Loomis AB (publ)

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the third quarter 2025 conference call. I am George, the chorus call operator. I would like to remind you that all participants will be at least anonymous and the conference is being recorded. The presentation will be followed by a Q&A session. You can register for questions at any time by pressing star N1 on your telephone. For operator assistance, please press star N0. The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Aris Larea, President and CEO. Please go ahead.

Thank you very much. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the third quarter presentation for Loomis. My name is Aris Larea, and I'm the CEO of Loomis. And with me here today, I have our CFO, Johan Wilsby, and Jenny Bostrom, our Head of Sustainability and Investor Relations. I'll start by providing a quick summary of our third quarter performance before taking questions. Let's start the presentation by turning to slide number two. We delivered a solid and positive performance in the third quarter, with revenues reaching 7.6 billion Swedish krona and currently adjusted growth of 7.1%. Despite the expected decline in our ATM business, the group achieved a strong organic growth of 3.9%. This was also the first quarter to include the full results of borrows, which made a meaningful contribution to our overall growth and further strengthened our position in the U.S. market. Our efficiency initiatives continue to deliver strong results, with the operating margin rising to 13.2%, up from 12.9% last year. We've successfully grown the business without increasing our headcount, further driving margin improvement and demonstrating the impact of our ongoing operational discipline. We delivered another quarter of strong operating cash flow with a rolling 12-month cash conversion of 95%. This robust cash generation enables us to continue investing in the business while also delivering attractive return to our shareholders. Our commitment to optimize capital allocation to drive returns is also reflected in the increased return on capital employed, which was about 16 percent in the quarter. While we have been active in M&A, invested in our business, and continued our share repurchase program, our net debt to EBITDA ratio has improved compared to the second quarter. During the third quarter, we completed four acquisitions and signed an agreement for a fifth one. I will address each later on in the presentation. As announced yesterday, the Board has also approved a new share repurchase program of 200 million Swedish krona for the fourth quarter. Let's now turn to our reporting segments, starting with Europe and Latin America. Our European and Latin America segments delivered a solid performance in the quarter, with revenues reaching close to 3.7 billion Swedish krona, and the organic growth was 2.3%. We have seen a different mix of performance across our business lines during the quarter. While we continue to experience strong demand for our cross-border valuables, transportation, and storage solutions within the international business line, and the automated solutions business delivered solid results, the ATM business declined due to previously announced losses in Sweden and France. In addition, there was a negative impact due to the ATM consolidation market in the UK. While these developments have led to short-term volume headwinds, we expect the long-term industry trends to continue to favor specialized providers. In addition, revenue in Europe was also affected by the ongoing restructuring activities in Germany, where we continue to discontinue unprofitable contracts as part of our efforts to strengthen profitability. These developments have temporarily affected growth in the region, but our initiatives are consistent with our strategy to focus on efficiency scalability, and long-term profitability. We can also see that the restructuring initiatives implemented in recent quarters are having a positive effect on profitability, while with the operating margin increasing to 12.9 percent versus 12.4 in prior year. In September, we completed the acquisition of KiptoLogistic, announced in July. KiptoLogistic is a leading pharmaceutical logistics provider based in Switzerland. and this acquisition significantly accelerates the growth of Loomis Farmer. By integrating a well-established company specialized in high-security, temperature-controlled growth rate, we are further strengthening our international business line, where Loomis already provides cross-border, high-security logistics for banknotes, precious metals, and jewels, including customs clearance. With our longstanding expertise in secure logistics, we continue to explore opportunities to expand and enhance our services in this area. Let's turn to the next page and talk about the performance in the U.S. The U.S. segment delivered another strong quarter. If we adjust for currency impacts, which was negative 9 percent, the U.S. achieved record high revenues in operating profit. Organic growth was 5.4 percent, and the acquisition of borrows to the overall growth. International and automated solutions lines of business had notably strong performance in the quarter. Our implemented staffing planning measures have enabled a more efficient way of working, allowing us to grow the business without adding employees. At the same time, we have secured a high service quality and maintained customer satisfaction. The volume growth combined with improved efficiency contributed to the improvement of operating margin. The operating margin increased to 16.3% up from 16.1% in prior year. This is the first full quarter with Boros, and we continue working on integrating their business into our U.S. operations and our Loomis culture. We are still early in the integration process, but while the business is adjacent to our existing operations, it represents a new line of work for us, one that is highly technology-driven and involves technical service teams we previously did not manage. We are seeing great progress and