Bonava AB (publ)

Good morning and welcome to Bonava's headquarters here in Stockholm and the presentation of the results for the first quarter of 2025. For those of you who may not be familiar with Bonava, we are a residential developer operating throughout Northern Europe with the purpose of creating happy neighborhoods. My name is Fredrik Hammarback, and in just a moment, you'll hear from Bonava's President and CEO Peter Wallin, as well as our Deputy CEO and CFO John Johnson. As always, we will open up the floor for questions at the end of the session, and you're welcome to start submitting your questions online at any time. And if you'd like to participate live, please dial into the conference call and press star 5 to ask your questions directly. Last but not least, please note that today's conference is being recorded and will be made available on our corporate website, ponova.com, along with a PowerPoint presentation later today. With that, let's get started. Peter, over to you.

Thanks a lot Fredrik and good morning everyone and finally it's time for us to report the Q1 in May. So starting off by giving an introduction here into the Q1 report. If we look around where we are in the market, we can see that we have an improving market and this is of course driven by the lower interest rates, the high disposable income. and the pent-up demand for housing. And if we look around what's happened lately and also after the close of the Q1, of course, the discussions regarding tariffs and different discussions is impacting and increasing the level of insecurity. But we can't see any major impact yet from the demand. We see quite high interest in the products that we are launching into the market. and we are not directly impacted as you can understand in our cost base but of course this is more an impact on our cost customers and also on the rental side which we saw a big pickup in 24 on and we've already reported in the quarter here our first Swedish deal in a number of years We are seeing an increasing interest also on that side. So we are hoping that we can close a quite interesting pipeline of B2B projects during 2025. And we have taken a lot of measures to adjust the cost base, to reduce the net debt and to decentralize the organization and the business. We are closer to the market and closer to our customers. And that also means that we are well set up to navigate in changing market conditions. If we take a little bit of a glance into our numbers, we are increasing the sold numbers and the started numbers in a good way. And we are increasing the sales rate in our ongoing production to 66%. If we look into the P&L we are increasing the EBIT margin to 4% and of course that is a level which is not a level we can be happy with long term but it is an important first step on our plan on the controlled growth path that we will continue to talk about. Of course, we have an impact of the lower cost level that we have in the business. And this is an impact which will grow as we grow the volume during the course of the year. And then we also had a good timing in renegotiating and launching a new bond of 960 million, maturing, extended the duration to mid-2028 and also lowering the cost. And this is the first step of many steps to decrease the financing costs. And this is something that Jun will address shortly as well. So if we take a little bit of starts during the quarters, we have started projects in Berlin, Schönefeld, an investment where we have worked on many years successfully. Årsta Park is the B2B deal in Sweden I talked about. That's in Uppsala, Sweden, and 231 units, so it's quite a sizable project. We have another Berlin project, and then we have a project in Riga and Latvia. And the Latvian market is doing really well. If we are glancing a little bit on the second quarter, I am super excited because on Sunday, the coming weekend, we will have a sales launch on our fantastic project Fredman here in Stockholm. And that will be a very good test on the Stockholm market also now. In total, it's 120 apartments in these two buildings that you can see on the left-hand side. And it's a very strong interest here. That's going to be really interesting. Another very good and interesting project is Renata in Helsinki, Finland, which is very close to the inlet of the Helsinki harbor with water around it. And we have a very strong interest in this. So we are hoping to start this during the second quarter shortly. And last but not least, we are also working outside Leipzig, Lake Sturmtal, where we are doing a lot of houses and in a big investment. And we are launching more projects there in the second quarter. So all in all, a lot of activity. And this is also one of the themes for John.

