Bulten AB (publ)

Hello and welcome to today's presentation with Bulten, where Axel Bernsson, President and CEO, and Anna Åkerblad, CFO, will present the Q1 report for 2025 and answer questions during the Q&A. If you're calling in, please press star 9 to raise your hand and star 6 to mute yourself when you get the word. You can also type in your questions using the form to the right. And with that said, please go ahead with your presentation.

Thank you very much and welcome everybody. So let's start with a summary of the first quarter. For me personally, it's been a very interesting first quarter. So I've taken the opportunity to travel around and visit all our major sites and also an opportunity to meet a few customers and some key partners that we have for the business. And it's really nice to see the good engagement and the care that we have for each other and for the business. And it's been a very good learning experience for me as we go into a phase now where we start to draft the strategy and the way forward for the company. So it's a super interesting first start here. And obviously, from a financial point of view, we have some numbers to show you as well. And the sales is down by about 6.6% versus a very strong Q1 last year. So for me, the sales is on a decent level. It is nothing that is going to look strange to us when we look at these numbers. It looks pretty much as we expected them to be on the sales side. We do have a slight decline in the market in general, especially in Europe, when it comes to light vehicles. That market seems to be a bit softening in Q1. But on a global level, the automotive market is fairly stable, as we will see later on. If we look on a margin level, we are down versus quarter over quarter last year. However, if we look at 2023, we had an EBIT of 4% for the business in 2020. In 2024, we had about 5.2% in EBIT. And now we are adjusted a bit north of 6%. So I think the trend is right. And we do see that there are opportunities if we execute our actions well to make a little bit more money going forward in the company if we have some luck on our side. The downside on Q1 is that we had an anti-dumping toll coming on us as a business. Something that we strongly disagree with. And this stems from a period where we were lack of capacity in coal forming in one of our plants. And we imported parts and raw materials from one of our plants in China. And we are not in agreement with that. We should be taxed on this with non-dumping. But let's see. We will push this to a court ruling and then we'll see what the outcome is on that. If we take a more long-term view, we had a 2024 strategy that had a target of 5 billion in sales. We hit that number with quite good margins. It's nice to see a really good CAGR growth of the company. The only thing is that EBIT did not really follow. Some quarters, we're up there sniffing at the 8% that we put as a target, but primarily because of one-off and disturbances and whatnot. quite dramatic events as such have pushed us away from this number. And therefore we are we are delivering a bit less than the eight. But that is still an ambition that we have as a business. And when we do not hit our profit target, we also do not hit our return on capital employee targets. If we look at something that we'll see later on in the call, we do perform better than our kind of guidelines when it comes to working capital in the business. where the guidelines are 20-25%, and we are somewhere in 16-17%, something like that, of the 17. So that's not too bad, but we want to improve further, obviously, going forward. So touching back on the forecast of our main customer group, which is light vehicles, that is projected to grow by a couple of percent during 2025. That should give opportunities for us to keep reasonable volumes. Obviously, for us, we have a selection of these type of customers as our customers. We do not have all of them. So it's our volumes or more, depending on the performance of our key customers in that way. But on an overall, the market looks fairly much OK, I would say. A hot topic during the last couple of months have been the tariffs. And what we can see, if we touch that point from a building perspective, we have as part of our strategy to produce locally, so basically produce where our customers are. And therefore, we do not have too much flows in between regions, which means that we do not produce much in the US that travels elsewhere. And we also do not produce much in Europe or Asia that travels to North America. So the direct exposure is fairly limited for us. It could be good to know. But obviously, we do provide customers that have tariffs on their side as they do export in between regions more and could then be affected by volumes as a kind of second step here. It's a little bit too early for us to know exactly what that impact is. But obviously, the risk exists. Then we hand over to Anna to give us a view on the financial side.

Thank you, Axel. And here is an overview of our quarterly sales the last years, including 12 months rolling sales and sales volumes for the first quarter was down 6.6% versus same quarter last year. However, our sales is still on a relatively stable level in a more volatile market. And in this waterfall, you can see the change in rolling 12-month sales for different customer groups. And there is a positive growth in the other industries and a slight decrease in the rest of the customer groups. And this means that customer group other industries has increased sales with 16% compared to last year's rolling 12 months.