HMS Networks AB (publ)

Welcome to the HMS Network's Q4 presentation for 2025. During the questions and answers session, participants are able to ask questions by dialing pound key 5 on their telephone keypad. Now I will hand the conference over to CEO Staffan Dahlstrom and CFO Joachim Niedborn. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning, everybody. We are sending here from a beautiful winter Stockholm with snow on the streets. It's a fantastic day. And we also have some good news to present. Quarter four report. Myself, Staffan Dahlström will start and Joakim will take the following sessions about financial summary. And then we end up with the Q&A. So just a quick highlight, quarter four, we are quite happy to see a very good development on net sales, organic growth, 23%. That's good, we think. On the order intake, we see organic growth, but we see also that the market is still a little bit soft, a bit hesitant. We're happy to get 3% growth, but we're also waiting for the pickup that we've been talking about, and we hope that it will come 2026 instead. very good development on all our profits depending with which line you look at it's either 50 or 100 percent up so it's we really see a good development good gross margin good profits and this lands in a adjusted margin of 28 slightly higher than our target in combination with a good cash flow and we're very happy to see this and this Joakim will talk more about our net depth and things like that but this really plays out with a good adjusted ETS of 4.17 so we closed 2025 as a quite good year net sales we are growing after uh quite a lot of years of inventory reductions and things like that we are back in good shape again we see the order intake has been growing organically by 10 so the market is not great but it's not that bad either compared to 2024. And 9-11 as the adjusted EBIT and we see also at the end that we are doing a good adjusted EPS 1373 and this also means that the board proposed the highest dividend so far 480 per share for the meeting in April. If we look at the markets, we see in Q4 a small improvement in Europe. Also in Germany, we are growing compared to last year. So even if the data isn't great for central Europe, we're seeing that it goes in the right direction. We have a fantastic year in North America, but a little bit of softer market in Q4, especially for these larger project orders in infrastructure. We're also comparing ourselves with Q4, where we've got some really nice orders in North America. But we're quite sure that North America will pick up again, so we think this softer order intake is a temporary effect in North America. We also made a lot of changes in the Red Lion, and we got this new factory when we acquired this, where we keep on investing. We are seeing a much better delivery performance. We're not fully yet completed there, but so far we are seeing that quarter four, we're delivering a lot from the order book, and we're getting back into relevant lead times, and we hope to be fully in shape here in quarter one. So that's good. We also keep our flag high when it comes to sustainability. So our planet target is important for us, and we got approval from science-based targets, a significant milestone for the company in our reduction of both reducing our own CO2, but also being active partners with our customers to help them reduce their CO2 impact for the coming years. So now we are committing to the 2030 targets, and then we also have the long-term targets for 2050. We made a small acquisition. We signed it last quarter and we now, second of January, closed the acquisition of Molex Industrial Communication, a business that we are integrating now in Industrial Network Technology, INT division. And I just would like to show two slides to describe this acquisition. a molex is a gigantic private owned company by in the industry's family and they were saying that what we have in industrial communication it's not bad but we don't really have a ability to ignore the size we have to really focus on it and they were asking us you know maybe hms can take this and revitalize the business they also felt that The main business for them is cables, connectors and these kind of things. And these active components with software and hardware was difficult for their sales, big sales teams to sell because it's very complex products. So we made a deal with them to take over this asset. So we get two R&D teams, one in Canada, one in France. 31 R&D engineers, very happy to get this. We are investing more in R&D, so getting more resources here is very good. But we also get complementing products and technology. We get large customers in mainly U.S. and Japan. Some of them are already HMS customers, but with this offer, we also can make a more complete solution. We paid 7 million U.S. dollar, and we expect this to be north of 10 million U.S. dollar in annual revenue. And what we do here is that the Molex products, compared to HMS products, HMS is really working with what is called adapters. These are all the thousands of devices inside a factory that is sitting into robots or drives or sensors and these kind of things. And all these things are connected to the controllers of the network. So the high volume products that HMS is focused on, that is more than 90% of all devices. That's relevant for our current offer. But the network controllers where Molex is very good, they are less in volume, but higher in complexity, higher in price and making both these things are very important. And you see the examples here with our robot customers where we've been connecting the robot to the network. But also around Molex, we can also do sub-networking around the robots. And we think this is a very good step for the division INT. And we are quite excited about how we can develop this together with the teams in Canada and France here. So a lot of things is happening. And Joachim, let's move into some numbers.