please thank you Peter and good morning everyone I will take you through the financial performance in the quarter and try to guide you so if we look at the If we look at this slide with the units in ongoing production, we see the trends we want to see. So we see an increased sales rate, which Peter talked about, 66%, which is the highest number in many years, actually. And it allows us to start production in many of our projects. facilitates this controlled growth, which we have both talked so much about. We also see that the number of units in ongoing production is growing, and that will steadily grow towards the number 5,000, which we aim to reach somewhere in next year. And that requires starts of 3,500 to 4,000 units per year in order to reach that level of above 5,000. If we look at the next slide, which is the completed unsold units, which is something we continuously monitor, we can note that we sold off 20% of the old inventory in the quarter. That's equal to 77 units. But we also completed three big projects in the Baltics in the quarter, and that resulted in an increase in total completed unsold but a lot of those were then completed only in q1 and we haven't been able to sell them out in the same quarter and the reason for that is also that baltics have different market dynamics where you tend to purchase the unit only when they are complete and not on drawing ahead of the actual production completion. And that is different to, for example, Sweden and Finland. But we are tracking this continuously, and this is still something we focus on in order to get on the healthy levels. And we expect this to decrease further in the quarters to come, but it's only temporary up because of these three projects in the Baltics. So if we look at the segment performance in the quarter and note that as we explicitly said so in also in the capital market day we have changed accounting principles from completed contracts to percentage of completion. Why are we doing that? It is something we have worked on for a long time and it's also very relevant because it tracks our performance here and now and not relating to what happened one and a half year ago or one year ago. So there is a of course it's close link between the two accounting principles but there is a delay in the effect you can see in ifrs completed contracts versus percentage of completion There's also another reason that by having the percentage of completion, you can benchmark us in the industry in a much easier way, because this is a known accounting principle also in the industry. And if we look at the quarter specifically, we see the trend. Last 12 month trend picking up. So we are now on 4.4 percentage. Remember, we have given a guidance of 5 to 6 percent for the full year. And this is exactly according to that trajectory which we plan. We see an improved gross margin and we see stable cost structure related to that one. Also note that as we only started to pick up in starts and sold units in Q4 last year, it takes time to build this up. So you will see a gradual improvement in both percentage of completions and the completed contract IFRS numbers in the second half and gradually, gradually growing compared to the previous years up towards our targets. We have a little problem here with a technical delay. Thank you. So the business units performance, if we go into the details here, we see something which I'm very happy about. We see all margins now with a positive development versus last year. And we see it consistently with Germany, Sweden, Finland, Baltics, all improved situation compared to last year. And a specific highlight is, of course, that Sweden are now back in black numbers in the quarter. I should also mention that in other, we had like a release of provision last year, which impacts, so it's actually 8 million impacting, which should have been higher last year without that release of provision. So all in all, strong Q1 in percentage of completion and according to the expectations and the plan. If we look at Germany, we have also those improved margins. Remember that Q1 traditionally in Germany is not so much activity. We have increase in sold and started units and we have stable margins improved. We have made important land acquisitions in, for example, Vislok in Stuttgart, and we have control over the costs, which are stable versus the last year. Sweden, I mentioned, we really see a turnaround on the market. Slowly, slowly, it's gradually improved market climate. And of course, from a low level. But we were very happy to see this also a major B2B project sold and started. And the total value of that one is around half a billion SEK. We have a strong pipeline and are ready for the starch as the market allows. And as Peter mentioned, we have some exciting starch and invitations for upcoming projects coming. Also, they improved the gross margins on this one. For Finland, the market climate is still slower. We see slowly picking up, but from very low levels. And they are behind the curve of the other markets. But we see a market turnaround also here. And what's notable for Finland in specific is that the projects we now have have very strong margins. So we have done a lot of the hard work in order to get us there with the projects we have in the pipeline. And also like with Sweden, we have many projects ready to start. And with these margins, we will also expect a better result. The last region. which is the Baltics. We also see a growth in sold units in particular. We completed a couple of projects, but we expect to start more projects. And we see that Riga and Vilnius are really picking up, while Tallinn has still a slower market situation. The B2M projects are really progressing well with a high leasing rate and improving returns. So better than planned, you could say, on that one. and the Baltics continue to deliver well. If we look at the building rights portfolio, I think this is something we have shown previously as well. We see a very flat trend versus where we ended last year, 24. We see a reduction versus Q1 last year, which is the inner circles you see in these pictures. But that is also when we have optimized land back and the building rights to have the right portions between the different territories, geographies. We will see continued increase in Germany as we need to invest in new land. Also in the Baltics we have a similar situation where the total dynamics between the markets then will even out and be more relevant to the growth we have seen in the last couple of years. We will also want to see more off-balance investments. And the reason for that is that it also gives a good profile for us in the liquidity planning and investment planning. So it should be a healthy mix between the markets, but also between the aging and when they are ready to be built on. And the last one is also when we need to do the payments and how we work with the cooperation with the different partners in the context. So net financial items and net financial items is higher in the quarter, but it's explained a lot by the fees we had associated with the new green bond. So that is the biggest explanation. We also have FX effect from vendor loans impacting partly and you will see this in the bridge in the notes we have in The quarterly report. But what I think is really important is that the interest costs are coming down and this will be a positive effect contributing to the net profit as we grow the business and then interest costs will be lower in Q2, Q3, Q4 and so on and on. And this has been something we have worked very hard, not the least by decreasing the net debt, which I will come back to, but also working with the partners and getting more and more project financing in as a key to this trend. If we look at the operating cash flow, that also continues with a stable development. EBITDA in this context is done from the completed contracts, the IFRS measure of it and not the segment reporting with percentage of completion. So we didn't have so many units recognized in the quarter, which was also very logical because they come from a production period from 23 to 24. So lower recognized units before it will pick up again. So EBTA lower. in the quarter. But also remember that Q4 is traditionally the strong Bonava quarter in the completed contract method. And Q1 is usually a slower one, which should be mentioned. But positive operating cash flow versus last year. And it's the same if you look at the cash flow before financing in the net cash flow, in the full cash flow statements. And there is also a bridge between these two measures in the report for those of you who wants to see the details. Net debt, again, something we have shown before, but it's important that we can keep a low net debt, even though we now grow in number of starts and number of sold units. And we ended on 3.1, which is exactly where we ended Q4. And we do expect the green part here, which is project financing, to start increasing, and we have given guidance that it will be up to 3.6 3.7 later in in the year because we need to grow the volumes we need to have more financing to start projects so successful refinancing of when i was green bond we have the market conditions for project financing has improved and we have investments in new project starch is likely then to increase the net debt We also still have a high available liquidity. It is lower than in Q4, but for the simple reason that we have amortized of the term loans. So term loans and also RTF is lower than in Q4, which is also according to plan, but we have sufficient and strong available liquidity for us to do the necessary investments to stimulate the growth and have a good development. My last slide is also recapping on the financial frameworks where, remember, we need an equity asset ratio above 30%, and we ended on 41. And the net product asset value divided by net debt is 1.4, and it should be above 1.0. So all in all, as planned, the quarter, as Peter alluded to, but it's also super important to continue to track this and, of course, deliver quarter by quarter. Thank you.

