Teqnion AB (publ)

Hi everyone, welcome to Technion 2025 Q1 Q&A. Today we have kept the tradition of issuing our quarterly report on the same day as our AGM, which is the reason why we do this Q&A a little bit later in the day. We will, as always, alternate between the questions that we have received through our Q&A email and ones that you can ask us live. Please use the Q&A function in the Teams window, which you'll see at the top. Before we jump into the Q&A session, I would like to hand it over to you, Johan, to say a few words about the quarter.

Hello everyone and welcome to this Q&A. Today we are broadcasting from TM Partners in Stockholm. Our legal advisors here will be later today going to hold our AGM. The quarter has been rather hectic with a lot of acquisitions for us. We have had a pace where we acquired six new companies and we are very happy to welcome our new colleagues into the group. This is a pace that you shouldn't be accustomed to. Please don't extrapolate this speed going forward. We have had a rather big backlog of acquisitions lined up for this first quarter from the previous years, talking to a lot of entrepreneurs and building relationships as we always do. We think that the pace that we communicated before with a handful of acquisitions per year is something that we like and are comfortable with. And over a period of time, we believe that's the right pace for Technion. The result in Q1 has been boosted quite a bit from FX effects. The Swedish Corona has been strengthened due to the very turbulent global situation that we have at the moment. And since we are operating more on an international level these days, these things tend to be bigger than they used to be. And it's also something that probably going to stay big or bigger in the future as we grow and move more international. We have operated quite hard when it comes to improvement projects out in our subsidiaries with struggling companies within the group and happily we start to see some effects in those improvement projects. So the results, some margins and the cash flow on specific companies have been improved and especially when it comes to the sequential comparison with a very poor Q4, we're actually doing a little bit better, which is I don't know if I can say it feels good. It's still a lot of frustration with these things. They take a lot of time. It's a very slow pace to fix things that needs to be fixed, but we're on it and we're working really hard to do this. And we are confident that we have the ability and skill set to do it. But once again, it's a slow process. I think that With that, we can maybe move into the Q&A, which is the main reason why we're here.

Yeah. We'll be trying to be quick on some of the questions just in order to get to the rest of them as possible, and then we might deep dive a little bit more in some of them. So the first live question we have comes from Niklas Dreiholt, who's wondering, would Tecna ever consider investing in the public market if extraordinary opportunities arose? like a 2008 type crash for example.

You're the investor guy. I think that we never say never to anything, but we're not thinking in those terms and we have never been interested in doing that because we have had so much opportunity on the unlisted market and we still have the valuation there that is far superior to the listed market.

Yeah. maybe do something that is more extraordinary, but the bar will be very high compared to what we think that we, compared to what we're doing right now. We got an email from Georgie through email saying, congratulations with the stream of acquisitions with the five companies from 2025. This was before the sixth acquisition. You are adding 10.7% of sales. Taking into account the work Yuan is doing in the week subsidiaries, what ambition do you have for the year regarding organic and inorganic growth and what margin recovery could be expected?

Maybe just to to underline that it's not only me working with improvement projects. We're a good team of people doing that, and also the people within the subsidiaries themselves are doing a tremendous job to improving our figures. When it comes to how we see, on a theoretical level, how we should grow going forward, we have said before, I think, and at least we thought about it, maybe 10% of the growth will be from acquisitions and like single digit percentages in organic growth over time in whatever that is, a normal market. So that would give us the 15% of annual growth that we are paying for.