Yes, let's do that. And we will start with having a look at the order intake. And as Staffan already said, we do see a small organic growth of 3% in orders. And if you see on the graph to the upper left, you see that we had a really strong Q4 in 2024, where we had some good product orders in the IDS business. And therefore, we think that 3% is not so bad, actually, even if we strive for more than that. Given the comparable, that's a fair number. You also see that there is a massive currency effect with a 10% negative effect from currency movements, where we see that especially the US dollar, but also the Euro versus the SEC is continuing to be weaker and weaker. We've been seeing that also after the period ended. If we look at the different markets, we do see Europe continuing slowly but safely in the right direction. It's been improving throughout the year. Upfront, we thought this would be a little bit of a quicker recovery, but we still see it's going in the right direction. So we think that is a little bit positive after all. And Stefan also mentioned that we had a bit of a weaker market in North America in the fourth quarter. Looking at the pipeline and so on, we believe that this is a temporary decline that we're facing. So we think that there is potential to improve a little bit from those levels going forward. If we look in Asia, we've been having a bit of a slow market in Japan for us, where China has been going well the whole year. And now we do see a bit of a recovery in Japan. It's related a lot to INT business and some of the big customers coming back and placing some orders. This inventory build-up situation with our customers have been the largest in Japan, and that's why that's been taking a bit more time. And overall, if we lift lift the view to a higher altitude, we see that for the full year, we see organic growth now on the orders of 10%. So it is moving in the right direction, and I think 10% is a decent pace for us to move forward here. Going over to sales, a little bit of a different situation. We have very good deliveries in Q4. So we reached 951 million in sales, organically plus 23%. And the reason, the story behind this is basically what you saw in the order intake in Q4 2024 and Q1 2025, when we had a lot of good project orders where the bulk is delivered now in Q4. So we managed to deliver out of that nice backlog, and we've been fighting a lot in our delivery, on our delivery sites, especially in North America, to get all the goods out. And I think we managed to catch up fairly well in Q4, too. to what we're supposed to deliver and try to keep our customers as happy as possible here with the lead times. Looking for the whole year, we've been struggling a little bit in the first quarters, also due to pretty strong comparables in 2024. And now we actually turn the whole year positive growth, organic growth of 3% with the strong ending of the year. so of course we would like to show more than three percent growth for the full year but it's it's good that we can turn this around and show a positive development it's been a bit of a bumpy road for the last years for us and we've been having maybe a little bit more than the industry average having the industry the inventory build up during 22 21 and 22 and then the reduction in 24 and maybe partly in 25 as well. So all in all, showing growth is good to see. And the drivers of the growth is a lot the IDS division and the North America's market will be doing those good deliveries in the fourth quarter. We also see on the sales side continued recovery in Europe, same as with the order side. Slowly but safely better. That's not the main driver in the quarter, but it's going in the right direction. And, of course, also here you see overall that the currency is playing a big role. So it's a pretty big difference on the reported and the organic numbers. For the full year, you also see that we have a pretty big acquisition effect with 18% growth from the red line and the peak acquisition. A few words about the divisions. You have first IDS, Industrial Data Solutions, where I think you see in the graphs, you see this story that I was talking about with really good order intake in Q4 and Q1, Q4-24 and Q1-25. And then you see the sales graph is improving in Q3 and especially in Q4-25. So I think those product orders that were received in the end of 24 and beginning of 21, sorry, beginning of 2025, you should maybe see that more of the sales graph that it's evening out a little bit over the