7/19/2024

speaker
Sanna Kaje
Head of KONE Investor Relations

Good morning and welcome to KONES Q2 result presentation. I'm Sanna Kaje, Head of KONES Investor Relations and I have here with me today our President and CEO Philip Delorme and CFO Ilkka Hara. But before I let Filip and Ilkka present today, a short notification. We've heard that there are currently some global telecoms issues, and there is a risk at the moment that we might not be able to take your questions online. So I wanted to give that as a heads up. But let's see how things develop. But with that, I'll hand over to Filip.

speaker
Philip Delorme
President and CEO

Good morning, Sadan. Good morning, everyone. Glad to be with you today. So I'd like to start by sharing a couple highlights from the quarter. First and foremost, I'm very pleased that the focus on service and modernization is delivering results. We saw, again, strong service sales growth at 9% and record high modernization orders. We also saw the sixth consecutive quarter of profitability improvement, which has been and is high on our agenda. The market outlook has mostly remained similar to what we saw three months ago. We still have a couple of updates. The first one is the China building solution market continues to be challenging and we have downgraded the market outlook slightly. At the same time, we have upgraded the outlook for the North American modernization market. Finally, something I am very happy about, which is our employee engagement improving and being well above the global benchmark. So now let's take a look at all of this in more detail. I'll start as usual with the financial highlights. So for me, the standout of the quarter was the double digit growth in orders in three out of our four areas. As said, we had very strong orders in modernization, but also some good wins in new building solutions, for example, in Europe. At the same time, Chinese new building solution market continued to be challenging. Overall, our orders received grew by 3.6% at comparable exchange rates. Our sales were stable in a quarter at comparable currencies, with continued strong growth in both service and modernization, while, as I said, the new building solution sales declined, significantly driven by China. Our adjusted EBIT margin improved by 20 basis points from the previous year, now the sixth consecutive year-over-year improvement, and the cash flow was solid. ILCA will, as usual, elaborate more on the financial in a couple of minutes. So next, I'd like to share a couple of exciting customer references. And as usual, we've taken the four areas of Coney, two examples in new building solution and two examples in modernization. First, a very typical project ahead of the Olympics, Le Grand Paris Express. We have delivered 56 escalators to the Saint-Denis playhouse station, which serve one of the key venues for the Summer Olympics. It's been of utmost importance for the customer that we are able to deliver on time and with high quality despite the complexity of the project. So it was in fact our earlier track record in reliability and good collaboration that has been one of the key reasons for being trusted with several orders in this project. The second case I want to share is a high-rise project, Wassault Tower in Dubai. This is a project where there was a lot of groundbreaking innovation on sustainable construction in a building. And sustainability was also one of the key criteria for choosing KONE as a supplier for the over 30 elevators with regenerative drive and the four escalators. We also enabled efficient construction during the project with our super-fast construction time-use elevators, and the customer chose also our 24-7 connected service for predictive maintenance. I also want to highlight a couple of exciting modernization orders, which again is a highlight of Q2. The Xu Jiahui Garden is a residential complex in Shanghai where we will upgrade 14 20-year-old Kone mini space elevators. The project is a great example of the rapidly growing modernization opportunity in China, where actually we are doing very well. The last reference is from Chicago in the US, where we were awarded a large office redevelopment project, the Thomson Center, Once completed, the building will become a Google campus with more than 1,000 workers. And also in this project, sustainability was highly important for the customer. Now, let's take a look at some other highlights for the quarter by business lines. So first, services. We had another quarter of very strong growth in our service base, taking us above 1.7 million units in service. The recent bolt-on acquisition contributed to about 1.5% of the growth, but also the organic growth remained above 5%. We also continue to scale and to further develop our new digital tool that enables us to perform services in a smarter way. One example is the remote service that we talked about last time that we are expanding to more countries across Europe and it's a real hit with our customers. In modernization, the clear highlights were the many project wins that demonstrate both the market potential but also our competitiveness in the market. We continue to strengthen this competitiveness by developing further our KONE upgrade partial modernization solution by broadening the coverage of the offering for both KONE and non-KONE equipment. The great thing about partial modernization is that instead of replacing the whole equipment, we can improve the reliability and ride comfort significantly in a sustainable way. last but not least in new building solution we've worked hard to further improve our offering especially for the highly cost conscious residential segment to even better match the customer needs in a cost competitive way and as a final highlight i want to mention our gen ai assisted tendering tool that we've been scaling it's quite exciting how we can improve the responsiveness and sales efficiency with the help of GenAI that everyone is talking about. We also got valuable feedback from our employees and customers from our annual surveys, and these two points are two key strategic goals for us, so they are really important. So first things first, employees, I'm really happy that our employee engagement improved during this period of many changes in the company and continue to be well above the global benchmark. We saw strong results in well-being, inclusion, and intent to stay with KONE. And I'm also very thankful for the very high 92% participation rate in this survey. In the customer loyalty surveys, we improved on many aspects. For instance, we saw a strong increase in modernization. And at the same time, the results provide us with very good insight on the areas where we need to work hard to improve the customer experience. Finally, we have also made a new appointment to our executive board. So Kaya Bridger has been appointed Executive Vice President People and Communication for the company as of July 1st, 2024. Kaya began her career at KONE in 2015 and has held various leadership positions in People and Communication, most recently as Vice President People and Communication for KONE Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa. I'm really happy to have Kaya on board in the executive team, and I want to welcome her warmly. She's a fantastic addition to the team. I would like next to hand over to Ilka, who will go through the market development and the financial in a bit more detail. Ilka, the floor is yours.

