MilDef Group AB (publ)

So with no further ado, please take it away, my dear colleague and our CEO and President Daniel Ljunggren. And remember, Daniel, to help the listeners in the audience that dial in to actually state the numbers on the slides that we present. That's a request from one of our lovely shareholders. Take it away, Daniel.

Thank you very much, Yolof. And a really warm welcome to everyone here for this conference call of our Q2 report. And I will try to do my best, Yolof, to make sure that You're all aware on which slide we are on, so to say. I think it's better we just deep dive directly into the highlights of the Q2 on the second slide. Number one is that we still have a positive order intake trend. We saw in the second quarter here, all-time high record quarter for order intake. We are more than doubling the order intake if we compare to Q2 in 2024. We're growing the order intake by 116% and 58% of that is organic and the rest is coming from acquisition of German company Rhoda. So there is a really high activities on the market. The order intake is really strong and that is putting us in a good position for the second half of 2025 and also beyond that. The second bullets around is what triggering the announced profit warning that we did last week on Friday. It's around that we have moved to deliveries from Q2 to Q3. And that, of course, has a clearly negative impact on both net sales, but also the profit here in the second quarter. For us, the move deliveries is nothing operational-wise. This is quite undramatic. This is something that happened in our industry from time to time. And we are, of course, doing this in some very close collaboration and dialogue with both the customer and also the end user. But it's, of course, highly impacting our Q2 numbers. And I have said it before, and I will say it again, that it's better to look at middle left on a long-term trend. It's better to look at rolling 12 months or something like that. Individual quarter could still be volatile. And that is something that the defense industry has to live with. And that is something that is also impacting middle left that high volatility quarter by quarter. So it's nothing about component issues. It's nothing about our general lack of capacity in deliveries. It's around that we have some integration issues in the end. For us, it's top prioritized that our products really are doing the work it's supposed to do when it's reaching the end customer. And when we are not 100% sure about that, it's better that it takes some extra time to make sure that everything will work as supposed when it's reaching the end user. So sometimes our products and solutions are always connected into different systems, other systems, and quite complex things. And sometimes the whole chain needs some extra time to make sure that everything will work as expected. So that was the reason behind the move from Q2 to Q3. Nothing has been lost and nothing, as I said, around components or capacity in general. Yesterday we have moved it to Q2. The outlook for full year in 2025 still remains positive and looks the same, but moved from Q2 to Q3. The third one, middle of clients value chain, is really important for us. We have normally been heavily relying towards our traditional hardware sales, but now we also see that we are winning business where we can add on software, we can add on integration, we can add on solution services and things like that. So that is a clear step towards becoming more of a system integrator, more of a system house. That also means that we can take on larger contracts. We can improve our margins in the long run, but it's more complex business as well. And I think that is creating a good value for Mildred. We are taking a position that we have now aiming for take for a long time. So we are really becoming more than just a sub-supplier of hardware. We are moving up the value chain and taking on more large contract and become more of a prime contractor in the most of the cases. We also saw a really strong underlying gross margin in the second quarter. If we exclude for M&A activities and the impact from road acquisition, we saw a gross margin that reached almost 58%, which is really strong and which is on a new record level for the underlying business of Midlife. This also is related to, as I say, the increased Middle left in the value chains, it's about adding on more revenue streams coming from software, from integration services. And that is really boosting the gross margin. So it's around our product mix and how that looks, which makes the gross margin here really strong. For the RODA, we have expected, of course, the total gross margin for the group to come down. We saw it was 47% here in the second quarter. RODA in the second quarter performed 34% gross margin. So even RODA has been able to move the gross margin in percentage points a couple of percentage points up. So that's also really important for us. We have also a strong order backlog for the second half of 2025. There's 1.5 billion Swedish krona that should be delivering in the second half of this year. We have now understand that we have been heavily leaning towards the second half of this year when it comes to the delivery and the revenue streams. It's nothing