Prevas AB

Good morning and welcome to today's webcast presentation where we have Prevas who will be presenting the Q1 report for 2024. With us presenting we have the CEO Magnus Vilén and CFO Helena Burström. If you're calling in and would like to ask a question please press star 9 to raise your hand and star 6 to unmute yourself. We will then announce if it's your turn by saying the last four digits of your phone number. You can also use the form that is located to the right. And with that said, please go ahead with your presentation.

Hello, everybody, and welcome to this presentation of the Q1 results for Prevaz. My name, as it was announced, is Magnus Vilén, and together I'm the CEO of Prevaz. And together with me, I have... Helena Bjursson. who is the CFO of Prevas. And the agenda for today's brief meeting is that we will start with this brief introduction, and then we will review our financial performance for the quarter, look a little bit into the market. Then we will spend some more time on the exciting acquisition we have made in NMAC. And then we will finalize this meeting with a Q&A session as we normally do. So how did we perform during Q1? Looking into the revenues, we actually managed to grow during the quarter. So despite the calendar effect that was negative during this quarter and the rather dynamic or in some parts also quite challenging market, we managed to grow our top line. And then the question is, of course, how do we perform in terms of EBITDA? We actually delivered a strong result in the quarter of an EBITDA margin of 13.2%, which we believe is strong, given that we actually have the negative calendar effect. One day in Sweden, three days in Norway. So it's a quite substantial effect on the result due to the negative calendar effect. And also due to this rather dynamic market, we are quite proud actually that we managed to deliver such a strong result in the first quarter. We have also managed to increase our prices in order to maintain our margins. One of the key aspects of that is, of course, the pricing. And we continuously work to increase our prices. And we can see that in the first quarter that the prices has been increasing in all our countries, which is really good, of course. What we also see in the first quarter is that the cash flow for Prevaz continues to be very, very strong. And for this quarter, it was substantially above last year as well as the last quarter for the last year. And also exciting for this first quarter is that we announced the acquisition of Enmac, where Prevaz established a strong foothold, a strong strategic platform in Finland. So Prevaz is moving ahead in many different ways. Looking into more detail of the quarter, as I was mentioning, we managed to deliver a strong EBITDA margin given the calendar effect. And we also delivered an EBIT of 44.2 million SEK. That is a little bit lower than the last year. And one effect that we see here is due to the acquisition related items of totally 9.2 million SEK that affects the EBIT and also the EPS for the quarter. Out of those 9.2 million SEK, 7 million were transaction costs related to the acquisition of NMAC. All in all, we believe that we start the year in a quite good way. You can see also the cash flow here, where we increased it from 22.8 million up to 27.1. So that was one quarter. Once again, one quarter. But what is happening, if we zoom out a little bit, You can see in these two graphs, the exciting development that Peos has had since 2017, where the company has continuously increased our EBITDA. And last year, we also increased our target for the EBITDA. So actually our target now is 12% over time. And this quarter, we are very glad to present that we actually overachieved compared to our financial target in terms of EBITDA. So you can see that we have a continuous growth in EBITDA. Last year's has been a rather flat development around our target of 12% EBITDA. In the other graph, you can see that we have continued to grow. The rolling 12 revenue growth figure is in that graph. And you can see that we have a continuous growth in Prevas. Even the first quarter, we actually managed to grow despite this calendar effect and also the rather challenging market that we see today. So this is one thing that we managed to grow the EBITDA. We managed to grow the revenue. But most important, of course, from a shareholder perspective, is that we managed to turn this into earnings per share. And here you can see the development of earnings per share the last years, and also that we have increased the dividend per share over time. So for us, it's very important that we continuously work and focus on earnings per share, so that we grow over time in that very, very important metric for Privas. So this is a little bit about the quarter, a little bit zoom out regarding earnings per share and dividend. And now I would ask Helena to look into our financial position.

Thank you, Magnus. As Magnus said, we have increased cash flow from operating activities with 4 million SEK compared to Q1 last year. amounting to 27 million SEK compared to 2023, Q1 2023. And this is mainly driven by a reduction of operating receivables. Since the final day of Q1 was during the week and amortization was deducted beginning April and thus affecting financing activities positively with approximately 6 million SEK. Cash amounted to 130 million SEK at the end of Q1 2024 compared to 83 million SEK in Q1 2023. Prevas financial position remains strong. We can see here that Prevas is well below the financial target of maximum two times EBITDA. Net debt in relation to EBITDA is still negative. Our equity ratio remains as well strong and amounts to 60.9% in Q1. Q1 2023 equity ratio amounted to 59.3%. And then Magnus, can you please give some market updates?