Hanza AB (publ)

Thank you. A warm welcome to this presentation of Hansa's first quarter 2025. I'm Erik Stenfors, the CEO of the company and I will be glad to give you this update together with our CFO Lars Åkerblom. So as we all know we are in a turbulent period of the global economy and therefore we are pleased to present a solid report but also a clear roadmap for the future and to provide a better understanding where we are right now and where we are heading we will start with a short general overview So for many years, the traditional routes for global manufacturing have been blocked one by one for various reasons. We see some examples on this slide. And it was the pandemic who opened the eyes how fragile the global supply chains are. And now this year, with the new administration in the US, it's become even more complicated with global manufacturing. They are imposing these new tariffs and the question is then where is Hansa in all this in this new manufacturing landscape? Where are we? Well, from the start we have had our concept to have local and complete manufacturing. There's a feature of Hansa we have combined different kind of manufacturing technologies. You see some of them on this slide so we can offer both mechanics and electronics and cable harness is a good advantage for our customers. And now we're up to about 3,200 colleagues. We have 25 factories grouped into what we call manufacturing clusters. You see on this map, the five manufacturing clusters we have in Europe. And we also have in China, not a cluster, but a single unit. And that is, we call it the gateway, that is to help our customers to relocate manufacturing. to China for manufacturing in China for China and also back to Europe. Another feature of Hansa is that we have something called MIG we help our customers to rewire the supply chain to optimize it to move manufacturing and all in all this means that actually Hansa has very low exposure to trade barriers being a European manufacturer producing in Europe for Europe also We could even have a small advantage when it comes to customers who want to relocate the manufacturing. And if we look at. Also, this is our business model, but also if we look at our expansion model, we have built Hansa in steps in defined phases. We put the milestone two three years ahead with defined operational and financial targets. We have passed three milestones so far. We're heading for number four. This is important. It's called Hansa 2025. You will hear a lot about this during this presentation. And we can actually grow in three dimensions. grow with more technologies, manufacturing technologies, we can grow with more geographies and we can grow with more capacity. And this Hansa 2025 is about increasing capacity on existing geographies, existing manufacturing technologies. And what's interesting, if you look at the sales graph up to the right corner, So this is the sales for the first quarter for a five year period. In 21, we were close to half a billion second sales. Two years later, in 23, we were up to a billion second sales. And this quarter, if you include leden for the full quarter, we are over 1.5 billion second sales. So it means that our business model combined with our expansion model ensures a steady growth. under different economic conditions as has been the case for these five years in strong economy we can really help our customers to have a better solution with our all you need is one concept the different technologies and in slower economies we can help with rewiring supply chain and also building on our company So with this short introduction, I think we are ready for the progress report when it comes to operations, sustainability and finances. And we will also end with a look at the future and of course a Q&A session. If there's anything you would like to have further explained, please use that moment to ask any questions you like. The quarter. The main event of the quarter was, of course, that we closed the deal with Leden. So the deal we announced in December last year. It was a bit delayed because we had to wait for approvals from the authorities. But it's part of Hansa as of March. And what a nice quarter it has been. I've been traveling around the APA line and you see... his photo here up to the right meeting the new colleagues meeting new customers we've got very interesting new customers like Eaton if you know the energy management company and Danfoss they are into let's say smart motor controls we also got more ABB in Finland for Finland very nice and they also have a brand new facility they open in January this year in Olainen You see a picture from that factory actually from a customer meeting next to the photo of Jukka. A fantastic street metal mechanics factory. So it's been a very pleasant first quarter to get closer to this company. And okay, we could not enter the company until March, but we had a little bit of a quiet start before then. So I would say the integration is running smoothly and it should. Because we do a lot of work before an acquisition with our due diligence of the HR and the company culture. So we are on full speed with integration running very, very smoothly. We have also separated the business according to our cluster concept. So Jukka, who used to be CEO of Leden, is now cluster president for Finland. He has our old units. You see them on the map, three of them, and the units from Leden. And in Estonia, we put the Talen unit to Livarkongi, who is the president of Baltics. So this has also been a very good separation. I believe very much in this. It's clear that the people also appreciate to be part of the same geography and the same culture and the same language. In this unit that we got in Tallinn, we also got a minor part of non-core business, product owning business. It's not according to our strategy. It's a very nice business, however, running at a bit lower margin. And we are now evaluating our long-term strategy concerning this unit. We will come back to you about this later on. And talking about a very nice quarter, this was also a highlight. We opened a new factory in Töxfors, Värmland, Sweden in February. Very good day at work. Nice opening ceremony and a very nice dinner with partners and investors and customers and suppliers. Very nice. We were running before this opening because of demand. We had to use an old grocery store. This is a final assembly unit we have built. And now, because of the new building, of course, we can move the assembly to this building. It is adjacent to the sheet metal mechanics, and that's the way it should be. So when you have made a box, you should fill it with something without transportation. We can do it now. It improves our efficiency. Then also, there are a number of other projects going on in Hamza. Worth mentioning is the one in Poland, the integration of Prabuty. It's a unit. in poland we got with the acquisition a year ago the orbit one acquisition after that we've been working to streamline and optimize where to have customers and where to have different technologies this is a work ongoing and will go on It will be ready before the end of the year, but it will still take some time to finish this. It will be really good at the end. That's a large project. We also have other similar smaller projects, but all of them should then be ready by the end of this strategy ANSA 2025, according to our plan. Then also we started something we call Lynx. it's a market program what we see now we talk about the turbulence the new situation in the world it's not for the best all the time but we also see that it has brought strength to some certain market segments and we also see in germany that they are open now to change the supply chain previously they have been rather conservative at least compared to The Scandinavian countries, we have been more into outsourcing, but now this is changing. And it means that we also have a chance to take a bigger stake of the operations of the manufacturing in Germany. So these new areas to take advantage of them, we have launched a market program links. I'm sure it will show some good results already this year. And I will come back and we will present more of course when we have some results. But this is something to keep your eyes on. And with that, I will leave the floor to Lars.