Yeah. And maybe just to clarify another thing is that When we report the sales numbers for the companies that we acquire, we always do it as an average of the last three years. So when you look at those numbers, that doesn't mean that it's the pro forma number or it's the last year revenue number. It's the average of the last three years. Most likely, the companies we're acquiring are also growing, which means that the historical numbers are a little bit lower than current ones. just as a FYI. We've got a question here in the live chat. is wondering, the acquisitions made in 2025 appear to have a beta margin of over 20%. Are there any one ops driving that figure, or is the 20% margin sustainable? I think the quick answer is that yes, we do believe that they are sustainable without promising anything, of course. If you look at, I believe, our Q3 report, we do show what the margin is for our international companies compared to the Swedish companies. And the positive thing on that slide is that the international companies are actually having EBIT margins north of 20%, The bad news is that the Swedish ones have much lower margins, but we are constantly looking at companies that are better than our average, which means higher margins on a sustainable level. It's a two-part question from Prakal. The second part is basically excluding the acquisitions, the same store Evita margin is approximately 7%, which is lower than our stated targets. Why is that? Was it entirely due to the minus 3% organic growth?

I think

I mean, declining growth or declining revenue is of course not helping this. The main problem or main challenge that we have in the companies that are not at the level we want is that they are really not performing at where we want them to. We have, as we pointed out, a few companies, especially in Sweden, where they are struggling and where they have been losing money for some time. We do see underlying progress in that group of companies. We see, Johan pointed out in his letter, for example, that one of our house building companies, the bigger of the two, actually is running at a profit right now after putting in Håkan, who was actually the original entrepreneur of that company, showing that the right person can actually do wonders. But obviously, we don't want to have companies where you actually need the best person in order to just barely make money. I don't know if that's any kind of answer. I mean, the same story Vita Markets does too though, mainly due to that we have companies losing money.

I think that's where pointing out that we have plenty of companies in Sweden that have really healthy margins. We have a few, unfortunately, where we're losing money, which drags the overall margins down, of course. And that's where we put in most of our efforts now to stop that bleeding force.

Through email, we got a question that reads, Dear Daniel and Johan, wiser older heads might suggest that you should buy a business that an idiot could run. I'm simplifying the letter a little bit. What is your thought on that? Do you have any businesses in the group that even idiots can run? Could you give any examples?

I think that we tried to explain a little bit around this before. When we look for potential acquisitions, we look for companies that we, me and Daniel, understand how they earn money. And that is a little bit saying that an idiot could run it. Since we are working in many different industrial segments, we have a variety of products and and customer offers, we tend to look at the business model. If we understand that one, if it's simple enough to realize how a normal manager could run that company, we believe that it's also something that we can acquire. If we have a solid history, healthy margins, stable earnings, and low business risk within that niche, then I think it's something we look at. And over time, of course, I think that we have acquired companies that fulfill more of these criteria. It also means that we have been able to look at companies that fulfill more of these criteria or have higher points in these criteria due to the fact that we have more money to buy companies for. When we started out back in 2006, we were only capitalized with our own operational cash flow. We had no money other than the money that we earned within the operating businesses. And that's how we learned and how we grew and how we maintained the focus on always having a positive cash flow, because that's our bloodstream. That's what we need. We need the positive free cash flow from our subsidiaries in order to maintain the acquisition pace and the growing pace that we want to achieve. That means that we need to understand and have the business model that we acquire and also that we believe that these business models will be sustainable over time. And that we, together with our co-workers, will be able to handle them even if they are on a downturn period due to outer factors or macro things, turbulences.

