NCAB Group AB (publ)

Good morning. My name is Peter Kruk and my colleague Anders Forsén here will go through the presentation of our first quarter 2024. If we start with the first summary of key takeaways, we can see we have solid financials and growth in orders. We can note that the market demand is improving. Our order intake shows improves over the previous quarters and we show growth in all segments except East. We can see that the customer inventory adjustments that has plagued or impacted our order intake in the last several quarters is appearing to slow down and we now start to see a pickup in recurring orders and our book to build is now greater than one. We see continued good performance in automotive as well as in aerospace and defense and a strong growth versus 2023 new part numbers and new customers one overall. We are also proud about the good results. We've been able to maintain good gross margins and a strong EBITDA margin despite the lower sales. Purchasing logistic cost savings have helped us safeguard our gross profit, which helps to offset the lower sales compared to 2023. We continue to work in a positive M&A climate, and there's a lot of activity in this field. We have several active discussions, and our pipeline is also continuing to grow. And we concluded one minor acquisition in Belgium here in the beginning of April. And finally, we have also concluded our recruitment process to find a successor for Anders Forsson. And this person, Tim Benjamin, will join us here after the summer, latest in October. If we look upon the quarter in numbers, we can see that still compared to last year, our net sales is decreasing by 17% to 951 million Swedish kronor compared to 1146 million Swedish in 2023. That is an organic decline of 24% in both Swedish kronor and US dollars. However, it's an increase in net sales of 9% versus Q4. Order intake decreased by 6% to 970 million Swedish kronor compared to 1 billion 30 million Swedish. And our order intake, however, increased by 11% versus Q4. EBITDA amounted to 143 million Swedish, which is a decrease by 22%. However, we maintain a strong EBITDA margin of 15%, down one point from 16% in 2023, despite the lower sales. And a big help from this is coming from our gross margin, where we've been able to continue at a high level of 37.6%, which is up from 33.6% in last year. Continue to have a good operating cash flow, but more normalized now at 96 million Swedish kronor versus 201 last year. During last year, we were in the process of reducing our working capital, which helped to boost our working capital in that quarter, or our cash flow in that quarter. So our working capital now is stable, but also stable on a low level of 6.4%. And we have a proposed dividend of 1 kronor 10 euro per share, which is the same as we had in last year. Overall, describing NCAB, we are a company present working with local presence, both in our sales side as well as with our factories. We are a company focused on supplying PCBs for demanding customers, delivering on time with zero defects, produced sustainably at the lowest overall total cost. We have the vision to be number one PCB producer wherever we are, and we are already globally the leading player in our organization, in our field. We have some 607 specialists in our company. We work with some main 32 factories. We have no in-house production, but have a very strong focus on production technology and are very much involved together with our factories. What we do is printed circuit boards that you see to the far left here, and that is the foundation in all electronic products, where our customers will then mount semiconductors, microprocessors to create the intelligent modules in any intelligent product. Very important to remember is that all PCBs are unique. They are customer and product unique, so there are no standard components that you find in other areas of electronics. Our focus on demanding customers is also then coupled with a focus on looking at high mix low volume market segments. So we are not involved in high volume consumer products like mobile phones or print or PCs. Instead, our customers would typically find in industrial applications where generally the printed circuit board is a very small part of the bill of material. However, they have very high demands on quality and technology. Even if many of those customers are globally leading players in their industries, they are still not large consumers of printed circuit boards. And that makes it hard for them to have both internal resources and know-how around PCBs and also to get access to the best factories. And we can add a lot of value for these customers. And it also creates an environment where there is less price pressure than if you would be in the high volume segments. We are providing reliable PCBs and peace of mind for our customers. Through our customer-facing presence with local companies where we have PCB and application technology know-how, we can help our customers optimize their design and also secure a smooth process with a short time to market. By leveraging our global technology organization as well as our factory management, we can continuously develop and secure leadership in technology, quality, and sustainability. Specifically, our factory management team plays a key role in developing our partner factories and also to handle difficult market conditions to secure safe supply for our customers. This is a global organization consisting of some 109 employees, mainly located in China and Taiwan. And that gives us an opportunity to have leading product quality, delivery performance and customer support, something we very much get constant evidence of when we make acquisitions and we can then compare exactly our performance with other players in the industry. Over the years, we have developed, we are working with a lot of different industries and we have also developed specialized know-how around these industries and their requirements that we are needed to serve them in a successful way.