Thank you very much, John.

I have a last slide just wrapping it up. Don't forget that one. Sorry. Thanks a lot, John. And so, as we have alluded to, we have an increasing portfolio of ongoing projects. It's increasing 11%. And profitability is increasing as well as we are maintaining financial strength. And we are maintaining the guidance we gave at the Capital Markets Day of an EBIT margin of 5-6% in 2025. And we are aiming to reach our financial target of operating margin of 10% for the full year 2026. So with all the measures we have done, we are well placed and well poised both to act in a market which is uncertain in a way, but we are also predominantly very well focused to take on the growth and normalization of the residential markets. Thank you. Now, Fredrik.

No, thank you very much. And now it's time to open the floor for questions. And you're welcome to submit questions via the online chat. Or if you are participating in the phone conference, please simply just press star five. And I would like to start with a question, Peter. The global environment is currently incredibly dynamic. And in the Q1 report, you highlight Bonava's decentralized organization as key to navigating uncertainty. Can you briefly explain how Bonava is managing today's shifting landscape?

Well, being close to the customers, being close to the market they are operating in is the key component of understanding how to act. And it's also we get a very direct impact and feedback from our customers. We get very direct impact and feedback from our subcontractors, our banks, our financiers, etc. So all in all, this constitutes a much better view on what is happening out there. We are not sitting in an ivory tower here in Stockholm and thinking that we understand what's happening out there. We are actually having a good professional businesses out there understanding what's happening in the local markets. And then also, we are scaled for a higher volume, but the combination of own resources and subcontractors will also mean that we have much more flexibility built in to being able to scale up when the market really returns big time.

And John, now in 2025, you mentioned it a couple of times, but we have introduced a percentage of completion. And if you think of the audience, maybe once again, but what's most important to understand about Bonava's use of the percentage of completion method to follow the financial performance today, tomorrow and in the future?

So, I mean, again, to recap, the big difference between the completed contracts and percentage of completion is really the timing of when you recognize revenues and profit. And so there is like a delay in the completed contracts while you see it here and now instinctively. how you're performing in percentage of completion. So it fits both the shareholders view on how we are performing, but also internally it's better to follow up in that way. I think that how we apply it is that we have sales rate, completion rate times the forecast and without becoming too technical, I think that we have a prudent and conservative approach with the risk factor, which means that if you haven't completed up to a certain percentage, we apply a risk factor until it's above that one. And that gives this controlled growth trajectory, which we want to see.