period. And with that strong comparable, obviously the order intake is down now 15% organic. We would love to see a little bit more than 374. And we think that we have a good chance to improve going forward here. And on sales, of course, a very nice number, 481. And as I said, deliveries of these big projects. So I think we're very happy about the delivery in IDS. We do almost 29% margin in Q4, which is extremely high and not something that we probably will show going forward. For the full year, we are now at 24% in this business. And then with two-thirds roughly coming from the Red Lion acquisition, we're very happy with that development that we've had. over this period in the HMS family. And this of course is a big contributor to the overall strong profitability in Q4. Then over to INT, and here we see pretty clearly this gradual improvement that we were talking about. You see on the order side, now we have 17% growth that we present organic, this is 27. So in that pretty big currency headwind, we're still managing to grow this in a good way. And the main thing we see here is that some of the bigger customers are coming back, filling up their inventories. And also the European market, partly also the Japanese market, are now coming back and placing orders. So this is very positive, we think. And you see not maybe the full thing converting to sales, but also sales is moving in the right direction and showing a 13% organic growth. As you know, this is our cash cow delivering really solid margins. We do 31% margin in the quarter and almost at that level for the full year. So this is a very solid business. And the team now will have their hands full with integrating this Molex acquisition and also delivering on the strategy for 2030. So it will be an eventful year, 2026 in INT. And then we have new industries, also solid development, both on the orders and on sales. Organic orders, 18% up, organic sales, 12% up, and an okay quarter. We would maybe like to see a little bit higher margin, but 22.7% is an okay level. We had in Q3 a very good development in building automation. Now it's a little bit softer in building automation, a little bit better in vehicle communication. So it's good that those parts are complementing each other and smoothing out the curve for us. Over to the profitability and obviously record profitability in the quarter, 268 million in the adjusted EBIT, a 28% margin, which is, of course, strong for us. And for Q4, it sticks out maybe even more. We normally have a bit of a higher cost costume in Q4. And we don't see the same increase on the cost side in Q4. We are starting some of those development projects that we presented earlier this year on the Capital Markets Day. We will see those projects rolling into 2026 and onwards with us trying to deliver those 2030 strategic plans. So all in all, over 900 million, 911 million for the year, 25.5% in adjusted EBIT margin. I think that was good to see that we managed to beat the long-term goal of 25%. And this puts us in a good position for the future as well. The good profitability comes from primarily the volume increase. The gross margin is stable at 63% in line with our own expectations, and we think that's fairly where we should be with this constellation that we have in the group. And maybe the other thing that sticks out a little bit is the lower OPEX, where I think we've been still being a bit careful on the cost side. And as I mentioned before, we will start doing a bit more investment going forward. Maybe to mention also on the FX side, you've been seeing the FX effects a lot on the top line, not to the same extent on the bottom line due to some good hedges throughout the year. We're starting to see that effect wearing off a little bit now. The hedges are not as good as they were before, not the same high rates. And we do see an EBIT impact of minus 15 due to currency, which is a bit more than what we've seen earlier this year. And with the recent development of currencies, I think this is something that we need to keep an eye out for in 2026. So there will be a bit of an impact from this going forward, obviously. And then to our EPS, and I'm showing in the graph here an adjusted EPS of 4.17 sec, which is in itself very nice. The reported EPS is a lot lower, 1.44 compared to 1.49. And then, obviously, we have the net financials and all that is nothing strange. But we also have a non-recurring tax effect of 104 million SEK, which is related to the Reliant acquisition. And we elected to do a