speaker
Ilkka Hara
CFO

Thank you, Philippe. Let's next look at how our markets are developing in the second quarter. In the quarter, the market was actually quite similar to what we saw in the first quarter already, with a couple of things to highlight. First, in the new billing solutions, we saw gradual stabilization in Americas and Europe, while the market continued to be difficult in China. Actually, even slightly tougher than what we expected. The markets continued to develop positively in services and in modernization across all areas. with even some pick-up in North America. The Asia, Pacific, Middle East and Africa market continued to be the most positive overall, although there was some temporary slowdown in decision-making, for example in India, related to the elections that happened during the quarter. Then let's look at the financials for the second quarter. Our orders received grew by 3.6% at the comparable currencies in the quarter, which was a bit higher growth than what we've seen on average during the past couple of years, and is a good result given the tough market environment. This good development was driven by significant growth in services and modernization. In the new building solutions, our orders declined clearly at the comparable exchange rates driven by China. As Filip already highlighted, our orders grew at the double digit rate in three of our four areas when measured at comparable exchange rates. Our margins of orders received was again fairly stable year on year, with a decline in China and a slight improvement in the rest of the world. Then to sales. Overall, our sales were stable at the comparable currencies in second quarter. Our new building solutions sales declined by 11.1% as a result of the slow construction market in China. On the positive side, we saw again strong development in services with 9% growth and in modernization with 11.1% growth. Geographically, we saw quite a strong growth in Americas at 9.9% and in Europe at 5.8%. Asia-Pacific, Middle East and Africa continued to grow well at 6.6%, but this was below the trend for the area, and the reason for this was the slowdown in order book rotation due to, for example, the India elections that I mentioned already earlier. In China, we also saw slower order book rotation due to the slowness in construction market. We also managed the deliveries very tightly to ensure our healthy cash flow for the business. As a result, our sales declined by 17.2% in Greater China. What's probably worth mentioning on China is that the services and modernization businesses have continued to develop positively there, and now represent one third of our sales in the area. Then moving to adjusted EBIT and profitability. As said, we had the sixth quarter of margin improvement in a row. This is important, as improving profitability has been a clear focus for us. The adjusted EBIT margin improved by 20 basis points, and our adjusted EBIT increased to 335 million euros. The positive drivers of profitability were the better margin in our new building solutions and modernization deliveries outside of China, as well as the positive impact from the business mix. We also continued to see some positive impact from savings from the operational model renewal completed last year. On the negative side, our margin declined in China as a result of the earlier seen decline in the margin of orders. and overall, the growth-based inflation increasing our fixed cost. We continue to be focused on product cost reductions, aligning our operations to the current market environment, particularly in China. Last, but definitely not least, is cash flow. We had a solid cash flow from operations in the quarter at €313 million, which was a bit above last year's level. Year-to-date, we are now slightly down from previous year. Our working capital continues to be strongly negative, although now slightly less negative than in the beginning of the year. The key drivers for the year-to-date change have been the positive we always get in the early part of the year from service invoicing cycle and the increase in accounts payable, where we've been working on the payment terms. Our inventories increased somewhat as a result of the challenges with logistics in Red Sea, and our accounts receivable increased slightly outside of China. Then let's look at the full year business outlook. For 11 out of our 12 end markets, the outlook is actually positive. Modernization markets are expected to remain very active, and the outlook is positive also in services. In the new billing solutions, the market outlook continues to be mixed with stable outlook in North America and Europe, growth expected in Asia-Pacific, Middle East and Africa, and China expected to remain difficult. We have made a couple of changes to our market outlook expectations. We now expect China new billing solutions market to decline by over 10% in units with continued price pressure. On the other hand, We are even more positive than before on the outlook for North America modernization market and expect that to grow over 10%. Then to the business outlook. We have specified slightly our guidance for the year, now that we have already two quarters behind us. We now expect our sales to grow 0 to 4% at the comparable exchange rates in 24, while previously the range was 0 to 5. The adjusted EBIT margin is now expected to be in the range of 11.5 to 12.2, while the previous range was 11.5 to 12.3. The drivers supporting our performance are expected to be the continued strong growth in service and modernization, improved margin coming through in deliveries outside of China, and the strong order book and the savings from operational model renewal, which we saw still in the first half. The drivers burdening our performance are the decline in new billing solutions market in China, persistent cost inflation, and our decision to increase investments in R&D and IT slightly. I would also like to mention the logistics cost as something where we see some risk related to the Red Sea situation. I would now like to hand over back to Filip to summarize our presentation.

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