Yeah. Maybe just to add to that, for us, when we look at companies, the litmus test couldn't either run this or alternatives to that question. It's a big portion of, is this a quality company or not? And I mean, it's on a scale and we always try to find better and better companies. Every now and then, of money, but where basically, even though it looks like a company, it's one person, usually the entrepreneur that runs the show, and where we know that profits would be halved or just evaporated, we start this one person. Those are companies that on paper look good, but we absolutely do not acquire. Whereas if we think that the entrepreneur can step out, and there are people in place, systems in place, processes in place, that things would just continue to run, theoretically at least, without that main person. That is something that is much more attractive to us. Another live question here comes from Kolopan Pillai. Sorry for pronunciation. I know Dan talked about this before, but it would be good to know, at what point would you consider divesting low performing companies? For example, if you see no trend line improvement, two quarters, one year or later, or will we strive to make them better no matter what? I can start because I ended up last time. The most important thing, maybe as a takeaway from this call, is just to reiterate that Technion, we do the best for the shareholders over the long term. And that means that we need to grow our earnings per share. It means that we need to increase our cash flow, our returns on capital over time. And it won't happen sequentially quarter over quarter all the time, but over time. We have a preference of not selling companies. We have a preference of owning the companies that we have acquired forever, but it's not the religion and it's not a high standing thing. And I just want to say that as a statement. It is a little bit difficult to say exactly the timeframe because it of course depends on the data and what it's telling us. Some of the companies that we have in our group, we do believe that we have done changes and are continuing to do changes that will be reflected financially in the quarters and year to come. We might be hopefully right about that, or we might be wrong, hopefully not. But in the cases where we see absolutely no progression, even though we've used the full arsenal of our toolbox, then we are obviously not the right owners of that business. And being good stewards of your money and being managers of basically your company, we feel that it's our fiduciary duty to look at the other alternatives, which might include selling that to someone that actually can take care of it in a better way and for us to offload losses. But I mean, we're not going to bleed forever. I said in the last call, and I can reiterate that, I mean, for us sitting in this room, if we don't see a good trajectory on these companies, we're going to suggest doing other things before this year has ended. But given that we're in industries where there is a lot of momentum in different directions, and also that there are changes. Even though the changes have pushed the button, the financials of that won't show sometimes until three, six, nine months later.

We just need to have a little bit of patience to see what the actual effects are. Do you want to add something?

That was a lot of words and I like most of them, so I refrain from saying them.

All right, we got the email from Christos Kastanar. Hi Daniel, thanks for the transparency showed in the PR. Also great news in the housing factory and it's great to see UK contributing more and more to our revenues. Some questions for the day. What's behind the decrease in return of equity? Quick answer, our profits have gone down whilst the equity base have not. We'll fix the profit and thereby return on equity and we'll return to levels that we feel is acceptable. It is not right now. Another question is regarding the scrapping of inventory and write-down on equipment. Can you elaborate, please?

We have done some restructuring in some of the subsidiaries, and with those projects, we also had some of those write-downs.

Yeah. Yeah. Any plans on hedging our currency? Same question from the same person. My overall opinion regarding hedging is that over long periods of time, hedging is a cost. It absolutely smoothens the quarters. However, because we're not in it in the quarters, basic economic theory says that hedging is a cost, not a profit over longer periods. So that is our overall view of it. Our subsidiaries, they are free to choose what they want. Most of them choose to have a floating exchange rate. Sometimes they're a little bit, let's call it lucky. Sometimes they're more unlucky in that regard. We do have a little bit of hedging in some companies, because some of the CEOs like to have smooth months or quarters. But of course, bearing that insurance costs, basically.

But we don't plan to do it on a group level. All right.

Let's go back to the line questions. We have a question from... I actually can't say this name. What key traits do you look for in companies before acquiring them?

I think we covered that a little bit. First of all, they should have financial stability and good earnings. When we see that, we look at companies that sell to other companies, we look at companies that promote or sell physical products and hopefully they are in a rather narrow industrial niche where they can dictate the terms for that specific market and they're not in it there to just to sell and because they can lower the prices they are there to sell because they can add something to that physical product if it comes to knowledge or knowledge about the application, knowledge about the regulation around that project or the application of that product. So the customer will keep coming back and build a long-term relationship with this supplier, which is our company, and hopefully grow together towards the future. So something that is stable, maybe at first glance, a little bit boring or a little bit odd, but it's necessary to run this society forward and hopefully it will be relevant in 10 years and 20 years to come as well. Yeah.

