Hanza AB (publ) ($HANZA)

Welcome to HANZA Q1 Report 2026 Presentation. [Operator Instructions] Now, I will hand the conference over to the speakers, CEO and President, Erik Stenfors; and CFO, Lars Akerblom. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning, and welcome to our presentation of HANZA's Q1 2026 results. This is Erik Stenfors, CEO and Founder of HANZA. With me, as usual, is our CFO, Lars Akerblom. This morning, we released Q1, our strongest quarter to date. We see organic growth, high margins and strong cash flow. But still, this should not come as a surprise. If we view this in context, it's rather a confirmation of a consistent execution of a solid business model. And that's the key message today. And to explain this properly, we have an agenda, which follows a clear logic. We will start with the HANZA concept because that's where everything begins. Then, we show how this model was executed in Q1. Next, how this execution translates into financial performance, and finally, how we will move forward. And of course, we'll wrap up with a Q&A session. Please use this to ask any questions you may have. HANZA was founded like all companies to solve a challenge; in our case, to solve a challenge in the manufacturing industry, complexity. And why? Because contract manufacturing is fragmented. You see it on this slide. There are too many suppliers, too many interfaces and across far too many locations. And this complexity creates costs, delays and risk, and also it makes it difficult to scale. Therefore, we started the company with a vision, manufacturing made easy. idea is to remove complexity from our customers' supply chain. And when you do that, when you remove -- reduce the complexity, instead, you unlock efficiency and scalability. So that's our vision. And if you look at our business model, under the slogan, all you need is one, one partner, full responsibility, less complexity. So in HANZA, we have combined multiple manufacturing technologies in one company, and that's how we are able to provide a better way to structure our customers' supply chain. So then, when it comes to execution, I can tell you, we have never believed in shortcuts. Instead, we have built HANZA with a long-term perspective. And since the start -- now, we turn 18 this year, we started in August '08 -- we have developed the company step by step, phase by phase, each phase, adding new capabilities. And this is important because a strong concept, it drives growth. But the structured execution, it also drives margin and cash flow. And this quarter, we also launched the next phase, which is HANZA 2028. And in short, our plan is to keep our current geography, but we're going to expand our manufacturing technologies, all with the idea to further increase customer value. If you want to get a deeper understanding in view of this, please visit our website. There, you can see the full Capital Market Day presentation, and you can also hear a lot of the good reps from HANZA tell you more about this. But the main idea is then to work with the manufacturing technologies. That's what you're going to see in HANZA moving forward. Let's now have a look at Q1. It contains several highlights. Firstly, so of course, in connection with the launch of HANZA 2028, we had a look at our financial targets, and the Board of Directors decided to raise them. So in '28, sales should reach at least SEK 14 billion and an operating margin of at least 9%. You can find a more detailed description of the goals on our website. But of course, we have been able to fulfill our previous goals, so we intend to do it this time as well. Secondly, we completed the BMK acquisition. This fantastic company you see up in the right corner, we are now in the integration phase. It's proceeding according to plan, and that should be expected. Acquisitions are one of HANZA's core competencies, so identifying the right companies, integrating them systematically and improving performance. And actually, the real work you do before the acquisition, we always do a full HR due diligence, so we check the company culture. And if you do that prework, then the integration will run smoothly. And also, it's really good. I've been spending time there. I've been acting Managing Director for this company actually also and spending a lot of time with customers. It's really, really nice. We get a great customer feedback. And not only that, we are increasing the order intake already. And you have seen that from previous acquisitions that the company inside HANZA many times offers -- gives a wider offer, and that increases the order intake. And that's also very important because order intake today is revenue tomorrow. And then, to the real highlight of the beginning of '26, we got 2 Supplier of the Year awards and -- from very important companies and customers, 3M and Saab. And this is, of course, a very good external validation of our model and our execution. I had the pleasure to visit Saab in April in Gothenburg and 3M earlier this year on a very memorable trip to Minneapolis. And then, finally, expansion in Sweden. At the last call, we talked about that we're just about to inaugurate a new factory in Sweden. And this shows how we then increase capacity to meet customer demand. And we also are ready to do tailor-made solution. In this case, among other things, we support Siemens Energy with the manufacturing solutions. And we see on this picture in the middle, that's from HANZA and Siemens and also our Defense Minister, Pal Jonson, who was attending the integration, and of course, really glad for that. It is important we've factories in Sweden. We need to increase our capacity. We have moved too much out of Sweden. But to sum up, first quarter had several highlights, but it's not about isolated events. Rather, it's about this consistent execution in line with our business plan. And now, for something new. For the first time, we are presenting our customer segments. We launched them at this CMD early this year. And here, you will see our customer segments illustrated by the development in the first quarter. And these segments also -- they also show the focus areas of HANZA. So they are quite important. You see that demand also is not concentrated. It is diversified across segments in a way that gives a good foundation for growth. And if we go through them one by one, [ we saw ] Electrification & Energy Systems. So strong demand, driven by power generation, power distribution. Of course, the data centers are booming. Defense & Security: this is -- so here, we have to separate a bit because in old HANZA before BMK, we were running about 10% on defense. We Defense & Security for customers, for example. In BMK, it was 0. So they have not been used to working with the defense industry. Now, we have launched a program. We have a program called LYNX, a special program for the defense industry. We have a pilot also in BMK. We have already secured the first orders from the defense industry. We have a very high hope that this will be a big part of BMK portfolio as well. Heavy Equipment: then we see mining, for instance, doing really well, and we have a positive order intake. Number 4 and 5, it should be separated like this that we are talking about industrial products, but in #4, it's primarily stand-alone equipment, whereas in item 5, we talk about integrated systems. So that's the split. In #4, just a stable demand. In #5, we had a really strong activity from some automation and material handling systems. That was a strong segment in Q1. Okay. So that's what we saw in terms of demand in the first quarter. And with that, I will hand it over to you, Lars.

