AB SKF (publ)

Welcome to SKF's earnings call for the fourth quarter of 2024. We ended the year with solid margins thanks to strong execution in a challenging market. My name is Sofia Arnjös and I'm heading up Invest Relations. We will have a slightly different team than otherwise. Our CFO, Niklas Rosenlev, left by year end. I'm very happy to have our acting CFO, Karinna Fandrenberg, with us today. And we will also have our CEO, Richard Gustafsson, with us today. After your presentations there will be an opportunity to ask questions. If you press 1 and star, if you are joining via the phone, you can ask a question. If you are joining via the webcast, you can already now type in your questions. So with that, I'm happy to hand over to you, Richard.

Thank you so much, Sofia. Good morning everyone and warm welcome to this earnings call. Well, with no further ado, let's just dig into it. As you heard Sofia mention in her opening remarks, we are continuing to manage a rather volatile environment. We are now reporting for the sixth consecutive quarter, negative organic growth. This quarter we're talking about something minus 3%, but we maintain our margin resilience. On a rolling 12 month basis, the margin is holding up pretty well, also compared to 2023, as you can see on this chart. And the drivers behind this are the same that we have talked about throughout the year. We are executing on the strategic intent that we have laid out. We are driving a lot of price mix. We are driving our portfolio management activities and we are continuing our regionalization efforts to ensure that we establish strong and robust value change in those regions where we operate. And clearly in this quarter, we have also spent a lot of time and emphasis on the upcoming separation of our industrial business and automotive business. We're in an intense phase and we're working hard with all the planning and all the preparations for the work that is needed to make this kind of historical split of our business. Clearly, this means that we also take the opportunity to review the future setup for both our industrial business and our automotive business to ensure that we create a platform for profitable growth going forward with two highly competitive business units. But more of this will be shared in the fourth quarter at the capital markets day that we have talked about before. And today I'm pleased to announce kind of a hold the date. We will be in Stockholm on November 11th. We're going to share more details on the upcoming separation and the cost of the separation. But more interesting the value that we foresee that this will create for both entities. So I hope to see you all in Stockholm in November. But if you start by taking a look at our full year, sorry, that's the slide, the full year. You see, we are have a net sales of almost 100 billion Swedish krona. This is a negative organic growth of some 5%. But as I mentioned before, the operating margin is holding up pretty well. It's almost on par with the same number as we had in 2023, even though in 2023 we had positive organic growth. So the resilience, I think, is a proof point of on in these numbers. We also have a strong cash generation, almost just shy of 11 billion. And with all the activities that were ongoing and our belief that we are creating a strong foundation for the future, we have the confidence also to slightly increase or propose to slightly increase the dividend from 750 krona to 775. So that was what we bring to our shareholders at the AGM later this spring. Looking into the quarter, the fourth quarter in isolation, as I said a couple of times, the negative growth environment is maintained. The margin is holding up pretty well. This time we're reporting some adjusted operating margin just north of 11%. It's worth noticing, though, that we have had some significant effects, headwind of 0.9 percentage points that have negative impact on the margin in this quarter. But also true that in this quarter, it is the first quarter where we have not been able to fully mitigate the negative impact from fixed cost absorption driven by the lower volumes. And this is especially true in automotive, which I will come back to shortly. Looking into cash flow, as you can see, I think it's a robust cash flow of 3.3 billion in the quarter. And as you've talked about the net sales just shy of 25 billion, representing a 3% negative organic growth. But this is not evenly spread across our geographies, as you will see on this chart. If I start with Americas, we're back into growth. We see a strong positive growth, net sales growth in Americas. Clearly, we see more activity, higher activity levels in the region, which is rather promising. I like to stress, though, that we have some timing effects here. So some business that we may plan to see in Q1 slipped into Q4. But even if we even that out, we would have reported a positive number here. Turning to India and Southeast Asia. Here we also see high activity levels in a number of countries. India, Indonesia and Vietnam to be mentioned, the prime ones. We also see a lot of activities here in two-wheelers. We see strong industrial distribution growth and also heavy industries. Turning to China and Northeast Asia, a rather significant negative organic growth in the quarter. As we said now for a number of quarters in a row, we still have a low activity level in the wind industry. But here in China, also for industrial distribution, we have seen some de-stocking in the fourth quarter. That is also having a negative impact on our growth number in that region. But clearly, there are also some green sprouts in this area where we see extreme strong growth in the EV sector in China in particular. And finally, turning to Europe and EMEA, where we also report a rather significant negative organic growth. But it varies quite a lot between different parts of EMEA. In Northern Europe and in Eastern Europe, we do see a positive activity level where we see positive momentum in a number of different industrial verticals. While it's more flatish or stable or slow, pick the word you like, in the larger Western European economies such as France, Germany and Italy. Looking into different industrial segments, we have seen strong growth in aerospace in this segment. While we see very