Sectra AB (publ)

Welcome to Sectra's three-month interim report presentation with CEO Torbjörn Kronander and CFO Jessica Holmqvist. My name is Helena Pettersson, Investor Relations Officer, and I will be the moderator of the Q&A session held after management presentation. And with that, I hand over to you, Torbjörn.

All right. So welcome here for our first quarter of the year. I will start with the input and highlights and then Jessica will come in with the financial development. I will talk a little about the second way forward and then we'll have a Q&A session and you can ask questions over chat or email and then Helena will read those so you can hear them. Sector business operation again is imaging IT where we manage images in healthcare. uh we have secure communications is that's actually the foundation of sector sector stance or secure transmission we do encryption and very high-end approved encryption systems we don't do bpn for people at it at home etc we do what the nations and the military and the security forces and governments ask for And then we have business innovation, which is our greenhouse for new operations. We haven't changed there since about a half year back, and I will go a little deeper into that. And that is genomics IT that we added to this. We have been developing that for about one and a half year. We have strong performance in all operating areas this quarter. Our first quarter normally is weak. There's not a lot of activity in our customer markets in the first quarter, but we had an unusually strong first quarter. We are rapidly changing to as a service model. We don't sell products much as a product. We sell them as a service. which, of course, limits our growth and also profits when you do the transition, but long term will be beneficial. We are growing a lot in that area and also in other areas. We have large investments. Going over to as a service model in the cloud requires us to change how we develop and deploy products, and that is a large investment. That is both prevalent over the last one or two years, but it will continue with Hebex investments also this year. So we will be affected of the burden of doing this transition for the whole year. But the years after, we hope to see a little improvement. And we're also working, we have a high effort and high customer satisfaction. For instance, in our incentive programs, a long-term incentive program that is now proposed to the shareholder or shareholders in the General Assembly next week is based on not financial performance only, but also that our customers are happy with us. That's a very important long-term success factor. That transformation to as a service model, cloud recurring revenue, which is our recurring revenue of operations in the cloud, It's grown to 42% to 123 million kronors. And now that is now, we're now reaching a level where the relative growth makes an impact on the overall figures. Recurring revenue as a whole grew 21%. And the difference between this is that recurring revenue as a whole is also service contracts and maintenance and rentals of old systems that we've had for many years. While cloud recurring revenue is the new business, what we sell as a service delivered from the cloud. We also, if you are based on a service model, it's very important that they keep your customers. You have these kind of people paying every month, but if they leave you instead of staying, of course, it's not a good thing. It never got paid up front. People pay when they use it and if they like it. And then churn becomes very important. How large portion of that recurring revenue do you lose? And we are very low, continuous very low at 0.4%. Happy customers, that's the best way to grow in our opinion. The contracted order bookings were down this quarter to 615 million. Now that is still more than our revenue. But the comparison quarter one year ago had a very, very large order. And compared to that, it was down. But we have huge quarterly fluctuations in our order intake because of the size of the contract and the length of the contracts. So we hope to see that averaging out of the year. You have to look at the rolling 12, et cetera, to really understand us. Net sales grew 24% and the profit per share grew as well to 0.42 SEK per share. Financial targets, our three main financial targets is equity assets, that is stability. We sell to customers who are extremely dependent on what we do. They will not buy that from three guys in a garage because the entire hospital or the entire country might be depending on that we succeed. And then we stay as a trustworthy provider. And then you don't want to buy that from untrusty or unstable companies. So equity assets, solidities, the financial trust is very important. We have as a target to be over 30% and we are at 52%. Profitability. That is another. So the two first goals here are hygiene factors. Profitability should be above 15%. We have a very good pipeline of good ideas and things we want to do and develop. We will keep it above 15%. If we get ways above that, we will use that for investment to grow. The main goal, which is growth of profits per share. and that growth target is set to 50 percent which is an annual growth of profits around eight or something like that we are ways above that with 138 percent now uh secure communications highlights we see partly based on a new project mixed partly based on that there is a tension in society, as you know, with Ukraine and everything like that, which has increased the awareness and the need of secure communication products all over the world. But Europe is our home market, Europe and NATO, and we see considerable growth. And we are now okay in communications after being struggling a couple of years before that. We also have a little developing arm where we develop security for energy companies, a so-called SOC, which we survey or we kind of look at the networks of energy companies so they don't get intrusion. We see this is changing to the better. There is an increasing awareness that a Countries energy provide provision needs to be secured against cyber crime. We also adding new products for both older new customers were coming out with new products and we have a nice healthy product development coming in with new products over the next years. Or for that. In business innovation in of beings, it medical education, genomics, it research. In orthopedics IT we got our first ever time that sector has been able to get a reimbursement code in the United States. Without reimbursement for a procedure in the United States it's extremely difficult to sell and that is what the cost was get paid for and when you go into reimbursement this is for implant motion analysis where we say post-operative if a prosthesis is properly stuck to the skeleton or if it moves. If it moves, you have to revision. You have to redo the operation. And we have a very interesting technology there. We got the temporary CPT-3 code for it. That means we have a couple of years, about five, I think, where actually customers will get reimbursement. And if it shows they are actually asking for it and using it, then they can get a real CPT code, which is permanent reimbursement for that part. Medical education, the most interesting thing there right now, so we're adding radiographer. That is the people who run the X-ray machines. And there is a huge need in those universities all over the world for educational tools for the radiographers. And we have just implemented all of Denmark. We have some very interesting customers in the US also starting to use our education tools for radiographer education then of course we also have the medical doctors educations that we've been working with for a long time and genomics it i will come back to that in the next slide and then we have research where we do a lot of research in ai and applications of ai In genomics IT, this is a new service to handle high production levels of genomic data, mainly right now for oncology. Long term, we might extend it to other diseases as well. So this is initially a product doing solid tumors together with University of Pennsylvania Health in the US. It has gone live in May, University Health Systems in Philadelphia. they're using it as a main production line and the interesting thing about this era is that it's a thing you have done increasingly and then you use excel or homegrown it systems for it but when production gets or when the usage gets big enough you need to industrialize it and that is exactly what we have done we have large initial interest from other institutions But growth will not be like a rocket of this product. It's a new product. The world has to understand that it works, begin to trust it and begin to budget for it. So don't expect this to take off. But long term, this is a very interesting area, complementing our other products in medical diagnostics, especially in cancer diagnosis. In Michigan IT, our largest area, we have the ongoing transformation to software as a service, which is clearly highly pronounced there, especially in the US or North America, we'll say. Cloud recurring revenue in that area grew at 42%. And we have also several, even though the order intake now was a little slower compared to the last quarter, we have an interesting pipeline to discuss further. One example, as we've begun doing this over the last presentations here, we got an order for all of Region Hovestaden in Denmark, which is Copenhagen and the hostels surrounding Copenhagen. They had tried with several vendors. It's a very complex, very large hostel environment. They have tried several other vendors before. We finally got the order and it's now fully rolled out all over. And very interesting is that a politician or a hospital manager in the region said publicly it was the best public health IT product they've run in Denmark, which of course is a big phrase for us. This shows that, you know, it's used, it's not stopping every day. as the previous systems were, actually it's not stopping at all. And it provides this value for a very large portion of the country of Denmark. Financial development, I will leave the word to Jessica.