Thank you, Erik. And I will start with sustainability and the main activities in Q1. And of course, the main activity was the CSRD report, the first time that it was also audited, and integration of BMK into the sustainability work. And that is then not only the climate part, it's also how we work with ethics, security, and mainly most important, how we work with our personnel. And to the right, you can see the KPIs that we believe are the most important for our business. And you can see that they are slightly down on energy use and hazard waste, and that is due to the acquisition also of BMK that will reduce the energy use and hazard waste going forward. Actually, BMK is not part of this yet. So we see a decrease in the sort of [ world ] business. And then, the accidents are on the same level as before. So, no major changes there. Of course, we want them to decrease even more. Looking into the financials, we see that we have doubled the net sales in HANZA in Q1 compared to Q1 a year ago and with an organic growth of 20%, leading to also operating margin for old HANZA for comparable units of 9.7% compared to 7.3% a year ago. So we see this trend of increased profitability, operating margin to continue. BMK, we said at the acquisition that they are on 7.3% in operating margin, and that's also what they came in with in Q1. And we see -- expect BMK to increase the margin over time, as we have seen with the previous acquisitions that we integrate them, and then after like a year or so, we definitely see a higher margin in the acquired companies. And for the group, including BMK, we came to an operating margin of 8.6%. And I also want to reflect on the old HANZA and the previous financial goals we had that we finalized in 2025 of SEK 6.5 billion with an 8% margin. We are now, in Q1, having a sales of SEK 1.8 billion. That's approximately SEK 7.3 billion on a running 12 months period with a margin of 9.7%. So we are definitely well above the financial targets that we are just ending. And looking into the balance sheet and the cash flow, we had a fantastic strong cash flow from operation of over SEK 400 million. And that is driven by this profitability, but also that we've been able to reduce the working capital. It was reduced with SEK 176 million compared to actually an increase in the Q1 last year of SEK 14 million. So, that has a big impact on the cash flow. And this also leads to that our net debt in correlation with EBITDA, and that is EBITDA including BMK for the time that they have not been part of the HANZA Group, of 1.4. And remember that we have not a financial goal, but what we said is that this KPI should not be higher than 2.5. So here, we have quite good headroom for -- continue to invest and also do acquisitions with the balance sheet as the base for the financing. We also see that the earnings per share increased in Q1 to SEK 2.08 compared to SEK 0.9 a year ago and SEK 1.6 in Q4. What is positive is also that we see that the acquisition of BMK, and BMK running at 7.3% is contributing to the increased earnings per share. If we look into the segments or the -- and remember that we have -- we'll change the reporting into the regions starting from Q1 next year. And the reason for not starting already now is that both BMK and Milectria are special projects during 2026 and will be included in the rest of the operation and into these 3 regions, North, Central and East, and starting to report this from Q1. But we see main markets have an organic growth of 11% and an EBIT margin of 8.3% and for comparable units, 9.4%. And this is where the main markets have been running for quite a while now in this good margins. We see segment other markets have a really strong organic growth, 34%, and that is approximately where we were in Q4, a little bit lower in Q4. But it's also showing a good profitability margin of 9.5%, and for comparable units, 10.7%. And that is continuous increase of the margin that we have seen -- for the last, I would say, more or less 2 years, we have seen this segment increasing the margin. But also maybe most important is to look into the total and the fact that we have been -- have a 20% organic growth. It is the total that is important, and where the growth come, that will change over time. And so, don't focus too much on the different segments. The main focus is HANZA in total. Looking into the shareholding, the big change in Q1 is, of course, that we acquired BMK with shares. So we have the 3 sellers, Knoferle, Baur and Muller, being included in the shareholder list now. We've also seen that the main owner, the largest shareholder and the Chairman and the CEO, they actually increased their ownership in Q1. And by that, I leave it over to you, Erik, and the summary.

