CTEK AB (publ)

Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. And once again, warm welcome to the Q4 presentation from CTEK. Today's presenters is myself and I also have CFO Tom Mathisen here with me. Before we start to jump into the results, I'm just going to give you a brief presentation of CTEK. CTEK was founded in 1997 by Bengt Wahlqvist, the inventor of the first ever battery charger to use electronic pulse technology. We are designing, developing and testing all our products in Sweden. We have competence centers in Vikmansyttan, Norrköping and Shenzhen. And we are producing in mainly Asia and Mexico. CTEK has a big business with client brand and we are chosen by the best. We have customers like you can see here in the picture, Lamborghini, we also have Porsche, Bugatti, Rolls Royce, BMW and 50 other premium brands. I'm very proud to have a CTEK name at the same product as the Lamborghini. Lamborghini powered by CTEK. I think that speaks loads of how strong our brand recognition is. We have mainly two technologies. We have the EVSE, which is chargers for electrical cars. And we have our low voltage, mainly 12 volts, chargers for the normal car battery. And we have different segments that we are serving. Many of our customers are using our products in many different applications. And we have products that are applicable for both Elec EV and plug-in hybrid. There we can use, of course, our EVSE charger, but also our 12-volt charger and the workshop chargers. For combustion engines, it's the 12-volt chargers and the workshop chargers. And we also have chargers that can be used in recreation vehicle and leisure. Motorcycle is a big growing business for us. And we also have chargers for the industrial sector. When we are going to market in mainly two divisions, the first one, professional, is our B2B channel. There we are selling our destination chargers to parking operators. And we also have our client brand, where we are selling to Porsche, Lamborghini, Corvette, and a lot of different other premium brands. In our consumer division, we are selling in retail through distributors, pure e-tailers and also to importers. So jumping into the Q4 result, we have a sales of 279 million SEK. The gross margin ended up at 49.8 adjusted EBITDA 25 million and we have a strong cash flow of 59 million SEK. The share of EVSE was 23% in the quarter and altogether we managed to lower our net debt ratio to 1.8. If we look at the quarter, we had a one-time buy from General Motors that affected our figures. And if we adjust for that, our organic growth was 5%. The gross margin adjusted from this one time order was increasing to 54.6%. The adjusted EBITDA was ending up at 10.2%, a little bit lower than the comparison quarter, mainly has to do with credit loss. and that some of our performance costs that we're paying to the onliners are not evenly distributed quarter to quarter so you can see the q3 we had a stronger result but there we had a little bit less of these performer costs but if you take it over a year it's on the same level as last year I'm very happy to see the continuous strong momentum in the consumer division. It was the sixth quarter in a row where we showed growth, organical growth. This quarter we had 7% organical growth and it was quite a strong comparison quarter as well. So I'm happy to see that we are increasing our market share and doing a good job there. We can also mention that we see a good demand for our workshop chargers, but we're mainly selling to workshops and they are used for when they're servicing both EV vehicles and combustion engines. Challenging marketing conditions for the professional division. My belief is that we have seen the bottom of the EVSE for CTEK. We are now introducing the CC3 with positive comments from our customers and we are opening up markets like UK and hopefully in the end of the year also Germany. So we are well into delivering on our strategy and we will happily invite you to a capital market day on May the 22nd in order to explain our next steps. So with that, I leave the word to you, Tom.