Thank you. Good morning and welcome again to our Q1 presentation. We are pleased to report a solid first quarter with strong growth in both revenues and operating profits. And volumes are increasing and recurring revenue is growing. And this first quarter has been characterized by deliveries and preparations for deliveries of previously ordered customer projects. During the first quarter, we received orders for Sector 1 and Sector 1 Cloud in North America, Europe, and rest of the world. And we also received orders in secure communication, various orders in secure communications, such as one for development and serial deliveries of Tiger S. Contracted order intake amounted to 615 million a significant decrease versus last year, 79% down. And as Torbjörn pointed out, in the comparable quarter, we recorded an individual order of 2.4 billion and orders of that size are not repeated quarterly and hence cause large fluctuation in our reported order numbers. We continue to grow with satisfied customers. In the first quarter, revenues are up with 24% to 724 million, and the recurring revenue churn remained low at 0.4%, rolling 12. growing volumes and consequently we see increased recurring revenue. The share of recurring revenue out of total revenue in first quarter equaled 67%, 58% rolling 12. And there is clear progress in our transition to cloud-based service sales. Cloud recurring revenue increased by 42% in the first quarter. Currency impact on sales was limited in this first quarter. We see sales growth in all operating areas year on year. Imaging IT report sales growth of 23%. Customers have increased their use of installed solutions and more hospitals have gone live. And the share of recurring revenue in imaging IT was at 70% in the quarter. Secure Communications has delivered products and services during the quarter to authorities and defense providers and resulting in a sales growth of 38% year on year. Business innovation has had a slower start to the fiscal year than the other operating areas and report sales growth of 5%. Sales increased in all geographic markets, all of CETRA's geographic markets. The trend from previous reporting periods is unchanged. We see the highest growth in absolute numbers in the UK, in the US and Sweden. And Denmark and Canada show the highest growth in rest of Europe and rest of world. Operating profit rose by 44% to 100 million in the quarter, and the operating profit margin was strengthened year on year. Profit development is a result of growth and strong performance in all operating areas, and the operating profit margin equaled 13.8 in Q1. The transition or the shift in business model to cloud-based service sales will reduce the level of variation and typical seasonal effects will fade out over time. But we are still in this transition and can expect to see quarterly variations in our profit generation. All operating areas increased profit year on year. Imaging IT, which is up 28%, reports a margin of 14.8% for the quarter. And here we have profitability being impacted by both the ongoing preparations for deliveries of large customer orders where we will see revenues grow over time as the systems become fully operational. We also have an impact from ongoing initiatives to become a service provider. Secure communications increased operating profit by almost 300%. and the main driver here is a higher business volume. They report an operating margin, operating profit margin of 13% in the first quarter. Cash flow from operations was negative to minus 57 in the first quarter. In line with our traditional pattern for cash generation and an improvement year on year due to decreased tied up capital in current receivables. We closed the reporting period with a cash balance of 699 million. And that's over to you again.

