Guideline Geo AB (publ)

Hello, my name is Malin Seiberg and I'm the CEO of Gailan Geo. Welcome to our Q4 report for 2024. I will soon give you all the numbers, but I will start with a very brief introduction to the company for any newcomers on this investor call. We are your guide to the subsurface. We use non-destructive geophysical methods and we can see things down to roughly 1000 meters below the subsurface from the surface. We have three main applications, groundwater management, finding water, monitoring water basins, ground investigations and utility locating, which is very much connected to the construction and infrastructure markets. Ground investigation is to understand ground prerequisites for any type of construction. Utility locating is to find pipes and cables just below the surface and digitizing, making a 3D model of them. From these applications, it's easy to understand that we have customers in the private domain, contractors, engineering firms, consultants. We have specifically for the water sector, we have governments, public sector in water ministry and departments, municipalities worldwide. And we also have customers in academia and research. If that is what we do, this is who we are. We are a stock listed company listed on NASDAQ, First North Growth Market. We celebrated 100 years last year. We are made in Sweden. We have Swedish quality. We pride ourselves to be innovation leaders in the industry. And given our size, we have a truly global reach through our direct channels as well as through our indirect channels, our partner network. And we go to market under two industry well-known brands, ABEM and Malå. Malå is also the name of the town where we have our roots and where we have our manufacturer up north in Västerbotten. So let's move our eyes to the financials and our Q4. We had a record high EBITDA. We had a record high EBIT and we had a record high cash flow in the quarter. So it was a strong quarter. If you look at the table to the right, the Q4 column, we had a net sales of 55 and an order intake of 57 million Swedish kronor, which is a solid, both net sales and order intake. And our EBITDA at 13.5, EBIT at 9 and a positive cash flow of 17.3. So we are very satisfied with the outcome of this quarter. If we look at the full year column for 2024, we ended our net sales at 185, which is lower than last year. And it's mainly due to One of the reasons is the weak construction and infrastructure market that has affected the sales of our Malo brand. Given that, our net sales is the second highest in our modern history, and we also managed to generate a positive EBIT of 3.8 over the year, despite the very weak Q1 that those of you who follow us saw early in 2024. So overall, challenging but good year and a very, very strong Q4. If we deep dive a little bit into the EBITDA and EBIT, to the right in the tables, you see quarter by quarter EBITDA on top and EBIT below. And there you can see clearly the record high profitability in the last quarter. EBITDA percentage is 24 and EBIT percentage is 16 in the quarter, which is to us a very high number. The reasons behind the increased profitability is a lot to do about the portfolio mix, the sales in the quarter and in combination with a very strong product margin for the quarter. We saw a strong sale of our Marlowe brands and our newer products, which have a strong margin and also the portfolio mix of software of which typically end of the year we sell our demo instruments. So a lot of factors that impacted both the portfolio mix and the overall product margin in a positive way. We continue to invest in R&D and we activate R&D investments that we know will lead to new products and new sales. So we had a pretty strong R&D activation in Q4. And I've talked to you earlier quarters that we've implemented a stronger, strengthened financial control when we saw the weaker outlook for the year. And in Q4, as an example, we had four-day working weeks in our operations to have enough capacity but not overcapacity in our production lines. And that is one example how we, through improved financial control, managed to keep our costs down. If you look at the EBITDA and EBIT over the full year, you can obviously see a very strong seasonal variation. We have that every year, that the second half of the year is typically stronger than the first half of the year, that is our season. But you can also see that last year was exceptionally in that sense that we had a very weak Q1 and a very strong Q4. To explain the very weak Q1, you have to also look at the very strong Q4 in net sales, but also in profitability. In Q4, what happened? Q4 23, we had launched a new big product launch for us, the Mira Compact. We took orders throughout the entire second half of 2023. We managed to ship and invoice everything in end of December 2023. We were not sure about that. So in order to complete the year 2023 in a good way, we also pulled in orders from Q1. And we also shipped our entire order book, more or less, which resulted in a lower order intake and sales in Q1. And that hurt this year and that made the seasonal variation stronger than it usually is. If we look at cash flow, we had a very strong cash flow in the Q4, a record high. And the reasons behind this big change in trend is, of course, the strong EBITDA affects the cash flow. We've also worked to lower our stock levels throughout 2024 and we continue to lower our stock levels a bit. We're not where we want to be