Thank you, Lars. So to conclude, this was the strongest quarter yet, but still, we must view it in context. So HANZA's performance is not driven by single events but by this long-term perspective. And that's -- based on that, we have created our well-received concept and our structured execution, our disciplined acquisitions, and most of all, our strong company culture. And furthermore, and this is important, Q1 then marks the end of the strategy phase HANZA 2025, at the same time, the start of next phase then, HANZA 2028, but from a stronger platform than ever. So in conclusion, what has been built up now step by step, we are ready to scale further. HANZA 2028 is just around the corner and will be visible for all of you very soon. And with that, we are ready to take your questions.

[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from Anton Ingves from Nordea.

Congrats here on a very strong quarter. So starting off here on the 20% organic growth in the quarter, how much of this was volume-driven and how much was price?

I can start if you like to follow up on that, Lars. So, not so much price. The price increases come later. So more volume-driven is the simple answer. Lars, would you like to add something?

No, that's my view as well. We see discussions about price increases on components, and that will -- when that happens, if that happens, that will, of course, then drive the net sales as well. But so far in 2026, that's not the main driver, no.

Also important that we update our prices not every day or week, but monthly or quarterly, meaning that when aluminum, for instance, increases the price, it will take a little -- there's a lag between the price increase in and the price increase out, and then the same way -- the other way around, so meaning that it evens out.

Yes. Okay. Perfect. Very clear. And on the demand here, did you see any pickup towards the end of the quarter and sort of the momentum here going into Q2 and perhaps rest of 2026?

I think it's rather uncertain times. We all know the administration in the U.S. coming with surprises now and then. I think that there is a concern with many customers how the year will end, and that's why we have our strategy. We cannot base our strategy on hope of an increased economy, but rather on secure areas. So for instance, we talked about defense that is rather solid with or without a strong economy, and we have other areas as well. What we do now is, we are working in Germany with outsourcing. They are well behind the Nordic countries when it comes to that, and that's something that is also increasing if the economy is worse. I wouldn't say that I see neither up nor down at the end of this quarter, but you must be prepared and you must make sure that you have a plan to continue to grow if the economy would be worse.

Okay. Perfect. And then, moving on to BMK here. You say that the margin is some 7.3% here in the quarter. And you obviously say that you expect this level to rise going forward. But looking at the full year for 2026 here, can you give any guidance on what your expectation is here? And perhaps looking even further out, do you see BMK coming up towards the target of 9% on group level as well?

Well, we cannot give that kind of forecast. What we can say is that we have had a good track record of the companies we have acquired to increase the margin, and it's very much depending on the economy. We saw, for instance, when we bought Orbit One, that was at the same time as the recession. So it took 1 or 2 years to get that margin up to HANZA's [indiscernible] that if the economy is stronger, it will take shorter time. But either way, we will get the margin up to the group level. We cannot give a forecast, though.

Okay. And perhaps a final one for me here, if I may. I know you, Erik, have been down quite a lot here in Germany and working closely with BMK. Sort of what -- have your impressions changed compared to before the acquisition and also compared to the CMD of both the growth opportunities and perhaps the integration here going forward?

Yes, I spent time because there was a gap between the sellers. One of the sellers was the CEO and he retired, and then we have a new MD coming in at half year. So I've been acting Managing Director of BMK. So I've been following this very closely. And have my opinion changed? Yes, I thought it was a good company, but now I see it's a great company. The skills of this company, that's fantastic. And it's also nice to be very close to the customers and be on customer visits because what you see and what we have stated is that we already see an order intake from both the existing base and new leads, meaning that the theory works that a company inside HANZA would gain more orders than stand-alone. We can widen simply the scope for these customers and get more. On top of that, it becomes a more interesting partner so we can also address new areas. That's why we can bring in new customers. If that was an answer to your question.