unlikely for Mildov. We have seen this in many years if we look back in the history and things like that. So this is something that we are quite familiar with, but we are really having a year where we're leaning, as I said, towards second half when it comes to deliveries of the order backlog. A continued capacity ramp up progressing as planned and at high pace when we are adding on this doubling of the order intake. And we also see this new landscape with increased defense spending and really addressing what we are producing. We see that we need to increase the capacity. We are in the next quarter, we will move into a new facility in the area of Stockholm, for example, where we can increase the defense or increase the capacity with four times. than we have in our current facilities up in Stockholm. And we are also adding on more people. We are also adding on competence when it relates to solution and software and things like that, continue to grow middle of up in the value chain and continue to strengthen our total offering, so to say. So that is important that we keep on ramping up our capabilities. And the final bullets around the highlights here in the second quarter is the integration phase of Roda, which is really intensive. And I think that we have Find a really couple of good moves there. We are on right track when it comes to the integration of RODA. And that's something that I will come back to a little bit later to give you a short update of the status around the RODA acquisition. Just a short and crispy market update as well. We see on the market still strong customer activities in the market. There's a lot of requests and there's a lot of opportunities out there. We also saw that you're probably already aware of the NATO summit here in June, decided up on 5% of GDP defense spending, that that will be the new target and that will be by 35. But we also have seen that Sweden and many other NATO countries already aiming for reaching this new spending targets already by 2030. So it creates a good market situation for at least five years, but probably for 10 years out in time. And the final bullet here on the market update is also around increased focus on European industrial defense space. And that is a real game changer for the defense industry in Europe, including MILDEF, of course, where we now see that they are stretching the supply chain in Europe and they are aiming to procure more and more from the European defense companies. And that is something I really believe will be some game changer for the European defense companies. If we jump down to the figures in the second quarter here, as announced, 383 million in net sales in the second quarter. That is in totally an increase of 27% if we compare to Q2 2024. But as we have said before, it's organic growth that is causing us some problem here in the second quarter. It's down 36%. due to this postponement of these two deliveries. So also impacting, of course, the rest of the P&L. Really strong, as I said, order intake is growing by 116%. 58% of that is organic and 58% is acquisition-driven. And aside all of the large announced contracts, we also see a good order intake when it comes to small and medium-sized orders. And that pushed our order intake to a new all-time high. we look at the operating profit adjusted ebitda in this case 25.1 and we see that the ebitda margin of course is coming down if we compare to q2 last year but this has we talked about is around the organic net sales that when we are losing the top line we are also impacting the whole p l and the operating profits is highly impacted by this lower organic net sales if we take um The P&L a little bit below the net sales, we can also see that the gross margin, as I said, is really strong, excluding the M&A. That is a really strong underlying gross margin. On the cost side, OPEC side, if we had just pre-M&A, it was flat compared to Q2 24. So I think that indicates a good continued cost control. And that is despite all the strong order intake we have had on a rolling 12-month basis. Now I also understand, and as I said, we need to add on more capabilities in the future here to be able to address this big order backlog and this great order intake. So the OPEX will probably see an increase going forward, but so far we have been able to have it under good control. Free cash flow in the second quarter ended up on 32.7, which is clearly better than we did in Q2 2024. And we also back now in this quarter, on a positive free cash flow. And that is despite the significant, of course, increase in the inventory due to this moved orders and a strong order backlog for 2025, where we needed to add on inventory already before we closed Q2. But despite that, we are now returning to a positive free cash flow in the second quarter. Some Q2 business news. There's almost 400 million Swedish announced orders in taking Q2. Our subsidiary in UK, that is coming from the Rota acquisition, Westec, announced their single largest order ever worth 45 million Swedish krona. We had from FMV, the Swedish procurement agency, a command and control order where we are delivering the middle of traditional hardware of 126 million krona. And then we had a really, as I said, strong and high strategic order from the