NCAB Group AB (publ)

good morning and welcome my name is Peter Kruk and i'll start the presentation today first a little bit about ncab ncab is a supplier of printed circuit boards so the foundation in any electronics and the basis for any intelligent product that you see in the market. And we supply the products, the bare boards that you see to the left, and our customers will then mount semiconductors, microprocessors to create the intelligence in the product. And we sell them either directly to the OEM, the end product manufacturers, or through contract manufacturers who supply them with the built electronics. As a company, we are the leading company supplier of printed circuit board with outsourced production. We believe very much in a setup where we are local and close to the customers, where we will add technical quality support as well as logistics and commercial dialogue with our customers in their local native languages. We also are local, very much close to the factory side. Even if we don't own any factories ourselves, we have out of our a little bit more than 600 colleagues across the group we have around 120 which are working in dialogue with the factories and are in proximity of our manufacturers Our focus is on supplying printed circuit boards for demanding customers, typically in the high mix low volume segments and supplying these with zero defects produced sustainably at the lowest overall total cost. And our aim is to be number one PCB producer wherever we are. And as I mentioned, we are already the leading company worldwide. If we then move over to the fourth quarter, fourth quarter was weak in terms of our revenue and primarily from the European side. So if we look upon the different markets, Europe has general weak demand based on the macroeconomics and this is impacting both our legacy business as well as the acquired businesses that we acquired here during 2024. in the nordics however we can see more positivity order intake continues to grow from q3 and we're also here benefiting from growth in areas like defense in the market north america and east who have been in a positive movement for some time continue their positive progress with an increasing number of project wins and also more stable markets than what we see currently in europe Overall, our gross margins are remaining on a healthy level, but our EBITDA is lower primarily as a consequence of the low revenue. And we can also see that the gross margin is impacted slightly by the fact that we've added now a number of acquired companies in the year who are operating already at a lower gross margin than NCAB as a whole. And EBITDA and EBITDA margin with a lower revenue is impacted by the top line. M&A activities remain strong. We made quite a few acquisitions during 2024, and we continue to develop our pipeline and entertain discussions with potential new targets. Looking at what we did as a summary in 2024 on the M&A side, we started the year with a smaller acquisition in Belgium. We believe very much in being local and close to our customers and this is a nice add-on to our Netherlands organization and it enables us to serve the customers in the Belgian market more efficiently. Similarly, we have also made acquisitions in Switzerland and Austria, giving us a local presence in these markets. We were partly selling to some of these markets before from our German-based organization, but now we have a stronger local presence and are taking over or bringing in new customer relationships through these acquisitions. Print production was a smaller acquisition in Denmark, which strengthens our team here with the technical know-how and also brings in new customer relationships. And finally, we had the more significant larger acquisition in 2024 with DVS Global, with business primarily both in Italy, but also partly with an organization in Asia. And they came into the business here in quarter four. If we look upon the numbers for Q4, we can see order intake up slightly 4% versus prior year in US dollars by 3% up. And we have a book to build, which is positive of 1.09. Net sales, however, decreased by 6% to 830. And you can see an organic growth of minus 11% in US dollars. you could say is a consequence of the relatively low order intake we saw in Q3 and then the seasonality effects that we typically have around year end where customers defer deliveries from December to January. And we can see some of those orders now being delivered out in January. EBITDA decreased with a low revenue to 72 million SEC and maintaining an EBITDA margin of 8.6%. And gross margin remaining stable, closely stable versus Q3, but down versus prior year. And there's a little bit of impact here from the acquired entities in Q4. Operating cash flow as a ratio of EBITDA remains healthy and strong, but lower than last year, also a consequence from the lower top line. And working capital up slightly, partly due to the fact that we're bringing in working capital from the acquired entity in Italy, notably that impacts it slightly. So we're expecting that to reverse back here in the coming quarters. For the full year, we can see that order intake down slightly or almost flat. So book to bill also close to one, slightly positive. Net sales, however, down 12% and organic grown down 15% in US dollars for the full year. EBITDA as a consequence also is down to 450 million SEC. but still maintaining a good margin of 12.4%, which is not far from our sort of the implicit financial targets that we have. Our EBITDA gross margin increased year over year to 37.1%. compared to 36 in the prior year and operating cash flow still continues strong the comparison with 23 is difficult and challenging as in 23 we were in the process where we're working down working capital which was on a higher level from the kind of pandemic long lead time situation so we had an excess cash flow during 2023 but i think the 357 versus evita is in a very good level And the board suggests a dividend at 1.1 sec, which is equivalent to what we had in 2023.