low activity levels in automotive in primarily EMEA. So it gives you a little bit of a flavor of how the growth has developed and the activity levels in the different regions where we operate. Then turning to our industrial automotive segments. Again, our industrial business is holding up well in a very volatile environment. We see a very strong growth in automotive segments, negative organic growth of some 3% in this quarter. While the operating margin is not far from what it was a Q4 last year. For the full year though, I think it's interesting to mention that our operating margin for our industrial business is actually somewhat higher than from for 2023. Despite that we're now into negative territory relative to growth. Moving then to automotive, which had had a tough quarter. As you can see here, a rather significant negative organic growth of some 4% and a rather weak adjusted operating margin of 2.6%. Here we have seen that in the quarter that many of our OEMs, especially in Europe, they really reduced their output from their manufacturing activities and prolonged the vacation period over the holidays. Which also had an impact here and made it rather difficult for automotive to fully compensate the impact from fixed cost absorption. In the quarter, we also seen that the product mix have shifted a little bit. We have sold more products that need more material and therefore material costs are also up a bit in the quarter. And finally, also logistics has cost a little bit extra in the quarter. On the good news though, when we look into the underlying business and the new business that we quote for, they are all very accretive to the long term operating margin target that we have set for automotive. So we are optimistic and we believe that what we said before is still valid, even though the fourth quarter was a problematic quarter. Leaving the numbers for a second and sharing some insights on some of the strategic initiatives that we are working on. And this quarter, I'd like to draw your attention to two things. Give you an update on what we have talked about for quite some time. Our efforts to drive a robust and sustainable supply chains in the different regions where we operate, i.e. what we call regionalization. And I'd also like to give you an update on how we continue to strengthen our value chain to support the ongoing electrification by building strong value chains in our ceramic bearings. But starting with the regionalization. Here you see an update on what we have achieved during 2024. And I do think we see some significant movements in the pace in our regionalization. This is something that we talked about throughout the entire 2024 that is high in our agenda. And I'm pleased to report that you can see that in the regionalization rates. In Asia, we are not far behind at 68 percent up five percentage points in a rather short period in one year. While in Mea, clearly we already have a very solid regionalization base. Here it's more about how do we drive efficiency and also how do we shift more production from Western Europe to Eastern Europe, which is also part of our agenda. And just to remind ourselves, why are we doing this? Well, there are a number of benefits that we truly believe we can gain from driving this agenda pretty rapidly. We do see increased flexibility in our value chains. We do see that it drives cost competitiveness for us. We do see that it creates more resilience in our value chains, which is clearly needed in the world that we live in, the volatile world that we live in. And it also provides higher customer satisfaction. And let's take a deep dive on this customer satisfaction. I'd like to share an example from China. And here you see the regionalization rate in the bottom of this chart and on the blue line indicates the development in our lead time to our customers. Clearly, you can see as we have ramped up regionalization, we have been able to significantly reduce lead time with some 25 percent in a few years time. And the key success factors are listed here on this slide as well. Clearly, we have invested in local production and sourcing capacity, which has played out well. But it's not just about the sourcing and the production. It's also our efforts to build local R&D and manufacturing efficiency and competencies. And by doing that, we have been able to leverage the total know-how and knowledge base of SKF that has also helped to accelerate that pace. So good momentum. And I hope this gives an indication that it also provides customer value to drive this regionalization for us. Shifting gear and turning into what we do to take advantage on the ongoing electrification trend. For us, we are the world's leader when it comes to ceramic bearings. And they provide a significant value in itself. Clearly, they have a natural isolation for electrical erosion, which has a high interest in many electrical applications. That provides high capability for higher speed or better capabilities for higher speed. And it's more resistant, wear resistant and have an extended life. So what have we done here is actually again, we are focused on the entire value chain, everything from ensuring that we have the raw material. We develop our manufacturing capabilities of rolling elements, both in-house and through partners. And we have accelerated our R&D capabilities and also our ability to test and prototype so we can be quick to market and short lead times to market. And when we talk about ceramic bearings, we normally talk about their application and how they fit into the EV space, which is true. And it's an important application for us and an important market for us. But it's not the only industrial vertical where this has a significant potential and provides significant customer value. You see here a number of other industrial verticals that are of a high interest, like high efficiency and heating and cooling, the A-Track being one prime example, aerospace being another. So clearly this is an interesting area for us and something that we invest in and we do see significant growth opportunities going forward. So with this, I end my part and I'd like to hand over to Karina. And I'm very pleased and grateful that you have stepped in to bridge this gap between Niklas and incoming Susanne. So more than welcome.