Kongsberg. contract of worth 225 million that is just around hardware but it's also around system integration and implementation and project management around a couple of things and so that is one piece of this moving up in the value chain taking more more responsibility and taking more of a turnkey solution contract than we have seen before And that's also a little bit related to the final piece, the order that was press released in July from FMV, and that one is booked in the Q3, so we don't see that in the order intake in Q2. But that was not just our hardware, it's also around software and integration services, so that is something that is really interesting and well, and put MILF on the map as more and more of a system house and system integrator. But of course, besides that, it's not every order that we can announce, and it's not every order that we are announcing due to the value and things like that. As you can see in the bottom of this slide here on slide five, there is tons of other different things to the Swedish army, defence, defence, Danish defence, for example. We have ground-based air defence in Germany, a placing order. We have partner contract with Czech Republic and things like that. So there is a, It's not just the big ones. It's not just all to the platforms that we are talking about sometimes today. It's a lot of small and medium-sized order that is going around in Europe and North America as well. Financial summary is the next one. I'm always starting with this picture. And I think it's a good thing to remember here again on slide seven, that this is a long-term play for middle of an hour growth journey. if we zoom out in time, has been quite aggressive and has also been accelerating in the last five years. So if we don't look at the single individual quarters, we can see that the picture for the growth going forward looks really, really strong. And now we can see that we're now ramping up again in the last 12 months when it comes to the net sales. And hopefully, as we also see the order backlog for the second half of 2025, we will see this bar growing going forward. If we do a geographic breakdown of our net sales in the last 12 months, we can see, and this is something that we have expected now that we will see Europe is taking over more and more. If we compare to 12 months back in time, we can see that Europe is now six percentage point higher than it was 12 months ago. And this is a dynamic that will shift you to the acquisition of RODA. We will see probably revenues coming from Europe that is more than 50%. So that will change the dynamic a little bit. when it comes to how we are breaking down our geographic sales. Order intake, of course, that is our most strongest KPI right now. And I think it's the most important thing to keep an eye on for middle of long-term financial development. We see a really strong momentum in the order intake. And if we look back now five years, we can see that there had been a steady ramp up in the order intake. Our last 12 months here is close to 2.5 billion Swedish krona. And that, of course, creating a strong book-to-bill ratio that is 1.78. And that is the landscape we are in right now. And that is also something that we need to address in terms, as I said before, increase our capacity, increase our capabilities in terms of delivering everything that needs to be delivered in this time when we see a quite rampant, quick ramp up in European defence capabilities. I also want to dip a little bit deeper into the order backlog on slide 10, showing you the duration of the order backlog. We have a record strong order backlog, 3.2 billion Swedish krona, and almost half of it should be delivered in the second half of 2025. So if we go back one year from today, we see that when we closed Q2 in 2024, we are today 177% better than we were in 2024 and also interesting for us now to see how we can grow the order backlog for 2026 and also beyond that but 2026 i think is looking quite healthy here and now it's already plus 125 percent and we have the second year of 25 to add on additional into the order backlog for 27 so hopefully we we can come out in 25 with a strong order backlog for 27. Gross margin development, as expected, is coming down here in total gross margin due to the acquisition of RODA. Now we saw in the second quarter that the underlying mill of gross margin was really strong. We saw that the RODA gross margin was also picking up a little bit. So let's see where this will take us in the end. But it's absolutely clear that it will come down in the near term. In the long term, hopefully, we can start to increase again due to this more system house value chain climbing. that Milov can continue to improve their margins in the long term. EBITDA development, we have now seen three quarters in a row where we have really ramping up and improving the EBITDA margin and the EBITDA in terms of absolute numbers as well. Due to this move deliveries in Q2, we saw that now we are having Lower profit in this quarter now we had in Q2 last year. So we also on a rolling 12-month basis, of course, then see that we are coming down a little bit compared to Q1 this year. But I think if we'll go back 12 months in time, we can see that it's plus 21% at least. So I think that