I think just to add to that, we are in the game of capitalism. So what we try to do is that we acquire companies that are somehow safe bets, quote unquote. So what we look for before basically everything that he wants, because it's a given, is that we look at the financials. We look at the financials to see, is this a company that is going to be accurate to our EPS? Is this a company that has return on equity that is sustainable and higher than our average? Is it a company that has profit margins that have been sustainable and higher than our average? We look at the growth over time. Is that sustainable and hopefully higher than our average? we look at the key financial metrics, and only when all of those key things are in place, do we look at any other thing. Before that, quite often, I don't even know what this company is doing.

And then we look at the soft things. Galileo, through email, has six questions. Hello, guys.

I can imagine backlog has been affected by several factors, including currency effects and less companies working with long backlogs. Can you elaborate on why it is down year on year? Yes, we can. Yes, currency effect, it has some effect. The Swedish krona have appreciated, so obviously other currency backlogs is worth, give or take, 10% less. However, that is maybe not what I really want to state. So the backlog, I think we look at backlogs per company when we look at our subsidiaries. We don't look at it too much on an aggregated level. The reason being that there's a handful of companies that actually account for roughly half of the actual backlog. Unfortunately, that half of the backlog is also very low margin ones. Dustin mentioned a few names. We have the contract manufacturers that typically have very long backlogs. We also have one of the housing companies that have had really long backlogs. And so when you look at the aggregated backlog, if that goes up or not, that might give an indication of, let's call it the overall macro climate, given that we are in different niches and these are the ones that are most cyclical. However, some of our best performing companies actually have no or low backlog all the time. So when you follow it as we do on a subsidiary level from one month to another or quarter to quarter, that gives a good picture. Whilst on the aggregated level, it gets clouded by, unfortunately, a few companies that account for a lot with revenue that doesn't bring profit at the moment. Good answer. Thank you. How many sales do we have in the USA affected directly by tariffs? Do you know? Low single-digit close to rounding error. Correct.

I think we just discussed this a few weeks ago and we are around I think we're below 5% of the total revenue trading with the US. That's unfortunate because we have a lot of plans doing more over there. That is, of course, being a little bit postponed just to see what's going on. But it's a very little effect. The big effect for us in this situation is the same as for everyone else, of course, that the world is waiting and just postponing any decision when it comes to investments or purchases, because you don't know what's going on next week. So that is, of course, frustrating. But direct trading with the US is very limited up until today.

Yeah. The little saves that we do have, those companies are, in my opinion, maybe the ones that are strongest when it comes to pricing power. the customer is going to eat that extra whatever percentage is going to be added on it. Which companies are planning to save close? Are you already in conversation regarding a possible sale? We can't disclose that at the moment. Really boring answer. Margins in contract manufacturers have been very thin over time. How do you expect the relocation to affect margins going forward?

I think the margins are very tough to improve in those type of companies, at least up into the levels where we are getting used to when it comes to new acquisitions and new companies into the group. Of course, you can do really, really well with a contract manufacturer and still be on what we consider normal on a very low level, which means that over time, I don't think that we with contract manufacturers will reach the levels that we will reach in other segments of industry.

I've seen many bankruptcies in some cyclical companies in Sweden. Are you noticing less competition in some of the cyclical markets? I think it's difficult to quantify because different companies are in different niches. I think as a very high level comment, I do feel that the number of competitors are a little bit lower. We are usually in very small niches. It's not actually affecting us one to one, but yes, there are Some of them have reduced prices lower than what we want to go. So net on net, I'm not sure if bankruptcies are helping us. I don't think it's hurting us either, but no big effect. Last question from Galileo. How much effect did you have in transaction USD that you mentioned in the report?

Well, we have had for us a rather big trade or we bought some equipment or products in the US and sold in Swedish. It was an effect that when we bought the dollars, they were expensive. And when we sold in dollars, they were cheap. So it's less expensive. Sorry. That's expensive, which meant that we lost quite a chunk of money, because the business from the beginning was a rather low margin business. That was a little bit painful, of course.

