Studsvik AB (publ)

Good morning and welcome to the Q1 Earnings Call from StudFisk Group. I'm Carl Thedin, President and CEO, and with me I have Peter Teske, CFO, who will join me in the presentation a bit later. So let's start with a recap on who we are. These are the sales numbers from 2024. And you can also see that we are a truly global company with setups almost all over the world or in the East and in the US and obviously in Europe. We have customers in Japan, large activities in Korea, obviously in the European Nordics, Germany, France, UK, Switzerland. And then obviously a big activity in all our business areas in the US and in Canada. So a truly global company that is serving an expanding nuclear market. then let's go into the the q1 results and we are very proud today of presenting a strong earnings trend and a very positive cash flow we are uh for the third quarter in a row growing uh reaching 227 million sec in in earnings for for this quarter but maybe more importantly we are also growing our profits significantly up to 19.5 or eight compared to 5.8% the same period last year. It's always good to compare with the same period last year, but also if you compare it to the previous quarters that we're coming from in the end of 2024, this is a significant change in trajectory for our business and we're very proud of that. All three business areas are growing and the most solid growth are coming from our scan power where we deliver core optimization software programs throughout the world, including services and consulting service with that. We also have a very strong positive cash flow this quarter of 39.6 million. This is the result of a strong invoicing in Q4 and Q1, but also that we have The programs we run in Q4 of increased cost control and further development of the organization has resulted in that we are much more efficient organizations already in the first quarter of 2025. If we then look into the key achievements in quarter one of 2025. As I said, we have improved operating margins and we have a solid growth in also this quarter. Cash flow is for me personally very important. I think that's a good sign that you run an efficient operation from order intake to delivery of your services and products. One business area that did not deliver according to our expectations in Q3 and Q4 of 2024 was the business area of fuel materials and now merged with waste management technology. That has significantly changed in Q1 and we're developing a positive result and a strong order walk and a much more efficient organization resulting in strong profitability in that very important business area for us. We have in the quarter also continued our M&A journey by acquiring Black Star Tech product line from the utility Constellation Energy in the US. That company offers products and solutions for safety systems in nuclear power plants and we have already taken our first orders there. We have also signed a very important agreement with European Spallation Source, ERIK, ESS, in short, and that has a big research center for neutron generation in the southern part of Sweden. And we have received an order for the planning of the management of radioactive waste that will come out of that big project. enterprise and that will be built eventually at the studsvik site so a very interesting and active quarter just going into a little bit more on the business areas and just to remind everybody that we now are running this company on the three business areas decommissioning radiation protection services is how we help utilities to dismantle and take down parts or the full nuclear power plants. Studsvik Scan Power is where we deliver our software for fuel optimization and fuel materials and waste technology is now merged. It was used to be fuel materials and then a separate one from waste technology. They have synergies and we have merged the two entities into one. let me start them with the business area of decommissioning and radiation protection services it offers an entire chain from planning and project management to radio logical assessments and clearance of material waste documentation this is much more advanced than you will see at the first glance it's a highly educated people that are helping our customers to do this in a safe way to in an efficient and safe way To expand our offering here, we acquired in August of last year a company called Extremborossog or EBS in short. And that company offers very advanced sewing equipment and services, for example, taking down reactor tanks. And we have now integrated that into this business area and we expect increased business synergies during 2025 as we now are integrating offers of this into all our offers for our base services here. However, this business area has had some challenges in this quarter with cost increases through the collective bargaining agreements in mainly Germany, which we have not been able to meet with price increases to the customers. It's still a very active market with a lot of opportunities, but it's a price sensitive market at this time. So we are delivering growth here as you can see up to 86.3 million but operating profit is down compared to last year and the profits are obviously not to our expectations. We do see that this business will develop more positively going forward based on that this quarter as you can see also last year was it's a challenging quarter because of the late start coming up to full speed after holidays both for our employees but also for the customers that we are working closely with when doing these services If we then move on to Studsvik Scandapower, who is a world leader in the development and support of software for reactor analysis and enables our customers to run multiple fuel vendors, giving them a much better cost profile of their very expensive fuel purchases. 50% of the light water reactors in the world are actually using this software, so we are a dominant player in this. Here we also integrated our Black Star tech new product line and we have our first sales under our ownership of products into utilities in the US. And we have also continued to win orders for our software in this case Simulate 5 and the S5K into first the Nordic region which this is basically a simulation of the fuel rods. and also we are continuing to expand also into the new developments of smr and smr vendors that are emerging in this case in the us but we are very active in that area of the emerging area of the market And finally, Fuel, Materials and Waste Technology. We do services here based very much from the site south of Stockholm in Studsvik, where we have our hot cells, fuel qualification analysis of material that has been irradiated in nuclear power plants for a long time. This is an area that has increased interest from customers based on the need to extend the lifetime of nuclear power plants. We have also seen an increasing interest for our waste management consultancy services and the Indram technology, which is emphasized by the ESS order that I will soon explain. We see a very slight increase in sales here, but as you can see, we are back to strong operating profits of 14.6%, which is significantly up from the bad quarters we're coming from in the second half of 2024. So if I then go to the next slide, explain a little bit why we think the order from the European Spallation Source, ERIC, or in short ESS, is very important for us. So here we are using our site, which is a very, very good asset where we have all the permits to run radioactive materials testing and handling. And the order here is about the planning and data design and licensing of a new facility that includes both storage for waste mid-term and then also a new Indram facility. And this is actually the first in its kind of the Indram order. And for us, that's a very good proof that our Indram is really offering huge customer value in reduction of waste that we can do in that and also based on all the testing that has been done in our demo facility this will now run for up to around about two years and then the next phase is when we hope and will work with ess to get the final order to actually construct and build these facilities and run them for a very very long time to support that research center in southern part of sweden So with that, I hand over to CFO Peter Teske. Please, Peter.