yet, but we continue to lower our stock levels. Also, we got paid from our customers and we've had this large order to Tanzania, a large order for us, roughly 10 million Swedish kronors and early Q4 we finally got paid according to our payment plan and of course that also gave an impact to the cash flow. We got paid by all our customers. If you look at cash flow, the investment activities that impacts cash flow, and if you compare 23 to 24, the main difference is, of course, the Australia acquisition. And I'll come back a little bit more to that. In the chart, the orange bars are the cash flow per quarter and the gray bar is the net cash. So the net cash when we closed last year was 19.3 million. And on top of that, we have an unused check credit of 13 million. So we are in a safe place in terms of cash flow and where we want to be. If we look into net sales and order intake, the left column is Q4 net sales on top and Q4 order intake below. And the right hand side is the full year comparison, net sales and order intake. To explain these numbers, if we start to look at the market and applications, for the full year, we've had a very strong development in the water sector, water management. It continues to grow for us and continues to grow in importance for us. And it's mainly our ABEM brand that we sell into this market. Our second core application that we focus on is, we call it ground investigations. And this sector, this application has been hit by the weak construction infrastructure market in our major countries. And in our major countries, I mean China, I mean Europe, UK, US. So many of our larger, typically larger customers have been impacted here. What we did see in Q4 and also with AmeriCompact is we've had stronger sales towards archaeology than we have expected and a strong Q4 in archaeology and that's pleasing to see. And our third core application is utility locating about pipes and cables. And it's been a weak year overall. But also we've seen countries such as US and China starting to pick up again. If it's a seasonal effect or if it's a turning point of the industry, it's a bit too early to say, but it was a strong cue for Malo and for utility locating. I talked about the seasonal variations and we talked about that before, but it's important to remember we analyze our sales that we had an exceptional week, Q1 last year. We also impacted, we are an export company, we sell only in US dollars and in euros, and we sell really worldwide. So currency impacts us a lot. And this year, we've had a positive impact from the currency on our total net sales, but it's been much lower than last year. Last year, we had tremendous or a strong tailwind, roughly 10, 11 million. And now it's still positive, but much lower. I think it's 2.4 or something. It's in the data. If we split net sales per region, and if we start by looking at the tables below, to the left hand side, you can see quarter by quarter in APEC, EMEA and Americas. And to the right, you can see net sales for the full year per region. And there you can see that we've had pretty tough in Americas and EMEA going down in net sales compared to last year, but APAC has shown continued growth. And the graph on top is to show you the APAC development the last five years, 2020 to 24. We've had a continuous steady growth in our APAC net sales, and that is really exciting to see. The growth in 2024 is, of course, impacted by our acquisition of our Australian distributor. That helped. We've had a headwind. We've had a really weak economy in China, in the public sector specifically, and we've lost sales in China compared to previous years. But still we see a growth in APAC, and that is because we have strong history, we have strong distribution partners in many other large economies throughout Asia, such as Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, a new distributor in India, Korea, Japan, Taiwan. We have many distributors that have shown growth in 2024 and that could compensate for the decline in China. In Asia, we sell both Malo and ABEM pretty across the board. We have gaps here and there, but we are strong in both product lines. We continue to sign new distributors where we do have gaps in certain countries or in certain applications. And last year we signed a new distributor in Japan, Topcon, which is the Japanese hexagon based in Japan, but very strong throughout Asia. And one in Sri Lanka. And actually today, we have this year's distributed conference in Malaysia this very week to get them excited and engaged to really continue to sell our gear also this year. If you look at EMEA, Europe was very weak this year. We had a downturn in Europe. The financial situation, the macroeconomics in Europe was weak, but it was also internal reason. We had a weakened sales team in Europe during 2024 that we are now addressing for 2025. And in EMEA, we also have MEA, Middle Eastern Africa. And Middle Eastern Africa had a very strong development in 2024. And Middle East and Africa, it's probably not a surprise that the water sector is very strong. Dry countries, warm countries. So our ABEM brand goes really well and it's really suitable for this part of the world. And next week, we're going to Ethiopia to have our distributed conference gathering the African and Middle East distributors there for a two-day conference. In Americas, we had a slowdown in Americas. Again, it was both external macroeconomic reasons and internal reasons. We have a we are strong in