so-called 338H10 election. And that basically means that we're treating for tax purposes in the U.S., we're treating this acquisition as an asset deal. So we have an amortization of all those assets that we got in the deal, which will lower our tax in the US for the coming 15 years. And that is giving us now a positive effect to make this election. We need to pay this one time tax, but we will have a pretty big upside for the coming years. So the net present value of the tax saving is a lot bigger than this cost that we take in Q4. This is really complicated and Complicated material and very special US tax laws that we're working with here. So this is the situation and we're going to look into this forward if it's really right that it should be 104 million. Looking for the full year, we do 13.73 in the adjusted EBIT. It's plus 42% compared to a year ago. And the board, as Staffan mentioned, also proposes a dividend of now 4.8. And the reason it was zero last year was not that we didn't make any profits. It was that we made two really big acquisitions and to not having to take in more new shares, we elected to cancel the dividend for a one-time thing in 2024. And then over to the cash flow. So here we have continued improvements on working capital and inventory reductions. So we've been now reducing our inventory for the full year of 207 million. And that is of course helping the cash flow a lot. We do 231 million in the quarter and 877 million for the full year, which we are very happy with. And the cash conversion is still quite good, 82% for the full year. And obviously this one time effect in tax is holding back the cash flow with the 104 million. So without that, you would have seen a record cash flow for the group. And for the future, we still believe that we are in a pretty good situation here. Even if we grow in 2026, we believe that we should be able to keep working capital neutral and maybe even reduce a little bit of inventory further. So we should be able to show a good cash conversion also for the coming year. And then to, I just love this graph to the left, the net debt graph. It's continued to be reduced. And we were in a situation a year ago where we took on a lot of debt to make these two acquisitions in 2024. And of course, in my role, it's really nice to see that we're following the plan and managing to close the year in net debt through EBITDA pre-IFRS 16 of 2.13. And we said here before that we should be in line with our long-term target to be below 2.5 and that we can also deliver that. This is very good to see and of course has a lot to do with the good performance and the strong cash conversion throughout the year. In Q4, when we have now a new strategic plan in place, we also signed a new financing agreement in December here with two Swedish banks for the coming years to be able to finance our expansion plans in the 2030 strategy plan. Finally, before we let open up a question, some takeaways for the full year, if we look what's been happening. From an internal perspective, we've been making a big change from the 1st of January 2025 with a completely new organization, a pretty big change actually, going into three divisions. We now have full accountability of strategy, resources, finances, and all that comes with that. and the reason for that was to to get the full customer focus throughout the whole organization from sales from rd from product development and all this and i think with the performance in the year we we are quite happy how this has been actually playing out in in real life as well, taking it from the plan to reality. And as a step in the new divisions, we also worked with the 2030 strategy. All divisions have set their own strategy for 2030 here that we presented in September. Performance-wise, we still managed to deliver some organic growth in what we say is a bit of a challenging or a bit uncertain market with a lot of macro challenges that's been playing out throughout the year. We grow now the orders by 10% and sales 3% for the year. And we managed to also to lift the profitability and show a really good cash flow with an adjusted EBIT that is up 37% in the whole year, delivering 25.5% margin. And solid cost control is, of course, a good part of delivering that good results. And also as I mentioned before the cash flow that we managed to convert those profits into cash is of course very key for us. So all in all a solid year and with that we are sure that there are a lot of questions from the group. So feel free.

