Fjord Defence Group ASA (DFENS.OL) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, and welcome to the third quarter presentation for Fjord Defence Group ASA. It will be conducted by me, Jon Asbjørn Bø, the CEO; and Øyvind Mølmann, the CFO. So let's get started, and thank you for listening. So Fjord Defence Group is -- have one company. And as you may know, we have acquired another company yesterday, and I will focus most of my presentation on the new company. But just a reminder, we bought in Fjord Defence AS in June and completed the acquisition during third quarter. Fjord Defence AS are in the defence market for vehicles, ground and maritime and some miscellaneous. And you can see here the percentage which we are, and we expect the vehicle part to grow over the next years. Fjord Defence have signed several new contracts with NATO countries and expect to deliver off-call (sic) [ call-off ] orders in the coming months. As I said, we concluded the acquisition, subsidiary, Fjord Defence AS is on track to reach the revenue target that we put forward when we did the acquisition, about NOK 100 million, and they have successfully qualified the .338 system with U.S. Army/Rangers during third quarter. Other things we've done during the third quarter and going forward is that we completed the uplisting on Oslo Stock Exchange. We had a oversubscription of the share offering for NOK 10 million to repair for the other. And we have entered into an agreement with Scanfiber Composites, which is the second step in the strategy that we told to be a compounder inside defence industry. We have got another multiclient licensing agreement in the North Sea for NOK 2.5 million. And year-to-date, we have approximately NOK 30 million in cash inflow from seismic assets. That's important to have a good liquidity when we are building up and buying companies. So the legacy is supporting us in this way. As we all know, there is a strong tailwind across the defence segments. And I would show you in where Fjord Defence is coming to the growth now, the same will be with Scanfiber A/S in Denmark. So the companies fit very well together. The compounding strategy focused on defence, security and related segments, we have a buy-and-build strategy that we showed during the second quarter presentation and presentation when we bought Fjord Defence AS. And Scanfiber fits in very, very well in that strategy. And we have said that we are going to buy companies, which have a revenue between NOK 100 million and NOK 900 million with a good profitability with EBITDA margins above 15%. And we have a clear path for both these companies for organic growth going forward. And we want to have a strong management team, which also fit both companies. If we look at the acquisition of Scanfiber, we, in the second quarter presentation, showed our criteria for buying companies and Scanfiber fits in to all of these parts, operating in defence, right size, good profitability, clear organic growth and a path forward to grow even more. We also managed to buy this company on an EBIT multiple of 8.1. Many has wondered if there is possible to do this on this type of multiples, and we are also reaching that goal. Scanfiber are producing ballistic protection. Mostly, it's spall liners, that is the ballistic protection inside the car that consists of 68% of their revenue, and they are on a lot of large vehicle programs moving forward in Europe. 30% of their revenue is add-on armors, which is put on vehicles and other things that are not ballistic protected. And they have a wide range of other products, which just compile of 2% of their revenue, and we see a good growth path also there. They have a strong performance financially. They have in Denmark, the year-end is [ 31.9 ]. So these are audited numbers. They had NOK 159 million in revenue and more than NOK 50 million in EBITDA. And as you can also see on the last page, they have very small deviation between EBITDA and EBIT. So I think EBIT came in NOK 49 million the next year. They have a strong order book, and they are very highly recommended to move forward, going forward for further growth. Here, you can see that they have a revenue growth of 50% with an EBITDA and EBIT margin of 30% in '24, '25. And it's looking good for further growth. We know many big vehicle manufacturers in Europe have had market -- Capital Markets Day, and they estimate the growth of numbers of vehicles to be doubled before 2030. If we look at their order book, they have NOK 250 million already in orders. They have pending orders about NOK 1.3 billion, where it's mostly based on their existing frame agreements with vehicle manufacturers. And they have a larger pipeline of opportunities, which is about NOK 1.8 billion. The numbers we are telling you are not 100% numbers. They are reflected on the probability. So we have a strong company, which we are looking forward to integrate into our organization. Then I leave to Øyvind Mølmann to take the financials.