Thank you so much, Carl. And I will take you through the numbers for Q1. And as Carl mentioned, we are very pleased that when we look at the net sales, which has increased by 8.2% compared to Q1 last year. and also all three business areas are showing positive variations compared to last year and especially it's stutzvick scam power who has increased almost 32 percent and that's mainly due to the software sales to europe and us but all also the acquisition of blackstar tech contribute also to the increase also worth mentioning here is that the scam power has variation the biggest big variation in the sales and that will also develop during the year. If we look at a role in 12 months, we see that the net sales has increased by 7.6% and that's higher than our financial target of 6%. So that's also we are satisfied with. We see the positive effect from the acquisition of both EBS and Blackstar Tech. The contribution of those two acquisitions in the quarter is 6 million SEK. And then EBS is for a full quarter and Blackstar Tech is only for two months. Because the acquisition was the 1st of February 2025. So if we exclude acquisition, we have an underlying organic growth in the company. If you then move on to the operating profit during the quarter, you see here an overview over our operating profit each quarter. And also we have historical lower results during Q1 and Q2. and as you see in q1 this year we deliver really strong results and also if you compare the result to law q1 last year we have a property sales of 2.3 million last year and if we go into the numbers of this quarter we see that the exchange rates have a positive impact of our earnings thanks to a re-measurement of our intra-group items and that's basically around five million sec we see that in the increased margin that are 8.6 percent this quarter is thanks to a positive impact of our improved cost control that we have in the group and also an effect of the efficiency program that we launched during q4 2024 and of course also the highest sales that we have is affecting the ebit the operating profit If we then look in our respective business areas, as Carl mentioned, we now have three because of the merge of the waste management technology and fuel and material technology. If we first look at the commissioning and radiation protection services, we see that the EBS, the acquisition of that one, are affecting the the net sales in a positive way. And also, as Carl mentioned, we see a lower profit compared to last year. And that's mainly because of those changes in salaries that in the short run, not fully can be compensated by the customers. And therefore, there is in the short run a negative impact on the margins. If you then go to the new business area, fuels, materials and waste technology, we have a strong increase here if you compare it to Q4 2024, because we have still the momentum in the production and we see positive effects from the cost cutting program that we implemented. So we have a good positive contribution to the profit during the quarter. And also the Stuttgart Scampower business area that we have the effects of the acquisition of Blackstar Tech. And also the good sales to our customers in Europe and US. And here you have the positive effects effect of 5.1 million in this business area. If you then go further to the next slide to look at the cash flow, we see also this real strong cash from quarter for us at Statsvik Group when we deliver almost 40 million in positive free cash flow. And that's because we have collected the payments from the high invoicing we had during December last year. But at the same time, we have still higher accounts receivable now than we had in Q1 2024. And also an effect on the cash flow is that we have an improved investment controls in the group. so the investments which are 4.9 million are basically replacements investments in the business area fuel materials and waste management technology so to summarize the cash flow is that we have a strong quarter behind us so our cash and cash equivalent equivalents and our uses of the overdraft facility is lower now than the fiscal year end 2024. And finally, if you look at our three financial targets that we have, we have the growth, operating margin and the equity to asset ratio. And as I mentioned before, our growth is green, so we are fulfilling that, but we still have And we have positive trend on the operating margin and also on the equity to asset ratio. Then I will hand it over to you Carl.

