Bulten AB (publ)

Hello and welcome to today's webcast with Bulten, where President and CEO Axel Berntson and CFO Anna Åkeblad will present the year-end report for 2025. After the presentation, there will be a Q&A, so if you have a 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 yourself when handed the word. You can also send in questions via the form to the right. And with that said, I hand over the word to you, Axel.

Thank you very much and welcome everybody to our Q4 call. uh as we said we will have some q a in the end and but before that we have a few different points we will go through the key things from q4 and then also cannot touch on what happened for the full year before anna goes through the financial results and i give you a few words on where we are heading going forward so that said let's have a look at q4 In Q4, for those of you who read our Q3 report, you know that we kind of projected that our Q4 would be impacted in the same level as Q3 from the cyber attack of our largest customer. They did recover faster, as they have communicated in the press as well, faster than expected, and they have remained on a good path with their recovery, which for us was very positive, and we are quite happy and proud to see their work on this. But for us, it meant that for the last half of the quarter, our volumes were kind of more or less back to where we expected them to be before the cyber attack. So that is quite nice. So happy for that. I think the only thing that is really deviating where the currencies, where the Swedish SEC strengthened more than we expected, that did have a fairly large impact on our top line. But other than that, I think we did fairly well. For those of you who have followed us also during the past year, you have noted that we have worked a lot with our costs. We have streamlined our organization a fair bit. We cut quite a lot of costs in the business. And this continued margin discipline and operational focus has supported that we were able to have a positive result despite these volume drops in the last quarter. If we can take a little bit more of a helicopter view on the full year, the story is still fairly similar because on the full year level, I think currencies is a major thing that affected us. I mean, it's a couple of hundred million that were dropped on top line from currencies. But we also had a few really disturbing events. We have had the Swedish Customs Authority enforcing anti-dumping fees on us that we do not agree with and that we are disputing in court. But that has had a quite large effect on our profit for the year. And then, of course, the cyber attack itself had a major impact on us, and that has put a quite negative flavor to our year. But the underlying performance is actually doing reasonably well. and we have finalized now the reorganization that we plan to do and we have decentralized the business into quite a few self-sufficient and independent business units and we do believe that this decentralization and increased focus on making money will have a positive result for us going forward and obviously having a lower cost base cost base makes us resilient to volume drops as well. So that is nice to see. We continue to work with our strategic review of the business. And a lot of that has to do with shifting built in a way to other customer segments, such as consumer electronics, and medical equipment, and so on, where we see better profit pools. But we're also moving further towards having more value added services in our business. And obviously, if you can have more value added services, you can provide more value to your customers. There are opportunities for us to also make more money in that. So we are quite happy with overall development of the business. So with those kind of noteworthy items, I hand over to Anna to walk us through the financial results of the fourth quarter.

Thank you accent if we start looking at the sales, we can see that the year on year decline reflects lower volumes following the cyber attack in the second half of the year, while we can see a stabilization towards the end of the year. and When we then look at our mix, the shift in the mix reflects lower automotive volumes during the year as well as continued growth in non-automotive segments. While automotive remains our largest customer group, the development supports a strategic focus on broadening the customer base. And even though we faced negative external factors, the fourth quarter delivered an adjusted EBIT of 37 million SEK, which is equal to 3% EBIT margin. And this shows that the underlying business is heading in the right direction and we continue to work with efficiency in our operations that is having a positive effect. Our adjusted key indicators for rolling 12 months are affected by the customer cyber attack. And we judge this effect is more short term and that we will be back in 2026. And the adjusted net depth in relation to adjusted EBITDA is in line with last year at around two. Now back to you, Axel.

Thank you. So a few short notes before we move into our q&a, which I assume is the highlight of this afternoon. If you look at what we're going to do going forward, I think we are not when we are in the type of industry that we are, we're never going to get away from, you know, the importance of being excellent in operational execution, and be very, very disciplined in our cost management. And that we continue, we will spend a lot of time and effort to make sure that we are as streamlined as we can be as a company. We will also continue our shift towards consumer electronics and medical technology and so on. And as Anna said, we have we have increased that share, but I would like the ratio to be kind of the opposite. If you compare the OEM business to these kind of other businesses to be reversed, where this is the majority of our business in the future. And obviously that means that we need to take quite large grip on this growth. but also be very, very disciplined in what type of automotive business that we go after. We need to have a clear value add in it. We need to know that we do create the right customer value when we quote. And then probably then win a little bit less business, but the right business when it comes to automotive. When it comes to non-automotive, we need to scale up. We need to invest more in sales resources and probably also do a fair bit of M&A to grow that bit of the business. Furthermore, we will continue to explore footprint reductions across our manufacturing base. In my opinion, we have too much underabsorption in our factories and given the fact that we are focusing most of these business or factories on a more slimmed down type of business, meaning the automotive type business we go after needs to be the right one. We will probably then add less volume to the factories as well in the future. So we don't need the full footprint and we don't foresee that we will fill it and thereby we need to probably shrink it down. And we are exploring opportunities to do this, both by divesting manufacturing, but also closing and consolidating factories. We do have a lot of customer relationships that we value. And we will continue to work intensely with those. We do believe in close collaboration with the key customers, which of course is a given. But you can do that in a different way. And we know that we can improve. We know that we can deliver more value and increase the trust with these customers. So they will give us more business over time. And there are a lot of value for us in that. And obviously the last point is also given. Also, we need to work quite a lot with our capital efficiency. For those of you who do analyze our numbers over time, you will see that our cash flow is not strong. It hasn't been strong for years and this needs to be fixed. We need to have a space to invest and we need to be able to acquire businesses. And for that, we need cash. And therefore, obviously, the cash generating activities are very high up on our agenda going forward. so with that final note i do leave over to some q a and see if anybody have any questions to you they've posted during the presentation today

Thank you so much for the presentation. And as you mentioned, we'll now carry on with the Q&A. So if you're calling in and want to ask a question, press star nine to raise your hand and then star six to unmute yourself when handed the word. So we can start off here with a question that has been sent to us. What are the key highlights from the 2025 year end report, would you say?