Thank you so much, Fike. Thank you and hello everyone. And I know you're not used to see me. I'm usually more behind the scenes as I'm globally responsible for the financial accounting reporting as well as the sustainability reporting for the SCF group. So my name is Karina Vandenberg and I'm here to take you through some of the financials. Let's start with the bridge. So you see that the bridge has a slightly updated format where you are able to more clearly follow both the sales development and the operating profit development in the quarter. So if we start with some comments on the sales, we see that sales is up 1% and this is driven by the FX effects, especially from last year where we had the devaluation of the Argentinian pesos, which is a cost sales to be lower last year. And this is then showing up as a positive 3.9 in this quarter and is compensated for the organic sales decline of 3%. If we then turn down to the operating profit, we are very encouraged to see that for the first time this year, we have the price mix was very positive and that actually offset the volume decline that we had in the quarter, giving a positive effect on the EBIT. On the other hand, as Rickard mentioned, we had some challenges when it comes to the cost development, partly driven by the low volumes that we had fixed cost absorption we could not account for. We also had some negative material mix. The price component in material is flatish or slightly positive, but the consumption of material was slightly higher and this was particularly true for the automotive business. And we also see some slightly higher logistic costs. If we then look at the FX component here, we see that this affected the margin quite a lot by 0.9 as the absolute number on EBIT was negative and this is mainly driven by the Turkish lira and the euro. The structural component in this bridge relates to the acquisition of the John Sample Group. This was not a full quarter that we had them with us and the operating profit also includes some transactional costs. What you don't see on this bridge is the item affecting comparability. I'd just like to comment on that, that they were 100 million higher than what we saw in Q3. And this is mainly related to the intense phase we are in when it comes to the separation of the automotive business. And we do expect that this will be slightly higher in the coming quarter as we accelerate that work. If we turn to cash flow, as you can see on the left side here, we had the very solid cash flow generation in the fourth quarter. Although slightly behind last year or half a million behind last year, but this was a record quarter for us. So we are quite pleased with this number. And if we then look on the right side where did this cash flow come from, we can see that the operating profit is actually higher than last year. And we have a good contribution from the networking capital that's partly driven by seasonality, but also with some diligent AR work. But we do see that we have further potential to reduce our inventories. If you would look further down into the cash flow statement on the investments during the quarter, this also now includes the acquisition of the John Sample Group for about 570 million SEK. If we then turn to the balance sheets, as we have reported for quite some time now, we have a solid balance sheet. We see a slight reduction in the net debt year over year, but also quarter over quarter. And the net debt to EBITDA is now below one, excluding the pensions and just slightly above including pensions. Talking about the return on capital employed, we do see a reduction. And this is driven by the tougher market conditions that we are in today, but also the higher investments we have had few quarters. And with that, let's turn to the future and the coming year. We have reviewed our guidance and we have also incorporated feedback we have received from some of you on this call. And given the nature of our business and the volatile markets we are in today, we have decided that we will not give a full year guidance any longer. And for the coming quarter, we will give a more qualitative rather than quantified guidance. So looking into the first quarter, we do expect that the organic sales is expected to weaken somewhat year over year. On the other hand, we expect the effects to turn positive. And based on the year end rates, this would be approximately 200 million SEK. On the capex side, we for the full year foresee some four and a half billion SEK in capex. And this is down from where we ended in the 2024 figures. And with that, Rickard, I hand back to you.