model sales but that also means that we are dependent on on the infrastructure and construction market and that has been weak in america's um public investment has been stalled because of the election last year so macroeconomics has led to downturn but also we've had a weaker sales management in place um part of 2024 and that is we we got a new sales manager in place in the second half of 2024 and we're really excited about the team going forward for this year. In Americas we also include Latin America and Latin America has had an okay development last year. Not a growth but not a decline, it's a bit in between. Malo is very strong in the US. Latin America is more an ABEM country. It's mining, it's water, environmental investigations. And we're going to Mexico in March to have a distributed conference to start up the year together with our Latin American partners. In APEC, we include Oceania, which is where we acquired our partner in Australia. So since January last year, we have a subsidiary, a fully-owned subsidiary in Australia, in Sydney. And when we close the year, we can really say that with this team and the setup, we've exceeded our expectations for the year. We now have a strong, young, competent team in place in Sydney. And they hosted a very successful customer event in Q4 where they invited customers and partners for a day of hands-on demos, relation building and nice evening and also showcasing our new facilities because we moved into new facilities during the second half of of last year. So overall, we've seen a strong sales trend in Australia and we're excited about the year to come. One thing to point out is that our distributor used to sell mainly Malo brand, but now we are asking them to also sell ABEM where we see there is a lot of potential throughout Oceania and we've started to see the first sales also on ABEM here. So it's exceeding expectations and very excited for 2025. We continue to have a high pace and high activity in our sales efforts and also in Q4. And of course we go to conference and of course we go to exhibitions like everybody else. But we also believe in being in front of customers where the customer is. doing hands-on demos, getting the customers to feel for themselves, try on our instruments and our software to see how it is to use them. We believe strongly in local presence and building long-term customer relations. And you can see in the picture top left is where James, our manager in Australia, in our customer event, we actually build relations, but we also do really hands-on demos on site. We also think it's extremely important to understand the customer application and be able to do application-specific trainings. If you look at the picture with the truck, our application specialist held an application and product training for a mobile team, a customer mobile team, that were driving this truck into the nuclear plant of Chernobyl to do subsurface investigations through GPR to understand and monitor the situation subsurface in the nuclear power plant. Really important work. To the right, you can see a picture from Jordan, from the World Heritage Site Petra, where another of our application specialists went to do subsurface archaeology survey together with a customer. So understanding customer and application is extremely important to us. And of course, we complement that with online webinars. We sometimes do assisted rentals to help customers understand what they see when they use our solutions. We also do new product demos. You can see on the green field to the bottom right, we can see Morgan demoing our newest release in Q4, our Explorer coils in front of a customer. And I'll talk a little bit more about that soon. If we move our eyes to product and our product lines, you can see that we continue to have two equally important brands. Malo had a very strong end of year quarter. Good to see the comeback of Malo. Overall, it was a strong year for ABEM. And if we conclude the full year, it's about 50-50% of sales in ABEM and Malo over the year. And that's a strong year for ABEM. To pick up a couple of highlights from Q4 around Malo is that we started to see sales of into utility locating customers in the US, and that's really good to see. We also started to see a kind of bounce back in China, very strong in tunnel projects, so selling GPR solutions into tunnel projects in China happening in Q4, and that's a good sign. Also pleasing to see is that the Mira Compact, our large launch from last year, is now being used in 25 countries around the world. So we can really claim that that's a successful product that is being used everywhere. To pick up a couple of highlights from ABEM is that we continuously see strong sales trends of our volume product, the TerraMeter LS2, really being used in the water sector. It's a strong product that it's hard to beat. We also see a strong trend in our TEM products. TEM is also targeting the water sector in a really good way. So we have a strong portfolio targeting the water sector. And the TEM product growth is both in our own developed products as well as products that come from our partnership with a Danish company that we started early in 2024. So we start to see good traction on the TEM products sales. And also nice to see that we start to see ABEM sales in countries that typically has been weaker in the ABEM sales. And I pointed out specifically in Q4, China and Australia. So that is promising to see. We continue to invest in product