On the report itself, I'm not so sure, but if you answer it from a year perspective, I think what I'm mostly happy about is the reorganization that we are now decentralized and we can drive faster improvements in our business. That is for me a key highlight. And the other key highlight is the wins of business that we have outside of automotive. I think we have won a lot of really interesting contracts and that will be beneficial for us long term.

Thank you so much for that. And we will now carry on with the first caller here. And that's Mats Liss from Keppel Chevre. The word is yours.

Hi. Great. Yeah. Two questions. First, you talked about, well, the order intake is pretty good there. And you talked about the growth in non-automotive and you showed that sales mix there with the growing part of non-automotive as I understood it anyway. Is the picture similar in the order intake?

I think overall our order intake is actually not a very good number. I mean the number is you know one and a half billion order intake is fine but one should know that the way we record order intake is also that we take fraction schedules in that we get from our customers and that is recorded as order intake Which is why that number can go up and down over time without really meaning that much. I just want to put that kind of disclaimer in there when it comes to people who analyze our ordering. I think it's not a good indicator overall. The customer mix of that I do think is reflective of the way the business is developing. we do have a good order intake of non automotive business and that grows faster than the rest of the business in general. So I'm quite pleased with that mixed development, even though we would, as I mentioned before, like to see a significantly bigger portion of other business.

Great. You also talked about this strategic review and measures you're implementing to to reach the target that you're indicated of growing in non-automotive but what's the time frame there should we expect some thing to happen already this year regarding maybe your production capacity or is it more of a long-term target that you have and well could you give some more flavor there regarding this process

But we do expect to see quite a bit of impact in 2026. But as many of these things are not 100% on our racket, for example, when it comes to divesting a business, if that is what we do, we need to make sure that that kind of process goes all the way through. If it is about consolidating factories and closing down and so on, that is also something that a lot of external factors impacting that. So I cannot guarantee that we will see the result. But in our plans, we should see a lot of this impacted in this year.

okay and then you uh mentioned the anti-dumping uh well charge you got from the swedish authorities there and uh is there any chance that you will sort of regain or get some well more limited impact there or is it well how how how does this talk progress

Yeah, so we haven't had a hearing in court yet for that, so it's yet to be seen. The good thing is we have taken the cost in 2025, it's only upside from here on. If we win, of course, it's an upside in the numbers. I think that is good. There's no further downside from what we can see. but we do expect to win all or parts of this claim and get that back but you never know when the court rules it the court rules that it's not always about beings right you also need to get them to agree with you on being right here so let's see you also mentioned the opportunities to to grow with acquisitions there and is it sort of a

balance there you need to free cash before you're able to to make these acquisitions or or could they the the sort of targets be so interesting that you sort of have a case already to to present and then and maybe try to get external support from shareholders and and of other numbers

I think if the case is strong enough, we would happily go up and ask our shareholders to contribute to acquiring the right business. But with the current state where we are today in the business, I don't see that we have too much headroom to acquire with our own balance sheet, maybe smaller stuff, but not anything of significance. So I think the top priority for us is to make sure we start to generate a lot more cash so we can use that cash to acquire. But if the right case comes up, we're happy to go to the market and our shareholders to ask for money.

And where do you see those opportunities the most? Is it to free working capital or is it to make divestment of assets?

in in general or yeah could you say something about that but i think it's both it is both in divesting businesses that do not fit our strategy anymore we do have a couple of buildings that we own that could be realizable assets as well that we could divest if if needed and obviously then it's operational performance like where we could generate more cash okay okay great thank you

a step back in line.

Thank you much.

Thank you so much for the question there. We have received a couple of more questions that has been sent to us here and the first one is the very strong improvement in terms of inventory levels, current receivables and current liabilities. Is this a work in progress or further improvements to be expected for 2026?

We do expect further improvement on this, but what is also important when one read those numbers in the right way, because it's also in. If our inventory goes down 10% because sales goes down 10%, OK, then it's actually not really an improvement. It's just an adjustment of levels. I think you also need to read that into the numbers. So in my opinion, we have relative to sales, quite a large improvement to do on our inventories. And then obviously our receivables. Our receivables are on a reasonable level, I would say. We have quite decent contracts with some of the largest customers. So I do not expect a large improvement of the receivables in relation to sales. Small ones, you can always do more, but I don't expect any large adjustments of that.

Thank you. Will there be new financial targets presented during the first half year of 2026?

I do not know yet. Our board needs to approve new targets and we do not have any decisions on that yet. So I will leave that to my board to approve actually.

Thank you. Another question here. Can you provide a bit more color on how the business has shifted between regions and customer groups over the last 12 months?

Good question. Obviously, if you look at the total mix, Asia probably has improved a little bit. But mostly what has improved is the consumer electronics business where we have seen quite good growth during the year. I think that is the most significant shift. Even though it's not big enough, as I said before, we would like to see more because we're coming from fairly low levels that we're growing from. We also see less business in North America overall and less focus on in North America at the moment.

thank you that was all the questions we had for today so thank you so much for bulletin for presenting here today and thank you all for answering or calling in with questions and viewing today have a pleasant day thank you thank you