Bulten AB (publ)

Hello and welcome to Bullton's presentation for the first quarter this year. My name is Ulrika Ulken and I'm the Senior Vice President for Corporate Communication and Investor Relations. Presenting the report today are Bullton's Acting President and CEO Kristina, or Tina, she usually is called, and our CFO Anna Åkerblad. As usual, you will be able to ask questions after the presentation, both on the web as well as in the telephone conference. So I will now hand over to Tina. Welcome, Tina.

Thank you, Ulrika. It is the first time you meet me here, so I take the chance to give you a short introduction. I am a long-timer within AB Volvo, with senior positions here in Gothenburg as well as in Asia. I have and have had several board assignments, whereof Bulten is one since 2020. and lately almost three years as a CEO in a mid-size industrial company. I left SEM in the autumn last year and I was available when Anders decided to leave Bulten. After a permanent CEO is recruited, I will return to the Bulten board. And for the clarity, I am not a candidate for the permanent solution. As you probably are aware, Bulten is a supplier of fastener solutions Our main customer group is light and commercial vehicle OEMs, but automotive suppliers and customers outside of the automotive industry are continuing to grow in their share of our business. We serve customers in three regions, Europe, Asia and North America. It is important to know that we don't supply just hardware. To some major customers, we are a partner for product development support, innovation, procurement and logistics. Bolton's three largest customers are still Jaguar Land Rover, Volvo Cars and Ford. They are and will remain important, but we have a number of new customers with strong growth in our base. And that's something we welcome. Our fifth largest customer is now a non automotive customer. The 2023 full year sales reached more than 5.7 billion SET, which is almost 30% year on year growth. Next slide please. We normally follow the market trends via global data, and this is what we share here. The vehicle production outlook shows basically flat development, both for light and heavy duty vehicles volumes for this year. Applying this forecast to the mix of Bullton customers indicates a market driven growth of just 1.1% in 2024. And this is following a previous year, 2023, with a very strong market growth in those categories. Next slide. So the highlights of this quarter in this year. The most positive thing is the EBIT margin. After three rough quarters with capacity issues, we can now see an improvement. The margin lands at 7.5% compared to 8.4% the same quarter previous years. But it's also worth mentioning that quarter one last year was an unusually strong quarter. The EBIT margin today shows that we are on the right track. The sales levels remain strong even this quarter, which is a positive. The capacity problems that we have had in our European factories have improved a lot the last couple of months. We are in much better situation even though we still have some work to do there are two things this quarter which delayed our capacity improvement work the main one is related to a failed furnace in poland in the beginning of the quarter it was seriously damaged and needs to be replaced and we are very happy that it was no injuries connected to that one a personal injury And we are confident that our insurance will cover us well. Also, we had some delays when installing new equipment in our Swedish manufacturing plant. Altogether, this further delayed recovery to normal production. That said, we are in a much better and more stable situation and assume back to normal situation. The positive thing is that we have learned a lot during this period. like creating flexibility by shifting production between our sites and outsourcing some production of more simple products to suppliers. This has come well in hand with the rollout of the new regional organization that I will tell more about in the next slide. We launched an organizational restructuring last quarter The implementation has continued in a fast pace and the outcome has been successful so far. A major cause for the new organization was to support faster decision-making and clearer responsibilities closer to where the business happened. This has two benefits. Firstly, we can better meet our customers' unique needs and requirements. Secondly, we can become much more effective internally, which will make us more competitive. We also launched the installment of the chief technical officer, and I'm actually amazed on how well this serves us in the interaction between technology, production and sales. I also want to take the opportunity to thank Anders Nyström, the former CEO, who initiated this reorganization before I joined and made my start as the acting CEO very smooth.

Some regional highlights then.