Next live question, one from Martin.

Ikenstam, you've completed six acquisitions already this year. Are there additional deals currently in the pipeline? Yes, there are. But we always have additional deals in the pipeline, some further away, some closer. As Johan said before, throughout the years, or at least since 2020 or something like that, we've said that We want to acquire roughly five companies a year. Sometimes we've been lower. I think one year we did fine. This year will be more. But over time, I think you should keep roughly five in your head.

Do you agree with this? At the moment, we are tuned in roughly five acquisitions per year with us. As you know, we're going to do more this year, but spread over a few years. I think going forward, let's say five years from now or so, we might acquire more. I think we'll be in that position. And we're probably going to buy a little bit bigger companies because we will be in a situation where that will be possible for us. So it's as we always thought of ourselves, that we are constantly trying to evolve and scale the things that we are doing and try to do them better and bigger. So it will be saying we are still aiming for a handful of acquisitions per year but maybe in five years from now we will say something different and hopefully that will be a bigger number and also bigger acquisitions.

Yeah, I think it goes back a little bit to our financial targets where we say that we're gonna at least double our EPS over a five-year period and then of course you can break that down and As we answered before, in a normal year, whatever that means, we're going to do at least 10% on the acquisition part of things, and then roughly 5% or so on the organic growth. And that can come through. buying more or buying bigger or a combination of those. And I think that that has changed a lot. I mean, only through the four or five years I've been here, I know that before I came, buying something that made roughly five million Swedish krona, that was seen as rather big because that would be 10% of the earning at the time. Now we don't look at things that make five, we look at things that make at least 10, give or take. Swedish krona, and that will probably change over time, slowly, year by year.

An email question from Shane Smith.

Three parts. One, can you explain the release note in Note 4 in the annual report? It was a 7.8 million reclassification. Does this indicate acquisitions post 2021 have underperformed expectations? Do you want to start, please? Absolutely. So what we usually do is that according to the accounting rules, where you should be conservative and where we, of course, have very happy and optimistic vendors of businesses, entrepreneurs that believe that they're going to take over the world. Not really, but so we have a forecast from the entrepreneurs and given that we're new to the business, it's difficult to come in and say you're wrong. Because one, we don't know. Two, that's a great way of destroying the relationship. So we have an earn-out mechanism. where if they make so much money that they have in their forecast, then they get a lot of earn out and we get a lot of profit. And then the earn out is built in a way that the lower the profit, the lower the earn out and both get a little bit sadder, of course. But the thing is, of course, it's more art than science to guess on a single point on this graph. that the profit is going to be and thereby the earner is going to be going forward. And given that we need to be conservative according to the accounting rules, we rather reserve a little bit too much than the opposite. So I would say that the group for the last five years or so have to form roughly in line with our acquisition, with our own forecast, maybe not always according to the entrepreneur's forecast.

And also maybe it's worth mentioning that there are not mechanisms constructed in a way. So if we don't reach the very high entrepreneurial goal or the forecast, we still have the same valuation. So the owner will we will still have our money back within the five-year period, even though they don't get the maximum or not.

Yeah. Shane is then wondering, I'm surprised at how small some of the recent acquisitions have been. Under World Regard, the Sierra Leopards have commented that small acquisitions are riskier. Succession planning, customer concentration, fragility of operations, etc. What gives you confidence that Tecnon is able to properly manage so many disparate small businesses? I think this goes back a little bit to what we said before. The well-regarded serial acquirers, no matter if you call them LIFCO, Logitech or whatever, When they were smaller, they bought smaller things. And even today, some of them are actually buying companies of the size that we're acquiring. But of course, the average that they're buying is bigger. We will most likely also go down that route, and we have been going down that route. The companies that we're acquiring today are on average much bigger compared to three years ago, and those were bigger compared to ones three years ago. We actually do not believe, we don't know the other companies, but Johan and I don't have a belief that we are way better at handling really small companies compared to other serial acquirers. I mean, we wouldn't be here unless we thought we were a little bit better at least. It's not a business strategy that we're going to buy only small ones forever. It's that we want to buy the ones that are small enough so that we don't risk the whole, but big enough to make an impact. And finding that fine line that will change and go up for every year that goes is what we're doing. Last question from Shane. Do you charge any fees to your subsidiaries? Is there any reason the subsidiary P&L understates the profitability?