Thank you, Eric. And for you, and that's been following Hansa for a while, you see that the interim report that we released today has a new format, a little bit change in the layout and in the way we present the information and figures. We hope it will be more easy to take on and more visual in how we present the development of Hansa. Starting with sustainability and the main thing happening in the beginning of 2025 was of course the release of the sustainability report for 2024 together with the annual report that was according to the European sustainability reporting standards and major step towards the CSRD. We also started the integration of Leden to be able to report the Leden figures. They are not included in the figures you see to the right and then we have in the waste one-time effect due to washing fluid that we always in the first quarter are replacing so that's a one-time effect on a little bit higher KPI on the other hand on energy juice we are having a one-time effect in the positive way we are taking away the gas consumption to adopt the scope two way of measuring the energy use. So that's how we're going to present it going forward. We see the injuries are on a stable and quite low level. And we also been working with cybersecurity and bringing more factors into Ecovodis Looking into the financials, as Erik said, we had Lea Dan joining the group in the beginning of March. We have only one month of the quarter that leden is included. On the other hand, it has a full effect on the balance sheet. So that brings the KPIs a little bit to, you need to adjust for the fact that leden, which is a quite big acquisition is done, included one month, but the full for the balance sheet. We also speak about the old Hansa comparison units and that is now together with Orbit 1 that we acquired and integrated from beginning of January 2024. The market is not that strong. We have increased the sales by 6% and that is due to the acquisition of Leaden. We actually have negative organic growth of 3% in Hansa overall. Proforma, including Lede, we are under 1.5 billion, so on a yearly base on 6 billion SEK. And we have an organic growth in the end of the quarter in the old Hansa. We continue to have sequence in increase of the margin. We reached 7.3% compared to 7.1% in Q4. And going back one year, we were on 5.3. So we continue on the development of the margin towards the 8%, which is our financial margin. financial goal. And Lea then came in the same level as what we call Hansa, a little bit above 7% in March. But of course, one month is quite short period to make any general assumptions on where Leaden is on the margin level. But it's a good start for Leaden. The EPS is increased compared to last year on 1.14 if we adjust for one-time items. And we have one-time items. Erik talked about the integration of Leaden, the new opening ceremony and the move from the old grocery store in Teksfors, and the continuous project to integrate the Orbit factory in Poland. And also we've been working with the ERP system and adjusting some values on the stock. So the one-time cost in the quarter amounted to 11 million SEK. Cash flow, we continue to have Positive cash flow, not as strong as in the end of 2024 when we saw the effect of the work we did with the working capital in Orbit 1. We are starting up and working with the working capital also in Ledon. And we strive to see a similar effect on a positive cash flow effect also when we are able to work with the working capital in Leven. On the rolling 12, the cash flow from operations is above 600 million SEK. And that also led to that net debt. of course increased with bringing on the net debt in Leden and paying for the shares in Leden. But if we deduct for those increased of the net debt, we actually decreased the net debt by 86 million SEK. The equity to asset ratio is of course decreased when we add leden, but we are still well above the financial target of 30%. We are on 34%. and also the net debt compared to the EBITDA. We said when we did the acquisition of Ledon that we might be above the financial target on 2.5, but since we have such a strong cash flow, we are now on 2.3, so below the financial target, and we expect the net debt compared to EBITDA to continue to decrease. Looking into the segments, we continue to have a stronger margin in main markets compared to other markets. We see and calendar effect in in other markets that led to that we actually decreased the margin a little bit from q4 where we saw that calendar effect we see in other markets that we actually have an organic growth of two percent and We have, on the other hand, negative organic growth in main markets. And the reason for that is the weak market in Germany that affects both the sales, but also the margin in a negative way. So we continue to see the increase in profitability and margin. And again, we are reaching and on a solid way on to the 8% or above 8% during 2025. The ownership and development of shares. We did a share issue to the sellers of Ledan of 2.9 million shares, which lead to that we have at the end of the period close to 44 million shares. The board proposed the dividends of 0.80 crowns per share compared to 120 a year ago. And that is approximately 35 million SEK. And the AGM will be held on May 13 a week from now. And we see some changes in the ownership schedule. Håkan Allén, which was the main owner, is not on the main owners list anymore. And Erik continued to increase his shareholding in Q1 and is now owning 1.4% of the shares in Hansa. And by that I lead over to you Erik and the summary.