The next question comes from Thomas Blikstad from Pareto Securities.

Congratulations on a really strong quarter yet again. Just quickly to follow up on the BMK order here in defense side. Could you give some color on what kind of program or subsegment of defense it was and if it was a prototype order or a larger order? Or any color would be very helpful.

Sorry, did you mean the entry orders from BMK or in the group?

BMK.

BMK. We cannot reveal details, especially not about defense. It's highly classified. But -- I cannot give you any details. I can just tell you that we have the first contracts now, which I think is a record speed, given the few months we've been in this company.

That's fair enough. And on the organic growth side, could you give some sort of view on how much was driven by RVM volumes and rollout of these systems, and if so, the sustainability of this growth going forward?

We don't give that kind of details. I'll try to give you an overview of the segments, and we do see that we are in a lucky position. Being a contract manufacturer is all about the customer base. We don't have -- we believe to be a pure contract manufacturer. If we would have our own products, then we would compete with our customers about the manufacturing resources. On the other hand, it means that we cannot have a sale or something, we cannot increase our revenue in other way than that our customers are growing. And that's why it's been so important to build this customer base. And I think, again, we are in a sweet spot when we see mining, electricity companies, server halls and a lot of companies growing at the same time. And we have to work with everybody. So we try to avoid automotive and telecom and more going to agriculture, forestry and things that we believe will be there forever. But again, we cannot give you more details than that unless Lars is ready to open up.

That's good. Okay. Good. And then, just on the main versus other markets, if we look at the underlying digits, it was largely the same dynamic as we saw in Q4. I was just wondering if there's any sort of specific drivers behind this and if it's still a, let's say, temporary effect such as Q4 was?

If you go back, I think, 2, 3 years, we got the opposite question, why are other markets not showing the same margin as main markets? When will it pick up? And we said that there's no real reason for main markets to have higher margins than other markets. It's a matter of how mature the market is and the development of those clusters. And what we have seen since that is that more or less, for every quarter, the margin in other markets have picked up and are now slightly higher than main markets. And so, now, we are where we said we would be a couple of years ago. So, no, it's not -- I cannot give you a forecast, but we do not see it as temporary. We see that going forward, the different segments shall be on more or less the same level in profitability, of course, moving up and down a little bit between the quarters. But there's no reasons to see that one of the segments will be more profitable than the others. And then, we will move into regions, which hopefully will give a better view on where we are in different margins in HANZA.

Okay. That's great. And just lastly, I understand that this was the last quarter with Leden M&A growth. I was just wondering if you could give some detail on the margin development and execution here in this quarter?

Before you do that, Erik, just to be clear, Leden was entered into HANZA in March -- beginning of March 2025. So, in this quarter, it's part of the organic growth for 1 month.

Okay, 1 month. And the integration process, has it developed according to plan, the margin side?

If you're looking at Leden now?

Yes.

Yes. So yes, and I think a sign of that was that we announced that we are buying a new building adjacent to the main Leden building. We announced it in last quarter last year, I think. So, of course, there's always new things to do. And I think you remember maybe that we are under strain because the customer intake that we got -- the order intake we got when we acquired the company was quite awesome. But yes, that's integrated, and we have good management in place. We have a good correlation between the different sites and the different clusters.

The next question comes from Jakob Soderblom from Carnegie Investment Bank.

Yes. Can you hear me?

Yes.

Perfect. I have -- [ if we can ] start talking a bit about the cash flow. I guess, [indiscernible] it was super impressive actually in the quarter. And just the question, is there any factors here that you could have included for BMK onto some type of factoring program? Or should we completely remove that type of assumption? Just speaking of the impressive organic growth, but also the working capital release in the quarter.

Can I start now? I think you're eager to explain this, but maybe just a few words for me first, if that's okay.

Sure.

So cash flow, we have had cash flow as our priority since we started the company. We are the fastest-growing contract manufacturers, and cash flow is the fuel. That's what we need in order to make this work, and that's the focus area. And cash flow is driven by 2 things. One is the good results of the company and secondly is the discipline regarding the working capital. And then, we have a model, and that's why I say that our CFO has [indiscernible] in working capital because we have a model where we can handle the supplier credits, the implant of [indiscernible] inside our building with the factoring solution, with a number of things which makes a release of the working capital. What was also said was that when we acquire a company normally, we apply these new principles on the company, meaning effect on the cash flow. So we saw a wave of cash flow after Orbit One. We saw a wave of cash flow after Leden. And we also see a wave of cash flow from BMK. And that makes us what you analysts would call a compounder that we are able to free capital and then use that for next acquisition. So it's also very good for our coming growth. That was it. Lars, over to you.