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 Simon Granath from ABG. Please go ahead.

Hi, Staffan and Joakim. Congrats on the very impressive margins here. I'd like to start on the supply chain and see if you could help us understand the impact, if so, from rising memory prices. How much is memory prices of the built-off materials? Can you pass this through to customers, similar as you have done in 2022, but also in 2025 after Liberation Day? Or should we assume any margin ahead? Thanks.

Hello, Simon. Actually, in our more embedded electronics, the portion of our material cost for memories is not that significant. So our product is not memory intensive. So this is not something we worry about. Maybe the only benefit with a weaker US dollar for us is that many of the electronics components are based in US dollar. So maybe get a little bit of tailwind there. But all in all, this is not something we worry about for our products.

Very clear, thanks. And on orders, you mentioned that you think the weakness in North America is temporary. Could you shed some more light on what indicators you see that makes you anticipate that? Is it perhaps connected to customer dialogues or similar?

I think many of these larger projects we had last year in quarter four, they are large and also difficult to predict when they land. So we are seeing still good activity, but we haven't really seen that we had closed any larger of these orders as we expected. So I think this is just delays, and we expect this to be temporary. And since it's a few larger orders, it's also difficult to predict the effects. So we think activity is still good in the U.S., And if we here in Europe are concerned about uncertainty, we don't feel the same kind of uncertainty in the U.S. market. They keep on investing in infrastructure and automation over there. So it will come back in U.S.

Sounds very encouraging. And just a final question from me. I know that Joakim mentioned or did make one comment around the cost aspect. given your comments at the CMD of the gradually increasing investments ahead. How should we think about this? Is it fair to assume that this will be more back heavy in 2026 or can you give us any more light on timing consideration about these growth initiatives?

Absolutely. So I think you will be seeing a gradual increase in the OPEX throughout 2026, starting wrapping up pretty much now. And then it will probably increase throughout the year without adding some extra resources to carry out those plans. So maybe that's good enough for you. I don't know what you're after, but you'll see gradual improvement and exactly what percentage is up, I think we keep for the time being.

Very good. Congrats again on the strong results. Thanks.

Thanks, Simon. Thank you.

The next question comes from Gustav Bernebled from Nordia. Please go ahead.

Yes, good morning. It's Gustav here from Nordia. Maybe just to build on Simon's question on the costs and the OPEX there, I mean, looking at your administrative expenses. I mean, if we look at a sequential delta from Q3 to Q4 last year, these costs were up 18 million. Looking at the delta this year, it's down 20 million from Q3 to Q4. So can you help us understand this effect, and is this the new base, or is there something extraordinary here impacting this quarter?

Maybe just a first comment. I think what is comparing 2024 to 2025 is very difficult to do in a line item base. Since when we made a new organization change, we completely changed the classification of the cost. So it's very clean. Now, everything that has to do with something around admin is in admin, even if it's a sales admin person. So maybe that's a clarification, first of all. And then the reason for being a bit lighter in Q4 is that we've been doing some of the investments on the ERP side throughout Q2 and Q3. That is now done in Q4. So that is taking down the admin burden a little bit on the ERP development or the rollout in the US. And also the integration project is more or less done when it comes to fully when it comes to Reliant and to the largest extent when it comes to also to Peak. That's maybe the two main things that is taking down this cost level.

Yeah, okay, got it. But I mean, the first part there, I mean, that would likely increase the admin expenses because you have moved the cost from selling expenses to admin, right? So that would be sort of contradictory.

So in admin now it's a larger share than what it was before. And then, of course, there is a reduction compared to 2024 in the overall cost base. I mean, we're growing, what did we say, 3% organically in Q4 on the cost side.

so we've been only been adding three percent organically and then you have the and the fx effect on that so it in reported figures it becomes less than it was a year ago yeah okay perfect that makes sense and then yeah yeah thanks um maybe then is it possible to say anything how demand has continued here in the early start of january

So just to clarify, last question as well. If you were talking about the development from 2024 to 2025, the main reason for the decline is, of course, the currency. But I think your question was about why it's lower than in Q3, right, in this year. So I think the ERP is the answer for why it's lower compared to Q3 this year, and otherwise it's the currency.

Okay, perfect. Thanks, Joakim. And on the start here in early January, is it possible to say anything there?

I mean, very early. We keep on tracking.

That's pretty much the same pace as you see in the quarter.

Okay, perfect. And then just the final one here on the order backlog. I mean, it has been reduced, as we've seen here, in Q2, Q3, and Q4. So do you still see that you have excess orders to deliver on here short term, would you say, or is it sort of stabilized at lower levels now?