Thanks Peter for that. I will now go in a little bit to explain a little bit what we see about the market and what has been in the press recently about this market. These are two slides that I put together from a presentation that the big utility in the Nordics Fortum gave a presentation to the market a couple of weeks back. And it basically, to very good way, explains the business we are in. If you see in the top right, left hand corner, you see the lifetime extension of the current fleet, which is, you know, in Sweden, the plans are at least to keep them up to 2060, maybe 2070. for the six remaining plants that we have. That is the same trend we see all over the world. There is a lot of activity to extend lifetime. And what happens then is that you need more testing. What is the situation of material? new fuel types, higher efficiency, modernization, digitalization, safety systems, and also an increasing demand on handling waste. So we see a lot of activity in our business that are driven by the lifetime extension. And we are going to continue to see that. And I think to some extent that has been The boost that we see in the bottom right hand corner of new nuclear, they work a little bit in parallel here that obviously becomes even more important to invest. as we also see that the new nuclear is coming but it will take quite a long time before we have a significant amount of new reactors built but the colors here indicates that for example in Sweden there is active planning but site or vendor discussions have started or been done in the dark and green they are more further down the line and will soon start to design new reactors the black colors here we have new reactors under design so a lot of activity this is not this is only Europe as an example obviously we see the same trend in the US a lot of new plants building built also throughout Asia a lot of power plant being opened up again for example in Japan after the Fukushima accident or or a tsunami in 2020 2011. so uh a glimpse from a customer which we really support our business um uh our business that we are in if we then continue it on the market we can see that SMRs is coming, small modular reactors. They are smaller. They will be able to be built in a more efficient way. And we are active now to make sure that our technology and our services are in there. And we already have contracts in both fuels materials and in the scan power business area for some of the SMR vendors. As I said a lot of countries moving to nuclear and not a very big increase of international of electricity demand in the world but that will change as we can see for example driven by data centers or the big change to electrification of big process industry and so on that we also see here in the Nordics. So the trend now is that there will be an increase of global nuclear capacity by 2.5x obviously that is to a large part driven by China but also we see a big increase in other parts of the world. So how are we meeting this demand? One of the things that we're doing is that we are investing in innovation and that can help us to be an even bigger part of this new market. We have talked about the Indram facility or Indram technology. You can see here a picture from our demo center in Studsvik. which is now we're running a lot of demos and testing for our customers, including for the customer we just won ESS. We have done that, but we have a lot of other customers in this on a regular basis. We are developing new software innovation for fuel optimizations, including adopting the software we have for the SMR and AMR markets. and we have acquired a new company in this quarter Blackstar Tech that will help with modernizing existing fleet where we are basically helping our customers to be much and use digital solutions to reduce the maintenance and operation cost of the operational fleet and if we summarize a little bit what we are doing you can see the new build operating plants decommissioning plants that are not going to be in use anymore and other services in the radioactive space and We have here written down some of the examples of what we do for the different areas here. So for example, for new build, there is both fuel materials testing. There is a lot of waste planning that you need to do when you send in your application. So we are also going to be very much part of that. And a lot of the fuel planning and showing how you're going to run them is also part of what we're doing for those. In the operating plans, basically all our business areas are very, very active. And we're adding now, as I said, the Black Star Tech, for example, as one. And decommissioning is also part of a very important lifecycle because some of these will come to a situation where they need to be decommissioned. And that is a very lengthy and complex process where we can support our customers. and we also enter into new areas like isotope production that we have highlighted before that we do for the healthcare sector and we see an increasing demand the discussions also in this part of our business So some final comments from me. First of all, just highlighting how we're going to run the company going forward in the three business areas, as I discussed, but also on the four main focus areas to reach our financial targets for sales and profitability. One thing, the number one, is enhance our commercial management. This company has been run very separately, the business areas, and we're now bringing together a more efficient commercial management, including increased focus on marketing, but also an increased focus on our key customers. Of course, we have a lot of large customers that we haven't addressed effectively before. There is a lot of organic growth opportunities in all our business areas that we will continue to develop and invest in because some of these are also requiring investments. We have started to execute on our M&A strategy and will continue to do so. And obviously the fight for talent in our industry is increasing to be really working on our employee branding and being a really strong employer is extremely important throughout the world. So summarizing the quarter, very strong profit trend with good growth, increasing margins and strong cash flow. We have some important customer wins in this quarter. The one we have announced is ESS, but there are many others. We continue to deliver on our M&A strategy. We have changed the way we operate the company and we have seen effects of that already in this quarter. And we see continued strong market for nuclear power, both to support existing plants and also building new ones. And with that, I can turn back to the operator for questions.

