NCAB Group AB (publ)

Welcome to the NCAB Q1 presentation for 2026. During the questions and answers session, participants are able to ask questions by dialing star 5 on their telephone keypad. Now I will hand the conference over to the CEO Peter Crook, CFO Timothy Benjamin, and Head of Investor Relations Gunala Oman. Please go ahead.

Thank you very much and welcome everyone to our call. Today presenting primarily will be myself and my colleague Timothy Benjamin. Just for those of you who might be new to us, NCAB is the supplier of printed circuit boards, so the product you see to the left on the screen, which form the foundation in any electronic product. So our customers will mount semiconductors or microprocessors on our product And that then creates the intelligent nodes in any electronic product. And what is important to recognize is that wireless semiconductor components are standard components. The printed circuit board is uniquely designed for each and every application. NCAB is present today through 19 companies across the world. We have some 650 colleagues around the world supporting our customers, and we are dealing with some 34 factories to supply the main portion of our customers. We have no in-house manufacturing, but we have a very strong focus on securing the supplier network. So roughly 120 of our 650 colleagues are working specifically with technology and the factory management. Our focus is for printed circuit boards for demanding customers, customers with high demands in terms of quality, on-time delivery, efficiency. And we aim to supply them with zero defects, produced sustainably, and giving them the overall lowest total cost. And our aim is to be the number one PCB producer wherever we are. And we are the globally leading supplier of printed circuit boards worldwide. Our focus is also on what we call the high-mix-low-volume segment. So we are not focusing on the markets of consumer electronics or PCs or main data applications, but we're typically more applicable working with the industrial applications or medical or aerospace and defense. And typically what we see in these applications is that the The printed circuit board forms a very small part of the total bill of material for the end product. These customers that we are focusing on have very high demands on quality and performance. And given the fact that this is a small part of their bill of material and that their overall total spend on printed circuit boards is relatively limited they struggle to get good support and access from the leading factories and this is where we can support them we can bring them knowledge to help them design their product efficiently and also match them up with the best factories and where we combined our global spend in printed circuit boards we are one of the leading buyers of printed circuit boards worldwide and that gives us also an opportunity to have a margin on the services we provide What we've seen is that the global printed circuit board market is somewhere north of 80 billion US dollars worth of. And it was a market that was growing rapidly during the early parts of the pandemic, but then had a recoil in the market. We are now positive to see that now for the last one and a half years, the market has resumed growth. And we can also see that NCAB's ordering take is matching that and is accelerating its growth in 2026. So moving to our first quarter, we have a strong positive growth on top line and also positive development of our EBITDA. We can see that the market recovery and our growth in order intake that has started growing from Q2 of last year has continued to grow and has accelerated over the last four quarters. it is a very challenging market situation right now the growth in the global market is accelerated by big data center investments this is not our main market but it is creating supply chain bottlenecks for printed circuit board manufacturing worldwide we have a strong supply chain and our factory management organization can actually help to make a difference in this tough environment and help our customers still get good delivery of product uh we're also seeing from the growth in the overall global market increasing market prices and in the quarter we have also had on top of that some some project wins notably north america which further enhance our order intake in the quarter but overall we see an underlying good positive development across our segments and we can see things like defense medtech and power doing quite well whereas our sales towards the automotive industry remains somewhat muted On the EBITDA side, we again have a good positive development versus 2025. We can see we're leveraging the growth and we're offsetting quite a significant FX headwind. And our gross margins are stable versus prior year. If we take a more detailed look on the numbers, we can see our order intake is up 27% in Swedish kronor. Our organic growth in US dollars, we basically trade 90% of our business in US dollars effectively. Our organic growth in US dollars is up 43%. Book to bill is also quite positive of 1.2%. Net sales grew by 12% to 1 billion 74 million SEK, which is a growth organically in US dollars of 24%. And we can see our EBITDA reached 128 million SEK up from 100 last year and our EBITDA margin equivalent of 11.9%. We can see our gross margin up slightly but largely stable, but we are overall on the EBITDA side offsetting a negative FX impact of 27 million SEK in the quarter. Cash flow was okay at 65 million SEK versus 53 of prior year. Our working capital is up slightly, mainly driven by the high growth that we see in the business, but also the fact that lead times are longer than they were a year ago, which is creating more goods in transit. Net profit at 75 million SEC versus 52 last year and an EPS of 40 cents versus or 0.40 versus 0.28.

Over to you, Tim. Thanks, Peter. So I think you heard a little bit from Peter that our gross profit has remained fairly stable year over year, which we're happy to see a little bit over the medium term. When we look at the quarter, as you heard from Peter, up 27% in order intake, 43% in U.S. dollars, which is comparable units for us, excluding acquisitions. Positive development in all segments. We saw good development, especially in North America and East. Net sales up 12% in SEC and 24% in US dollars. These two effects contributed to a positive book-to-bill of 1.2, which you would expect with the longer lead times that we see right now, as well as some of the larger project orders that we have within the quarter. But we were happy to see a positive trend in EV charging, as well as in our aerospace and defense businesses. When we look at the EBITDA, we did see a 28% year-over-year increase going from 100 million SEC last quarter to 128 million SEC this quarter. We did have to offset quite a negative headwind coming from FX, which mainly impacts gross profits, offset a little bit on the SG&A side. These two things were offset very much by the strong growth in revenue that we saw, and they contributed to a very strong operational leverage within the quarter. And as you heard a little bit from Peter, gross margins, although a little bit down sequentially, were quite stable year-on-year.