the second half of this, due to a strong order backlog, we will see a continued good development of the EBITDA and profit margins. Working capital in that step, David, the networking capital, we are, as I said, already in Q1, expecting this to come down a little bit when we are now seeing more and more of the net sales coming in from Rhoda. The big jump up here in Q1 2025 is related to the acquisition of Rhoda, where we're adding on all their net working capital at once, and then we need to take the net sales over 12 months. So we're expecting this to come down a little bit. Now we saw in Q2 that it was moving in the right direction and we come down to 38%. Net depth 3 with DIA, we have a long-term target not be north of 2.5, more than just temporarily. Now we see 2.9, but the Net depth is the same as we had in Q1. It's just that due to the moved orders, we have seen a decreased EBITDA, which, of course, impacting the net depth of EBITDA as well. So we are closing Q1 at 2.9. Then I would still like to come back yesterday, give you a status of the acquisition of RODA and what we have seen so far now when we have a full quarter of RODA consolidated into mill of numbers. I think we saw a solid Q2 figures, and this is, of course, related to Milof and the business we're doing as well. They also have this kind of volatility on a quarterly basis as we have. So I don't think that we should look too much into their individual Q2 figures. But as I say, I think it was a solid Q2 numbers with an increased gross margin and quite a strong order intake, I would say as well. I'm quite happy about that. We also see integration projects now really running for full speed, focusing on realizing the commercial synergies, making sure that we are doing the rationalities that we have told before that we could increase the middle of own IP products on the German market, on the Dutch region. And that is something that we are really running at full speed now to try to make sure that that happened. But besides that acquisition, As I said before, it's clearly a part of Miller's strategy to expand and also increase the presence in the European market. And I think that is becoming to me clearer and clearer that this is really a right time and that the timing is really good and the relevance in this investment into the central Europe and Germany. is just increasing. We saw that Germany early in this year announced the defense ramp up of 500 billion euro over the next 12 years. And there is a lot of business opportunities down in Germany, in the central Europe. And I think that we, through the acquisition of Rhoda, will be taking part of that growth in those markets. So there will be a I think that acquisition road will be an important part of middle of road journey going forward. There is absolutely a clear direction how we can grow them and there will be a lot of opportunities. Then we will have before the final part of this presentation, a future outlook and what we see in near and long-term outlook. Near-term middle of move ups to value chain create a lot of opportunities out there, creates also a stronger middle of and creates a middle of where I think that the margin can come up when we are doing more of this business towards a full solutions provider and system house. Also, as I said, continuous strong trend towards digitalization and data driven defense capabilities. The total defense spending is growing. The total pie is growing, but also the piece that addressing increased data power and digitalization will grow within this bigger pie. So I think we are in a really good position to take care of that. And the need for data power and utilization is high out there on the defense forces. And that is really into the sweet spot Miller from Rhoda, accelerate market penetration. We will, of course, try to move to this European powerhouse in defense technology and solutions. That's the whole play that we're coming together and make this a strong acquisition and making sure that we are addressing all the opportunities that we see in German market and central European market. And I can also recap the new defense spending that I always talked about. So market growth expects to be strong, I think, at least five years, 10 years out in time. We will see a strong market. We will see increased defense spending. So there will be a lot of opportunities. And in near term outlook, I think that we are supported by our strong order backlog. And that indicates that we will have a positive outlook here for the second half of 2025. And that's the final slide on the presentation. I probably forgot some of the slide numbers, Olof. I did my best, but... You did very well.

Most of them you caught, so that's good. Thank you, Daniel. We are now opening up for the Q&A, and we have a lineup, and I will open up mics, but I just want to thank you, ladies and gentlemen, 42 souls in this call out of 46,108 shareholders. So thank you for participating today for the two of you out of 46,000 shareholders. So something is growing in Milde. But now we open up the Q&A. And please raise your hand. Benny Dahlqvist, Anni Lindqvist and Hugo Lise is coming on. And I'm going to open the mics for Benny Dahlqvist. Please. Let's see if I manage. Yeah, let's take it away, Benny.