AQ Group AB (publ) (AQ) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Okay. Welcome to the Investor Presentation for AQ Group for Quarter 4, 2023. Let me see. So many here. There's lots of reports today. So interesting that so many of you decided to join our call. Let's go. So first, we start with why we believe that you should invest in AQ Group. So we have an earnings per share CAGR of 15% over the past 10 years. We made profit every quarters since the foundation in 1994. We have exposure to industrial market segments with underlying growth including electrification, data centers and defense. We have more as well, but these are the ones that I will highlight today. And then we have a long history of acquisitions. We've bought 2 to 4 factories per year. We haven't done so many in the last couple of years because of the high organic growth, but we will get into that later in the presentation. Then we have an extremely strong balance sheet with very low net debt. And fourth quarter, October to December 2023 in brief. So we have a very strong cash flow. And our Board proposed double dividend of SEK 6.66 per share. And the net sales increased by 12% compared to the same quarter last year, which is a little bit below our goal of 15% growth. Operating profit increased with 30% to SEK 193 million compared to SEK 148 million the quarter before and our EBITDA margin was 8.2%. Profit after tax was same quarter-over-quarter, and the cash flow from operating activities amounted to SEK 240 million, and earnings per share before dilution was SEK 7.32. We will get into a little bit of profit after tax later on as well. And the full year in brief. It was a record year for AQ in 2023. We increased our net sales with 27% to very close to SEK 9 billion, which was our target for the year. And it is way above our target of growing 15%. And EBIT was 61% increased compared to the year before to almost SEK 800 million. And the profit margin before tax for the full year was 8.4%, which is above our target of 8%. And profit after tax also increased quite substantially and cash flow from operating activities was excellent with SEK 980 million, which is above our target because normally we say it should be similar to EBIT, but we have been good in managing our inventories. And earnings per share before dilution was SEK 34.57, which is a big increase compared to SEK 22.43 the year before. And our equity ratio is way above our target, which is 40%. So it is 63% at the end of the year. And as I said before, the Board proposes a dividend of SEK 6.66 per share, which is double from the year before. The number of the business. Earnings per share growth slide with AQ Rocket. It is looking very nice. What we can say in quarter 4, though is that we had a little bit higher tax in quarter 4 2023 versus quarter 4 in 2022 due to earnings geography. What do we mean by that? It is different tax rates in different countries and some of our countries have higher -- that we operate in have higher tax than others. So in the quarter 4 this year, we made more profit in countries with higher tax but also we have decided to take [Technical Difficulty] where into the group where you have to take back on the dividend. I have done that now. I think if we look at the full year, then the tax rate is rather normal and same 2023 versus 2022. But anyway, I think this chart is really beautiful. So let's watch it for one second more, and then we go to next one. Net sales in the quarter was okay, I think. We grew with 12.5%, but it's below our target. And there also 4% was currency. People who are fast in math then know that organic growth was 8% in the quarter compared to the same quarter last year. We still have some productivity constraints in Finland and Poland and in some parts of Sweden, where we're not delivering out everything that we should. We will look at it when we look at the on-time delivery as well. And also some of our customers postponed a little bit their products that they took out from us to quarter 1 instead of quarter 4. And the increases this year is mainly in electrification, defense industry, commercial vehicles and marine. So if you look at the organic growth then, it was, as I said, a little bit lower than our target of 10%, and 2 customers really have postponed some products from quarter 4 to quarter 1, which you would see that in quarter 1 instead. And main part of the growth was electrification of defense commercial vehicles and marine and the main countries where we deliver the growth from. So it's not 2, it's from Lithuania, Bulgaria, Sweden, U.S.A. and Finland in the quarter. Quite good growth, but it's not really at our target level. So we're a little bit disappointed. Acquired growth, 0, it is not where we want to be, but we have a good list. We have several targets, some are close, but some are not. And I say the same thing as I did last quarter, we should be disappointed if we don't close anything before quarter 2 2024. At the EBITDA side. The margin is above our target, but just above. I can say I am disappointed in the margin in quarter 4, even though we reached our targets. We have had struggled with some customers to deliver out and we have also had some internal quality issues that we have had to rectify during the quarter, which has pressed our margin a little bit down. We have implemented process improvements that should improve the situation going forward. We have opportunities to improve on our margin in