Right. Thank you. I'll speak a little about the way forward. Our general philosophy, those who have heard us before recognize this one. We kept this for many years. If you have a rational strategy in a growth market, you begin there. You begin by identifying that the market you're operating in will grow. Ideally, it's a market that has to grow by external forces, kind of neutralizing a little bit of the effect of the economic tides around you. And then if you have happy customers, which is required for growth. And in order to have happy customers, you have to have happy employees. It will not work otherwise. You cannot have happy customers without happy employees. Dare to be expensive when you're worth it. And a little stubbornness and a thick forehead. And careful with cost. Shareholders will be happy, but it comes in that order. And the rational strategies in the growth markets, I think we have. Coming in on the business customer satisfaction, we again, we have said this since we were awarded this. This is normally awarded in January, February each year. And 24, we were the happiest customer in the main segments, which is US packs, large. 11th year in a row, US packs small. Canada, very high rankings in Canada. Northern Europe and Southern Europe, and Europe has been divided into five regions, so we have best in class in two of them, and we are second in two more. We also say that, as for the help employees, employees have to be motivated, and culture is a very important thing. And we use, in general, one single rule for that, and if we can give everyone, make everyone adhere to and live The oldest rule in all humanity, the golden rule, do to others what you want them to do to you, we'll be fine. Pastors will be fine, and then we will be fine, and you shareholders will be fine as well. So this is a thing we preach very much. Kind of unusual for an IT company, perhaps, but still very valid. One thing that was mentioned last report was that Klaas, which are doing these evaluations of customer satisfaction, they also do other Evaluations and reports, and this is from the US market. It was in January 2024 and it's a 500 page report that you can acquire from class if you're interested. And it goes through everything, training, quality, deployment, quality, stability of the product, everything about 10 vendors impacts. The most important one that I think and we think is most important is would you buy again? And that's a real verdict if we did a good job. And 98% of our customers in large would buy from us again. There is no other comparison that is even close. We're actually so high that we average the average. We are the only one above the average. Everyone else is below the average. And I will not go through their names here. That's not appropriate. But we have very happy customers, which is crucially important. This is Charles Darwin. What he really said, we like quotes, or I like quotes, so I use them. I don't change them now, so you don't get bored with them. It is not the strongest of a species that thrives and proliferates. It's the most adaptable. Things change. We are living in a world of increasing and very rapid change. We have AI coming in. We have new technologies. We have a very, you know, tense international situation between countries, and there's wars going on in Europe again. And then a company who won't operate in such a world has to be adaptable. You have to be able to change. You have to be able to change fast. And that is, I think we are. I think it's a very good thing with us that we actually are able to adapt. We are considered to be the thought leaders in our industries, which is a good thing. We hear that from customers. One of the things we're doing now is transforming into asset service company. As I said before, we are increasing the recurring revenue. We have a large interest rate. This is kind of the areas where it's good for both vendor and customer. Customer will get the feeling that they don't have to use a lot of cash to pay something up front that they think will work but might not. So they pay for usage instead. For the vendor long term, if you don't lose customers and provide a good job, it's more income than getting an initial license up front. It requires low churn. As I said, we are 0.4%. And revenue and profit growth will temporarily be smaller. And we are not through this yet. So, I mean, just before, because we had a very good quarter one, that will not proportionally go up for the rest of the year. We will see it leveling out, and we are still in a hefty, investment phase, especially in North America, of very large contracts that have not really begun to pay back yet. So we will see still large variations between quarters and don't expect the first quarter to be kind of extrapolated all over the year. Investments of future revenues are taken up front, while payment comes later, and that is the situation we have here. Long-term, the financial effects of this would be strongly positive. And we are the only vendor now that not only do this for radiology imaging, we do it for all imaging in our healthcare system. We do this for ophthalmology, orthopedic imaging, cardiology. We just had a cardio advisory board of physicians here. We will discuss what we do in that area and improving rapidly. Digital pathology is growing very well, especially in some countries, notably France, where we do very, very well in digital pathology. Amplify service, which is our AI app store, and other areas as well. So all of this you can get in one single contract, in one single system, which of course is very important for the customer. Enterprise diagnostic imaging. And we are now adding