Anders? Thank you, Peter. I will start with a little bit of a brief history of NCIB. You might remember this, but the company started 1993, 31 years ago, very much focused on the Nordic countries in the beginning. And 2007, the founders of the company sold the company to Artwell Capital Fund. And then we started to and grow much more outside Nordic and set up offices and companies in Germany, Poland, UK, France, et cetera. In 2012, we made the first acquisition in USA to enter that market. And we did the second one in USA 2014 with Amway. 2018 then, we made the IPO six years ago. And after that, we have continued to strengthen our organic growth as well as the acquisitive growth. And we have done 15, 16 acquisitions since the IPO. And that has been a very good part in our growth story, of course. NCAB has growth all year except 2009 and 2023. 2009, we had a financial crisis. And in 2023, we all know about the weaker market. Normally, we can see that the market picks up rather rapidly when the demand started to increase again. Let's see, change picture and then look into first quarter where we, as Peter said before, ended up with revenue 951 million, which is 17% below last year. And for comparable campus, 24% down. We have to remember here that the first quarter 2023, we still had a higher price level. So we could see that in the order intake first quarter, 2023 prices were starting to go down. But revenue still based on orders placed 2022. So we had approximately maybe 10% higher pricing the first quarter than we have right now. We have the EBITDA is down 22%. And we also made a few acquisitions in the second quarter. So now we are more people than we were one year ago. So that also explains why the EBITDA is a bit lower. Still very proud of the EBITDA margin of 15%. And of course, we have safeguarded a lot with the gross margin that have increased, which means that even if you have 70% down in revenue, only gross profit is down only 8%, which then is shown on this slide. And you can see that we have had a rather stable gross margin of just about 30%. It went down a little bit, 20 and 21, due to two big requisitions. But then we see a rapid growth in 23, very much connected to the price decrease we have seen in the factories in Asia. So we have been able to lower prices to customer, but even lower our price even more from the factories. So of course, this has sort of supported our profitability going forward. Looking into the net sales and order intake, we have talked about the numbers. I think what is important to note is even if you see order intake below last year, we have looked at the blue line. We saw that the order intake was about 925 in second quarter, 925 in third quarter, and yes, below 900 in fourth quarter. And now we are on 970. So we can see that if we compare the order intake versus the last three quarters, we see a positive trend. And we can see a lot of customers now talking about that they had done the stocking. we see more bigger orders coming in we see an increase in in new part numbers so there are a number of positive signs here and finally this is the first quarter a long time that we have a positive book to build even if it's just one point or two but it's still positive And I think we have been resilient in our EBITDA margin. Even if we have lower revenue, we have been able to keep 15% EBITDA margin for the first quarter. In general, we can say that our overall costs are in line with previous quarters. It is a little bit higher than first quarter, but we also have done a few acquisitions since then. We continue with our rollout of the new IT platform. We launched that in the UK last year, and now we continue with further countries. And that will have a running migration cost, roughly about 10 million SEK, which was almost in line with development costs last year. And we will continue to roll out this new system during 2024 and 2025. As Peter said before, we are happy to see the increased gross margin up to 37.6%. And then earnings per share compared to last year is a bit down.