Thank you Lars. So a very quick summary and I look for the future. We had a very strong start to an important year, and we finalized all these very important activities. We saw a sequential increase in the operating margin. For old Hamsa, we saw Lelen coming in at a very good margin. Now we will work together to increase it further. And all this, that's what makes us confident in repeating our financial goals. We also launched this new market program, Lynx. and again i keep an eye on this i'm sure it will deliver some results already this year and then we are closing up to the launch pad of hansa 2028 as soon as we are done with 25 we will start 28. So expect new operational and financial targets to come as soon as we have reached the current and most likely we will present that during a capital market date somewhere late this year. So with that we 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. The next question comes from Lucas Mattson from Indiers. Please go ahead.

Good morning, Erik and Lars. Lucas here from Indiers. Thank you for a great presentation. Could you start off by elaborating a bit on what factors are expected to sort of help to bridge the gap to the 8% operating margin target in 2025, and to what extent is reaching that target contingent on an economic recovery, given your outlook for a potential upturn in 2025?

I can start, and then Lars, if you'd like to continue. and so we are not relying of course we hope for a market recovery but we're not relying on it hope is not a strategy so what we are doing is we are collecting new customers and you know that today's sales is tomorrow's revenue so the customers we brought in last year will help us to drive towards this goal then we have done these major activities we talked about And there's always a startup phase with this, I would say, state of the art. Now we have, if you remember, we opened an auto sheet metal mechanics factory in Estonia last summer. So now we have three state of the art factories, Estonia, Sweden and Finland. And of course, there is a startup of them, but that also drives the margin. And then we have all the other activities and not least the synergies. the margin increase comes from higher efficiency caused by our cluster concept so when we get our business together that will also drive the margin so there are a number of different things that will make us we are very very confident about this margin goal this year and and it's not relying on on a better market okay great that's very helpful thank you

And then you mentioned organic growth towards the end of the quarter. Could you specify which segments or geographies that are contributing most to this growth?

No. To give you a clear answer, we're not revealing that, but we are happy to see because again, we need organic growth and it's not driven by the market. The market was rather flat since they started a year ago. It's driven by new orders and new sales. So we're glad to see that kicking in. And that's also what will drive organic growth further on. If you would accept that answer, Lukas. Okay. Okay. That's good.

And then lastly, have you observed any recent shifts in customer behavior in response to the rising global economic uncertainty due to the tariffs and so on?

Yes, yes. And again, we have a very low percentage, less than 1% for the US, so we are not affected. What we see, though, I had a very interesting customer meeting the other week where there was one customer who said, now we will move the manufacturing to Europe. They had it in the US. Actually, I had two such a meeting last month. So it can be more disruptive that people move manufacturing to be closer to the market. And if you have a company offering manufacturing in Europe for Europe, that could be the obvious choice. We have not seen so much in the other direction. I think that Europe is still our end market, so it's just positive.

Okay, interesting. Thank you very much for taking my questions.

Thank you.

The next question comes from Fredrik Nielsen from Redeye. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning, Erik and Lars. I want to start with the margin in other markets. I noticed that you mentioned that seasonality might have some effect but still I mean it was down like one and a half percentage points compared to Q4 and I mean over time we should expect it to move towards main markets in regarding margins. Is it just seasonality or is it something more having a negative impact in the quarter?