development in R&D, and we had two pretty large and important product releases in Q4, one on the Malo side and one on ABEM side. For Malo, it was a product that we called Geodrone 600. It's a GPR antenna that is carried by a drone, and the customer can use more or less any type of drone. It's really helping customers to increase productivity of their GPR survey tremendously. And flying a drone makes the solution tailored for surveys in inaccessible or remote areas. In the picture you can see over ice or glaciers. But it can also be riverbeds. Customers also try to search for UXOs or landmines where it's, of course, inaccessible areas. So we've seen large interest since the release in end of Q3. On ABEM, we released in Q4 something that we call the Ground Temp Explorer coils. It's a key accessories to the Temp products coming from the partnership with our Danish company. So what it does, it really increases infield productivity. You can do service much faster and easier. by using these Explorey coils and it's a really nice accessory that you can sell as an aftermarket to existing customers or together with a new instrument sale. So our products do a lot of good and we've decided that this year's annual report will also include a sustainability report for the first time and This time we will include three areas in focus in our sustainability report. One is to describe the impact of our solutions because our solutions are being used in many good ways that makes the world a better place to some sort. We will also focus on our history. We have a hundred year history. We are a sustainable company and we have employees that have been working with us for 40 years. So we invest and we spend to be and we want to be sustainable and have a sustainable working environment and climate. And we'll tell you a little bit more about that, how we do that. And we also want to highlight our supply chain. In today's world, supply chain is even more important than ever. And to us, we want our supply chain to be local. We produce in Västerbotten and we try to keep most of our suppliers in a range of 200 kilometers from our operations site in Malå whenever we can. So more to come in the annual report about sustainability. Looking ahead, we've set five strategic focus areas for this year. The first one being strategic market development, and it has a lot to do with our go-to-market channel. the wallet and we want to continue to develop our sales channel. We have gaps and white spots regionally or for an application that we want to find a distribution partner to help fill that gap. We have through the Australian acquisition also seen and pointed out certain areas where we want to go direct. We want to be there, put down our own flag and sell directly. So we'll continue to fill the map with sales channel that is beneficial for us in our core markets. We also believe in OEM channels, that sometimes we're not selling to the end user, we're selling sensors to an integrator who sells a solution to their customers. So that is also part of how we want to strategically develop our market and our go-to markets. A second area is around product portfolio optimization. We have a 100-year history. We have a broad portfolio of products. We need to manage that. We need to make sure that we invest in the right new product that helps our customers and our core customers, our target customers. And we need to look at that from a business perspective. That means that we are optimizing to increase our spending in the software development that really drives customer value in a really strong way for our solutions. And we also, like we did with the Danish partnership, we're looking for partners instead of doing everything on our own. Aftermarket is another focus area for us. We have a large and strong customer base worldwide. We believe in local presence and be able to provide local support and service locally in local language, having the local relations. And we also know that that customer base is a potential for sales growth. A happy customer will also invest in an upgrade, in an accessory, in a service, in a training if we are there and if we're talking to them in an active manner. Brand building and communication is also another focus area for 2025. We know brand building and communication drives sales, drives engagement. And we want our website, for instance, to be able to be easy to use and also drive sales leads. And then we have acquisitions and partnerships as part of our strategic agenda. We did two in end of 23 or early 2024, and we are continuously looking for both partners and for potential candidates to acquire. So that was all for me. But before I hand over to any questions, the key takeaways from this Q4 report from Geiland Geo is that our Q4, we showed record high EBITDA. We had record high EBIT and a record high cash flow. A very strong quarter. If you look at the full year, it was a good year, but it was a challenging year. But despite the really weak Q1, the net sales will be our second highest and we managed to close the year with a positive EBIT. Our global sales is a strength. I think we can see that when we look back at 2024, it shows that we're not dependent on one single country or region. And in this turbulent global trade environment that we're in, it is a very good situation to be in. And it's a risk mitigation in a time when tariff threats are real between EU and US. So with that, I will hand over to any questions that you may have.

