Bulten AB (publ)

Welcome to today's third quarter report from Bulten. With me to present, I have President and CEO Axel Bernsson, as well as CFO Anna Åkerblad. The presentation will end with a Q&A, and if you're calling in and want to ask a question, press star 9 to raise your hand, and star 6 to unmute yourself. With that said, I give the word over to you, Axel.

Thank you very much. Let's go ahead and dive into this presentation that we have labored a stronger business ready for its next chapter. And obviously, this is then related to that we are performing a bit better than we have been historically, and that we have divested a quite large chunk of our business. And therefore, we feel that we are prepared to move on to the next chapter. Trying to change pages here, but we have a bit of an issue. Just give us a second. There we go. All right. So this is the agenda for today's call. So we have three different little sections. The first section is where we go through Q3 itself with some highlights and talk a bit about the divestment that we have now executed and so on. And then Anna will come in and give you some flavor of the financials of the quarter. And then I will end with some forward-looking thoughts. So that said, let's move into the Q3 highlights. And when we look at the Q3 highlights, I think it's important to remember the Q3 that we had last year. And that, of course, has created a bit of funny comp numbers. For those of you who remember well, we had a quite major issue with one of our largest customers last year that had a cyber attack. And that obviously had a large impact on our sales and our profits and so on. But it also created quite big timing swings on our cash flow. But that aside, I see this as a fairly strong quarter that goes in the right direction. We had a good sales growth also comparing to the last couple of quarters that we have had, and we have had a few years now of declining volume, so it's nice to see that the volume is starting to tick up again. And we also see a sequential improvement in our profitability that have now improved for a few quarters straight. So we're happy with that and hope that we can continue that trend going forward. And we had a very good conversion from EBIT to cash flow. So overall, from a financial point of view, I find this to be a good quarter and clearly in the right direction. Then obviously the key event from last quarter is that we have concluded a divestment that we communicated before the summer, where we handed over the keys to our European manufacturing operations to Mali here on October 1st. And then on the 16th of October, we handed over the keys to our Tianjin factory in China to Mr. Chen and his friends. And then in December, we will hand over the keys for our real estate in Haastahammar to Melir as well. So I think we are quite happy with this. These are important big steps in our transformation that we wanted to execute. And these are also the largest and Probably not final, but there's nothing major in the transformation box that remains. So we are very happy that we have gone through the first larger part of our plan to create a more resilient, stronger, better performing company of Bulten. So very happy with that and also want to take the opportunity to thank both Melir and Mr. Chen for good collaboration around these businesses. and we will continue to have relationship with them going forward as customers so we also wish them best of luck in their continued operations. The business then that remains as you can see margin has improved in Q2 we had 7.6 or so Q1 7.6, Q2 8, Q3 8.1 and we look forward to continuing that trend going forward. On the larger highlights, we are having some big progress or large move forwards in Asia. We have fairly good growth on some key customer segments, particularly we are quite happy with the development that we have in India, where we are building a new plant for micro screws and micro fasteners in general. So that project is moving forward well. We are also having quite large operational improvement in our operations. We still have a couple of factories in the group, so we have a factory in Wuxi, we have a factory in Shenzhen that we co-own, and we have a factory in Taiwan, all of which are moving the right direction, improving their operations in a good way, so happy with that. We have also been able to capture a few opportunities in the AI space. And obviously when we speak about AI, it's not about large language models and things like that. We're talking about the infrastructure side where we have customers that are in the energy supply and so on of this sector. And we have won some quite large new projects for that also related to then the semiconductor business connected them to the AI as well. So we are happy with that development. We see that we keep broadening our verticals that we make business with and become less and less depending on each one of those. So that's very nice to see. And that is something that we will continue with going forward. So happy with the development overall in new verticals in the operations in Asia and overall stable operations also elsewhere in the world. With that, I hand over to Anna to give us some flavor of the numbers.

Thank you, Axel. Net sales for continuing operations amounts to 831 million SEK in the third quarter. And that is a significant increase compared to last year. But as Axel already mentioned, last year's quarter was heavily affected by major customers' production stoppage. However, when comparing with previous quarters this year, the sales is stable and increasing. The continuing business is delivering a stable and positive profitability for the third quarter, and the quarterly EBIT amounts to 67 million SEK, which is equal to 8.1% margin. And the EBIT comparison between the years is also affected by the customer stoppage last year that we mentioned. But the performance during the year reflects a more favorable business mix, more competitive cost base and disciplined operation execution. So it's positive to see the stable profitability. Our key indicators for continuing operations are steadily improving on both return on capital employed and net debt EBITDA. They are quite positive compared to full year 2025. The equity assets ratio is however affected by the write-down due to the divestment. The discontinued operations had an effect on equity with approximately minus 1,200 million SEK. And this was mainly due to impairment charge, but also some current results for the business. The expected cash effect from the transaction in Q4 is approximately 545 million SEK. Now back to you, Axel.