Yes. So we continue with some overall comments on the financials and the first bullets that did a bit of repetition from what Henrik already said. We have an organic growth of 5% excluding the GM last time by. We have increased the gross margins as well, and we had adjusted EBITDA margin that is around 10.2%, lower than last year, as Henrik mentioned. But if you see all the year, it's more or less Quarterly, how we split the cost of the performance cost, how we receive that costs, that is not fully even over the year. The full year result is 3% below last year, 9.8 versus 6.7. We have a little bit higher share of EVSE products in this quarter if you compare with the GM numbers, but without the GM numbers, it's basically on the same level as last quarter for 16% versus 15%. As you have seen, we have a quite large item affecting comparability, 90 million, related to the ended collaboration with General Motors. I would like to mention that this is a conservative approach and potential upsides in the final negotiations with GM will be reported as positive items affecting comparability. If you take a look at the respective division, start with the professional division that stands for two thirds of other net sales and mainly with the low voltage products. We can see, as Henrik mentioned, the 7% organic growth from a strong quarter four last year to an even stronger quarter this year. The adjusted EBITDA is a bit lower in this slide than on last year, but that is again related to performance cost coming not evenly over the year and the underlying margins, both gross margin and EBITDA margin are stable. Professional division. bit more of a challenge than in the consumer division. It's one third of our turnover. It was an increase organically with 95 million, but impacted on the last time buy from GM. The adjusted EBITDA number wise is on the same level as last year and a less bad result than quarter four last year. However, we would like to say that this quarter was impacted by this low-margin sell to GM. It was also impacted by that we are selling out slow movers, some of the variants of the CC2. That is obviously better than scrapping them. And we have also taken the provision for credit loss, as Henrik mentioned as well. So we see that we will come back on the blue line in the lower graph. That should turn upwards again and hopefully pass the zero line during the next year. Then some words around our cash flow and capex. Again, on the full year, we can say that we have a net cash that is the most important because it's money we have left after the investments is on full year level 54 versus 53 last year. It was also strong improvement during quarter four with a positive net cash of 42 million. We have... Cash in the bank account on 142 versus 192 last year. But during the 2024, we have amortized 100 million. So it's in fact an improved cash position. And again, our leverage has decreased from 2.7 to 1.8. This is well below the financial targets of three. CapEx level, as we have shown over the quarters, is now going steadily back to more normal levels. 8% is a peak of 12%. And we expect that to continue to be on these levels of 6% to 8% over the years to come. So with that, I hand over back to you, Henrik. Thank you, Tom.

And since this was the last quarter of the year, I just want to talk a little bit about the full year 2024, which we improved in every point. We grow organically with 4%. And if we take specifically our 12-volt chargers, we grow with 13% in a quite tough environment. And that means that we're gaining market share. We improved the gross margin with 3% units to 53%, and we also improved our adjusted EBITDA from 6.7% to 9.8%. And also happy to see that our net debt ratio is going down well below our financial target to 1.8%. So key takes away for 2024. We are following our strategy. We are driving in the right direction. We also can see that the restructuring of our organization that we initiated during 2023 is paying off. We also see that We hope we my judgment is that we have bought an out CTEX EVSE business and that we will see a growth in that during 2025. During the year, we also got a new chairman, Johan Menkel from Latour. We refinanced our credit facility with Swedbank and we inaugurated an office in Stockholm. As previously mentioned, we also ended the collaboration regarding EV chargers for General Motors and the reason there is that the volumes was not according to the prognosis and our expectations and we couldn't earn enough money on that business. um so all in all uh we put up this three step three phases strategy a little bit more than a year ago we left phase one stability beginning of last year and now we are well into the phase two strengthening our profitability. And we are happy to invite you to Capital Market Day 22nd of May, where we will describe more about our plans for phase three, where we have a more accelerated, profitable growth. So to summarize, third consecutive quarter with growth for the group. Sixth quarter in a row with growth for our 12-volt chargers. Very strong quarter for consumer division. We have launched our charge storm connected free EVSE charger mainly for destination charging. And we have had very positive reception from our customers. Net debt ratio down to 1.8. And as I mentioned, happy to invite you to our Capital Market Day, the 22nd of May in Stockholm. So with that operator, I open up for questions.

If you wish to ask a question please dial pound key 5 on your telephone keypad to enter the queue. If you wish to withdraw your question please dial pound key 6 on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, please dial pound key 5 on your telephone keypad. The next question comes from Mattias Ehrenborg from ReadEye. Please go ahead.