Yes, we start with Q1 versus Q4. Is there a risk that we will see the same weak Q1 in 2025 due to the strong Q4 in 2024?

Of course, that's an obvious question when you see our numbers. And of course, I cannot comment on Q1. But explaining the history might give you some kind of indication that this 2024 Q1 was affected by the very, very strong Q3. And that was not a natural thing. seasonal variation. It was internally pushed because we emptied our order books and we pulled in orders from Q1 because we were afraid that we couldn't ship the Mira Compact orders that we had received throughout the entire year. We managed to do both, which led to a very high Q4 last year, but that also meant that we started 2024 with entirely empty order books. We have not done that this year. This year is a more normal seasonal variation. There is a seasonal variation. How large that is, I think that remains to be seen. But this is a more normal seasonal variation compared to last year.

You had a very strong order intake in Q4. Was there a particular area or product that stood out?

We had strong order intake on Malo and I think that is promising to see because we've had a weaker order intake and sale on Malo earlier in Q4. And that was also interesting, it was not only the Mira Compact, it was across the Malo portfolio, which is really good to see. It was also across regions. It was both Americas, EMEA and APAC, which is also good to see. So no, it's not one specific product or product line or country that is behind that strong order intake at Q4. And to me, that's a good sign.

Investments increased quite a lot in 2024. Will they fall back to a more normal level in 2025 or what is the investment need?

The difference in investments compared 23 to 24 is partly because we've invested in having demo instruments where we have our own sales. We acquired Australia and of course we wanted them to have the full portfolio of instruments to be able to demo and show to customers. Our newer instruments are a bit larger. That means that we invested in having the newer instruments in the hands of our sales team and applications team. So that's part of the reason.

What is the risk of the US tariffs? How will that impact 2025?

Yes, that's a million dollar question that I think all of us are thinking about and perhaps losing sleep about. But of course, there is a high risk of tariffs if we sell into the US. That's pretty obvious, I think, for all of us. I think we are in a pretty good situation because we are not dependent on the US only. And I think we can see that from 2024 sales. Our sales in the US used to be much higher than it was last year. And still we managed to get a good, decent net sales because we are in every region, every country. So we are not as dependent on the US than many other Swedish export countries. But of course, we're also preparing internally what we can do. We have a legal entity, we have a service and support office. If, depending on the outcome, there is, of course, opportunities for us to have some kind of... We're not having manufacturing in the US at the moment, but we can... we can take action to minimize the impact of those kind of tariffs. But of course, we are preparing internally for that. But we're not overly conscious. We're conscious we're making plans, but it will not change our plans for this year.

And I think that concludes the last question. Unless we have something on the way in, but as usual, if we miss your last question, don't hesitate to contact us and we will answer any questions.

Send any questions to me on, I think my email and telephone number is on the website. So please don't hesitate to reach out if there's any questions that you missed to type into the chat. Thank you for today and see you in a quarter again.