Okay, so if we look at quarter four and a little bit what plays out here, what we see is around 830 million SEC in sales, which is about 6% lower than the prior year. Same, more or less the same thing when we look at it in the US dollar currency, which resulted, that level of revenue resulted in around 71.6 million SEC of EBITDA, down 40%, as you saw, mainly related to Europe. which was around an 8.6 EBITDA margin down 4.9 percentage points. I think you heard a little bit from Peter what's been trending with the gross profit up full year to 37% versus 36% in the prior year. And then when we look at the order intake side, we see order intake up to 907, up 4% versus prior year, supported in part by acquisitions in comparable units by 3%. We saw a positive development in Nordics. We saw good demand in North America and also growth in East. But I think as you heard from Peter, and we'll talk a little bit more, still a bit of a weak Europe. As said, 6% down on the net sales, but a book to bill still at 109. And also a good trend in new part numbers and customers. Yeah, when we look at the total, as said, around 71.6 million SEC on the EBITDA side compared to prior year of 1.19. Largely related to the decline that we see in Europe on the revenue side. The EBIT at 8.6% was really a function of what we saw on the order intake side in quarter three, what was able to translate there from order intake. And then we had some longer lead time orders, which obviously don't deliver in that same quarter. Gross margin for the quarter, still good at 35.9, not quite as high as we were prior year at 38.2, but still at a very good level, which related to around 298 million SEC in terms of gross profit. EPS comes out at around 22 SEC per share. I think over to you, Peter.

Okay, thank you, Jim. So looking then into our different segments. So Nordics, you can see here, our order intake grew substantially by 14% to 234 million SEC over 204 in prior year. And we see notably, we can see aerospace and defense continue to build our order book. some of these orders have longer lead time so we should not expect them to turn into revenue in the in the next term quarter we also start to see some positive movement in areas of green energy like ev charging in construction heat pumps from a very low level in 2023 so we can see the order intake here starting to pick up and we can also note that some of our end customers are seeing growing sales but they are still working through some inventory of final product So we expect here things to improve in the coming year. Book-to-bill continue to be positive at 1.19. Net sales still lower than last year at 197 million SEC versus 217. So decline by 9% in Swedish kronor. EBITDA amounted to 31 versus 33.2, slightly lower, but an EBITDA margin that increased from 15.3 to 15.7%. If we then move to Europe, where we have our biggest challenges, we can see that our order intake is in line with last year. But then, of course, we have acquisitions that have supported the order intake. Otherwise, we would have been lower. And we can see that the demand in some of the key markets in Europe, like Germany, Italy and UK, remains quite weak, as we can also see from macroeconomic indicators for purchase managers index for manufacturing industry. But we can also see some positive improvements in other markets in Europe. but which doesn't really fully offset the big ones that we mentioned. We see some positive movement in commercial vehicles, so trucks and buses, but also in aerospace. And the book to build ended at 1.17. Net sales is where we saw a big decline of 11% to 365 million versus 412 in prior year. But the decline is, of course, operationally more substantial if we take out the acquired entities that we did in 2024. And then we can then see that organically we're down 21% as a result of the low Q3 orders. And then, of course, year-end effects where shipments are quite often moved from December to January. That drop in volume led to a big impact on our beta side, which came down to 3.4 million SEC on the margin of only 0.9% versus 13.3% in the prior year. uh moving to north america here we can see the ordering order intake is basically in line with last year for the full year we have a good development with up close to 15 and the comparable units up five percent for the full year so a continued sort of positive trend here uh net sales increased for the year by seven percent uh to 205 million sec over 191. And I think here we are leveraging a strong technical know-how in the group and also leveraging our group capabilities in the North American market. And as we also at the same time are expanding our sales network. The US market overall represents a similar potential as the European one, and our market share is at this point considerably lower, so there's a lot of opportunity for us to focus on growth in this market. We also have certain unique capabilities to supply PCBs for the US aerospace and defense industries, using also suppliers outside US in Taiwan, which gives us also a strong advantage in that segment. And we can also see that we are now in a situation where tariffs are being changed in the North American market from imports from China. We are already dealing with tariffs historically, but now there has been an additional 10% tariffs imposed. starting here from early february and i think we can support our customers in a good way twofold that on the one hand we have a good network of supporting customers customers with supply from outside china we already today our u.s customers to degree of around 50 source from outside china and we have the ability to grow that share should our customers want to should they remain in china with their with their production then we will sort of transfer the tariffs as part of our pricing EBITDA in the US increased to 32.8 million SEC, up from 25.3. And the EBITDA margin improved from 13.3 to 16% in the quarter. And then finally over to our east segment. Here we can also see positive development on the order intake, which has been going on for a couple of quarters. So order intake grew by 11% to 55 million SEC, up from 49%. And generally, we don't really see a strong positive development of the market. But I think we're making good progress in developing niche applications in a number of high tech segments. We can see even if their market in general is not growing, there has been a pickup during 24 in specifically data centers, which applies to worldwide demand. And that is, of course, improving the loading situation with the factories. which on the one hand may lead to future price increases to the industry, But I think it also leads to opportunity for us to serve the customers in a good way as the factories themselves turn their attention to those high volume end customer applications. Overall, our net sales in the quarter grew by 8% to 63 million SEC up from 59. And our EBITDA remains stable around 11 million SEC with an EBITDA margin on a good level at 17.3% for the quarter, slightly down from 20% in the year before. Then back to you, Tim. Thanks, Peter.