are already observing how it complements our current business. Boros is a strong strategic fit as it allows us to provide a fully integrated ATM and automated solution service offering to our customers. In August, we acquired Keys Hardware Express, a CIT service provider operating in the Florida Keys area. We've also signed an agreement to acquire a precious metals vault and storage facility in Toronto. This acquisition will strengthen our local presence in Canada and increase our depository service and storage capacity within the international business line. Let's turn to the next page and talk about SME pay. Revenues in the SME pay segment increased to 65 million SEC in the quarter. Nearly 40% of this revenue now comes from new small and medium-sized customers, demonstrating that our strategic focus on SMEs is then reimbursed. growth, and margin. We're also making strong progress on the digital side, where we stay continuous to scale, broadening our payments offering and strengthening customer loyalty. Transaction volumes through our payment gateway surpassed 2.5 billion Swedish kronor in the quarter, representing a 23% increase compared to last year. In addition, in July, we took an important step in Spain with the acquisition of two POS companies in Cataluña. This significantly strengthens LumiSpace's presence in the region, enhances our POS capabilities, and expands our customer base among SMEs. Let's now move to the next slide where I'll share a few updates on our sustainability progress. This quarter, we adopted two new sustainability policies, an environmental policy and a human rights policy, further reinforcing our commitment in these critical areas. Our environmental policy includes our emissions reductions targets to 2030, with the actions being taken to reach these. The key focus here remains on reducing emissions from our vehicle fleet. For the first nine months, we have reduced our scope one and two emissions by approximately 2% compared to prior year. I want to highlight that the increase you can see in emissions in the graph here compared to the second quarter is largely related to the acquisition of boroughs. Initiatives are ongoing to align boroughs to our carbon emissions reduction plan. Continuing to decrease emissions while growing the business is, of course, challenging, especially due to difficulties with charging infrastructure for an electrified fleet, but something that we're fully committed to. As a global employer with an important role in society, it is crucial to uphold fundamental human rights across our operations and value chain. A new human rights policy reinforces our dedication to safeguarding the rights of our workers and how we intend to uphold our efforts in addressing actual and potential human rights. Now let's turn to the income statement slide, where I'll begin by noting that despite a significant negative impact from exchange rate fluctuations, we achieved a strong currency-adjusted growth. This quarter includes costs classified as items affecting comparability, primarily related to the ongoing restructuring efforts in Europe and Latin America. Our financial net has declined compared to previous years, following lower financial expenses driven by declining interest rates. I would also like to highlight that the effective tax rate has gone up to 30 percent for year-to-date 2025 due to changes in our assumptions for deferred tax assets. This year-to-date adjustment impacts the effective rate in the quarter. Additionally, the tax rate in 2024 was also lower due to the U.S. green tax credits, which have now been removed. For the full year, we expect an effective tax rate of about 30 percent. Despite the considerable currency headwinds and higher effective taxes, earnings per share rose to 7.83 trillion per share. I would also like to highlight that also our net debt to EBITDA ratio is about the same level as prior year, And we also see an improvement compared to the second quarter, even after several M&A and continued salary purchases. Now let's move on to the next slide, where I'll provide a longer-term view of our performance. As we can see, we have a stable and resilient business model that continues to deliver. We delivered a strong third quarter, and I'm confident in our journey ahead. Our restructuring initiatives in Europe and Latin America are showing results and we've seen clear margin improvements over recent quarters. On a rolling 12-month basis, we generated over $30 billion in revenue and reached an operating margin of 12.6%. Currency-adjusted growth was 6.1%, fully in line with our financial targets for this strategic period. A major focus in this strategy is accelerating growth within the SME customer segment. This is already contributing to our performance. We have seen healthy revenue momentum and solid margin contribution from SMEs across all our key markets. As we look ahead, it's important to recognize that we are up against a very strong fourth quarter last year, which benefited from favorable movements with U.S. tariff uncertainties. We're also managing the impact from ATM business losses in Sweden and the consolidation of ATM networks in France both impacting our European operations. In addition, there's a negative impact due to ATM market consolidation in the UK compared to Q4 last year. That said, we still see solid opportunities for organic growth, both with our actual customers as well as with SMEs. And as we outlined at our Capital Markets Day, value-creating M&A will continue to be a key lever in our strategy going forward. This concludes my summary of the quarter. Operator, we are now ready for questions.

Thank you very much. We will now begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and one on their telephone. You will hear a tone to confirm that you have entered the queue. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star and two. Question is on the phone. I request you to disable the loudspeaker mode while asking a question. Our first question comes from Simon Johnson with ABG. Please go ahead.