genomics to it, which means we are not only doing images, we do diagnostics for the areas where it's most important, the old people's diseases. In medical IT, the demographics of the Western world is alarming. I think some countries are now even below one child per woman averaging. That means those countries will disappear. uh and some of the main gdp with countries from 20 years back or 10 years back are now having a big problem people live longer and longer and get sicker and sicker the workforce working healthcare get fewer and fewer and everyone cannot work in healthcare we need to make healthcare more efficient or this will not work and in order to make it more efficient society has to concentrate on the diseases of the aging person neurodegenerative disease, cardiovascular disease, oncology, cancer disease, musculoskeletal disease, which is one of the most expensive diseases we have, but not much discussed, and vision. These are what drives cost in healthcare and those resource use. If we can make these five more efficient, we have done a huge service to society, and the results will be margin in that for us. And as you see, we have medical imaging there, but we are transitioning into medical diagnostics with added genomics to it as well. So vision for medical imaging area or medical area is collecting all imaging-related diagnostic data in one system to support better care for patients and lower cost and reduce complexity for the providers in the healthcare. We have had radiology, cardiology, So this is the acid, sorry for that. We have now radiology, pathology, and genomics, which is cancer. We have cardiology, a very large area of disease, and ophthalmology, one single system, which of course, we are the only vendor on the planet to have this in one single system. And customers are asking for it. They don't want 2,000 IT systems. They want a few. we have the highest customer satisfaction, it increases customer efficiency. They don't have to have five staff in IT working with each one of the 2,000 systems they have. They can have five staff working with the one system they have. I'm not saying we can replace 2,000 systems. We can at least replace five with one. So it decreases customers' costs and it decreases cybersecurity risks because every IT system you have in a healthcare environment is cybersecurity attack risk. And if you can reduce them, you reduce the risk. Now, no IT system is 100% secure. I'm not saying we are either. But we are better than most already from the beginning, and we have fewer systems, which is also good for cybersecurity. And then in the cybersecurity area, we live in a new digital reality. There are increasing attention in international tensions and cybercrime as well. Both of these drives growth. We are very well positioned and have a very, very strong branding in this area. We are providing NATO, European Union and more than half of the countries in Europe with the most advanced encryption they have, especially in mobile environments. Threats are expanding, attackers are getting smarter, and also the attackers now have AI. A couple years back, if you got a known vulnerability in, for instance, Microsoft Windows or some other IT environment, it took a couple of weeks before the crooks had made an attack software for it, a virus. Today, they also can use AI that can write that attack records in hours. So it's now... very strong reasons to be very good at cybersecurity. Also, the impacts are larger and larger. You saw CrowdStrike in the last quarter, which actually shut down a very substantial part of the industries on the planet. And that was not even a criminal, that was a bug that was introduced by a provider. Demands more and more countermeasures that society and companies must invest. And as I said before, the ideal to be in a market where society and companies must invest, come high water or low water. We have to do things in cybersecurity and we are there and that drives that market for us. So why should you be a shahool etc.? ? We are positioned in markets that are by external factors forced to grow and growing is easier in a growing market than in a declining market. We have high customer satisfaction and a very strong brand in areas where brand trust and trust is super important. Rapidly increasing recurring revenue and very low churn. Yet we have very exciting self-financed prospects for future growth areas. Several of our businesses Business innovation would have been, if they had been listed as a start-up, being valued quite a lot. The majority of these areas are already cash flow positive and positive profit-wise as well, except for genomics, but that's very new. Management at Sacra owns shares and incentive programs are long-term. We don't pay people by shares. that they can sell within a week. Our incentive program is stock-based, but they are over long-term. Then we come to the upcoming financial events and annual general meeting. The annual general meeting will be next week, September 10th, here in Linköping. It will not be broadcast. You have to be here physically to attend to it. December 12th, six-month report. March 14th, nine-month. And finally, the year-end report on June 5th. We also urge you, these presentations are made for you out there. We try to listen what you do and what you say, and we need to make them efficiently so you think they're valuable. If you have any feedback on these meetings, send an email to info.investor.sector.com. For example, the idea is to have some examples of business coming out of that channel. We got that suggestion, and now we add some examples of products to the presentations. Then we come to the questions section.