Hello, Fredrik. If you look into the graph, maybe I can show it. Down to the right, you see that if you take away the Q4, you see that we are increasing the margin. So the main reason is the seasonality effect in Q4, which we have seen also in 2023. um in in q1 we had this project in in poland which is part of central europe and part of other market that led to to lower margin um but we still are solid in in in our belief that we are on the right track and on the way to see more equal margins in other markets and main markets.

I can add a bit to this. Lars is pointing at the right way here on the graph. So if you look at the quarters, for the main markets and before it was 7.0 7.2 8.9 and now it's 9.4 but in q4 it was 8.1 so disturbingly serious if we do the same exercise for other markets you see 3.3 4.0 4.4 now 4.9

but Q4 disturbing the series with 6.3 so this seasonal affecting Q4 is disturbing a rather straight line otherwise yeah that's a good point but in 2023 for example it was roughly the same for the full year so I mean it's a bit hard perhaps to draw seasonal conclusions from just one year that was my point but perhaps that's

representative for the current business there then and you had the same thing in 23 so at from q3 to q4 it was down in the main market 12.4 to 10.4 and up in other markets 5.7 to 6.5 so you have the same season effect there and it's just driven that that we are more active in other parts of the world than in the main markets during the end of the year

Okay, maybe my numbers are wrong then I have to look at it. Let's move on. So could you give us some color on the impact on growth from orders from new customers which you disclosed quite a bit last year and the demand from current customers respectively?

And the thing is that what you can expect from the new uncertainty and turbulence in the world economy is that there will be a further recession. Everybody's been waiting for the upturn of the economy. It was talked about that it was destocking a year ago, but destocking indicates it will be for a short period. We don't believe in that. We believe rather that's a new level on demand and we don't expect it to go back even to the post-COVID level, which was really, really high. But the question is, when will the upturn come? And still we see that our customers are positive about this year. It has not affected their full year forecast. We still believe in a good year. So when we give our forecast, we base it on what we know now. And it seems like it will continue, not bounce up, but not go down either. So maybe the locomotion in the US will not have this big impact on our customers. We don't know that yet. We will know that by the end of the year. It could be that we see this upturn, which has been expected for a long time. Or it could be that there's some disaster scenario for all companies in the world. but all we know now we believe in a rather solid situation for the rest of the year with the same demand adding new customers that's what drives our increase not not the previous demand okay great and last question from me the

6.5 billion in sales target for this year seems a bit stretched perhaps given the current environment. Do you believe another acquisition is needed or do you think you can reach it organically?

Well, Lars, should you or I answer this? You can start. I can start. Yeah, but the truth is that we are lagging a bit behind because we were expecting Leren to be part of Hansa sooner. So for this first quarter, we have 200 million SEK that was not included in our books. So we are lagging behind. So we have to do something, obviously. If that was the case, we would be on a yearly basis 6.2 something. So it would be not so far for 6.5. Now that's not the case. And of course, we need to measure the actual figures, not the performer figures. So it means that probably some more activities are needed. Again, I will be a little mysterious, but yes, we believe in the target still.

okay great thanks that's all for me the next question comes from Oliver is it a low from Acti Esperana please go ahead good morning guys and congratulations to solid quarter you address the increased activity in the German market as well as the new customer dialogue as a consequence of the lead and acquisition I was wondering if you could elaborate on this. Have you seen any new sales that might even impact Q2?

Again, there is a time between when you sign an order and you see it in your books as increased revenue. So what is driving the sales right now are orders we took last year took takes maybe half a year to get it up and going so we cannot say that that will impact q2 what orders we have taken in q1 but the one from the last year now what i think is interesting in this question is that if we do like we did last year some me exercise in germany so mig is when we take over and restructure supply chain then it is faster than traditional all-you-need-is-one sales. Because then you can, in a few months, grab a large portion of manufacturing and move it somewhere where it's beneficial for the customer and also gives a large impact on Hansa. So would we be able to conclude some of these MIGs in Germany, for instance? That could have an impact already this year. But when it comes to traditional sales, it's a longer period. Was that an answer for your question?

Yeah I think that's a solid answer and I suppose it's safe to assume that you had some perhaps some MIG orders in your pipeline then?

We always have something in the pipeline.

Fair enough. Do you think that this increased activity in Germany will drive increased investments or any optics going forward?

I can answer on that one. We see that the investments are lower than a year ago, which we also said during 2024 that we will see a decrease in investments in 2025. We do not see any major investments due to new orders, we should be able to handle those without any major investments. There can always be some minor investments that you need to do in order to add new type of customer or so, but no major investments needed.