If you wish to ask a question, please dial pound key five on your telephone keypad to enter the queue. If you wish to withdraw your question, please dial pound key six on your telephone keypad. The next question comes from Stefan Knudsen from ABG. Please go ahead.

Morning, Carl and Peter. Congratulations on a solid report. I have a couple of questions from my side. Firstly, on scan power, was there any significant license deals in the quarter, or was it mainly operational performance driven by better underlying demand that drove the results?

I think ScanPower was, the results were driven by a strong backlog from Q4. We have wins as we indicated in the Nordics and also for the SMR sector in the US. They are not as large as the license deals we took in Q4. And we will see fluctuations of our revenues from ScanPower as we saw in 2024. But the underlying demand is strong, but there will be seasonal variations throughout the year.

And the delivery for Gardel, for example, how long do you expect them to continue here? Because that was the driver in Q4, and it seems like it was part of the driver here as well.

Yeah, the Gardell software is obviously one important module that we are selling and license sales of that will definitely continue throughout the year. But I would emphasize that the order intake and the revenue associated with that is fluctuating over the quarter. As you saw last year, we had a very strong Q4 and less strong other quarters in 2024. definitely we still see demand for all our software modules but we have some new ones that is specifically addressing the SMR market for example that we're also driving.

Okay perfect. Going on to the fuel material and waste technology. Quite a significant improvement from where you were at the end of last year. Is there more to come from your cost initiatives or do you deem that you're fully back to where you were before? before the dip in profitability?

The dip in profitability had multiple causes. One of them was too high cost, but there was also other things that efficiency in the organization. I think we have that behind us. We are not going to do any significant cost cutting at this time, but there are always efficiency tweaks that you can do to your organization and so on. We have put a lot of new things in place in terms of how we run our investments, how we run our business how we invoice how we collect money so I think there's a lot of efficiency gains that we will continue to see in that business area.

Thank you and then lastly on the German business how do you assess the current situation as you mentioned price pressure and wage inflation is that something that we should think of as a structural problem or something that you can address later in the year?

We see that we will come up in profitability compared to week Q1 but this is a tough market that is also in a bit of a midpoint at this time. We don't know exactly where it will go and some of the small companies may disappear and obviously we are working on a very high quality services offerings and hope that we can get even better paid for that over the time but it's going to improve but it's till at this time a challenging market.

Thank you very much and then also a financial question regarding the working capital release in the quarter is that something that you deem to be at the sustainable level or something that you expect to continue to be volatile throughout the year?

we will yeah the working capital for us is volatile but we think now that we will have a stable in the next coming quarter okay thank you very much for the clarification that was all from me have a great day thanks as a reminder if you wish to ask a question please dial pound key 5 on your telephone keypad

There are no more phone questions at this time. So I hand the conference back to the speakers for any written questions and closing comments.

I think we thank the audience for listening. Once again, we are proud to deliver a strong Q1. Look forward to continue to deliver the business in a strong market. And we will talk again in July timeframe. Thank you very much.