Thank you Torbjörn and Jessica. I will do opposite from previous meetings. I will start with a question from the chat function this time and it's about secure communications. What are you going to do with the communication business?

Grow it. As with everything else, etc. Have happy customers and that's about what we can discuss.

And then I will move over to questions from analysts following Sectra. And if you have any further questions online, please write them in the Q&A chat. And I start with Nikola Kalanowski from ABG. One of the operational bottlenecks is cloud implementations. Would you say that you are able to ramp up the tempo to onboard a greater number of hospitals, or should we expect the rate of at least two hospitals per month to continue going forward?

We're working hard to improve that. We have already come a very, very long way. We have some huge cloud orders that would not be possible in that pace. We would have worked for 20 years and we would still not be through it. So yes, we are improving rapidly and cloud is also lends itself very much in that direction. But we need electronic training material. We want support going, you know, automatic. So a huge progress in that area. We're not there yet, but we are working on it and we have come quite a long way.

And I continue with questions from ABG. Follow up on the previous question. Does the rate of cloud implementations in terms of number of hospitals per month differ among geographies? IG, is it faster in the US than in Europe?

Cloud is still hampered in Europe by the EU regulations, GDPR, which have different interpretations in different countries. There was a judge decision called Schrems 2 that said that an American owned operator couldn't provide healthcare sensitive information or host that even if the sites were in Europe. It's very unclear, but we see increasingly also in Europe who say it's okay to use a Google or Microsoft or an AVS Amazon cloud if the servers are in Europe. So we have such customers. But it's still disputed, and it's very different interpreted in different countries. In the US and the UK, it was okay with using the Microsofts and the Googles and the Amazons, and we see a much more rapid progress there. In Europe, we still have private cloud that we host ourselves, which is not a specialty. We shouldn't do it, but we're forced by regulations to do it.

And then a third question from ABG. Is there a difference in the exam volume growth among clients in Europe versus the US? If that is the case, could you please help us understand why there may be a difference?

So we don't see a clear trend difference. I mean, it's mainly is that more and more people get old and old people have much more exams. And that varies really by market. We don't see any clear trend that there would be a difference in the different markets.

Thank you. Then I will move on to questions from Jakob Lemke at SCB. What is driving the growth in non-recurring revenues? Is this something we should expect to continue?

Well, not all revenue from our SAS contracts is recurring. For example, revenues generated during implementation and for migration of data that's non-recurring revenue. And those revenues, we will have those revenues going forward as well. And then we also have the communications side of the business where we have a much lower share of recurring revenue.

