Guideline Geo AB (publ)

Hello, my name is Malin Syberg and I'm the CEO of Gailan Geo. Welcome to our Q2 report. We will start as always with a brief introduction to the company and what we do, and then we will shift our focus and spend most of the time of the Q2 report, of course. Gailan Geo, what do we do? map and model what is subsurface. So we are your guide to the subsurface. And we use your physical methods and we can map what's just below the surface down to roughly one kilometer down below. We serve the building construction in infrastructure market and also the water sector, the water management sector. Our specific core applications that our solutions, our instruments and softwares are used for is groundwater management, finding new groundwater and making sure that they are maintained in a sustainable way. Ground investigations are prerequisites for the building construction infrastructure market. Whatever you need to build, you need to know your ground prerequisites, to know bedrock, bedrock quality, to know if there's clay, to know that whatever you want to construct and build works on that specific area. And utility locating is a specific application where we map and model where pipes and cables are just below the surface. So our customers are found in both the private sector consultants and contractors and engineering consultants specifically for utility locating but also for general ground investigations. We have quite a few customers also in the public sector. A good example is water authorities worldwide that want to use our solutions to find and monitor water levels. A growing area is also academia and research. It's quite a lot of customers in this field, in this sector that uses our instruments. So if that is who we are and who our customers are, who are we as a company? We are listed on Nasdaq, on First North's growth market. And we are a 200 million Swedish kronor company last year. We're profitable, we're growing, and we are a Swedish tech export company. So given our size, we have a truly global reach. both through our own people, our own subsidiaries, the yellow dots in this picture, this map, but also through our partner network, our distributors worldwide. And we pride ourselves to have the market leading partner network in our business. We are a tech company. Innovation is in our DNA. We have our R&D in Umeå, our headquarters in Stockholm, and our operations, our manufacturing, is in Malå up in Västerbotten. And we have a history. We celebrated 100 years last year, so we have some history. We go to market under two brand names, ABEM and Malo, which is also the name of our operations site. So these brands are really well known in our industry, more known than the company name actually. That was very brief about us. Let's move our eyes into the numbers and into Q2 and let me give you some explanation and my analysis of it. Q2 was a strong quarter for us. And for you that follow us, it is important for us to get that we saw a quick and fast bounce back from the week Q1. In the table, you can see Q2 to Q2 comparisons, but also the first six months comparison between 2024 and 2023. If we look at net sales in Q2, we saw strong net sales this quarter, plus 21% compared to last year, and we're happy to see that. It also shows us that we are close to last year's first half year numbers, which is why we say we've bounced back. We are where we should be, which is good to see. The order intakes is solid, plus 10% compared to last year's Q2, so over 50 million a quarter is a good quarter for us in order intake, so that's a good number. And then we show both the EBITDA and EBIT numbers. And we saw a strong EBITDA this quarter, 6.3 million compared to 4.6 last year, which gives us an EBITDA margin of 12%, which is a strong quarter for us. EBIT is more on par to last year's Q2, 2.3 versus 2.1, which is a 4% solid EBIT for us this quarter. The cash flow. This is negative. It's minus 12.3 for the quarter compared to minus 7.5 last Q2. So this is negative. This is more negative than expected. So I will, of course, give you my thoughts and analysis around this. But this is the overview of the quarter. But if we start by looking more deep into what gave us the net sales growth. In the tables you can see Q2 to Q comparisons for the last three years. You can see the six months comparisons for the last three years. And you can also see the split between our three regions, APEC, EMEA and Americas. And in Q2, the 21% growth overall for the company, we can see that all three regions contributed to this growth. Americas with plus 26%, APAC plus 24% and EMEA plus 14%. So good to see that all three regions delivers on sales. If I should highlight one specific market or application that gave us the growth in Q2, it's the water segment. It continues to grow for us and continues to perform well. I also want to highlight currency effect. We are an export company. We are very much dependent on exchange rates. And the last years, you follow the exchange rates. It's been giving us a tailwind. But this quarter, if we would compare Q2 net sales numbers with the same exchange rates, this year we had a tailwind of 0.4 million compared to last Q2. we had a positive tailwind of 3.4. So the currency effect is not helping us as it used to. So this also gives me comfort that we are delivering a strong net sales quarter. If we look ahead, look at the order intake for the quarter, we can see in the charts that APEC and EMEA had strong quarters and Americas a weaker quarter. It goes up and down between quarter and quarter, but this is the situation this quarter. And in EMEA, we had one large order that those that follow us might have read our press release around the large order from Tanzania. And I'll elaborate a little bit about this in a coming slide. That, of course, helped our order intake for Q2. But we saw other strong orders in EMEA. We got a large order from Austria, from Slovakia and from Tajikistan. So there are some odd large orders within EMEA that helped generate this order intake growth. Also, APAC is doing well. Of course, our newly acquired Australian subsidiary helped grow. But we also see that Philippines is doing well, Indonesia is doing well. So we are seeing India is doing well, order intake. So we are seeing many countries contributing to this order intake. And in America, that is both North and South America, we've seen pretty good orders from Latin America, Mexico and Colombia in Q2. This slide, I've shown you this before, it shows the split between our two brands, Malo in blue and ABEM in orange. And I usually say, and this is also fair for this quarter, that we have two equally important brands, and you can see that we rely on both of them in the same extent. What we can see is that the orange bars, the ABEM bar, had a strong quarter. So ABEM, I think it's one of the best Q2 quarters for ABEM during this period that I show here. And this is driven by the water sector, also ground investigations, but it's driven by our ABEM volume product, which is the Terameter LS2 that goes really well. If you look at the blue bar, which is the Marlowe brand, it's been more difficult. It was an okay quarter. It was not the best. It was not extremely weak. We can see some impact from the weak building construction markets in many parts of our world. That has had an impact on part of our Marlowe product portfolio and the sales and order intake. Not all of it, because you can still see a good quarter, but it has impact. We typically see that some orders slip and they continue to slip. And that to us is a sign that the building construction market trends is impacting our end users. On the other hand, we see that, I've talked to you about our new Mira Compact, and I'll talk a little bit more about that, that we released this period this time last year, and that we started to ship end of last year, that in Q2, we had a strong sale of Mira Compact, which is good to see, and helping out the Malo sales. Q2 is for us a very hectic period, intense from a sales perspective. There's a lot of exhibitions, conferences that we participate in sometimes together with our partners, sometimes our partners separately, and sometimes only on our own. So just a few highlights, pictures. And in the US, we participated in two exhibitions, both for Malo and ABEM. In India, we have a pretty new partner, distributor, a really strong