We charge subsidiaries a management fee for the services that we perform for them. Yeah.

We have another question from Martin. What should investors focus on when it comes to earnings growth per share? In 2023, EPS was around 7.5 Swedish krona. Should we be thinking in terms of long-term goal of 15 Swedish krona EPS by the end of 2028? Yes. But this is also the reason why we have... I know it's a rather unusual method, but we don't have one long-term goal until, for example, 2030, and then make up a new one. We want to keep the financial target that we have for as long as humanly possible, which means that there's basically a new five-year target every year, or actually every quarter.

and that is what we're aiming for. E-mail question from Haim.

On culture and leadership from HQ, given techno's decentralized model, where subsidiaries have a high degree of autonomy, I'm curious, what role does the team at HQ play in shaping the overall culture of the group? How do you lead by example and set the tone So that values like long-term thinking, accountability and humility are consistently reinforced across all the companies.

I think we just live as we learn, aren't we? Or at least we try to. And then it gives a tone to the entire group. We gather all the CEOs a couple of times per year to to share information, to share the culture and to get to know each other and maybe share a few beers as well. We also try to emphasize these things as often as possible and in all the forms that we communicate with our colleagues. When it comes to loving to make money, of course, to handle I mean, we have the company's money to grow. That's our task. And that's the game we set out to play. And we want to be the best at it, which means that we need to be very, very thoughtful of what we spend those money on. It's much more fun to see the money grow than to spend it on a fancy car or a business class ticket when you fly somewhere. We try to compete in living cheap and making as much profit as possible and use that capital to acquire more companies and grow the capital base as we move along. That's the game we're in. And that's the game that me and Daniel and the rest of the management team is living. And that's the drive we have. And of course, we hope that reflects to as many of our coworkers as possible. But just meeting, talking and showing by example, of course, affects the overall culture within the group.

The next question there, same person. On entering unfamiliar industrial niches, Technion has deep roots in the industrial sector, but it's also a space full of highly specialized niches. If you come across a company in a niche where you have little existing knowledge or operational experience, how would you evaluate opportunity? What are the non-negotiables you look for to gain conviction despite a knowledge gap? I think you said some really good things about that in the previous case.

You can say it again.

Just repeating. Absolutely. And I think one thing, just to tweak the question a little bit. how do you evaluate something where you have little existing knowledge or operational experience? When we get into situations where we feel like that, we actually just walk away. We don't try to squeeze in things that we don't understand because we look at very many companies a year and we meet with a lot and we're happy with acquiring roughly five companies a year that are really, really good. So when those uncertainties Of course, there are always uncertainties, but when they are high, we just go away. But when it comes to non-negotiables, I mean, the financials, historical robustness when it comes to growth, when it comes to profit margin, when it comes to return on capital and having an organization.

important is spread out and also when it comes to customers and suppliers those are things that are super important for us and yeah just because I put some things down here before that maybe I can squeeze in it's also when it comes to the framework or what we're looking for or that we walk away from is that we walk away from turnaround cases and we walk away from startups we walk away from typical contract manufacturers, because we see that this is not what we should spend time and money on. Yeah, that was just so I get the thing there.