India, China, Mexico, Finland and Hungary as we see it. They are below our target level. Inventory, we have been working very hard with the inventory basically since 2021, where the inventory increased a lot. And I can say we are quite pleased that we have not reached our target of 3.5 turns per year, but we are currently now at 3.2%, which is very much better than at the start of the year when we were at 2.3 turns, I believe. And the main reason for having high inventory turnover is to reduce the risk of obsolescence in the inventory, but also, of course, to generate a good cash flow. But I'm happy with the smiley mouse that we see here. And net cash from operating activities continue to be very good, and it has been good the whole year, as I mentioned before. So in the quarter, it was SEK 239 million. And our net debt, excluding IFRS 16 is now SEK 25 million. And I don't promise anything, but I believe that our net debt will be -- we will not have any net debt in quarter 1. And I think it's easy to see it unless we do any big investments. Quality and delivery precision, I want to mention a little bit about that today. So our on-time delivery is below our target of 98%. Our result for the quarter is 91.35% which is a little bit better than the last quarter, but it's still very disappointing. We have made big investments to increase capacity, and we have hired a lot of people, bought machines and added square meters to be able to deliver to our customers. But I can argue that it's very hard to have a very good on-time delivery when you're growing almost 30% of our business. However, we see that the trend is starting to improve. And in December, we reached 92.6%. Still, we have problems, but I believe that going into next year, we will see better numbers here. We have a number of projects for certain sites and certain customers in order to improve this metric and make the customers more happy. And now I want to comment on something that we have put up in the report. So regarding our battery systems facility in Bulgaria, we have done a very fast ramp-up during 2023 with one large customer. We have delivered out a large number of battery systems for them. And there are several projects. I think it is 10 projects or so we have delivered during 2023. We do not believe that our internal quality has been satisfactory. There has been a lot of issues and we have had delays due to that. So in November and December, we had a lot of efforts in improving the quality in our processes, and we managed to deliver out all the projects with good quality at the end of December. But this customer is not happy, and we have no new projects we discussed in 2024. We hope that this will change. But currently, that is the way it is. And we will utilize this capacity, of course, then for other customers. So we have 2 ramp-ups in this factory during 2024. And it is 1 battery system -- it's really 2 battery systems customers that we will ramp-up there. So that will be fine. But we are not happy with this, of course, and this is the things that can happen. We really took a little bit of a chance. The customer wanted us to improve. We increased the capacity faster than we could really. So I'm actually really proud of my team that we managed to deliver out as much as we did in 2023, but still customer is not satisfied. That is the way it can be. Projects for future growth and outlook going forward. Running a little bit later. So we still see a huge demand in electrification. I have some pictures there for something different. It is everything from big charging stations for trucks and buses to solar inverters to drives for motors and also for underwater transmission of electrical power. We see that we are also growing in data centers. We are working with one of the bigger cooling companies in to cool data centers that it is on the left there. We are building the enclosures for them in Bulgaria. We have one big order for transformers for data centers in the US. It is the picture in the middle. It is for one power company that do power systems for data centers. And on the right, it is super capacitors for -- it is for balancing of the grid, but it will also be used for data centers. And this is super capacity racks with super capacity. Super capacitors is really a battery that is really fast. So if people want to surf the Internet a lot when there is some cute puppy or something on TikTok and a lot of people need to surf the Internet at the same time, then they need a lot of power. And we are helping one of our customers to build those. So that is really fun, and we believe that this segment of our business will grow going forward, even though it's not huge today. I would say, it is roughly today SEK 100 million, something like this. And then defense, I have to mention. I think we grew our defense business by 223% in 2023. We believe that it will continue to grow. And roughly now it has gone from being 0.5% of our turnover to 2% of our turnover. And it is a sheet metal system components and some inductive components and wire harnesses that we deliver into this market segment. And unfortunately, this will continue to grow because there is a lot of war in the world and countries need to defend themselves, and we are happy to support democratic countries with equipment to defend themselves. And basically, that was that. So now we come to the interesting part, which is the Q&A. I suggest that that you raise your hand, and then we can take some questions.