If we move into the different segments, starting with the Nordics, we have made one update from 2024, and that is that we are now reporting Poland as part of Nordics. And that is also shown in the tables and the data we provide. It's been updated interactively. And the reason we're doing this is that there is a lot of interaction between Nordics and Poland. We have several customers where they have production sites also in Poland, and therefore there's a lot of interaction. It makes a lot more sense. for us to serve our customer in a good way to manage this as one segment. If we look at the numbers, we can see that our order intake decreased to some 11% to 234 million sec, which is also the same decrease in US dollars. However, we are showing double-digit growth numbers in both versus Q3 and Q4, and we can see aerospace and defense performing particularly well, but also good stability performance in the EV segment. Net sales amounted to 260 million SEK, which is a decrease of 25% versus last year and almost the same 24% in US dollars. But the revenue has been fairly stable now since the last couple of quarters. EBITDA amounted to 41.4 million SEK versus 59.2, but still a good EBITDA margin of 19.2% versus 20.7 in 2023. Looking at Europe, we can also see here year-over-year decreasing sales of net 23% to 503 million Swedish kronor. For comparable units, it's a decrease of 27% in Swedish kronor or 26 in US dollars. Order intake reached 488, so we still have a slight negative book-to-bill in European segment, but we can see that our order intake is growing versus Q4. German market still is weak in the European segment. However, we see more positivity in other markets and a good positive development in our automotive business and also in aerospace, where we're winning several new projects. EBITDA decreased to 76.6 million Swedish kronor versus 96.7. However, there's an improving EBITDA margin up to 15.2 versus 14.9 last year. Moving to North America, we can see our ordering take mounting to 199 million Swedish kronor up from 170. Here we need to factor in the fact that phase three is now in the numbers and they joined NCABE in mid Q2 last year. So if we look upon comparable units, our ordering take decreased still by 17%. But however, we continue to see a growing trend in order intake from both Q3 and Q4 as both we are making good progress, but also more positive marketing market conditions. Net sales increased by 20%, 291 million Swedish kronor. Net sales, however, for comparable units decreased by 60% in both Swedish kronor and US dollars. EBITDA reached 24.7 million SEK versus 26.2. And we still have a healthy EBITDA margin of 30% versus 16.5. And here we need to factor in what Anders mentioned that in the US numbers, even if they are higher revenue versus last year, we now also have added phase three into this. So there is a declining sales that we are offsetting in the business and still maintaining a good margin. Looking at East, this is the market where maybe we have continued to see also challenging market conditions. However, there is an increase in customer activity levels. And even if net sales were low, our book-to-bill was positive at 1.18. Our order intake decreased versus last year. Net sales decreased to 41 million sec versus 52. And we've seen also that there have been extended closures around the Chinese New Year in quarter one here, which also has impacted both orders and sales numbers. The beta decreased to 6.1 million Swedish kronor, but still unhealthy beta margin of 15.1%.

Thank you Peter. We reported return on equity on 26.3, a little bit lower than last year, but mainly due to that we have more equity and a higher solvency than one year ago. I think still we show a very positive and strong balance sheet. Our net theft is stable with last year on 0.7. net debt versus EBITDA. As I said before, strong solvency and we have been working a lot during last year with reducing our net working capital, looking into making sure that customers pay on time, making sure that we have reducing our inventory level and so on. You can see that net working capital is down from 440 last year to 312. We believe now that we are back to sort of a stable level and we estimate that our net working capital versus net sales last 12 months would be around 6.5%. This also means that we have over 1.1 billion in availability liquidity. So we have still strong possibilities for continued growth and acquisition activities. And going into acquisition activities, we continue to search for new possibilities and new companies. We have, as we maybe talked about last quarter as well, started to look more into the East region, into Southeast Asia and into Japan. So we have added on approximately 50 companies on the identified company list. So we see now around 300 potential companies working with some kind of PCB trading. For us, it's of course very important that they are in the high mix low volume segment. They should have the right customer focusing on demanding customers. No own production, of course. And we are only looking for profitable companies. On the short list, we have about 50 companies. And you can see below the number we have down here in 23 and 24. And I think as Peter said before, we are in a number of good discussions. It's always difficult to say when they should close. It takes more time than you think sometimes. But I think that the market is rather bright. And we also have a number of cases where we couldn't agree on valuation one year ago when the seller is now coming back to us. So I think that the current market situation is in our favor for that. So we look positively on the opportunities. Peter, to you, I think.