Thank you so much. And let me try to wrap up this presentation part of this call and then we head into Q&A. But to summarize then, I think the story continues. We are still navigating in a volatile world with negative organic growth rates. But our activities to offset that and maintain our margin resilience continues. And I do see that, you know, for the full year, that story holds true and also figures holds true also in this fourth quarter. And that journey will naturally continue as we move in to 2025. We will continue to execute on our strategic agendas that we have laid out. And we will continue to drive the important initiative to create two independent and competitive business units, one for industrial and one for automotive. And as we do that, we are looking over the structure, the organizational structure and the setup of both entities to ensure that we can create two strong entities, highly competitive and fit for purpose to drive profitable growth going forward. Also, if in a volatile market environment. As I mentioned, we look forward to share more details in November. And you're more than welcome to join us then at the Capital Markets Day in Stockholm. And with all of these activities and our closeness to our customers and our innovation and development together with our customers, I do feel that we are very well positioned to benefit from profitable growth once demand turns back into positive positive territory again. So this we end this formal part and Sophie time for Q&A. Yes. Will you help us? Yes. Facilitate.

I will try to do that. And as I said in the beginning, if you are want to ask a question, you press star and one. If you are joining via the telephone, if you are joining via the webcast, you can type in your questions. You find that up. It should be right above the slides. And I should also mention for those joining via the telephone, if you want to withdraw a question, you press star and two. And let's start with a question from the telephone line and it comes from Andre Kuchnit at UBS. And your line is open.

Yes, good morning. Thank you very much for taking my questions. I'll stick to two. I think that's the rule. I just wanted to think about the capital markets day on November 11th a bit more. And should we expect the separation process to be largely done by then? And do you think you'll be able to give some midterm targets for the new businesses, for the two separate businesses by then?

Richard, you want to comment on that? Sure,

I'm happy to. Thank you, Andrea. When it comes to how far we come with the separation, the intention right now and the plan that we have that the vast majority of the work to internally divide these two entities will be done by end of 2025. So there will still be activities afterwards, but the vast majority of the activities should be closed by end of 2025. So what you should expect, you should expect and what we plan for is to be able to clearly articulate, you know, the value creation plans that we see for the industrial business and also for the future automotive business. We will share our long term financial targets for businesses and we will also be more transparent on the cost that we have incurred to actually do this transaction. So that's what to expect. But as we said, the work will continue into 2026 as we already announced at the point of the announcement.

And Andrea, you mentioned a second question there.

Yes, that's helpful. Thank you. And I just wanted to check on this new development on the profit bridge in terms of cost inflation. You've explained that this was to an extent makes of business. How should we think about this for 2025? Is this kind of now the run rate or was that a particularly different mix in the quarter? So if you could just maybe give us a bit more color of what it was, what kind of products are these that are incurring this mix and driving such a cost impact?

Karinna, will you take this one?

I will do my best. I would say that, I mean, we have a vast majority of products and they have slightly different cost components as is natural. I would not say that there is anything specific standing out in this quarter, but I do not see that it will have any material impact in the coming quarter. But we do not comment on specific product mixes.

Just to clarify, you do not expect this mix to continue in the coming courses, or you do?

No. You

don't? OK. No. Great. Thank you very much. Thank you.

And we will continue with a question from the telephone line and it's from Daniela Costa at Goldman Sachs. Daniela, please go ahead.

Hi, good morning. I have two as well. The first one is just a follow up from these last points that extending it a bit into pricing and sort of the price versus cost, X the mix, which you were clear you don't expect to repeat. Do you expect that to turn negative? Maybe you could give some guidance on how you're thinking about that and pricing in particular for 25. I'll ask the second after.

Yeah. Karinna, do you want to talk about pricing here?