Absolutely. And maybe adding to that, we have a lot of respect for that in different countries, for example, there are different cultures and different legislations and we learn new things all the time. That is also why we're focusing on the current markets that we have. So we try to find as many common ground interactions as possible in order to remove some of this, at least. On setting a subsidiary, the third question here. is a very attractive offer to acquire one of Technos subsidiaries. What would go through your mind in evaluating whether to sell? Are the guiding principles or thresholds that you keep to help you weigh financial gain against the long-term vision of building a permanent group of companies? So this does happen. Not very often, but we get approached every now and then for when different people want to buy certain companies. Very unsurprisingly, they always want to not pay a lot for our best companies. I mean, a lot is relative, but there are absolutely offers every now and then in, let's call it a mid-team. EBIT on some of our better companies and that is absolutely not interesting for us because we do believe that we can use that cash flow and help those companies grow and acquire other companies that would be worth much more than those multiples and so the question that more is close to our heart, and especially now, of course, what would happen if we cannot fix the companies that we have in our group? And the answer is, of course, we're not in the game of having permanent, consistent losses with some of the companies forever. If we do believe that we cannot fix it, then we'll need to find a better home for someone that actually

So they think that they can fix it. Do you want to add something to that?

Yeah, maybe. But I don't know. I mean, it's also, I think we touched on the subject as well, that some of the fundamentals for some of the subsidiaries will never reach the average of Technion today and will be even further away in a few years because we are moving the threshold all the time. So maybe we will in the future find a better home for a subsidiary that someone else see bigger potential with than we do. So that's also might be a reason why we should let go of something because we can use that energy and cash better somewhere else. But like we said it and I think it's worth mentioning again that one of our rules is that we never sell a company. We buy them to hold them forever. But that doesn't stand above the rule of doing what's best for the company and for the shareholders when it comes to generate earnings and return on equity. So this is... The most important rule is to win in the game of capitalism, not to keep a company forever if we see that it can do better somewhere else.

Yeah. We got an email from Valentin. Hello, Daniel. It's a four-part question. The first question is regarding Jonathan, our CCO. You mentioned that Jonathan has a veto right on acquisition. He joined fairly recently. Can we know something more about his background?

He's a very nice guy from Värmland in Western Sweden. He's been an auditor for PVC for seven years. Economist by trade. He makes us smile and he's very smart.

Very interested in investing. He does all of the financial stuff. Not all, but he's in charge of the financial stuff at Technion. He's also very interested in investing and wants to be part of the acquisition process. So we have an investment committee, which is Johan, Jonathan and I. And in order for us to acquire something, we need to have 100% votes for, which is three votes. And Jonathan is usually, when we look at companies, Jonathan is more involved small team, so everyone is interested in looking at different aspects. Second part of that question from the same person, Sweden versus international exposure. With the geographical footprint expanding, could you share a rough breakdown of sales earnings between Swedish and non-Swedish businesses? Based on recent acquisitions, it seems like international operations might now represent a substantial share.

Yes, that's correct. I think you mentioned to me that we are approximately at the same level of earnings, but the margins in the international businesses are much higher, so the sales are much lower. But maybe we stay with that.

The philosophy of not selling companies, I think we touched upon that. Name origin, just out of curiosity, what's the story behind the name Technion?

Sorry to tell you that it's not a very fun story. We were just trying to find, we're playing with words and putting them together to find something with a web page that was free. And we came up with something with technology and unification and playing with words it ended up with the Technion spelling with the Q. Which is great when you try to tell people in a hotel how to spell it. I never regretted it.

We have a live question here from . Hello. Great job, guys, as always. I have a few, but all related questions. Do you put a technical culture person in each and every company, kind of like a chairman to follow the monthly report and offer them guidance, best practices? Yes. We do that for all companies, and that is the minimum level of guidance that we're doing. But then of course, For all companies, there are also other interactions, both through formal channels, through the chairman, but also more informal ones, depending on if they like to speak more with Johan or me or someone else.

And also a lot of interactions with the financial and accounting team on the headquarters. So Maria, Melilla and Jonathan is also interacting with all the subsidiaries continuously to make sure that we have the right quality in reporting and the accounts out in the subsidiaries.

