Nederman Holding AB (publ)

be in listen-only mode. During the questions and answers session, participants are able to ask questions by dialing pound key 5 on their telephone keypad. Now I will hand the conference over to speakers CEO Sven Kristensen and CFO Matthew Cusick. Please go ahead.

Thank you very much and good morning everybody. Welcome to this conference call on Nerman Group's Q4 Concluding that we had a solid profitability and a very strong cash flow during the last year, we have also strengthened our position in a very uncertain macro environment. We have improved our market position in what we can call structurally growing industry, food, batteries, other different technologies. We have made significant investments in manufacturing and logistics. To enhance efficiency, we have opened a complete new facility for Robovent in US in Detroit. We have extended significantly the capacity Thomasville for dark and filter. We have increased our capacity also in MCT and we are continuously doing so. We have the inauguration of Helsingborg's new facility which gives us a very good distribution, logistics and manufacturing capability, but above all an innovation center that could be the center for 14 local hubs with the competent centers around the world. So we have accelerated our innovation and that means that we have also accelerated the pace of product releases and upgrades. So a relatively small but strategically important acquisition of Olisem that will further strengthen our MCT division with the capability of in an efficient way help our customers with them collecting the information and sorting it and being able to, in an efficient way, use the information as well as create reports for different authorities, etc. When it comes to shareholders' favorite subject, dividend, we have had the highest ever net profit. So the board of directors proposed a dividend of Swedish krona of four compared to 3.95 last year.

If I move on to some of the key financials for the quarter and the full year, if we start with orders received, it was a little bit of a varied scenario between the divisions. We will come back to the divisions in detail a little bit later. For the consolidated group, the quarter four order intake was just over 1.4 billion Swedish kronor, which is a decrease of around 4.8% currency neutral versus quarter four of 2023. You can see from the charts on the slide number four that the large chunk of the decline is organic. Currency is having much less effect during 2024 overall than in previous years. than in the prior year. Orders received, yeah, 1.4 billion for the quarter. It is the lowest quarter we've had for some time. And we'll come back to the backlog being a little lower going into 2025 than it was into 2024. Full year, incoming orders were 5.78 billion Swedish kronor versus very slightly over 6 billion Swedish kronor for the full year of 2023. That's a currency neutral decrease of 3.3%. When it comes to sales, this was a very strong quarter for Nerdman. It was our second highest sales quarter ever. All four divisions increased versus the same quarter in 2023. In total, we did 1.62 billion in sales in quarter four versus 1.501 billion in 2023 Q4. That's a currency neutral growth of 7.6%. For the full year, we... achieved exactly 5.9 billion Swedish kronor these numbers have been audited so it isn't us just looking at decimal points we get to 6.1 that's versus 6.188 last year so it is a clear reduction if we see the organic reduction is 319 million if you look at the chart on the bottom right of slide five Of course, anyone who's deeply into the number sees the vast majority of the decrease is in the much more volatile process technology division, which we will come back to later on as well. When it comes to profitability, it's no longer a teaser, but we had our best profit after tax ever. But if we start a little bit higher up and look at our adjusted EBITDA, that was 185 million in quarter four, 185 million Swedish kronor in quarter four of 2024, up from 172 million, which gave us a margin of 11.4%, which was exactly in line with Q4 last year. Profit after tax 10 million Swedish kronor higher at 87 million SEK and earnings per share in the quarter 2.49 Swedish kronor versus 2.2 in Q4 2023. For the full year, we were up at 708 million Swedish kronor EBITDA. That's very slightly down from 2023. Margin up 12% now versus 11.6% in 2023. And earnings per share now for the full year, 983 versus 971. So we're pleased to continue the upwards trend there. And Sven already mentioned that following that increase in earnings per share, the board has proposed a dividend increase to four Swedish kronor. Sven also mentioned the cash flow was very, very strong. We've had a very good year overall and quarter four in particular was very good. We've continued our focus on managing cash flow. It doesn't just happen on its own. We remain managing our accounts receivable very well, and we have had projects in subdivisions to try and maintain and actually decrease the levels of inventory held. So among other things, those are contributors to the fact that we had a 245 million positive cash flow from operations in Q4, up from 212 million, which was very strong already in 2023. The net debt, as we can see on the right side of slide number seven, that is now at 1.697 billion Swedish kronor versus 1.332 million SEK 12 months previously. Must be pointed out that that increase is completely connected to one of my least favorite international financial reporting standards, IFRS 16, which relates to leasing. As you can see on the charts, the proportion of debt that related to leasing increased significantly in Q3 when we went into the new premises in Helsingborg and Robben's Detroit site as well. But we see a clear decrease in debt. We've had a very good cash flow and that's meant that we've decreased debt versus 12 months ago. If we now move on to the divisions and we start with extraction and filtration technology.