I think, Richard, you also mentioned it during your call that we work on pricing and mix continuously during the year. And there's something we have proven that we can push all through 2024 and we will continue to do so and drive pricing wherever possible in this environment.

Clearly, yes. So you should expect us to behave as you've seen us behave in the last year or 15 months or so.

OK. And then the second question sort of relates, I guess, to the overnight lots of news flow again on tariffs. You talked to your localization in America has a whole. Can you maybe split it between localization in the US versus Mexico in terms of those moves that you've done and sort of like how much are you importing into the US right now and from where? Thank you.

Yes, we don't disclose regionalization by country, but the I can say this, the vast majority of what we sell in in the US is also made in the US. But we do have imports. We do have imports, some from from Mexico, clearly with the investments we have done there, but also from other parts of the world. So if these tariffs will materialize, yes, they will have an impact. But this is something that happens occasionally. And we've been in the business for more than 100 years and operate globally. So we will find a way to also navigate through these headwinds. And we do have a number of levers that we are assessing how to deal if depending on what's placed out, anything from pricing through additional cost activities and potential or some additional movements in our footprint. So we'll see. But we do expect some volatility in this regard in the coming year.

Thank you. Thank you. We will continue with a question from the webcast. It's from John Kim at Deutsche Bank. And it's we have seen very different organic growth rates in Q4 by region. Given the trading to date for Q1, what do you see in the market? Do you expect these trends in growth continuing? And Richard, you talked about this on the call. Do you want to continue on this theme here?

Yes, sorry, my mind slipped a bit. Could you emphasize on the question? It's

that we had a very different organic growth regions or growth per regions. And do we expect these trends to continue here also in Q1? Got

it. Thank you. Thank you. Sorry for the confusion. Well, starting with Europe, I do believe that the activity levels in the Nordics and the Eastern Europe are not temporarily. I hope that those should be a signal that there are, you know, a positive movement in those regions. I'm not that confident that I dare to say that I see that that's going to kind of also start to bridge over to Germany, Italy and France in the near term. I don't see any signs of that. So I don't dare to go there. But it seems to be kind of robust in those parts of Europe, the activity levels. Turning to North America. Yes, we see now for some time that the activity levels are increasing. And I think in general, there are more activities after the presidential election. So that's something that we see no reason why it should not continue into 2025 as of now. Same thing if we move eastbound into India, Vietnam, Indonesia. Strong activity levels really also supported by heavy investment in infrastructure from governments and so forth. Clearly another area where we do believe that this is going to be maintained into 2025. China. It's difficult to read how that's going to go. We have seen a number of incentives initiated by the Chinese government to try to help boost the economic environment in the region or in China. As of today in our business, we don't really see any real impact from those incentives. Maybe there's a time lag there or we'll see. But it's more we don't really know what that will do. And if it's going to have a significant impact or not in 2025, time will tell. But otherwise, this is also the reason why we have the guidance as we have that we believe that we're going to maintain a rather weak general demand also in the beginning of 2025. And that's why we have this guidance as we put out there.

Thank you. Let's continue with a question from the telephone line. And it's from Andreas Koski at BNP Paribas. Andreas, please go ahead.

Thank you and good morning. So first question, could you please share with us an indication of what impact your portfolio pruning activities had on organic growth in 2024 and what we should expect from this in 2025?

Karinna, do you want to elaborate on this one?

Yeah, I mean, clearly it has had an effect as you can see and I think that's partly driving the price mix component. So yes, we have negative volume effect from the pruning, but we have the positive price mix, which is compensating for that. So I think that's a proofing point that we're doing the right thing and we will continue to drive that going forward.

So should we expect the same kind of headwind in 2025 or will it ease?

But maybe I can. When it comes to given that we are still and we do forecast a rather generally soft economic development or demand, clearly, you know, our ability to drive excessive price will be tougher. That's the case. But we are holding our price levels and we continue to push as Karinna mentioned, price levels selectively where we can. And when we come up with new products and new initiatives, clearly we have a conversation with our customers about the value that we provide and that is also should be reflected in the price. So it's an ongoing activity and we will continue. But, you know, these broad general price increases clearly is not the climate for right now. But when if we have new tariffs coming into play, maybe that's a different ballgame.

