Bulten AB (publ) ($BULTEN)

Hello, and welcome to today's Finwire broadcast presentation with Bulten. [Operator Instructions] With that said, I'll hand the floor to you. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and welcome to our Q1 presentation at Bulten. We have a short agenda for you today, and then we open up for questions afterwards. We will start with going through some key items for Q1, talk about the momentum that we have in our C-parts business. We have some comments on our financial position, and then we'll speak a bit about our order intake reporting before I hand it over to Anna to talk about our Q1 financials. And then we'll wrap it up with some focus items that we have going forward. All right. So I think looking at the first quarter, I think what we can see is that the volume is down a little bit. Half of it is currency, half of it is kind of volume driven. But we can see that even with volume decline, we have done quite a lot of improvements during the year on our cost position, which creates a lot of resilience, and therefore, we can deliver a pretty decent margin anyhow. So we're pretty happy with that. It's a good step in the right direction. We can also see that we have improved our gross margin. It's actually the best margin that we have reported in a couple of years. So that is a very important metric that we monitor tightly, and we keep pushing for. It obviously creates a good upside if we get more volume into the business, if we have a strong GP. So happy about that. You might have read in earlier communications here that we have changed our business model in the U.S. So in the past, we have had a factory in Ohio, Finland that we are now turning over to become a distribution center where we basically are trading fasteners and related items instead. And this factory has a history of being built for Volvo basically. Volvo had a lot of volume plans in North America. We built a plant to support and follow them, and we never really got enough volumes to make that profitable. And therefore, we have now terminated that and shifted Volvo over to buying from Europe basically. So I think that is a good step in the right direction. It also helps us improve the margin over time. And it's a small but important part of our transition of Bulten to a more profitable and stable company. Next point is that we have had some important wins in our C-parts business. And I think that is quite important going to wind power and defense, and I think we speak a bit more about that on the next page. One of our 3 business types that we have in Bulten is a distribution business, related to C-parts. Obviously, still a lot of fasteners and related items in that, but we are working quite hard with enhancing our value-creating services. So we do more kitting, more inventory management, more quality control, more kind of integrated supply chain solutions here. So we're developing our offering, and that is progressing in a nice way. We have established a business in China, and we have now our first orders in China. And most of this is to other segments in automotive, with all of it is related to other parts in automotive. And we are particularly targeting the renewable energy sector, and we have some important wins in wind power, where we have I think there are quite significant upsides to doing that well. We have customers that like what we do that promise us good volumes if we keep delivering the way we deliver. So we are quite happy with that and excited about the opportunities in wind power. If about defense, we just recently won a first defense order. Obviously, with everything going around in the world, getting into defense is important. In this case, it is a customer that build kind of type of armored vehicles. And what we are doing is that basically, we consolidate a lot of items that they use for making these vehicles. And then we do a kitting operation where we create different kits for different parts of their assembly line and then we feed them with that. And it's a very nice business for us, and there are very good opportunities for future volumes here. So we're happy for that, and we do hope that we can penetrate other defense customers in the future as well, both in Asia and in Europe. So happy for that, good development. And overall, we are going into 2026 with a strong momentum in our C-parts business. We included a slide that we don't normally talk about, but I do this because in our last earnings call, there was some confusion. I got the question in that call about if we were looking to make some kind of share issue or take in more capital to the business. And my answer was that could happen if we have a very, very attractive acquisition on the table. And that is actually what I meant. There is no plan to make any share issue or taking any capital to the business. We are fairly sound. We have worked a lot during last year to strengthen our balance sheet. We have an adjusted net debt to EBITDA of 2.2, and there are no plans to do anything on a defensive way. If something super attractive comes up, yes, but then it's an offensive move that we make to strengthen the business. As you can see here, our interest-bearing debt has reduced by about SEK 200 million or 20% since last year. So we feel that we are in a good position with our company, and we are getting a healthier and healthier balance sheet every day. We have made a change to our Q1 reporting is that we have stopped reporting order intake. And for those of you who have followed Bulten over time, both during my days here, but more so in the past, we have in multiple occasions, commented that our order intake is not really a good metric. It doesn't really show the development of the business as most of our order intake is related to kind of forecasting and schedule changes from our customers. They are not -- it's not really order intake. And having been here now for a year, having been in all the business reviews and all the companies, nobody tracks or follows or take any note to these numbers. It is not an indication of where Bulten is heading or going. And therefore, I feel it's probably more misleading to communicate that than guiding. And therefore, I have decided that we will stop reporting order intake in this way. And given we're now in new year, this is the first quarter of 2026, we think this is a good time to do so. With that said I'll hand over to Anna to go through our financial results for the quarter.

Thank you, Axel. The year-on-year decline in net sales reflects lower volumes following the cyberattack in the second half of 2025. Cyberattack towards one of our biggest clients, that is. While we can see that we have stabilized sales towards the end of last year as well as for the first quarter this year. And when we look at Q1 this year and exclude currency effects, the decrease versus last year's first quarter is only 6%. The mix shift reflects both continued growth in non-automotive segments and lower automotive volumes. Since 2023, the share of sales from our defined growth segments has increased by 10 percentage points to 17.5%, contributing to reduction in OEM light vehicle exposure from 68% to 58% and a more diversified revenue mix. The first quarter of this year delivered an adjusted EBIT of SEK 78 million, equal to 6.2% EBIT margin, and this is in line with the adjusted numbers for the same quarter last year. The second half of 2025 was affected by the previously mentioned cyberattack, and we can see that the numbers are stabilizing, and we are coming back to more healthy levels again. And here, we have some rolling 12 months key indicators. And as Axel already mentioned, our adjusted net debt in relation to adjusted EBITDA is at around 2, which is also at the same level as last year. So now back to you, Axel.

Thank you. So to wrap up before we go over to Q&A and see if there are any questions from our shareholders or listeners here. We have a lot of focus on profitability to protect margins in some places and expand margins in other places. And most of that is around that we want to generate much bigger cash flow. Obviously, that has to do with the strengthening the balance sheet, but also to have firepower to go and make more offensive moves and speed up our transition to more business in the kind of non-automotive segments and create a healthier mix for the group. So that is very, very high on our list for this year. And when it comes to this new business segments, so we are -- I mean, we are making quite a lot of work around India to get into the consumer electronics industry. We're not going into, but expand. So we have a significant business through our current factories in Taiwan and China and towards this sector. But we have a very, very high demand for our products in India, both for customers that produce in India, but also they want an alternative source to China and Taiwan. So we are quite excited about the opportunities here, and we believe we can make good inroads on that over the year to come. But we also see great opportunities in medical technologies. We see great opportunities in renewable energy, and we are spending more and more efforts and time in expanding those type of businesses. So that will be an important part of 2026 as well. And then we continue with our footprint optimization. We are not happy with the overall structure. We need to improve more. We need to consolidate some of our footprint to get better leverage and better utilization of our assets. That is and will continue to be an important project for us also going forward. With that said, we hand over to some Q&A.

[Operator Instructions] We have not received any written questions at the moment, so we can wait like 10 seconds and see if somebody is writing something. There are no questions coming this time. So I give you the word to you for some closing remarks.

That's great. That means everything is crystal clear, and we have been transparent now. So we're happy for that. And we look forward to coming back and present our Q2 to you next time.