And then if we look upon our overall strategy, I mean, MCAB is operating in a global market for PCBs amounting to around 80 billion US dollars. And what we define as the high mix low volume target market is around 25 billion dollars. So we are a leading player in a very fragmented market where we have a lot of opportunities for growth. So our focus will remain 100% focused on PCBs and driving this business with an asset-like model. We continue to invest in technology and capabilities to increase our market shares and also invest in safe resources in new markets. We are looking to expand continuously globally, both strengthening our position in regions where we already have a presence, like adding Belgium to our Benelux activities. And M&A can play an important part in making this expansion. Overall, it is also very fragmented. A lot of companies will start up like NCAB in the 90s or 2000s, early 2000s, as production moved from Europe and North America. many of these are smaller companies successful in the regional areas but maybe not lacking some capability to grow and also now facing more demands in terms of both quality technology and sustainability which is hard for them to grasp by their own so it's a good opportunity for us to bring them into the ncab family and consolidate the market and with that we close our presentation

If you wish to ask a question, please dial £5 on your telephone keypad to enter the queue. If you wish to withdraw your question, please dial £6 on your telephone keypad. The next question comes from Jacob Edler from Danske Bank. Please go ahead.

Hi, Peter and Anders and Gunilla, and thanks for taking my questions. I have a couple of questions. To start with, it's well noted that Germany has lagged behind... Do you guys hear me? Sorry? Yes, we hear you fine. Sorry. It's well noted that Germany lags behind some other markets, but you state that the trends in order intake improved during the course of Q1. Are you able to provide any flavor, for instance, how much better March was relative to January, And also, any comments on how April has started thus far? That's my first question.

I think development has been kind of stable in the quarter. You have some seasonality effects with Chinese New Year and Easter, of course. But overall, there is no, say, there's a good stable development within the quarter. We will not comment right now on Q2. But overall, it's a positive development. You can also see in Germany some progress from Q4 to Q1.

Okay, cool. Second question on capacity utilization. You said that that also improved gradually during Q1. Should we expect factories to start becoming more price competitive now? And will that be an effect already being seen here in the coming, you know, Q2 or the coming quarters or rather something to be seen in H2? What are your best guesses there?

I think as you said I mean we are seeing signs that the market demand is increasing not just from our own order intake but we can also see that the factory utilization is going up I think after Chinese new year interest or orders picked up to factories in general and I think their their loading situation is now in a better state than what it was earlier that combined also with the fact that we can see some raw material commodities starting to move upward I think means that we If anything is going to happen to pricing going forward, we may expect prices start moving maybe upwards at some point.

Okay, cool. I think you're looking into the Q1 numbers. We are very much in a stable price level, both in revenue and over intake versus end of 2023.

That is correct.

Okay, cool. And any flavors there, just some more flavor on China, a bit of a delayed demand recovery. I believe in Q4 you stated that Asia as a region was flattening out or even improving slightly. Is there anything important to note here on China or is it mostly related to the Chinese New Year being a bit more, I don't know, dramatic this year or something like that?

I think there is still a lot of uncertainty in the Chinese market. I think service industry is doing better than industrial production. So as we see popular, I guess now we saw some new industrial production data from China for Q1, which is coming out slightly more positive. I think many, I think the start of Q1 was quite weak and I think therefore many factories and customers also extended their Chinese New Year holidays or closures. I think what we've seen after Chinese New Year has been more positive in China.

Okay, cool. And then just also on Nordics, the order intake stands out as quite strong. Do you expect the demand trends in some of these customer segments, for instance, defense, aerospace, to continue during the course of the year? Or are there any temporary strength effects to be aware of here in Q1?

It's hard to judge whether or not the growth will continue at the pace it's doing right now, but it's not related to specific one-time projects.

Okay, cool. And just a last question. Given the current conditions, you state that this could support a strong H2 here. Would it be feasible to expect organic growth returning somewhere around Q3, or would that be too early? What do you think?

I think it's a little bit still sort of early days to make solid predictions. I think it is very much the same view we have taken and seen from the latter half of last year, where we could see things flattening out at the second half of 2023. We were expecting to see gradual progress in H1, no really super strong rebound, but some signs of progress in H1, and then maybe more of a robust growth in the second half. Cool. Thank you so much. I think nothing has really changed.

Okay, perfect. Thank you so much for taking my questions, and I'll hop into the line. Thank you. Thank you.

The next question comes from Johan Skoglund from DNB Markets. Please go ahead.