What kind of guidance do we give is the second part of that question. It depends on which company it is. Depending on how well the CEO and the management team have been running the company and for how long they've been doing that, then they get longer and longer leashes. And if it's someone new and that doesn't have a background of running this company, then we are there to guide them much closer. I think that one of the lessons learned is that maybe we have been giving a little bit too much leads to some of the newer CEOs, which is something that we've been amending lately and monitoring more closely. But when it comes to what kind of guidance, I mean, for the longest leash people, it's really about the long-term targets and going through the budgets and talking through the really high strategic things. Should we start selling more in the US or not? Whilst for new CEOs and in companies that we feel it's a turnaround, then basically it could be a situation where we have someone there as almost like a co-CEO, not really, but really part of the operational

So it tends to be a human thing that when you're stepping to a new place, you want to put your color on it. And we don't allow that, not to start. First, you have to prove yourself that you're worthy of this very, very good opportunity that you have to take over someone's life's work and drive that towards the future. When you've proven that you're able to do that, maybe then you can add a little bit of color, but not from day one.

Yeah. Do you think in time, tech will have synergies within businesses operationally? Yes, is the quick answer. We don't really look for synergies, but I mean, in the beginning when we had two companies, they were very far from each other. But for every dot we put on the canvas, it's only natural that some of them will be closer to each other. So we have a few where there are more operational synergies, because they sell to similar markets or they source from similar suppliers, where we do believe that they, because they both want it, can help each other out and get operational synergies. We are running out of time, but I want to bring up one more question, because I think

So we have Bob from LMK Capital.

He's saying, of the cohorts two and three that are struggling, one portion of them are home builders, two apparently contract manufacturers. What do the others do? I think Bob is referring to that in the last call, could divide all of our companies into four cohorts of five years, depending on when we acquired them, the first five years, the second five years, third, et cetera. And cohorts two and three that are struggling the most, the biggest losses do come from the home builders and contract manufacturers. But in that group, there's also a few companies that are, they provide products to, let's call it the general heavy industry, mostly in Sweden. And that has also been tough times for them.

And it continues to be so. So even though that we're making a lot of improvements, it's also, we experienced a lot of headwind just from the economic situation in this country.

Yeah. And last question from the same person. While clearly incorrect, what was the thinking on buying the home builders at the time, given the company had been through the financial crisis?

Oh, it's a short answer. We lack of time. Okay. Now it falls on me. I was confident that the people that had built the company and was running the company, was able to run it in good times and in bad. They had a very strong case supporting that. And they were not operational when we went into a tough market for the house builders a couple of years ago there in Sweden. And now we put one of them back and he made it profitable rather But so it's maybe it's not a it's not a good answer to that question, but it maybe it's just emphasized that we shouldn't buy companies where you need a specific, very skilled, more like a magician to run it. It's more like a normal manager should be able to run the companies that we have within the group. And in this case, you need to be really good at this in order to run it in a poor economic situation, which we are in now. It's hard to make really good profits. It's not that hard in a company like that when everyone is buying a new house. But still, you need to have very hard control of every aspect of a big factory like that. It's a lot of people, it's a lot of material and it's rather complex projects. And if you don't have it in you, you won't be able to manage it in tough times. And that maybe was a little bit proven now that we put Håkan back into the factory and he made it effective and profitable again, even in this very rough environment. So I don't know, I underestimated the skill set and, I don't know, drive needed within a normal manager in order to operate a company like that.

Yeah. We are unfortunately out of time. So with that, we conclude this Q&A, unless you want to say something at the end.

I want to say that thank you so much for showing interest and listening to our answers. We're very grateful for you sending questions to us. It makes us think about what we're doing and how we can improve. Please rest assured that we're working really, really hard to get back to numbers that we can be proud of again. We're going to be there as soon as possible.

Great.

Thank you everybody and have a great Wednesday.

Goodbye.