It's pretty much stabilized. We do have a couple of tens of millions left, but it's been really important for us to reduce this backlog because the customer wants the goods. So that's why we've been struggling or fighting in Q4 to be able to actually reduce the backlog and get the deliveries out for customers. But from now on, I think you can expect that. I've said it a couple of times before, and I think now is another of those situations where we need to get in what we're going to deliver out pretty much. So book to build should be around one or maybe increase higher than one in 2026.

I think in addition to this, we are, during quarter one here, completing all the investments we've done to making sure that our new factory in York, Pennsylvania, becomes state-of-the-art, high-tech manufacturing. We've done a lot of things there. So the capacity will increase. We see it already in Q4. We see another. uh expansion in q1 so from q2 and onwards we would have better delivery capacity so of course we we are open for more orders because we can ship so it's a big focus also to make sure we fill up the order pipeline as well that's perfect thank you very much thank you thank you the next question comes from eric larson from seb please go ahead

Thank you, and good morning. A follow-up on North America and the project orders. So is it a fair observation that in 2025 you really only had project orders in Q1, whereas Q2, Q3, Q4 was a bit slower? And just another question on that topic, you know, how would you look at project orders in 2025 versus previous years? Is it lower or higher than usual, et cetera? Any favor there?

I think many of these project orders, if I start Joachim, is related to Red Lion. So it's quite new for us with this kind of larger project orders. And we see that since it's large, not so many, it's a bit bumpy. And I think Q4 2024 and Q1 2025, we got better than expected orders. Since then, it's been, I guess, lower than expected.

I think maybe the main difference is the size of the orders. We do get a lot of product orders, but the size that we had in Q4 and Q1, that's kind of unusual. And that size we haven't seen since then.

All right. And then second and final question. I just noted your peer, I guess, Appendium, established a business unit within defense with pretty high ambition. So I'm just curious. If you have any defense exposure, if you've thought about this, any opportunities or so?

We get a lot of questions from investors about this. We have quite little. I mean, could it be? Less than 1% of revenue would end up in defense applications. And mainly, it's not really in, I would say, more... in application where you have automation of these things. Most, if you look on Swedish factories, for example, as one big factory up in Örnsköldsvik making tanks for BAE. I mean, this is not high volume manufacturing. We are looking into some customers where there is more ammunition and there's more automation. It's a new field for us. We have very little business. Maybe it's potential there. But for us, it's a small market today.

Okay.

Fair enough. Thank you. All right. Thanks, Eric.

The next question comes from Frederick Lithell from Handelsbanken. Please go ahead.

Thank you very much. Thank you for taking my questions as well. I would like to have a little bit of discussion hearing your views on the very strong margin progress you have in IDS. I understand it's probably driven a little bit by Red Lion. So if you could sort of explain a little bit what you have done in Red Lion and what that brings to the table would be very interesting. Thank you.

Of course, we'll try to cover that. It's a couple of things. Now, of course, if you look in the quarter itself, it's obviously a lot driven from volume. But over the year, as I said, we've pretty much taken the business from like a 20%. Business to now maybe 24 for the full IDS, where two-thirds of IDS is now Red Lion. um there are a couple of things we've done on the gross margin side we've been doing we're now through all the investments in in the manufacturing that has been helping a lot we've been looking into the the distributor and reseller structure and change the the discount programs a lot so the ones that actually promote our products will have high discounts and the ones that do not they will have a reduced discount So doing some cleaning on pretty simple things. I think that's maybe the main thing. And then we've also been looking into the cost structure a little bit, taking out more or less a layer of management. And now we're making also the ERP investments to be more efficient and be able to use the back office functions of the whole group around the world. So it's a couple of different things that we're doing to get to these improvements.

When we acquired Redline, one thing we identified when we started meeting them was that they didn't really have the ambition to improve their margins. And we saw some really low-hanging fruits, but there was no push for picking it. So I think also we've just been executing some of the things we saw when we acquired them. So it's not really complicated. The discount, implementing our manufacturing system where we have some things in-house, something out of the partner. So I think all this is falling to the right.

places at the moment. And maybe one final thing to get also our same sales team some credit. We have been seeing now some cross-selling as well that is helping this couple of million dollars. So that's also been good.