I was more thinking about the portfolio pruning when you decide to leave customers behind because they are not prepared to pay and you have a negative volume effect from that. And should we expect that volume headwind to be the same in 2025 as we've seen in 2024?

Andreas, we have done quite a lot of that portfolio pruning, as you referred to already in 2023 and 2024. So we will continue with that, but to a more limited extent. And then, of course, there are some contracts that we still need to honor that will show in the P&L also in 2025 before we can exit them.

No, you're right. And as Sophie is mentioning, we have done most of the heavy lifting in this has been done. But with that said, though, our portfolio will be a living organism. We will constantly and always manage our portfolio. And as we move forward, there will be some customers that may be more attractive and some that will be less attractive. And we need to manage. And that's the kind of the way of working and the normal modus operandi going forward. But this kind of one-offs where we had to do some sort of cleanup in the portfolio, most of that is done.

Understood. Thank you. And then just your comment about pre-buying in America. Do you want to give some indication of how big it was? Or if this means that we should expect negative organic growth in America again in the first quarter of 2025 when we won't have that pre-buying effect?

Yeah. Now, on that one, I reiterate what I said in my presentation part of this call that yes, we have had some timing effects in America. But also if we exclude those, we would have reported a positive organic growth in America's also for Q4. We don't go further than that. Thank

you very much.

Thank you. And we will continue with a question from Ben Heelen at Bank of America. Ben, please go ahead.

Yeah. Morning, guys. Thank you for the question. The first one I had was on industrial distribution. And if you could give us some color about what you're seeing across the different regions there, where are you in terms of the stocking on the industrial distribution side? And then in terms of the bridge, you've given some of the color on the kind of cost headwinds and the material headwinds that you've had. But were there any other costs in that bridge around underproduction or the factory efficiency, lower efficiencies of production that you talked about at Q3? If there's just any color around that, that would be very helpful. Thank you.

Let's start with your question there on industrial distribution. Enricke, please. Right.

It varies quite a bit across our different geographies. Starting in India and Southeast Asia, we see strong growth in our industrial distribution business. Same story goes also for America's as we touched on before. In EMEA, it's holding up better than the OEM business, but in general terms is also down. But relatively, the OEM business is holding up better and it drives some of the positive price mix that you heard Karina mentioned before as well. And then in China, in China is the region right now where we do see tangible de-stocking and that impacted us in Q4. And we probably have to live with that also in the beginning of 2025. But that's the only region where de-stocking is actually tangible at the moment.

And Karina, do you want to continue with the bridge question there?

The bridge question. I think I gave you quite some detail on that, but let's see if I can give you some more color to that one. As you say, I mean, particularly in automotive, it was a challenging quarter with customers having a lower factory up or closing longer over Christmas. And this had an impact on our cost absorption, as we mentioned. It's difficult to deal with that on a short term basis. However, we have our starting activities or have already started activities in getting that down. But it takes a little bit longer time to get the fixed cost down in our, particularly in our European factories. As I said, also logistics was slightly higher. And I could also mention that we had salary inflation, but this was offset by efficiency in our factory. So that did not have an effect on the in the cost component this month or this quarter, I should say. Yeah.

Thank you. Let's continue with a question from Tim Lee at Bartlett's. Tim, please go ahead.

Hi, thanks for taking my question. So I just like to follow up on that cost issue. I think, can you give us a bit of color about what's the impact on e-bids from the under absorption of the fixed cost in numbers that would be super helpful? And also the other question would be on the localization. I think as you have some progress in terms of the movement in the pollution fruit trees, do you have any specific targets in terms of what level of localization you would like to achieve in the Americas or in Asia in your midterm targets that would be helpful?

Should we start with the regionalization here, Richard? Sure. Carina, you're not off the hook with the bridge there. Continue with that.

