Bulten AB (publ)

Hello and welcome to today's webcast with Bulten, where CEO Axel Berntsson and CFO Anna Åkerblad will present the year-end report for 2024. After the presentation, there will be a Q&A. So if you're calling in and want to ask a question, please press star 9 on your phone to raise your hand and then star 6 to unmute your microphone. You can also send in questions via the form to the right. And with that said, I hand over the word to you, Axel.

All right. Hello, everybody. Thank you all for joining the call today. I will assume that most of you do not know me from a Bulletin agenda. I joined the Bulletin here on the 22nd of January, so just short of two weeks ago. I'll give you a short introduction of myself before we move over and talk about Bulletin and our Q4 and full year results. So before joining Bulten, I ran another listed company called Absland Air Care Group, listed on First North. And before that, I worked for a company called ISAB that do welding products. So a lot of consumables for welding and also machinery for that. Way back, I went to Chalmers and studied industrial engineering and management, after which I went into consulting and worked a lot with cost down projects. As you can see, I decided to invest a little bit in the business from the start here and have bought a few stock options. And I hope that we together will continue to build a good share price development of the bulletin share over the next few years. If we move over and talk about Bullten then. So I would assume that most of you listening to the call know Bullten much better than I do. But for those of you who do not, I'll give a short introduction to the business. So basically what we do, most of our business is fasteners for the automotive business. But we also provide quite a lot of logistics services. So it's not only parts that we produce ourselves, but we also trade in quite a bit of products. And we also have a couple of other business segments where micro screws is a fairly big one and also seed parts management from companies that we have acquired as part of Exim and PSM in the past. If you look at the total business, we have a turnover of around 5.8 billion SEC and grew just a little bit over last year, but just short of a percent. And we have operating margins of around 5.2%. which is also a good improvement over last year, even though it's not in line with the targets that we have as a business. And we'll come back to that later on in the presentation. The largest customers that we have is automotive OEMs. So it's a Ford, Jaguar, Land Rover and Volvo cars. The fourth largest customer that we have is in electronics manufacturing, for example, but still automotive is a very big piece of what we do. If given that the automotive business is still the biggest portion of our business, we tend to look at that as some kind of future outlook for the business. And this is data that we get from a company called Global Data. And what we can see is that 2024 is projected to have been a fairly slow year for the automotive industry, where the passenger vehicles or light vehicles shrunk by about 0.4%, while heavy commercial vehicles shrunk by about 5% over the prior year. And I think our development is fairly much in line with this. We follow the market more or less on the big picture. And it's good to know then that we are quite heavily geared towards light vehicles within Bolton. If we take a look at the full year summary, as mentioned, we did about 5.8 billion, so a slight growth over the year before. And I think overall, given that the market is really fluctuating, I think to have some kind of growth this year when you're a primarily European supplier, I think that's a pretty decent outcome as such. And we were also facing quite a lot of issues around an explosion of a furnace down in Poland. I think the team here did a really good job to manage that and make sure we were able to keep the volumes flowing out of the factories. And obviously, we are also very happy that nobody got injured in this accident. And we're happy with that. We could see that our margins improved from about 4% to a bit north of 5%, also step in the right direction, but clearly not good enough from where we want to be as a business. We have expanded our new ventures, so Exim, for example, and gone into new markets with them. And we are opening up the old PSM business going further out into the world with that and have set up a JV in Vietnam. And we are also expanding a JV in India with that business. Worth mentioning is that the tension camp business, which is a kind of an early stage investment that we did for a new technology a couple of years ago, now has its first orders. We're happy for that, even though it's not something that has a significant impact on our full year numbers. We're also quite proud of the sustainability work that we do as a business. I think this is an area where we've been trying to lead for quite a few years. And I think this year we got a very nice award from Ecovados with a platinum award, which is given to the top 1% of businesses when it comes to sustainability. So very well done from the team in this regard. So to sum up Q4, uh i think the most exciting part is that we established these micro screw and businesses in vietnam and in india or expanded india should say and that the results were below what we expected or what was expected on us mainly due to extra costs that we have of about 55 million uh mainly this is related to a closure of a logistics center in poland and starts up of these new businesses in Asia, so in India and Vietnam, and major maintenance work that we had to do here in Sweden. With that, I pass the baton over to Anna, our CFO, to give you some more details.

Thank you, Axel. Here you can see an overview of our quarterly sales the last years, including 12 months rolling sales. and the sales volumes for quarter four was down 6% versus same quarter last year. We had overall stable sales volumes for the full year in a more volatile market, and we are still in line with previous year's sales. According to the waterfall on the left side, you can see sales rolling 12 months, and there is a positive growth in other industries and a slight decrease in the rest of the customer groups. On the right side, you can see that as a proportion of year-to-date sales as of December, sales to other industries outside automotive amounts to 13%, which is an increase compared to last year. Our main customer group, OEM Light Vehicles, amounts to 62% of total sales and is in line with last year. The fourth quarter delivered an EBIT of 20 million SEK equal to 1.4% EBIT margin. This is not a satisfactory level, as Axel already mentioned. And we had the extra cost, for example, related to startup in India and Vietnam, as well as closing down a warehouse facility in Poland. However, the full year EBIT improved over last year and ended at 5.2%. And our target remains at 8%. Earnings per share for the quarter was at around zero following the unsatisfactory result. But looking at the full year, our earnings per share improved versus last year. We reached 6.45 sec compared to 4.89 last year. Cash flow for the fourth quarter is positive compared to same period last year and cash position is in line with same period last year. Cash flow for the full year improved at minus 8 million SEK versus minus 103 last year. Net debt excluding lease liabilities is almost about the same level this year compared to last year. Our key indicators for 12 months have all improved versus last year. Return on capital employed, including financial lease, is at 9.2%. Our adjusted net debt and adjusted EBITDA ratio is at minus 2.1 at the end of the year. And our equity assets ratio, excluding financial lease, is at 44.9%. Our guideline for average networking capital in relation to 12-month sales is about 20% to 25% depending on the growth pace. At the end of the quarter, our rolling 12 months are at a level of 17.1%, which is a good level and in line with last year. CapEx as percentage of sales is slightly above the guidelines, and this is related to catch-up of previous years where CapEx were held at a low level. Depreciation as percentage of sales is in line with our guidelines. And now back to you, Axel.