Hello, Henrik and Tom. Mattias from ReadEye here. I think you have already answered several of my questions, but I just want to if you can provide some additional information on the performance costs here. You mentioned, I think, that there was limited effects on the P&L in Q3, but more significant ones in Q4. Is it possible to quantify the delta between these quarters?

I don't have a delta quarter on quarter, but if you compare with last Q4, it was about 3 million higher this quarter. But for the full year, it was the same level.

Yeah. Okay. Okay. Excellent. And also regarding the credit loss that you mentioned in your report, is it possible to quantify the amount of this credit loss and perhaps provide some information about what type of customer is being behind this?

Yeah, it's no secret. This has been out in the media that eways was a big customer to us. And we, due to their insolvency, we have over the year made provisions of that. And since they were filing for insolvency in Q4, we made the last provision and that was of 1.5 million SEK.

Okay, excellent. Thank you for that. I was curious to hear, you mentioned in your report that North America is going quite well for you. Now we have a new administration in place, new trade tariffs, but as you mentioned in your Q3 report, you have moved some parts of your production from China to Malaysia to mitigate this risk. Could you just give more information or insights into the North American markets, what you're doing there right now, Is it all focused on low voltage, I assume, or what's it looking like there at the moment?

Yeah, you're right. We are focusing on a low voltage and we have quite limited market shares in North America at the moment. So as you mentioned, we had production in China. There was tariffs of 25%, which made us a bit uncompetitive. Now we have rectified that and we have changed our production site for 80% of the volume to Malaysia. In this current situation, it's hard to say if that will be unaffected of tariffs going forward. But as of now, it is. And we have managed to keep our margins but lowered the price to the customer. And that has had a positive effect. So we see a good growth potential in North America going forward. And we are aiming both at e-tailers and distribution channels.

Okay. And looking at Europe, obviously consumer division was very strong in this quarter as well, driven by the low water sales. What are the main drivers in Europe? Is it the overall high demand? Was it a favorable trend?

uh water in terms of temperature so what was um what's the main drivers in this quarter would you say actually we the the comparing quarter was better weather-wise because then it was very cold weather which is good for our sales so we didn't have a weather with us this quarter but we have increased our sales organization we are working tighter together with our customer we are growing in the digital channels And I would say that we are growing, taking market share, growing in markets where we have maybe not been satisfied before. So it's hard work from the consumer division and we see a good momentum there. And also, the workshop chargers have grown double digits during the year. Okay.

So in general, it's more of the same that you have mentioned in previous quarters, or is there anything new in this quarter that you would wish to highlight compared to Q3 or Q2?

We have mentioned and we continue to mention that this year, but we are continuously investing in our sales organization. And of course it takes some time. So the sales, the stronger sales organization that we put into place in the beginning of the year, we now can see, and that was mainly in the DAF region. We can see that that is paying off now. Now we in Q4, we have employed another, strengthening even more and that is mainly in some of the nordic countries and also in eastern europe and of course that will take some months before we see the result of that but our our judgment is that during the 2025 we will see also the result of that investment okay final question from my side now um

I noticed on LinkedIn the other day that you have hired a new head of e-commerce. I'm curious to hear, is this a new role of the C-Tech or is it a new person coming into an already existing role? And what are your hopes here?

We have the digital channels are a big part of our sales. We have had already a very good and existing organization for for taking care of this. But the role as such was divided between marketing and e commerce. Now we have made a pure e commerce role. And that is part of the investments that we're doing in our sales organization. Okay.

Okay. Excellent. That was all for me. Thank you for taking my questions.

Thank you, Matthias. Thank you.

As a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, please dial pound key five on your telephone keypad. There are no more questions at this time, so I hand the conference back to the speakers for any closing comments.

Thank you, Operator, and thank you all for listening today. And as I mentioned, you are warm welcome to our Capital Market Day at the 22nd of May in Stockholm. So hope to see you then and have a nice day. Thank you. Thank you.