Yes. Karl, please.

Just maybe if we start off here with a question on the deliveries that was postponed from Q4 to Q1. Is it possible to quantify approximately how much that was?

I would say it's roughly SEK 50 million.

Okay. And that's coming in the first quarter of 2024?

I expect it to come in quarter 1, yes.

Yes. And then on the battery storage customer, we have problems here. I'm just wondering, you said SEK 250 million in sales in 2023 for this customer. What do you expect from the new customers coming in? I guess it's the plant in Bulgaria where you need to fill capacity, where you said you have 2 new start-up projects. Can that compensate for that or is it a little bit lower, the new ones?

I would say, in the long-term, yes. I'm not sure if it will compensate for that in 2024. But I believe that, I think we have a lot of things that are growing, as I plan to show as well. But I think it will not compensate fully in 2024 for that in that effectively. If we are able to do that, then it is going faster than I think. And normally, this kind of ramp-ups take longer time than you believe.

Yes. And then I just had a question on like the pricing of -- or the price mix going forward. I think you have discussed that you are going to be more aggressive on keeping prices up or even raising prices to customers. Is that still your view here going into 2024 or are you seeing any changes in that.

No. I think we are still striving for, I think, 3% to 5% on price increase in 2023. Of course, it is selected customers where we believe that we have not been -- the way we see that the costs are increasing. I think it will not have a big margin effect. I don't expect it to be so, but to compensate for where costs are increasing, for sure. And then even though inflation has gone down in several countries, we still see quite high inflation in several of the markets where we have factories. So we definitely need to get compensated for that.

Yes, clear. And then maybe the last question from my side. I think the million-dollar question, even though you lost this customer or there you will get no more projects from this customer, do you think you still can reach 15% top line growth for 2024.

Let's say it like this. And I think I have tried to say it before as well. We will not reach it without extremely hard work from our employees. And also, we really need to make acquisitions in order to reach it. It is dependent that we are successful in our deal making and that we are also -- my fantastic employees are able to deliver like they have been doing now for the last, I think, 3 years, very high growth. So I think it is definitely possible. But --

Release it in 1 year. I know you are not so confident on M&A.

Forward-looking statements, but I believe in what we are doing, I believe in our business model and how we are. I think it is proven. So I believe that we can do it. Any more questions? 10 minutes more. So if there are not any more questions...

I can take. Karl here again. Can I just as a question on the cash flow or do you -- I mean you have tied up a lot of working capital here during the last 2 years when you grew a lot. Do you think are you at normal levels now in terms of cash conversion and the inventory turnover, et cetera or Do you think it's possible to improve it even more?

It is absolutely possible to improve it more. And I think once we reach 3.5 turns, which is the target for this year, then we will change the target to 4 turns. I believe that we see that several of our factories are way above 4 turns in inventory turnover with good on-time delivery. So if we have good order in our planning, both production planning, inventory planning and purchasing, then we can definitely be at 4%. So I want the inventory to be lower than the cash conversion to be better.

And is it possible, one question also on China, which is site this weak here in the quarter. Is that a Q4 or was weak already in the previous quarters? And can you maybe quantify how much China is down or your Chinese factories because I guess you have mostly Chinese customers there.

Actually I was in China 2 weeks ago. And I mean we are celebrating AQ 30 year anniversary this year, and it was also the Chinese New Year party. So we had a chance to have some fun as well. But it is the year of the drag, and I have lived in China for 10 years. And year of the Dragon is always a great year in China. So I believe that we will grow in China, and we will improve profit in China in 2024. We see that the China -- I see in my factories that China has woken up down from the slumber after COVID. So I believe that 2024 will be a comeback year for China. That is my prediction. Do not have to trust me because everybody says something else. But I think China is a good bet this year. Okay. If there are no further questions, then I thank you for listening, and I wish you a good Thursday. Thank you so much.