All right. Yeah. On the regionalization and the targets, we haven't set any firm and hard targets. But with that said, though, I will give you some flavor. We're not aiming for 100 percent regionalization. That is not realistic for our type of business. There are certain products, categories or parts of our portfolio that makes no kind of commercial sense to spread globally. We need to condense and we need to centralize in order to drive synergies. So that's one reason. Another reason being also patents and also to secure some technology that we may not want to spread that globally as well. So for a number of reasons, you should not expect 100 percent. I think the old famous 80-20 rule applies. I think that's kind of what we're aiming for, to roughly have some 80 percent regionalization rates in Asia and America as long term targets.

And Carina, the bridge. Yeah. I'm sorry to disappoint you, but I will not give a number on that part of the bridge. Thank you. Thank you, Tim. Let's continue with a question from James Moore at Redburn.

Yes, good morning, everyone. Thank you for the time. I wonder if I could ask about China in two dimensions, really one on wind and one more generally. I get the sense that your wind business over the last few years has come down materially as a share of your Chinese revenue. But the wind market in terms of sort of megawatts, gigawatts is relatively stable. And I sense that that is a market where the Chinese have prioritized local players for bearings. I just wonder with the ongoing destocking that you're seeing. So I wonder if you can talk about wind and whether you think that that's going to be an ongoing drag basically in wind. And then turning it to the general side, do you think that the stocking is a market phenomenon or are we starting to see any prioritization of local Chinese bearings in the general industrial channels as well? Is that is that a new topic? Is that something that could worsen as we go forward from here?

Richard,

yes, starting with wind. Yes, I think it's fair to say what you said there that we see a trend that there is a priority for more local producers in the wind business. And us global players ourselves, Timken and Scheffler's, I think we all have reported negative development in terms of growth for wind in China. So and quite honestly, short term, I don't think that it's going to change. But clearly, wind is also in high technology industry, requires intensive R&D and innovation. And when it comes to future releases or future solutions and applications, we are all working with Chinese OEMs and continuing that pace. So where this will lead long term, I don't know. But here now, I think we don't foresee that this is going to shift. But it doesn't mean that we have abandoned our activity levels to the full extent related to wind. And we continue to invest in R&D and innovation in that space, also for China. When it comes to industrial distribution, no, I do not see that this is a reflection of more kind of local for local activities. I truly believe rather that we saw that a number of industrial distributors in China, they are small and medium sized enterprises. And during the first half and also the beginning of the second half of 2024, I think they still had rather high confidence in the market development. And they dared to kind of stock up. Now, I think they have had more concerns and a bit more skeptical towards how the Chinese economy is evolving. And therefore, I think they have decided to start to take down their stock levels a bit to make sure that they don't end up in a difficult situation. Again, as I mentioned, these are small and medium sized enterprises. And again, if the Chinese government and those incentives can bring forward a more confidence among consumers and small and medium sized enterprises in China, if that sentiment changes, then I do think that we're going to see that this is going to rebound pretty quickly. So it's not derived from a shift between shifting us as a supplier.

No. Thank you very much, Richard.

Thank you, James. Let's continue with a question from Johan Schöberg at Kepler Chevrolet.

Good morning. Thank you. I had a question on your outlook for Q1. I'm getting a lot of questions on that from clients and better hear from the source rather than my interpretation here. Looking at Q1, how do you see the industrial business performing organic growth wise compared with automotive? If you could give some sort of split on those two businesses, it would be fantastic.

So, Karina, do you want to enlighten? I mean,

we have the guidance that we have. We believe that we will have a weekend market. We don't give specifics on the segments we have. Sorry, Johan.

No, no problem. And then, Richard, your comments also on the automotive margins here. I mean, the 5%, I understand it's not a fully 25 target, obviously, but I guess Q2 at least should be sort of in that range or at least very close to it. If that's still sort of your main scenario, could you talk about what this sort of from here going forward from these levels until Q2, what are the main drivers for that? What did you expect? Yeah, please go ahead.

