Sweco AB

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the SWECO Q2 2024 Financial Report webcast. 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 will need to press star 1 1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star one, one again. Alternatively, you may submit your question via the webcast. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Marcela Silvander, CCO. Please go ahead.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to this presentation of Veco's Q2 report. Sveko's President and CEO Åsa Bergman and CFO Olof Stolnake are with us today to take us through the results of this second quarter.

Welcome everyone to Sveko's Q2 presentation and before we present the second quarter of 2024 let me give you a quick overview of Sveko. Sveco is 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 Sveco's long-term success is our mix of competencies spread across 22,000 experts. our focus on organic and acquired growth as well as our efficient and decentralized operational model. The strong financial track record and financial position, we are focused on continuing our growth journey and build on Sweco's success. This introduction, let's move over to the Q2 highlights. Q2 was another good quarter for Sweco. continued the positive momentum from Q1 and delivered a quarter of solid growth and improved margins. Net sales increased by 11% and the organic growth amounted to 6%. EBITDA improved by 12%, adjusted for the positive calendar effect in the quarter. As a part of our efficiency measures, restructuring costs of 58 million are also included in the results. The positive development was mainly driven by higher average fees, higher billing ratio, and a continued FTE growth. I am very pleased that the margin improvement increased to 9.8%. This summary let us dive into more details. As mentioned, we continue to build on the momentum from the first quarter with a positive operational trend. Six of eight of our business areas reported organic growth and EBITDA improvements in the quarter, and we continue to keep a good pace in recruitment. I would also like to highlight that seven out of eight business areas achieved margin improvements in the quarter. Over the past few quarters, we have put increased emphasis on our efficiency and billing ratio, and I'm pleased that we are now seeing a higher billing ratio in the second quarter. Let me give you an update on our work to improve our efficiency. Efficiency improvements are key to improve our margins, and over the past quarter we have implemented a series of measures. This includes redundancies mainly in the UK, but also in Sweden and Finland. We have also initiated a group-wide organizational review to streamline the organization. We are now pleased to see that these measures are starting to have effect. Repositioning in the UK is progressing according to plan and the business area reported a positive result in the quarter. We are also seeing an uplift in our profitability across most business areas and improvements in our billing ratio. This will remain a key priority going forward, but we are pleased to see that we are taking steps in the right direction. Looking then at the overall market situation, it is generally in line with previous quarters. The overall demand for Sweco services remained good, especially related to the green transition. In the water, energy and industry segment, we see continued strong demand related to the transition in the energy and industry segments. and a strong demand in water. We see a weak demand in traditional industry services. In the transport infrastructure segment, we see good demand supported by infrastructure investments and transition to more sustainable transportation. And in the building and urban area segments, we see stable demand in public buildings and a continued weak demand in residential and commercial real estate with variation across markets and sub-segments. With that, I will hand over to Olof to walk you through the numbers. Please, Olof.