Good morning. So I think you wrote a quite clear report, so only a few clarifying questions from me then. So the first one is on orders where comparable units in dollars is down 14% year-over-year. Did you say prices in Q1 were down around 10%? Because if so, it seems like volumes is only down a few percent year-over-year. Am I along the right track here or am I missing something?

No, I think it was more related on the sales side. In the sales numbers, when we started to see order price downs on orders in the second half of 2022, but still on the deliveries in Q1 of 2023, there was still very much to say pre-price down pricing. So the price downs are effects on revenue is starting to show maybe a little bit in Q1 last year, but primarily from Q2 onwards. So on the order side, then there's not much of a big price difference.

It is because we had a gradual price reduction during both first and second quarter, and the prices flattened out, I think, in third quarter. So still there are lower prices in order and take now than one year ago. But the main impact is on the revenues. Almost everything was delivered with the old higher prices.

Okay, got it. Thank you for clarifying. And a follow-up question on the earlier question on Easter and Chinese New Year. Is it possible to quantify that effect in SEC or could you elaborate on that, please?

It's a bit challenging. I think normally you would have that the factories would close for roughly a week. I think this year we've maybe seen them close, many of them closing roughly more like two weeks.

Okay, good. And then a final question on the pipeline. I know you pointed towards a number of current M&A discussions, but would you say your appetite during this year is as large as last year?

Yeah, I would say so, absolutely.

Good. That was all from me. Thank you, and good luck with Q2. Thank you.

The next question comes from Anders Ekerblom from Nordea. Please go ahead.

Hi, good morning. Can you hear me? Yes, good morning. Perfect. So I just, I mean, most has been asked already, but I have just two or three quick follow-up questions. So, I mean, in terms of the commentary around you saying that some customers that have not been placing orders for a long time now actually returning, I mean, is it possible to say anything here? Is this linked to certain end markets or regions and kind of the the EMS versus OEM split?

I think this is actually say we can't relate it to certain industries nor specific regions. I think we see it here and there. So it's more customer specific. I mean, we've been on a journey where our own working capital peaked in, say, maybe Q1, Q2 of 2022. And then ourselves, we worked down our working capital for five quarters or so to get down to a really low, good level at the end of 23. And we saw many of our customers, maybe they were six months behind us or six to nine months behind us in starting that kind of process. And I think For a long time, we've seen low orders from our customers during 23, as not only was demand lower in the global market, but also there was this work that they were doing going through their own inventory situation. And maybe not only themselves, but also their customers. Now we can see some of those customers who were ordering at a repeating, repetitive level, that maybe for some time were not ordering at all or much, much, much less, now are starting to come back with more of these kind of regular orders. So it's a positive sound from that perspective. And I think we can see that they're therefore coming through their inventory adjustments and we're also getting that verbal confirmation from them.

Okay, yeah, that's clear. I was wondering a bit on just more high level kind of with you moving a bit more towards, I mean, high tech applications. You've commented that this can limit the pressure on the gross margin. Is it possible to say anything regarding the margin difference here between high tech and more volume and also how much more of this journey is possible to do?

I think for sure there is of course a margin difference if you're working with really complex leading technology because you add a lot more value and you spend more engineering time with the customers also. But I think it's a kind of natural progression. I think we've talked earlier that the pricing may be on like for like technology that might be slightly decreasing over longer periods of time as productivity gains make things more efficient. However, there is also a constant move to more sophisticated printed circuit board technologies. to keep up with new microprocessor technology, etc. So I think those kind of things offsets and I think we work with customers generally who are leading companies in technology areas and they have high demand so it's natural that we work with them and follow them into higher and higher technology.

Right, right. And we've kind of been over this but I just wanted to ask based on us kind of noting that we're seeing some more bankruptcies among certain manufacturers. And I mean, if you comment a bit just in general on the health of the PCB industry, I mean, prices are stable, but kind of putting this in context to the bankruptcies among manufacturers, what can you kind of say here?