Would you say that you now are on the right level or do you still have, maybe not low-hanging fruit, but do you still have structural improvements that will continue to push the margins higher over time?

I think we don't want to get inflated expectations, but of course we also have ambition internally to drive this. So we're a little bit careful about how we answer this. But there are more things we can do. But the fruits are higher up in the tree now.

Okay. Thank you. My second question is the 338 tax sort of application that you did send in and that gave you a charge of 104 in the quarter. Is it possible to somehow gorge sort of the benefits you see over time, sort of a net between the two? Is it very big compared to the 104 you had as a chart in the quarter, or is it closer to?

So it's a super relevant question, and if I would have been 100% certain of the full impact, I would give a very clear answer. I'm not 100% certain. I can give you some direction. So what it will mean, you will not see anything in the P&L, so the tax cost will still be there. But cash flow-wise, there will be a part that is not payable. So it's overall, I think that the potential will be around 2% of the group tax cost for the full year. That's around the upside that we will see yearly. But you will not see it. And this is IFRS, right? And this is a rather technical thing.

Yeah. All right. Understood. Final question, you talked a little bit about your ERP implementation. Could you describe a bit wider where you are in that process on a group basis and what you have in front of you in terms of the various parts of the ERP project would be interesting also. Thank you.

Yeah, so we started this project in 2023, and we rolled out the same ERP in more or less the full group. And during 2025 and up until Q3, we also implemented this in Red Lion. So we have now one common ERP, one common CRM. which we think is great for enabling all the cross-selling and see all the customer activities in one system. What is left is the sales entity in Australia and also now the new acquisition with Peak. And the Molex acquisition, since that was an asset deal, we cannot get that implementation for free. So that is already done. It's already working in the new system. So it's not a lot left for us to be in this structure. And it is, of course, a big project that's been going on for now some years with different intensity throughout the different quarters. But it's an investment we've been taking and we've been seeing, you see also in the admin costs this year that we do see a payoff from that investment. So soon we'll be there with the full implementation, and then I'm sure we'll have acquired something else to keep it going for the future as well.

All right. Very clear. Thank you very much. Thanks. Thank you.

The next question comes from Joachim Gunnell from DNB Carnegie. Please go ahead.

Thank you and good morning. So we can perhaps start with where we left off. So in light of the stellar deleveraging progress here and the financing agreements in place, can you just talk a bit about your appetite when it comes to go back into more an active acquisition mode? I mean, more like the side.

I think we are feeling that we have good financing. We have a debt level that is good for us, even after this dividend we do. So I think we are positive and we see continued strong cash flow going forward. So we have an appetite. We work mainly now in each division and in each division they have their own pipeline and looking for this. But of course, it's not easy to find this. It's always long processes. And most of the companies we look at have been private or privately held. That's a very long process. So we have the appetite. The challenge is to really identify and take these processes forward. So I think that's where it's difficult to find and it's long processes. But appetite is there.

Understood, perfect. You talked a bit about an update on the Newark facility investments here, but can you mention just a bit where you are in terms of capacity utilization in your U.S.

operations? Maybe from quarter four, we felt that there's some general things in ERP and stuff like that. If you look more on the things we love here with machines and stuff like that, I think quarter four, we were halfway, and quarter one will be the full way in equipment and the software and all these things we do. And actually what we have done is that we did not move to a new factory. We refurbished what we had. So it's been a bit of a... We talk about a factory that have not been getting a lot of love the last 15 years, I think. So there's been a lot of... It's from changing lightning in the facility, to change a new concrete floor. It's really been starting from the beginning. But what we see now is something that looks really great. And we hope that this can also be a way, a showroom for customers to see that this is how we should do manufacturing. And it's not so common in the U.S. to have this kind of modern manufacturing. So we hope that this can also be a showroom to customers to show that automation is the way forward also in the U.S. So we are halfway there.

