Sweco AB

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the SWECO Q2 2023 IR report. At this time all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session you'll need to press star 1 and 1 on your telephone and you'll then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question please press star 1 and 1 again. Alternatively you may submit your questions via the webcast. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I'd now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Marcella Silvander, CCO. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to this presentation of SECO's Q2 report. As you heard, my name is Marcella Silvander, and I'm the Chief Communication Officer here at SECO. SECO's President and CEO, Åsa Bergman, and CFO, Olof Stornakert, will take us to the results of the second quarter. And after that, we will, of course, open up for questions. Sveko, go ahead.

Welcome, everyone, to Sveko's Q2 presentation. Before we move into the quarter, I would like to give you a short recap of Sveko. Sveko is today Europe's leading architecture and engineering consultancy with operations in eight geographical business areas across 15 markets in Europe. We are a well-diversified business operating across three different segments with a good balance of private and public clients. The foundation for Sweco's long-term success is our mix of competencies spread across 21,000 experts, our focus on organic and acquired growth, as well as our efficient and decentralized Sweco model. With a strong legacy, we continue to build Sweco's success Our solid financial position keeps proving itself essential, value creating acquisitions as well as dividend growth. The second quarter was another good quarter for Sweco with a strong performance across the group. We continue to deliver a strong combination of organic and acquired growth with the net sales increasing to 7.2 billion SEK in the quarter. EBITDA increased to 564 million SEK. Adjusted for the calendar effect, the result improved by 29% compared to Q2 last year. The result is driven by a positive momentum in pricing, a solid FTE growth, and positive contribution from recent acquisitions. especially from BK Architects and Engineers, and Olof will provide you with some more information on this later in this presentation. Moving over to the operational highlights in the quarter. Overall, the demand for Seco services remain good, and we continue to see good growth opportunities. One key to our organic growth is our positive momentum in recruitment. And over the past couple of quarters, we have established a solid level of FTE growth and we are also improving employee retention. The performance in Q2 was generally strong across our business areas. Seven out of eight business areas reported both organic growth and EBITDA improvements in the quarter. And I would like to especially highlight the strong performance in Belgium and Denmark that is driven by a strong positioning in attractive growth segments And we are also seeing good growth in Norway, Finland, while Germany and Central Europe continues to take steps in the right direction with good growth in the fortress. We made four new acquisitions, welcoming around 200 new experts to Sveko Group. With good demand and solid inflow of new orders, we also continue to strengthen our order book and won several new exciting projects. I will come back to this later in this presentation. Let us now look at the market situation. The market situation is overall unchanged compared to previous quarters. The underlying demand for services is good, but the market uncertainties related to the macroeconomic development remains. This means that we need to continue to stay agile in the market. The green transition continues to be a core driver for Sweco, and a theme that cuts across most of our business areas and projects. This is notable in the water, energy, industry, and transport infrastructure segments. The segment building and urban areas remained a bit mixed. We see stable demand in public buildings, but a continued weakened demand for services in residential and commercial real estate, driven by the macroeconomic situation. Overall, we continue to see good growth opportunities And we also see that our diversified offering and business models is a strength in this mixed market. And with that, I will hand over to Olof to walk you through the numbers. Please, Olof.