Thank you very much, Jon Asbjørn. I'm happy to present the financials for the third quarter and especially after having acquired or made an agreement to acquire Scanfiber, which is then doubling the number of companies within the core segment, defence segment in Fjord Defence, but more than doubles the top line of this segment. Also, we should remember that we have the legacy with us, which is giving us a meaningful cash flow from both the multi-client library and the potential winning the shares we hold in Capsol. So looking closer at Fjord Defence AS, it has performed a steady growth as expected, as Jon Asbjørn mentioned, up to NOK 100 million approximately this year, we expect, with margins at 15% or above for the EBITDA and very similar margins for the EBIT, which you can see at the lower left hand of the slide here. So that means that this company, as is Scanfiber, is capital light, minor depreciations and minor maintenance investments in this company as well. At the lower-hand side, we have illustrated order backlog. And as you can see, this is a total of NOK 77 million, which is quite stable since the second quarter. But you will see from quarter-to-quarter, this can vary in the short term, but the long-term prospects for the order book is that it will continue to grow over time. And we are -- that is based on the call-off of existing orders that Jon Asbjørn alluded to and also new orders coming in, but sometimes it takes time with prolonged procurement processes in the defence industry and also rigid test procedures. But when they are finished, then you will see major shifts in the -- potential major shifts in the order book, and that is what we expect to see going forward. Okay, so then diving into the seasonality and details of Fjord Defence Group. You can see that on the left-hand side, we have illustrated the split between the quarters. And this is more or less erratic and very, very seasonal, as you can see. In general, we think that you will have a concentration around year-end in Q1 and Q4 each year and lower revenues in the 2 remaining quarters. So not concentrating too much on the split between the quarters, I think it's meaningful to look at the year-on-year growth on the right-hand side from third quarter or 9 months last year to 9 months this year is a meaningful growth of 17%, which is in the vicinity of what we expect and can see for the full year this year as well. We are happy with the performance in the third quarter, and we expect this development to continue through the rest of the year. But first of all, or first and foremost, for the coming -- for the years to come. Okay, so looking at the impact of Fjord Defence in the -- on the group numbers. We have shown this before during the second quarter presentation. And as you can see from -- in 2024, the pro forma numbers as if we bought and owned Fjord Defence for all of 2024. It would be comprising 2/3 of the turnover of the group. And if we look at the first 9 months of this year, it's even more significant with NOK 67 million in the defence segment and NOK 10 million in the legacy segment, a total of NOK 76 million top line year-to-date in the group. It should be remarked that the NOK 9.7 million is revenue from net sales in the seismic business. But in addition to the NOK 9.7 million, we have more than NOK 20 million in cash inflow that is not captured in the P&L, meaning that this year, we expect a bit north of NOK 30 million in cash inflow from the legacy business. And as a CFO, I'm very happy to see the cash coming in from that part of the business, and we expect that to continue for the period to come. So also in the rightmost column, I would like to point out that we are making money on an adjusted EBITDA level when adding back unrealized loss at Capsol shares of NOK 13.4 million and also adjusting for transaction costs, which will be a significant cost for us going forward. That is how we grow. So -- but happy to see that on a cash basis there, we are making NOK 6.3 million year-to-date at the group level. This is not including now the Scanfiber numbers. We are not allowed to show them together, but you have seen the separate numbers previously, and that would more than double the top line of the segment. It will triple the top line of the segment here when we can add it for the first 9 months of the year. So that is extremely satisfying. Then a short look at the balance sheet. The numbers here for 2024 are on a stand-alone basis for the previous -- for Fjord Defence Group ASA, excluding Fjord Defence AS. But the balance sheet at end of third quarter, of course, is including Fjord Defence AS and showing a total balance sheet of NOK 595 million. We have a satisfying cash position of NOK 64 million at the end of the quarter. That is before the NOK 10 million subsequent offering, which came in October, so NOK 64 million in cash. And on the debt and equity side, you can see that we have drawdown in our loans of NOK 25 million, of which NOK 19.5 million is a long-term part of that. NOK 64 million less NOK 25 million in debt means a net cash position of NOK 39 million at the end of the quarter -- third quarter. So strong cash position and also a solid balance sheet with an equity ratio of 85%. So this is giving us a good starting point for the acquisition of Scanfiber that we have conducted now. So that's it from my side, and I will leave it back to you, Jon Asbjørn.

Thank you very much. So if we are looking forward for the Fjord Defence Group ASA, we have started now to execute on our compounder strategy. We are loyal to the criterias we set up and presented during the Q2 presentation, and we will continue to be that. Scanfiber Composites A/S adding significant growth and revenue potential, and we expect further growth both for Fjord Defence AS and Scanfiber Composites A/S. As Øyvind just mentioned, we have a solid balance sheet and ready for both organic and acquired growth going forward. We are currently multitasking. So we are doing evaluation of multiple other companies to acquire in the Nordic and Baltic region. And we hope we can start that immediately after everything is legalized and fixed with the Scanfiber acquisition. Expect also continued positive cash from the legacy business going forward. At last, I will say one thing, the growth in the defence market as we see it, I said it on the second quarter presentation. I hope for peace in Ukraine. And I hope that can move forward very quickly. But still, we see the growth in Europe -- in all NATO countries will continue because we have realized that Europe have to be more independent from other parts and as we used to be. So I believe there will be strong growth in the defence market over the next 10 years. And hopefully, the war in Ukraine will end. And with that, thank you very much. Then if there is any questions? No. Okay. Thank you. Thank you very much.