I think you can say in queue for SMT was a capacity constraint in the U.S., and now with the new investments in place, it will not be a capacity constraint going forward.

That's clear. Thank you. And the INT EBIT margins were strong here again despite volume perhaps being slightly lower and also the FX headwinds. So what's your confidence on maintaining this high level of profitability in this division as volumes potentially recover?

For INT, I think we have some small customers and some large customers. What we're waiting for is the bounce back at some of the large customers that we, in Japan, we see still some inventory at some IT customers. but what's different here is that the product mix per customer generate different gross margins so here we see a little bit of disappointment on the revenue but very good gross margins but if revenue have been increasing on these large customers we would see slightly lower gross margins as well

So that's, it's not easy to, I think there are two, maybe two things. One is what Stefan said, that we might have a bit of a gross margin pressure in INT with the large volumes coming back. And then we should also keep in mind that this Molex acquisition is fully integrated in INT. And we'll have a little bit of a dilution effect to the margins. We will still expect it to be good, but it might be a little bit down from what you see in 2025.

Lovely. And just to end just on the customers' conversations and how they are evolving, in particular the U.S., you mentioned the broadening and the deepening here. Can you just talk a bit about what that means for you?

I think what we say here, we feel good activity. We have not seen so many of this larger project, but in general, it's a solid market. We think we have good access to customers and doing the right thing. We are very motivated and well-integrated sales teams now. We have a good relationship with our distributors, highly motivated. So I think we are in a good situation. The market is Not great, but it's good in the U.S. There are investments. People are quite optimistic, and we also see many companies who want to have more manufacturing in at least North America, which drives the investments in Mexico and other places, but also domestically in the U.S. So we think it's a good market, and it will bounce back for us after quarter four here. Great. That's all from me. Thank you very much. All right. Thanks, Joachim. Thank you.

As a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, please dial pound key 5 on your telephone keypad. The next question comes from Gustav Bernebled from Nordia. Please go ahead.

Hi, it's Gustav here again from Nordia. Just one follow-up, sorry. Because in Q3 you guided or commented on a potential negative impact here in Q4 from production upgrades. I guess that's related to IDS here, but just a clarification, is there any negative impact here on IDS that you're not discussing?

You mean in the gross margin?

No, just on the EBIT margin, that's the report here on 28.9%.

I think what we probably were talking about in Q3 is since we went into this upgrade of facilities, we would maybe have a bit extra challenges to deliver. I think that's what we've been talking about. I think the team has been doing a great job to get all the volumes out. And there is maybe a little bit on the OPEX, but it's minor. I mean, the most part is CAPEX in that upgrade of facilities. So maybe a million or two in OPEX, but the vast majority CapEx.

I would say rather the opposite. I think how Q4 was in IDS was better than expected. Yeah. We are quite impressed about the team here, and we saw some risks go into Q4, and they've really been managing it as well. So it's been better than expected. All right. Perfect. Thank you very much. Okay. Thanks, Gustav.

There are no more questions at this time, so I hand the conference back to the speakers for any closing comments.

thank you all right everybody thanks for joining this call and helping us to close a good year 2025 we're very happy to see the good development of our organic growth coming back again and of course also the integrations of red lion peak that's been instrumental for our growth going forward i'm also very happy to see that we have the new acquisition int coming in and we are quite excited about the 2026. Of course, we live in a world that is quite uncertain, but we think we are at a good place in our market and where we see continued future for investments in automation and this regionalization. So we remain fairly optimistic about 2026, I think. And, of course, it's good to also close the year with good cash flow and solid net debt and stuff like that. So we feel that we are in a good place for the coming quarters. And we hope you join us for the coming quarters and look forward to talk more about this after quarter one. Right. Have a good day. Thanks, everybody.