Yeah, you're absolutely right. I mean, I think the manufacturing industry is financially strained. Many of them were making significant investments as the market was growing in 21, 22. And now they're in a situation with lower prices and an excess capacity. And we have seen I think we have noticed some 50 companies going bankrupt, manufacturers going bankrupt in quarter one alone. yet none of our factories and I think it's again one of those areas where we can make a difference for our customers with our factory management team on site and our sort of close collaboration with the factories we can secure that the factors we are working with are in a healthy state that they are continuing to maintain their equipment that they are adhering to sort of control of material choice etc we have seen attempts where some factories might have tried to sort of cut costs in some areas and I think for our customers we can provide them sound sleep and by delivering them on time with a reliable quality and that has been an increasing risk during 23 and maybe also now in 24 still that the manufacturers are on a financial strain.

Right. Thank you for that answer. Just one final question. I think Jacob kind of asked this already but If we kind of look about the stock incoming to an end and kind of that orders are up 11% sequentially, I think Germany was asked specifically, but just in a general sense across the divisions or segments, is it possible to give any flavor on how this has developed during the quarter, if it was kind of back-end loaded and stronger towards the end, or just a general reflection there?

I would say there's no clear trend in the quarter that we can sort of highlight. I think it's been a stable progression in the business.

You can also say that the first quarter is a little bit tricky to estimate because they have the Chinese New Year, which has one impact in February. So there are different sentiments in the in the court as well. So they have different ups and downs that the different months. So I think it's more correct to compare first quarter versus the latter quarter in twenty three.

Right. OK.

that makes us thank you that's that's all for me mm-hmm thank you the next question comes from Anders Rudolfson from DNB markets please go ahead good morning and great to think take my question and great to hear that you start to see some positive signs on the industry and I have two questions The first one is we have listened into a number of reports so far in Q1 and there's actually quite a few companies talking about the Easter effect. Have you seen anything of that?

I mean, you could argue compared to last year, Easter was in Q2 and this year maybe partially Easter was in Q1. It's a little bit maybe early to judge what impact it had. If anything, it probably could have had a slight negative effect on Q1, but it's probably in the minor.

Okay and the other one is I think it was Anders on the last conference call we were discussing the gross margin effect when the going up when the capacity utilization in the fabrics in China is low and now we're seeing the fantastic gross margin are we supposed to see the gross margin coming down now coming quarters if the capacity comes up again?

I think it depends a little bit what happens with the market prices and what happens in the factories. It might be, of course, if prices start to go up, I don't know, 5% or whatever, I think it might be tricky for us to keep the 37-38% gross margin. But we have to see. I think we have in similar cases in the past, I think we had the financial crisis, we did more or less the same kind of thing. We We compensated the lower prices and revenue with higher gross margin and then we managed to keep it. That was, of course, in the lower level. So I think in some way you need to follow the market and make sure that we are competitive to the other customers as well. So I think our main focus is to secure a good progress in the gross profit. And then that might mathematically be a slightly lower gross margin going forward if price is going up.

Right. And a follow up on that one. You also mentioned last time that you could continue to keep the margin on a better level than before the crisis. Is that what we could expect as well? I mean, we start seeing it already, but you don't see any signs of people and customers trying to push prices down now?

No, I think we can see that. I'm quite sure that we will keep a higher gross margin than before the rise before 2022. Then if we will keep this high level, it might be tricky maybe, but I'm quite sure that we will be on a new higher level than we were before 2023.

And also one comment you asked if customers will ask for price down. It's important to recognize that we are providing significant price downs to our customers in the current market already, but still being able to work with our supplier base and our economies of scale to offset that through cost savings.

I think also one other component that's important is freight prices. And I think we have, due to our size, been able to keep very good track on the freight and also to reduce that compared to the past and I think that was awesome area where we can sort of save cost and secure a higher gross margin going forward.

So on all the markets right now where do you see the strongest demand?

I think what we have seen is, I mean, when we saw the downturn, probably we saw the negative trend starting in the U.S. And maybe now U.S. is the region where we have the clearest rebound. And we now have several quarters in progression with growing order levels. So maybe U.S. is slightly leading the pack. And maybe Europe and China right now are a little bit at the end, somewhere in between.

Great. That's fine for me. And good luck out there. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

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

So thank you very much for all good questions. We just want to remind you, we have our AGM in two weeks time, the 8th of May, and our Q2 report is due on the 23rd of July. Thank you so much for today. Thank you.