4C Group AB

Good morning and welcome to this Earnings Call webinar where we will deep dive into Foresight Strategies results for the first quarter of 2025. My name is Jonathan Jurisow and I will guide you through this session today. With me I have our CEO Jonas Jonsson. Also joining this call later on during the Q&A session is Anders Norgren, our CFO. And as usual, feel free to enter questions in the chat and we'll try to answer those after this initial presentation. So with that said, a lot has happened in the world during the first quarter and also at Forsyth Strategies. And Jonas, could you please give us a little overview of where we stand and your thoughts on the situation?

Yeah, no, thank you, Jonathan. And good morning, everyone. And thanks for joining this call. Yeah, I would like to just initially take you through a little bit of a sort of a focus area on our two main product segments. So we talk about our defense sales and we talk about our resilience sales. And I think everybody in the world today is aware of the discussions and the situations that are ongoing in the global defense buildup. We've seen shifts in the U.S. global politics and the U.S. approach to global politics over the last quarter, which we were not expecting, I think it's safe to say, at the back end of last year. We've also seen an acceleration in the European approach to defense spending and defense infrastructure and the defense rebuild that is ongoing. So I think some of the graphs that you can see on the screen here shows quite clearly that there is a significant investment going on at the moment into the market. This is right now at the sort of the political and the very high macroeconomic level. We are still starting to see that it trickles through into actually the purchase of new systems, into the purchase of new or more ammunition and that force generation build up etc but it is taking time but i think if you just look at the trends that we're seeing both in europe but also in for example as you see on the screen here in sweden there is a quite a significant moment and quite a significant movement going on at the moment uh in terms of where the defense organizations in europe are are heading um i think so how does that impact us at 4c well i think just as an example during q1 We've seen additions and expansions with both the UK Ministry of Defense, but also we've seen a significant contract with the Norwegian Armed Forces, which we're very pleased for, obviously. We've also seen that increased focus that comes from all of these different organizations across Europe. and NATO and the allied countries in terms of, we've now done the first initial stages of this rebuild in terms of looking at the new platforms, the rearmament of munitions, and we now start looking into how are we gonna put this into production? How are we gonna train all of these troops and these soldiers and this, sailors and airmen in terms of actual delivery of forced generation. So we're seeing quite an increase when it comes to dialogues with us in terms of how we can support with that. But I think and we're still assessing obviously, but we're still not we haven't seen the full impact yet in terms of our position. We've talked earlier about the first, second, third, fourth wave in terms of defense investments. And I still think we've got a lot more to see in the coming quarters and in the coming years in terms of how all of this investment and this ambition which is now being put in place is going to be converted into actual force readiness and and a higher military presence from the European countries. So a lot more to come. But I think all in all, we've seen a greater instability and uncertainty than we were expecting during Q1. But if you look at the macro trends when it comes to defense, there is a clear and present need in terms of the solutions and in the areas where we operate and where where Exxon, our military product, comes in as the ERP for training and force readiness. So really excited to see how this takes us forward during 2025 and beyond. And if we shift focus slightly towards the resilient side of the house, I mean, there's a lot going on. As I said, there's a lot going on in the world and everybody's aware of that. But just a couple of examples here. You saw earlier this quarter where Heathrow shut down because of an explosion in a power station overnight and the impact that that has on global society and global travel. And this is just one example of things that are going on. We see adverse weather conditions increasing. We see increased demand on supply chains and an increase or a decreased tolerance when it comes to disruptions. And this is obviously the area where 4C has been working for a really long time now, over 20 years, in terms of trying to get organizations to prepare in a more structured way for this. And that interest is also increasing, albeit in an environment where it's slightly more tricky to take decisions given impacts on global economies, etc. So during Q1, we had an event here in Stockholm where we launched our newest version of our continuity manager, which is one of the four elements in our resilience platform. And you can see as an example here on the screen, you can see a visualization of that impact mapping and how do you as an organization or how does an organization work in terms of being better prepared so that when something maybe not as extreme, but also in that case, but maybe not even as extreme as the explosion at Heathrow happens, how is that gonna impact your organization? And how can you then mitigate that? And how can you plan for being better prepared to handle that disruption? And I think one thing that we're seeing quite clearly as a market trend is that this kind of work, this preparation is now not only happening in the heavily regulated areas like financial industries, insurance companies, et cetera, but it's also increasing in the lower echelons when it comes to these areas because the requirement is coming that this is no longer a nice to have if you look at it from a board of directors perspective and you look at how you're running your business. So manufacturing, the providers within the supply chain and everything basically that is in a business to consumer operation is looking at how do we better prepare so that we can handle these disruptions when they inevitably happen. So a lot going on, a lot of challenges on the macro level, a lot of uncertainties, but obviously also an increased interest, which I think from my perspective and from 4C's perspective is shining a light on the services that we provide. So yeah, a lot going on.

Perfect. Thank you. And given that, let's circle back a little bit and look at Q1 results. I know that most of you are here to listen into that. And let's start on an overarching level and then we can go down on each market segments, please.