Vimian Group AB (publ)

Good morning. This is Patrick speaking, and thank you very much for joining us on our quarterly call today.

We'll just jump right into it and talk a little bit about our highlights for the quarter. First and foremost, we delivered a strong earnings growth in the quarter. We're very pleased about how that developed and we'll talk a little bit more about where it came from and how it came to be. And as you might recall from our last time we met, we signaled that our organic revenue growth was going to be impacted by the adjustment in the annual program. Therefore, our organic growth is a bit lower than you might have expected and see us do in the past. The remaining operating units that we have, the three others, all deliver double digit organic growth in the quarter. And we also passed a very significant milestone here a few weeks ago when we started to trade on the large cap market on the Nasdaq main market here in Stockholm. It's a very important milestone for us as a publicly traded company. And in general terms and overall, we are very well positioned. We're in an attractive market. And there's some fundamental underlying growth factors there that we really like and we continue to see positive that. And we're also an agile business with an opportunity to steer and change our business as our world around us is uncertain and change. With that, let's go and dive a little bit deeper into the numbers for the quarter. We delivered 18% revenue growth to 107 and a half million euros. Organic growth ended up being 4%, again, negatively impacted by the adjustment in the annual order program, which is limited to our med tech orthopedic business in the US. The other segments delivered double digit growth. Our adjusted EBITDA for the quarter also grew 18% to 28.3 million. Our margins were stable at 26.3, exactly the same as we had last year, And remember, we consolidated a new medtech segment here in dental with our IM3 acquisition that at the time we acquired it, it has a lower margin profile than the rest of Vimeo. Now turning into our specialty pharma business, another quarter with great performance in terms of growth, 10% organic growth. And we had... growth across all of our therapeutic areas. We had significant contributions from our specialty pharmaceuticals and our dermatology part of the business. We continue to innovate in the part of our business and we see that the new launches contribute to growth. We had 23 new products that we launched this quarter. The EBITDA continued to grow nicely at 19% here and our margin improved from 27 to 28.8%. And that was driven predominantly by operational leverage and positive mix. Returning to MedTech for a moment here. As expected, and as we communicated in February, we saw an organic decline for our MedTech business, and it was primarily driven by the annual order program in our orthopedic part of the business in the US. We also, as we have noted since last summer, we've seen softness in the elective surgery market in the US, so that would be for our knee business and our hip business there. The other regions that we have in MEA and APAC continue to deliver high single-digit growth, and that's up from when we reported in Q4. We continue to invest in education, especially in the U.S., to access the untapped opportunity, the untreated animals and the untrained clinicians, so that they can help us expand the addressable market. In the first quarter here, we educated over 1500 professionals in orthopedics. That's about the same as we did in Q4. As you might recall, it was about 1600 back then. The target for us in 2025 is to return this business to growth, which we're confident that we will be able to do. When we look at our margin here, we have a clear sequential improvement, both year over year and the consolidation from Q4. We've phased out AUP, which has an impact on our margins and obviously the incorporation of IM3. At the end of the quarter as well, actually right after we finished the quarter, we completed our first Bolton acquisition with Dental Focus that we welcomed to our family. That's a New Jersey-based company in the Northeast part of America with revenues around $3 million. It's a great strategic fit for us. It complements the IM3 portfolio, and it also adds access to a new customer base predominantly in the Northeast of America. So we're very excited to have that team join us. We go to our veterinary services business, another double digit revenue growth, a quarter with phenomenal growth on EBITDA. During this quarter, and as we mentioned, we have started to do some investments to grow our business organically. And one of these initiatives was launched in the first quarter where we launched DVM Grow, which is a new services platform targeting an unpenetrated market segment in the US. This was launched mid-quarter and it's an important initiative for our veterinary services business to continue to strengthen our position in America and also tap into a market that we were unable to reach in the past. Our margins improved from 25.4% to 30.3%. And again, it was driven by the growth and also we have positive geographic mix for our vet services business. Now turning to diagnostics, again, second consecutive quarter, we delivered double-digit growth here at 16%, driven by our livestock segment. And also, as we have told everybody before, we are continuing to invest in rolling out a product in the companion animal space, which is why our earnings continues to be at this level. that it is. So we're making investments in further market growth. And before I let Carl Johan go through the financials, I want to spend a little bit of moment just to talk about our progress on ESG. First of all, during the quarter, we improved our ESG rating with MSCI from an A to a double A. So we're pleased about the progress that we're making there. Now, when we look back and reflect of 2024, we've reduced our emissions and we've strengthened our supplier controls. Both of those are very important focused initiatives that we've been running. We're continuing to create with the work to create a great place to work at Vemian and we trained all of our employees in business ethics. This is highly important to us. We also educated more than 40,000 veterinary professionals throughout the year. and that is also one of our key metrics and key methods in which we can unlock market growth we launched 82 new products during the the full year we continue to be committed to the esg strategy and drive positive change in the world and with that said i'm going to hand over to call you on to walk us through some of the details in the financials thank you very much patrick and good morning everyone

as said let me give you a walk through and some further insights to the group financials for the first quarter starting with the income statement adjusted eb a in the first quarter was 28.3 million euro that's an increase of 18 percent compared to the same period last year and represents a margin of 26.3 percent this margin is on par with the same period last year and that's after including and consolidating im3 from october 1st that has a lower margin profile than the rest of the group and also a clear improvement of 290 basis points from the fourth quarter of last year we report an operating profit of 15.6 million euro an increase of 17 percent from last year's result of 13.4 million items affecting comparability clearly impacted the quarter with a total of 7.0 million euro. This is mainly cost relating to the continued high level of legal fees in the US patent litigation, with the main hearing taking place in the first quarter, as well as acquisition activities within Medtech. The net financial items of minus 7.5 million euro consists of three main components. Finance expense of minus 5.0 million with an average interest rate of 5.1% during the quarter, which was to some degree offset by 0.5 million interest income. The quarterly discounting impact of minus 1.5 million euro and impact of minus 2.8 million euro from probability adjustments on continued considerations. mainly related to adjustment for boba australia and freelance given good momentum in those two businesses and lastly a positive impact of 1.3 million from exchange rate effects on revaluation of debt the income tax expense for the quarter amounts to 3.4 million euro and in total this results in a profit for the period of 4.7 million euro with an earnings per share of 0.01 euro cents for the quarter the q1 cash flow cash flow from operating activities reached 17.1 million in the first quarter an improved cash generation compared to the same period last year with a cash conversion of 70 percent defined as operating cash flow in relation tbta networking capital amounted to 94.3 million Euro at the end of the quarter equal to 23% of revenue, which is a decrease from 100.1 million at the end of December, which equal 25% of revenue. The majority of the decreased working capital is a consequence of higher payables in Medtech and specialty pharma. Cash flow from investing activities of minus 12.6 million. which is primarily reflecting earn-out payments of 9.1 million in the quarter and capital expenditures of 3.2 million. Cash flow from financing activities of minus 9.2 million euro, primarily reflecting repayment of debt. At the end of the period, net debt amounted to 212.2 million euros, which is down from 221.9 million at the end of the fourth quarter. External lending of 206.9 million euro, which is approximately 10 million euro less than at the end of the fourth quarter as we have continued to repay debt. Leverage in the quarter equaled 1.8 times compared to 2.0 times at the end of the previous quarter. With this financial review of the first quarter of 2025, I would like to hand the word back to Patrick for some concluding remarks.