distributor. And we jointly did a large workshop, several day workshop, where we had our own people together with our distributor on site. And you can see pictures that was really well attended and generated a lot of leads for us in China even though China is struggling a bit in the business building construction market we are continuing to push with our partner we were part in two exhibitions to continue to show our products so once the business turns we're there and we're known In France, we have also a pretty new distributor, a new partner for our Marlowe brand. And we did an extensive workshop together with them to help them get sales going and help them introduce the new products in a good way. We took part in exhibitions together with our partners in Mexico, in Japan and in Colombia. In Sweden, we did workshops and user workshops to introduce our newer products to Swedish users. That was really well received. In Australia, we've done also customer events and we've had our global sales director, Per, located in Australia part of the quarter to help our subsidiary get started and benchmark what they do that we can use the rest of the world and vice versa. On top of these face-to-face events, we also see an increasing positive response on our online sales activities like webinars and trainings. And our US team has had an initiative around webinars and trainings specifically on resistivity during Q2 that has been really well received. And in our industry, we sell instruments and we sell software. And to buy, seeing is believing. So as part of the sale, almost always there's a demo involved. So we've done demos worldwide to get customers hands-on on our gear, on our products. And that is also a way to get our newer products out in the field and in front of customers. So a lot of sales activity going on. And in Q2, we got a very large, to us, a very large order, an eight million Swedish kroner order from Tanzania. It's from the water ministry in Tanzania that bought our solutions to survey map and monitor groundwater aquifers throughout Tanzania and to also make sure that the water aquifers are being used in a sustainable way. We worked on this case together with our local partner and it's a local partner that will provide training and local support to make sure that these solutions are being used throughout Transania. And included in this 8 million Swedish credit order is nine systems of our volume product ABEM Terameter LS2. We got the order and we managed to deliver all of it during Q2. So this is spot on what's in our strategy. This type of customer is what we're actually aiming for. It's so good to see that it generates also good results. I have talked to you about our newest flagship product on Malo, the Malo Mira Compact that we introduced last year. And as part of a big launch, it's important to get demo systems out to our partner network and get these systems out in front of end users. so we have delivered all demo units that our partners wants and have bought from us so they we have now a worldwide network of of demo systems that are being used in front of end users and we are seeing really positive feedback and In Q2 we saw sales finally start to take off. We sold seven systems in Q2 on this, our newest and our flagship product, which is really good to see. If we move our eyes from sales and products to profitability, EBITDA, we had 6.3 million in the quarter compared to 4.6 last year and in the table below you can see quarter by quarter EBITDA numbers. And you can also remind yourself that the Q1 was something we were not at all satisfied with. But it's good to see the EBITDA bounce back on healthy levels. So EBITDA margin Q2 was 12%. Surprisingly enough, it is the net sales that is the key driver for a sound and healthy EBITDA. But it's important to say also that we, of course, track per product and per sale the product margins, and they are maintained at a good level. And that doesn't happen by itself. It's a lot of hard work behind that. But it's always good to see that our product margins are where they should be. and they also help provide a healthy EBITDA for the quarter. Cash flow. This is the negative number for this quarter. Minus 12.3 net cash flow versus 7.5 last year. And if you look at the operating cash flow it's minus 8 versus minus 1.7. So this is below expectations and this is of course something we've analyzed a lot and have taken action to improve. First of all, we do have a seasonal impact of cash flow. You can see that in last year's Q2 numbers, it's also negative. And that is an impact of we have our operations in Sweden and we do shut down our factory during two weeks in the summer break. And what typically happens is that before we do the summer shutdown period, we source from our suppliers. to make sure that once we return from our summer shutdown, then we have material to be able to build and deliver products directly immediately after. But that's not the explanation for this load number. What we have seen is, I talked about the uncertain building construction market and infrastructure market in some parts and many parts of the world. And that has led to a really challenging period for us in terms of forecasting. So our forecasting have been really volatile. And for us it's led to that we had believed that both Q1 and Q2 would have had stronger sales on specifically on the Malo side. And we built for our volume products, we built to forecast. We're not building to order because we want to deliver fast and we have those volumes. So we've bought too much stock. So we built stock levels both on components level, but also for some parts also on ready-built products. This is, of course, something we need to improve on. So we have taken measures both to improve our forecast in these turbulent times, do it faster, more accurate, I can't say, but spend more time and some more ways of doing it, has been important and will be important going forward. Part of the cash flow, if you look at the investment side of the cash flow, it includes the Australia acquisition that we bought, acquired early this year. And also R&D, the large Mira Compact that we launched in the last year that starts to depreciate from January. We have a higher depreciation rate compared to the same period last year and that is also affecting our net cash flow. This net cash flow of course make you think about what's about the liquidity. So our net cash right now is or after Q2 is 11.6 million compared to 12.3 last quarter, same quarter last year. And in addition to the net cash, we also have an unused check credit with our bank at 13 million Swedish kronors. So we don't see a big risk in liquidity problem in the company. But here's where we see that we've taken measures to improve and we have expectations on improvement here. If we move our eyes to our innovation, this quarter we were granted 11 million from EU for EU funded project that is called GeoHeat. And we're pretty proud that we've been a selected industry partner to a larger consortium. It's a large research project consisting of industry partners, academia and authorities that participate in this project. And the purpose is to make geothermal energy more accessible as a solution for the European energy market. Our role in it is of course within GPR, Ground Penetrating Radar, and we have already solutions for borehole GPR for investigation, but this specific research project goes deeper to develop a GPR sensor that can be used in really deep boreholes for large-scale geothermal energy solutions. So really important area, exciting and really private that we were the selected partner. So 11 million is granted for us in this project and for us it's a three-year project that we will work on this. And with that, I will end this presentation with the key takeaways from this presentation. But Q2 for us is a strong quarter. It's a really strong quarter. And it's good to see that we've bounced back this quick. And the second takeaway is that the water sector continues to grow. It continues to be strong for us. And for us, that is our ABEM brand that goes really well for us right now. And with that, I'd be happy to take any questions that you might have typed in the chat or will type in the chat. And if you have any specific questions, please also feel free to email me or my CFO. The email address is on our website. Anders, do we have any questions in the chat?

