in the middle of this. It is an exciting development, so we have to have a look that is well fixed on the horizon in relation to what we will need in the future. So there is a significant focus on competence development and how we integrate new technology into our deliveries. We have to say that we are experiencing strong competition. Now we have seen that we, as we believe, deliver solid results, and it is perhaps a little unevenly divided in the industry, so we experience that there is significant competition, especially in the field of individual consultants and smaller teams. Of course, in the big competitions, These are the big actors, together with us, competing for them. And then, the last point. We experience that we have increased access to good competence. And that is good. There are more in the movement. And we work, as you saw, with how we recruit and grow with our own employees. So we work quite dedicated with exactly that. And now we are in a period where we think there is room for, both need for, and room for in the market to attract good people. So in that way, this is a positive picture. So all together, The quarter we have behind us, with what we have achieved, what we have won, what we have established, the people we have brought with us, plus the picture we see here, then we have a positive view of what lies ahead of us. So with those words I conclude, and then we have the opportunity, if anyone has questions, then we can take questions here. Is there anyone who has any questions? Then we have been crystal clear, which we are very happy about. So we thank you, thank you all who have been here in the room, and we thank all of you who have followed us on stream. So may everyone have a really nice day. Goodbye.