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Hiab Oyj Unsp/Adr
2/12/2025
Welcome to Cargotex Full Year 2024 results call. My name is Haki Vesikallio. I'm from Cargotex Investor Relations. Today's results and the final results for Cargotech will be presented by Cargotech's CEO, Kasimir Lindholm, Cargotech's and HIEP's CFO, Mikko Puolakka, and HIEP's president, Scott Phillips. Please also pay attention to the disclaimer in the presentation, as we will be making forward-looking statements. With that, over to you, Kasimir.
Thank you, Aki. And also welcome on my behalf to this webcast. It's a historic one. It's the last one for Cargotech. It's the 79th quarter reporting Cargotech figures since 2005. All in all, The Q4 and 2024 were strong. Orders were really good in Hayab. And Scott will come back to that a bit later. Book-to-bill was positive in Q4 and a really strong full-year profitability and cash flow. And this goes for both Hayab and McGregor. I think that Haieb did the best result ever, keeping in mind that we have a roughly 8% drop on the top line. And also McGregor performed on a very good level. It's the best year for McGregor since 2014. So really good and strong performance continued and this is the eighth quarter in a row when we have strong and stable profitability in the company. We also managed to sell McGregor during the fourth quarter that was signed in November and I will shortly come back to what we are doing now to go from signing to closing of McGregor. We had three main focus areas in 2024, and we delivered on all of these areas. We continued the strong business performance in a not very favorable market, so that is again a strength that has been shown by both Hayab and McGregor performing in a softer market. And we also completed the separation of Kalmar. So 14 months after the announcement of the demerger, that was then on the 27th of April in 2023, 14 months after that, we separated and listed Kalmar on the 1st of July in 24. And 16 months from the announcement, Kalmar was already operationally operating a total separate company. also from an IMIT perspective. Then the story around McGregor, of course, a lot of work to turn the company around and then start the sales process. And again, we signed the agreement with Triton on the 14th of November. And I will shortly come back to where we are in in that process. But all in all, a very strong year, both from the business performance perspective and also delivering on all the items that were set two years ago by the board regarding the demerger and separation of the three companies. So, regarding McGregor, the deal was signed in November. We are now working on going from signing to closing. The closing is expected in the latest 1st of July. I'm a bit more positive here in this area that we will be able to do it sooner than that, but that's, let's say, the target that we have. There are a lot of technicalities and legal aspects in this process, going from signing to closing, but everything has worked according to plan so far. And of course, McGregor's report that discontinued operations, and we will not go through McGregor results today in any detail, but as mentioned before, a very strong year for McGregor in 2024. Then the last mile in the transformation and on the transformation journey is, of course, to have HIAB as a standalone company, as planned on the 1st of April. The AGM invite is now out and the name change is on the agenda there. And then, of course, also part of that, Scott will then later introduce the management team for HIEB. And at the same time, the management team for Cargotech is stepping down on the last of March. And on top of these changes, we also are then implementing, of course, subject to AGM approval, governance model change for Hayeb, a similar one that we introduced for Kalmar then last spring, where Hayeb will have a nomination board as in a normal stock listed company. So the journey is on the last mile, and I'm confident that we can close the matters that we have left on the table, most of them as part of the AGM and then the closing of McGregor. And again, I'm a bit more positive that we can be faster than what we have anticipated here as the last date. With that, thank you all for the journey. This is my last quarter report as CEO of Cargotech. And with that, I will give the word to Scott, who will now go through then HAIEB and later on Mikko Puolakka, the numbers of HAIEB for the fourth quarter in 2024. Over to you, Scott. Thank you, Kasimir.
And good morning everyone from my side. I look forward to guiding you through the fourth quarter and the full year financial results for HIAB as a business area. We'll provide a bit more color on the financials later in Miko's presentation as a standalone entity. And in many respects, as Kazimir mentioned earlier, 24 was an excellent year for HIAB despite the continuing rough demand environment and the high level of uncertainty that we face. In addition to improving on our relative earnings, we were able to improve on all key business area level one KPIs for the year. And as order intake improved by 3% as well, our cash flow improved by more than 100 million. And this has enabled us to continue investing in creating incremental profitable growth and improving upon our business resiliency, which I'll come back to in later detail. So looking further into the order intake, On a full year basis, the business area improved year over year from 1.466 billion to 1.509 billion, driven primarily by the Americas as a geography, our larger key account customers, and our defense logistics segment. For the quarter, we also had a 3% positive variance, but the demand situation I would characterize as the ninth straight quarter, quite on a stable level, still driven by the factors that we've shared earlier, high cost of financing, our construction segment still remains soft, and we have overall a low level of demand still in some key geographies in Europe and increasingly in South Korea. However, our order book grew sequentially, which is good news. Now turning our attention to revenues, as Kazimir mentioned, we had an 8% decline year on year, as well as quarter on quarter. As our order book continues to normalize, the decline came primarily from Europe as America's region was up versus prior year, and APAC was relatively flat year over year. Our service sales continue to develop nicely as we had an all time high in revenue for both the quarter and the full year. So our long term targets for the service revenue remain valid. Of course, a lot of this will depend upon the development of the market demand and how the new equipment deliveries go over the next two to three years. Now, we're really proud about the fact that despite the 8% decline in sales, profitability improved year on year from 14.1% to 14.9% as a business area, which is an all-time high, as we had on the headline and