Okay. Thank you, Erik. And Jakob, we are working, and that's no secret. We are working with off-balance factoring in HANZA Group. And -- but that's not the main driver of this SEK 400 million-plus in cash flow from operations in Q1. That is, of course, the profitability, but also the decrease of working capital, and that is excluding the effect on factoring.

Yes, that makes sense. Just another question then. If you just -- I mean, you don't like to give any sort of forecast and guidance going ahead. But could you remind us perhaps how it was during 2022, '23, where you also had higher input costs, for instance, related to aluminum or sheet metal and so on? How much -- do you have any quantified level of how much that actually impacted, say, gross margins when you had this pass-through revenue based on this where you basically can't take any margin? Could you just -- do you have any numbers related to that so you can have some sort of indication for what it could look like in the quarters ahead?

Short answer is no, I think. I can give you some color because when that happens, we all remember the post-pandemic price shock. We have the contract in such a way that we can both ask for prepayments, again, something supporting cash flow, and we can adjust the prices to our customers. So we were quite unharmed about that situation. We have quite good -- we have open books. We work in transparency with our customers. We just want to safeguard our margin, and then we need to put the cost on the customer. We work on the same side of the table. We both want the products to be cheaper, but we must safeguard our margin.

[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from Oliver Uusitalo from Aktiespararna.

I just have a few questions from my end. First of all, this 20% organic growth, are there any one-offs? Perhaps you already answered this, I'm not sure. But is there anything special here that you think that we need to be aware of? Or should we rather see this as a normal organic growth going forward?

Yes. I can start, and maybe Lars will add. But there is no normal organic growth, but what we state is that we're going to reach our financial targets, and that we will do. And then, of course, the organic growth fluctuates over the quarters and over the year. And we have always said that in the -- when the economy is weaker, we take new market shares. And when the economy is stronger, then we grow with the market shares. We also have a model for creating growth in strong and weak economies. But you cannot say that we don't have a standard growth that will be applicable in all the quarters and all the years. Lars, would you like to add on that?

No. That is -- and again, coming back to what I said a couple of minutes ago that Leden will, from beginning of March, be included in also the historic figures, so will be part of the organic growth as well. And that, of course, has an impact on the size of old HANZA, so to say, what we are comparing to.

Right. And a short question as well regarding the one-offs on the cost side. These are fairly low in Q1, and perhaps that's a result of the integration with BMK being in early stages. Do you see these numbers pick up in Q2, Q3?

You want to start, Erik? Or shall I?

Yes, I leave to you, Lars.

Okay. What we have said is that we will integrate BMK, of course, and it will most likely lead to cost for integration to actually get the synergies out the way we want. And the size and the timing of that, we haven't revealed, but we are working with the integration. And I think you can sort of expect some integration costs in order, again, to reach the synergies that we want with BMK.

Okay. Great. And then, I have one last question as well regarding -- you had some sort of growth outlook for BMK in the report. And I was wondering if you can elaborate a bit on that. Are you saying that you expect BMK to grow above the SEK 3.3 billion for 2026? Or are you saying that the company may return to growth in late 2026, meaning that the growth is actually negative in this quarter? Can you help me understand this?

So what we can see from the first quarter is that it's flat, that BMK is in the same size and profitability as we announced when we acquired it. And what we're stating now is that we see that our model is working, meaning that we do get new orders to BMK and that will drive the growth. And they have been flat -- or say, they will be flat than last year in this year. It takes some time between orders turns into revenue, but it should be visible something at the end of the year. That's what we're saying. So I don't expect the full year to be a huge increase, but we should see the increase by the end of the year. Was that a fair answer?

Yes. Yes, I think so. It will be really exciting to follow this.

And even more exciting if you come and visit BMK in real life. It's fantastic.

Yes, of course.

There are no more questions at this time. So I hand the conference back to the speakers for any closing comments.

Okay. So, as there are no more questions, we will conclude today's presentation. And to summarize the key message, today, we have not reported an outcome, we have demonstrated our model. So thank you very much for your attention, and we really appreciate your interest in HANZA and wish you a good day.