Yes. Cash flow was negative and you explained why. But can you tell us what improvements you are taking to avoid the same situation in the future?

Yes, of course. In challenging and turbulent market environments, forecasting is even harder than always. Forecasting is always difficult predicting the future. But we've taken measures to improve increase how often we do forecasts and we're also improving the way that we are forecasting bottom-up from a sales perspective and from a cost perspective and we're also doing management assessments to make sure that we are considering stock levels when we supply the forecast to our operations so that they can plan for an assessed forecast in a better way than earlier.

You mentioned that the infrastructure segment is slow and that it affects part of the Malo sales. Can you please elaborate?

Yeah, our Malo product portfolio is pretty wide. We have several different products and they are used in many different applications, more than those that I mentioned to you today. Our model products are being used in the building construction market, but they're also being used in climate investigations, such as glaciology, bathymetry, archaeology. And those applications have not been affected by the building construction market to the same extent as utility locating or ground investigations for a new building construction. So there are things... applications that have been affected by building construction market, but we do see other markets and applications for the Mahler product that still go well for us. Also academia has been going pretty well for us. And if we look at products, we've talked a lot about the Mira Compact and we've seen sales to the building construction market, but they've slipped sometimes. But we've also seen sales to archaeology, to universities, to those type of road investigations. And they are not affected as much by the volatile or turbulent building and construction markets.

Next question is how much of the order intake is delivered and how much will be delivered in Q3? And more specific about the Tanzania order that I believe you answered was invoiced in Q2.

Yes, for the Tanzania order we did get the order early Q2 and they wanted us to deliver so we delivered all of it also in Q2 and invoiced in Q2. We typically don't communicate the size of the backlog but So I can't really comment on that, but you can look for yourselves, net sales, and we do communicate both order intake and net sales every quarter. So I think you can almost do the math on your own.

And last question that we have right now is, is there a risk for liquidity problems moving forward? You touched on it. Can you please elaborate?

No, we don't see an immediate liquidity problem. As I said, we are used to this situation in Q2. There is a seasonal variation that typically is not the case in Q3 if you look at our older reports. But of course, we also need to make sure that we take down the stock levels to get to a healthy balance. As I said, the net cash is 11 on our bank, and also we have an unused check credit at 13, and that's the same level that we were a year ago. So no, we don't have a liquidity problem.

I don't have any more questions right now, so maybe we give it a few more seconds to see if something shows up.

And if you come up with more questions afterwards, please just don't hesitate to reach out to me or my CFO. Emails are on our website page. So if there are no more questions, thank you for listening and see you all in a quarter's time. Thank you.