I see. Great. So turning to the integration of Leiden, and I've tried to address this previously um what what does your integration plan look like i suppose you have more a better view of that now and do you expect any additional costs

I can start maybe if you like to continue, Lars. So there are some major steps in this. One is, of course, to cut leather into two pieces, which I talked about previously. One for the Cluster Baltics, one for Cluster Finland. That's done already. Then we have the integration. We have now, we try to optimize the different manufacturing technologies in the different sites. So that's a longer term work. But the most important thing, the most important thing is that we work together as one team and that's again why it's so important to check the company culture before an acquisition and we see now that already we feel like one unit so the most important part of the integration being one company has already been executed then there are a number of other technical things of course Lars is working with the child service center to make sure to add things together there we are talking about increasing the margin by maybe transforming the manufacturing between the sites and all that that's a longer period but the main activities are already done and that's why we are quite positive right now

And when Eric says that these actions are done and the factories are split between the main markets and other markets, we still do not see the full effect in the P&L of the synergies that will come in during 2025.

Okay, fair enough. And as you talked about, Eric, the and how do you feel that these changes have been received by the leading employees and and what impact have you seen on the hansa group sorry can you by the people how they feel about this or what do you mean yeah exactly how is this by been received by the employees

Yeah, and that's, I think, is a good lesson learned for anyone running a company, that the thing we do when we separate the companies, so the Estonians are much happier to work with other Estonians. There's always a little language barrier and could be some cultural things. So the same thing when we acquired Orbit One, then we got a unit in Poland and one in Sweden, we separated it. And we really felt appreciations from the workers being part of geographic area close to them rather than being cross countries so that is one thing secondly we have a lot of activities going on we put a lot of energy and focus on the company culture so we are working hard with that no accidents that there should be no harassment or corruptions and all these things and that's also something that people appreciate to be part of a company who really cares about these things so i would say that we have had really good mood let's say with the workers. Actually right now we have a new sourcing team in the building from Leden and Old Hansa and Orbit One and they are working well together so yeah overall a good integration.

Sounds great and I have one last question from my end. The sales of Leden amounted to 320 million for the quarter.

think this was surprisingly high can you elaborate a bit on what has been driving the sales and are there any seasonalities here that we should take into account i think that it it's a big part of this is of course the new factory in new line with a new capacity and that capacity has let's say the machines have started so that capacity will increase over the years i wouldn't say it's unusually high it should be like this and more And I think also that the customers appreciate that. I can say the customers appreciate being part of Hamsa. So now they know that we have another strength, another size, meaning that just the size itself makes it possible for them to place larger orders. So don't expect this to be a one time for the first quarter or the other way around.

Interesting. Thank you for solid answers. I get I will jump back into the queue.

Thank you. The next question comes from Forbes Goldman from Pareto Securities. Please go ahead.

Yeah, hi, thanks for taking my question. Just one follow-up on what you said there about leden. I guess my question is what sort of capacity you're expecting for this company throughout this year when considering the recent investments in capacity that you did last year?

I can only answer on a global level and I can say that we have capacity for 6.5 billion SEC without a problem and that's what we have been that's the dimension of Hansa for this phase so but of course it gives another opportunities we now as I said we have three real estate without sheet metal mechanics factories in Sweden Finland and Estonia of course they can help each other so there is a secondary effect of being larger so the capacity itself is 6.5 but actually if you rotate the debate it will be much much higher all right that's great and you mentioned the lead and operating margin was in line with Hansa anything you can say on the organic sales level is that also

Or that should maybe be a bit higher than for the old Hansa, considering the investments you did in capacity last year.

I don't know if we can go into details, but what I can say like this is that I expect the growth of, let's say, Leden to be higher as a part of Hansa than before. factories that we have bought, the customers appreciated it, and there are new opportunities, then of course, there is a general economy that sometimes is taking down the volumes, but in general, we see more products. So I would expect that sales wise, we will see some synergies on this.

All right, understood. And then a final one on CapEx, having completed the acquisition, We now see CapEx levels coming down a lot year over year. I think it's 30 million here in Q1. Is this level representative for the rest of the year or should we be expecting anything else going forward?

We have said for a long time that the capex will go down and we have invested quite a lot in the new factories and machines to the new factories. And as Eric said, we have invested for a capacity of six and a half billion. of course depending on the market and the growth, but if the market stays as it is right now and the volumes are in line with what we see today, you can continue to see quite low investments in in in hansa of course it's always need some replacement investment but no no major needs for expansion investments all right that's understood thank you and well done on a nice quarter

As a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, please dial pound key 5 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.

Okay, thank you. Thank you so much for joining this call. Thank you for all the interesting questions. I hope that you will continue to follow us as we continue to build Hansa. Thank you so much and bye for now.