Thank you very much. And I think that we have a question coming in from the phone conference. Please go ahead.

The next question comes from David Flemish from Nordea. Please go ahead.

Hi, morning all. I have a couple of questions. Firstly, you're right in the report that IFRS EBIT in Germany was burdened by recognition of projects with lower margins and increased reserves in a few older projects. I'm wondering what's the reason behind projects with lower margins and on the increased reserves are they attributable to projects completed in the quarter or even older than that?

So it is predominantly price impacts from the two projects specifically in Germany, one in the Bonn area and one also in the Leipzig area. And these are old projects, right, which we have completed. So these are specific impacts in the quarter. In terms of the... provisions there. It's a restatement then of these different projects.

So in other words, David, it's not a function of us not being right on the cost. It is the price. So these projects started up late 23, which means that it was the toughest part of the market at that point in time. So you had to revise the price tag. And that is something that is... sort of not sort of caught up in the pnl until we hand them over according to ifrs as you know and then of course if you look into the ifr as result as such also the volume of started we started to cut down very quickly after the ukraine crisis and and started our projects on a limited level uh during 2023 and that also means we have a lower volume of recognized unit against the cost base now so those two impacts the profitability in IFRS.

Okay that's clear and is there any material impact on the POC EBIT in Germany from this or yeah anything to specify there? Great, great. It's a short answer. Next question. On the sales ratio, it increased to 66% in Q1 from 59 in Q4. You're right in the report that you have a number of sales starts planned for 2025 and that you could be well on the way towards 3,500 to 4,000. starts already in 2025. Are you willing to start projects on lower pre-sold rates or is it a prerequisite that sales also increase in order to increase starts?

I think in some exceptional cases it can be allowed, but I think that our general principle is that we want them to be in balance. And that is, again, what we mean with controlled growth. We don't want to start a lot of projects on speculations. We want to see the consumers return to the market and the interest before.

And just if I can, if you allow me, David, if I can correct you a little bit, we have not said that we will reach the interval in 2025. We have said that we will be on our way to reach the interval in 2025, which means that we have said that we hope to be in the interval for the full year 2026. I just want to make that clear.

Yeah, got it. And Jun, a follow-up question for you in terms of the net financial items. You mentioned that the net interest decreased to 72 million in Q1, but that fees and guarantee costs, etc., increased to 62 million. What was the effect from the redemption and tender offer in Q1? And could you give some guidance as for the run rate on guarantee costs, et cetera, looking forward?

So the fees were around 30 million for that redemption. And then going forward, I think that we will see the interest cost, as mentioned, go down, not least because we have lower net debt, but also because of improving rates. But then guarantee costs will grow together with the projects we are running. So we do I believe that we will see like maybe a 10% and I'm just estimating a little bit growth on the guarantee cost and it will continue to grow. Perfect.

Sorry, did you say 13 or 30? 30, 30. Yeah, perfect, perfect. That was all from me. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much. David, we can just remind you that if you would like to ask questions, you can do it via the online chat, or if you're participating in the phone conference, simply press star five to ask your questions. I don't see any questions in the chat at this very moment, but maybe we can repeat it. It will mention it though a little bit here, but... Our teams are actively out and meeting customers almost day and night. And as you mentioned, Peter, we have a sales start, very exciting one here in Stockholm this Sunday. Any new views on starts going forward?

Well, we have a number of starts planned in every market and we have already started a few projects in the quarter. So that's a great input, as I mentioned before, from what's happening out there in the marketplace. So I'm really happy to see the development in Sweden. A year ago, we did not see these signs in Sweden. So that's also very good. So that also gives us more hope about Finland going forward, where we have very good teams on the ground.

Yeah, thank you very much. Let's check if we have any more questions coming in from the phone conference. No, it doesn't seem so. Yeah, we can just remind you that you simply press star five if you would like to ask a question in the phone conference. Let's see if we can hold on maybe one more minute. Otherwise, I think that we don't have any further questions at this point. Then it's time to wrap up this session. And before we close, we would like to remind you that Bonava held a Capital Markets Day here in Stockholm in March. And the full recording is available on our corporate website, bonava.com. And if you have any further questions, you are always welcome to reach out to any of us. And Bonava's Q2 report will be published on July 17th, which means that it has been moved slightly earlier than previously announced. Thank you very much for tuning in this morning. We wish you all a very nice day and soon good weekend. Goodbye for now.