Casimir mentioned. The result came as a consequence of executing on our plans to improve operational efficiency and our product cost base. For the quarter, our profit was flat year on year despite the decline in sales and was affected by approximately 15 million euros in non-repeating costs. And as we highlight here, if you look at the underlying profitability level, we highlight that as well as the reported profitability level. Of the 15 million euros non-repeating costs, they were associated primarily with four different cost buckets. The bulk of the cost, and I'll highlight this in just a second on another slide, we had 11 million. That was a consequence of shrinking our footprint in Italy from three to two. And that's going to help secure a much better long-term profitability, which we should already see the impact within this year. The second area was two other restructuring exercises that we did, all of which is related to the 20 million euros of cost savings that we announced prior quarter. Those added up to $1 million each in both areas, so that's another $2 million. And then finally, the last $2 million came from investment that we made to increase our management bandwidth so that we could execute simultaneously on several exercises that would help us improve our product cost. And that comprises the $15 million in the one-off cost. So on a relative basis, our profitability improved by 100 basis points versus comparable period last year. which is a strong result. Our return on capital employed remained above our target of 30.5%, and the profitability combined with reductions in our net working capital resulted in 323 million euros of operative cash flow for the year. So overall, I'm really pleased with the results our team delivered in executing on our strategy and building a business that's much more resilient than at any other time. So I would like to highlight three investments that we were able to make in the quarter that will result in incremental cash flows from operations in the future. I talked about this when I was taking you through the profitability bridge that we invested as a result of being able to optimize our supply chain in our heavy and super heavy business in Italy. This is going to help significantly improve our gross margins that we should start to see towards the second half of the year. The second investment is related to our truck mounted forklift business, which has grown substantially over the past several years, in which we will create a purpose built facility in Dundalk. This will allow us to grow the business more efficiently and provide a better experience for our customers and our colleagues. The third investment is in the UK related to a new service and installation center in Wrexham, replacing the existing facility that does not allow us for growth. And again, we can give more color with regards to the details around the financials. In total, between the factory and our customer support center investments will require approximately 25 million euros of capex within this year. And as I mentioned earlier, I'm proud of our global team successfully executing on our strategy that we shared with you last May. We have signed, relative to our North American piece, we've signed seven new distributor agreements, and that will enable us to better service our customers in more geographies where we are currently subscale, two of which we've highlighted on the page. So we agreed We agreed a distribution agreement with Ring Power in two parts, one covering our loader crane business, the other covering truck mounted forklifts. We're really excited about this as they're an outstanding full service provider for sales and service with scale in parts of the US where we are currently subscale. In addition to the distribution agreements that we've signed, I'm proud to represent the team in telling you that we introduced 45 new solutions last year, of which 41 are relative to our equipment business, four relative to our service business. So it sets us up quite nicely to deliver on our long-term strategic targets. So just guiding you through those, the 7% growth over the cycle, remains the same as well as our return on capital employed as well as our sustainability ambitions. What did change with the technical adjustment and now that we have a good view in terms of the additional cost as a standalone entity, our long-term comparable operating profit target is at 16%. And I'll take you through the details of that in the next slide. Additionally, we've added the gearing ambition, which we aim to stay on a long-term basis under 50%. There may be periods that could go above, but our ambition will be much as it has been with Cargotech. And similarly, we have an ambition to grow our dividend. We aim to stay in a range of 30% to 50% of our earnings per share. So looking into a bit more detail in terms of the long range targets relative to our profitability bridge, if you think about where we ended at 2024 at 14.9%, the three elements that got us as a business area to 18% still remain the same. So we have growth that we seek in geographies and segments. We have incremental profitability that we aim to drive through our business excellence platform. And we aim to have a better business mix or a sales mix with ambition to grow our services business slightly higher than our equipment business. That got us to 18%. Doing the technical adjustment, which amounted to 1.7% of sales in 2024, that takes the starting point to 13.2% and our targeted endpoint at this time at 16%. So as Kazimir mentioned, I would like to take you through briefly an introduction to the team. I'm highly privileged to lead such an international and capable team representing eight different countries, many of which you know from prior capital markets events and other investor touchpoints. And so this is the team that has delivered the excellent results and quite confident that this team will continue to do so. We've got Mikael Burnix leading our services business. Harmony Luski, who's leading our demountables and defense business. Barry McGrain is leading our truck mounted forklift business. Martin Saint is leading our tail lift business. Magdalena Vojtovic is leading our light and medium loader crane. And as an interim leader that we go into the next time period with, we have Marcel Buxom, who's been leading our heavy and super heavy business. You know Mik go quite well as our CFO. Sana Ahonen is leading our sustainability strategy and business excellence function. Gita Janssen is leading our HR. Birgitta Skull is leading our communications and marketing. And Taina Torkman is head of legal. We have an open position that I currently fill on an interim basis for business operations development. So really excited and privileged to lead such great team. So with that, I'll turn it over to Mikko.
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