And next question from SCB. Based on your work with customer, size of your implementation team, et cetera, When do you foresee we could see acceleration in go live in cloud sales?

It's already happening, as I said before.

Could you talk about the pipeline for new larger cloud contracts? Anything that could materialize in this fiscal year?

Well, we can't disclose things that are in discussion, but there is a solid pipeline, as I said in the introduction. of customers, both large and small, that are interested and we hope to get a substantial part of them.

And then another question from SEB regarding digital pathology. Could you talk a bit about how important a step the FDA clearance supporting DICAM is? Has there been any noticeable acceleration for digital pathology following this?

It's a general trend that people want to use standards. We saw that in Regiole in the 90s. The big modality vendors tried to create a closed department. So they had an x-ray machine and they wanted to do the packs. Then, of course, when you want to buy the next x-ray machine, there's a huge advantage or even impossible to buy a competing device. Now, customers only take that for a while. and then they say no we want to have freedom of choice in every single component hospital and in order to do that then standardization is crucially important now pathology is a more unmature area so so standardization has been slower but customers really want to have the freedom of choice of the next device we have as an independent vendor who also come from radiology where dicom is a standard frame which transfer is very well so why no one does anything else today. We have introduced this and we've driven that trend in pathology. I don't think that would be a major change, but it's good for us that we show that we are a true open systems vendor.

Thank you. Then I will move over to questions from Kristoffer Liljeberg at Carnegie. Increase in the number of employees has slowed somewhat last few quarter. Is this temporary or a first sign that the massive ramp up needed to handle new contracts is coming to an end?

I don't think we will grow as fast as we did before, but we will still grow, especially in some markets where we have a lot of orders. If we have huge orders like the one we got one year ago, that needs to be implemented and that takes people.

And the next question from Carnegie is, could you comment on timing for larger new contracts that will go live coming quarters?

We are gradually, when we get very large orders, like billions, there is normally a bunch of hospitals or there is a bunch of hospitals below that might be hundreds of hospitals. And that is not something you take live over one day. You start with there. They say there's only one way to eat an elephant, right? One piece at a time. Save 100 hostels, you gradually take them in to use. And that process is begun for that large order. But we are not nowhere even close to halfway yet.

And then we move on to questions from David Vinyong at Stifel. Could you share some insights into the progress you've made in cardiology, both in terms of offering and in terms of commercial momentum? Particularly interested to hear your thoughts on the partnership with General Electric.

Cardiology is an interesting field. There is a very large market in cardiology. It has had its own systems, but we now have several customers, not the least in the U.S., use our products for cardiology but then they have other products as well doing some parts of cardiology offering as i said we last week had a device report mainly by americans here in the in linchpin and we discussed we're adding functionality all the time there is no hesitance for us going into aiming to be a very good provider in cardiology we are not all the way yet but we're getting there

And next question from Stifel. Are there any triggers that could help the US adopt digital pathology tools faster? CPT codes have been available for more than a year, so is growth limited by resources to roll out the solution on the hospital side or limited by sector sales force?

I think it's a conservative mess in the business. Regulatory is very often technology savvy and they use the new technologies. Pathology is a little more conservative and it's also a new area. You can't expect a complete new area to grow very fast, at least not the beginning. But we see a kind of increasing deployment rate in the US. After a while, very important hospitals like University of Pennsylvania is showing that it actually works.

Thank you. And we actually have a follow-up question on that at the chat function as well. How many existing customers did adopt the digital pathology solution already?

I don't really understand the question, so I will interpret it in my way. Of our current customers, I would say that less than 10% have gone out of digital pathology, but not all have digital pathology or pathology at all.

pathology is not like radiology available in all hospitals it's available in some hospitals yes if you someone online have a final question please write it and i will take another question that we have received on mail and this is i think you've touched upon this earlier how should we think about seasonal patterns Could you please give some more flavor on how recurring revenue will impact rest of the year?

Well, it will gradually decrease the fluctuations. So, I mean, we have had a typical kind of quarter one is bad and we're high numbers later on. That would be decreased. But we will have a lot of investments this year as well. So we are far from through that. time when we actually have to invest a lot for cloud so there will be substantial cost and less variations in income over the rest of the year than we used to and with that i think we can close the q a session all right thank you very much for listening