NCC Group plc

Good morning everybody and welcome to this presentation of the third quarter 2024 for the NCC Group. I'm Thomas Karlsson, CEO, and with me here today I have Susanne Littander, our CFO. But let's start by looking at our key numbers.

In the third quarter, NCC had orders received of 13.3 billion SEK. The order backlog was 53.5 billion SEK. Net sales in the quarter was 14.3 billion, and in line with the preceding year. Operating profit was 665 million, an improvement by about 8% compared to the same quarter last year, adjusted for capital gains from the divestment of buying assets.

Good morning again, and let's look at how you can think about this quarter for the NCC Group. We had a stable third quarter, and for us, stable is good. Earnings increased compared to last year, adjusted for that we had a capital gains from the sales of a subsidiary last year. We are up 8%. Increased orders received. We have rather good orders received in the quarter, but more importantly, we have booked a bill on a rolling 12 basis on one. We see a continued positive outlook for the market, however divided, but we see a good demand for infrastructure, public buildings, defense and other types of large segments. We see in the quarter, we see continued improvements for industry. And I will quantify that in a little while. Earnings up for building Nordics and stability in infrastructure and building Sweden. And finally, property market is still slow, but we see a positive signs in the market from the lowering interest rates. That's sort of the gist of it from the quarter. And let's give some details. And then Susanne will give you more details on that. Good orders received. The third quarter is seasonally always a little bit lower for the simple reason that we have a vacation period during July and August. But we have good orders received in this quarter. We've had that for some time and we now have a booked bill of one. While maintaining... a disciplined approach to tenders, and that's important going forward. That gives us a stable order backlog on par with where we were last year. And just to give you some examples of the orders that we have won this quarter, we have another phase of the hospital project in Västerås, Sweden, that's the largest one, 2.5 billion, but we also have a production facility in Örnsköldsvik and we have continued refurbishment projects in Denmark, which is a segment that we really like. Net sales on the same level in the quarter and year to date. There was a pronounced seasonality effect in the beginning of the year due to the Easter. This quarter continues, so we have net sales on the same level as last year. EBIT up 8% in the quarter, including the capital gains from the divestment. And you can see that we had capital gains of 175 million dollars. on this slide. So 665 is the number for Q3. If we break that down to the business areas, we can see that infrastructure and building Nordics and buildings wind together all together pretty stable and improvement in building Nordics. And that continues the trend from earlier on this year. But the big improvement is from industry continuing from the already good year last year, continuing to improve this year. PD, a good quarter, not from divestments, but from the fact that we are now starting to see rental income from the Finnish projects that we have in the portfolio, bringing us to 665 million in EBIT. If you look at our financial targets, we have for the short and medium term, we have the earnings per share at 16 SEC. We're now at 12.7. Net debt should be below 2.5 times EBITDA. We are significantly lower than that on 1.79. And then, as you know, we have a dividend policy of 60%. eight SEC this year. Half of it has already been paid and the second half is coming up in a couple of weeks. Environmental and climate targets. CO2 target will have to be revised next year because for scope one and two that we have a target of minus 60% until 2030. We have already now reached minus 65%, mainly due to more biofuels in our asphalt production. Scope three with the target is minus 50. We're working with the important categories and with our suppliers and the most progress we made with rebar steel. And the health and safety target, we have a target for 2026 of having a lost time injury frequency four of below two. We are now at 3.8 at the rolling 12 basis. The last two quarters, we've had really encouraging development, and I expect that to be more visible later next year. So to finalize, we have a continued positive market outlook divided, but with an underlying demand still strong in infrastructure, industry and public market segments. Property market still slow, but we're starting to see some positive signs driven by the lower interest rates. And with that, I hand over to you, Susanne.