Right. Johan, I'm a bit disappointed, as you know, we don't guide on margins. So I'm not going to do that today either. Full year 2024, our automotive business came in just shy of 5% operating margin. And, you know, we have higher ambitions than that. But also, as I mentioned, if we look into the new business that we quote for and that we win, it's very accretive to the long term target. So we're building a stronger portfolio. And what you should expect, and the key drivers are actually the same as we talked about now for quite some time. We are putting a lot of emphasis on the personal vehicle in the EV space. That's really, you know, where we put our main emphasis and efforts, where we truly have significant value, both on the wheel hub side and in the powertrain. And we do sense that we are a market leader in that space. We also focus heavily on commercial vehicles. Commercial vehicles at the moment have had a rather weak development in terms of sales. Listening into some of the OEMs and as they disclose their order books, it seems that these things will pick up over time. And if that happens, that would be positive from our point of view as well. But that's another important segment for us. And thirdly, we continue to develop and try and grow our aftermarket business, which is definitely less cyclical and also provides an interesting boost to our profits there.

Great. A final question, if I may. Looking at the EU cost here, near-term, should we expect them to be around the Q4 level, given that you have to take out costs in order to offset the inflation? Is that how we should think about it? And if you could give some detail about full year 25 EU items, that would be fantastic.

I'm sorry, it was items affecting comparability, you wanted to know, Johan? Exactly. Yeah, okay. I did not catch you there. As we said, the majority of the cost in the fourth quarter was related to the regionalization and shifting our production and reducing our fixed cost. And part of it was the automotive separation, which was around 100 million in the fourth quarter. And we do expect that that will increase the coming quarter as IT and advisory costs will go up now when we accelerate that work. I will not give you more details than that today. And as you said, in November, we will come back with more.

That's perfect. Thank you. And

then you already answered a question here from Seb Kuhn at RBC. Thank you, Karinna, for that. And we will continue with that question from the webcast here. It's from John Kim at Deutsche, also talking about the automotive separation. And if we can provide an update of the functional separation and the manufacturing assets, how those will be split? Rickard, do you want to share your view there?

Right. We are in a very intense phase. We have a dedicated organization now focusing on all the thousands of activities that will be required to separate these two entities. And we want to make sure that we're going to point towards the capital market today in November, where we can bring everything in a holistic view rather than drop feed you throughout the journey. Because it's for us as important as we can at that stage, we will be able to tell both the value creation part and the operational part and the cost to get there. And we want to do that holistically. So no, you should not expect us to drop feed you throughout the year. We give an update every quarter on the progress clearly. But, you know, the big picture will be served in November.

And let's continue with the final question then. And it will be from Anders Roslund at Pareto. Anders, please go ahead.

Yes, thank you. Sorry for asking the same question about the outlook. There are some moving for the first quarter. There are some moving parts here. We have the extra buying in the US, but you have the stock in China and you have the Christmas effect maybe hitting Europe more. Could you give some light on what somewhat lower demand means? We don't know your new structure of outlook here. The previous one you could say it was between -single-digit growth. How should we interpret those moving parts and your outlook?

So, Rikka, do you want to start with the moving parts here?

Well, I don't know what to answer on the moving parts. I think we have disclosed what we can disclose. And when we look into our crystal ball and what we know and the information that we sit on, the guidance that we give is our best estimate on how we see that our net sales will evolve in Q1. But then, you know, how to interpret it? Maybe, Sofia, you want to take that one?

That's a question for me then, Anders. So, of course, we want to share our view on how the market is developing. But as you know, it's a fairly dynamic environment. And given the nature of our business, we have decided, as Carina already said, to provide a more qualitative comment rather than quantifying as previously. So I'm going to disappoint you. I will not share with you exactly what we can somewhat will translate into figures. Any more questions from you, Anders? No, that was it. Thank you, Anders. That was also the final question. And of course, for those that had not the opportunity to call in now, you can always call the IR team afterwards. So with that, I leave the word to you, Richard. Thank

you. Thank you, Sofia. And first and foremost, thank you to all of you. Thank you for spending an hour with us this morning and take part of our story. And I hope that you take away that the journey continues. We are navigating in a volatile world. And in that world, we have been able to provide resilience in our business, in our earnings. And we continue on our strategic initiatives, driving our business forward to ensure that we will be well positioned to drive profitable growth once demand turns positive again. And so we look forward to see you in a quarter. And as I mentioned in the beginning, I hope that you now pencil in November 11th in your diaries and that you will join us then in Stockholm. So with that, I thank you so much and I wish you a good day.