Nilörngruppen AB (publ) (NILB) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

This morning, we made it 8:30. The reason is that we will make presentation internally as well. So we want to catch up also all staff and so on. And we have staff around the group, as you know, in Asia. So we want to do that. So everyone in the Nilörngruppen can also join the presentation. So that's -- we thought that good to have the presentation to the stock market before the stock markets opened, and then also be able to inform all the staff what's going on. We have some interesting news. We think here with the cooperation with Worldfavor, et cetera. As usual, Maria Fogelstrom joined me in the presentation. So any tricky questions and so on that might come up, she will help me out with that. And what you see in the background, the Nilörn is our new logo that was launched here in January -- in the group. Well received, I must say, both from the client and within the group and so on. It's -- yes, and also for -- we updated all the booths and so on for our fairs and so on. So that's been well received. So that's good. I also want to mention that this presentation will be recorded. So now to the presentation. Yes. Our slogan, adding value to your brand; and our vision, we believe in adding value to your brand. And I will start first with the financial presentation of financial performance in the Q4, and then going over to more what we are doing within the group, especially to what we call Nilörn:CONNECT and the things around that. The order income in the Q4 was quite okay, plus 12%. That has been a trend shift versus the first 3 quarters in the year. And the comparison numbers from 2022 has been tough in the first 3 quarters where we had good growth and also an operating margin of 16%. Q4 was -- 2022 was a little bit weaker. So it's good to see that the order income comes up now. I mentioned earlier that there have been a hangover in the outdoor and sports brands in the 2023. From the pandemic, we had a fantastic development during the pandemic, especially for the outdoor brands and the sports brands. And we see now that they start to slowly come back. It's too early to say that yet. But I think in 2024, we will see recovery on those. Sales increased by 3%. Also, we have seen a big currency effect in the previous quarter. This quarter, it was not much currency effect versus last year. So that's now -- yes, the Swedish krona has strengthened again. We have seen still a strong development in the -- sorry, in the luxury brands, especially in France and Italy. And yes, we found something there, we think. So it's good momentum in that. We also see the trends where sales moving out from China and Hong Kong. That is a trend that continues. China and Hong Kong is still the biggest and will still remain the biggest for quite some time. But we see the volume moves out. We're starting up now in Vietnam and where we need to follow the clients out to -- especially also the outdoor brands into the Vietnam and workwear brands. But we also see the trend shift to Bangladesh, Pakistan and Portugal. We still see some suffering in Turkey due to the high inflation. The operating profit was SEK 9 million versus SEK 14 million last year. And then we had some currency effect negative this year and positive last year that had made some quite impact on the operating profit that is related to -- mainly related to Turkey where the big inflation and the currency. Looking at the accumulated numbers, we see the order income was weak and that was especially in the previous quarters. And we see that the sales -- we had, as I mentioned earlier, quite big impact of the currency effect. So that has come -- the Swedish krona, as you all know, that is slightly stronger again. Operating profit of SEK 63 million versus SEK 136 million last year. So that gives an operating margin of 7.2%. The goal set by the Board used to have an operating margin between 10% to 12%. Coming back to that a little bit later in the presentation. Here you can see, as I mentioned, has some currency effect in the sales -- and yes, slightly higher cost and an operating margin of SEK 63 million. The tax effect here is 25%. That was we had estimated as well before. And this is a reflection of the different countries where we're operating in -- where we have quite a big difference in the tax rate, depending on where the profit comes from, like in Bangladesh and other countries where we have slightly different tax rate versus Hong Kong and so on. So it's a mixture of depending on where we make the money. There is also an effect here in the external cost of the acquisition of Bally Labels, the Swiss company. From last year that has not so much impact on the operating profit, but have been a mixture where the gross margin increased and also the cost increase. So it's a movement between the lines here, but the net effect of the operating profit has not been that much. We've taken some costs last year for staff and so on, but which made some changes. The quarterly income, operating margin here, we look at that quarter-by-quarter. As you can see, historically, before the pandemic and like 10, 15 years before that, the operating margin has been between 9% to 12% variation between there. Then we had the pandemic where we ended up with an operating margin of -- you can see here at the beginning of 2022 was about 16%, 16.6%, 16.7%. And then in Q4, last year, there was a drop. And that was, as I mentioned in the past, especially the outdoor brands, a hangover from the pandemic where they have ended up in too much of end stock. And that we still see that now. We still see slow development from these outdoor brands. But we think -- and what we heard in the market that they will come back in Q2, Q3 this year or listen to what they're saying. Quarterly comparison on sales. Normally, we used to say that Q4 and Q3 used to be -- sorry, Q2 and Q4 used to be the strongest quarter. That trend has shifted now. So we also see it's very more smooth all through the years. But you can also see here that the Q ended 2022 and 2021 was extremely strong numbers. But of course, we're aiming for going back there. The balance sheet, we have had a goal to reduce the inventory. We ended up with quite much inventory during the pandemic here, and the goal has been to decrease by SEK 50 million. We're now targeting SEK 46 million. So we are almost there, also taking some currency effects into consideration. Equity level, we have a strong balance sheet still. Here, we have paying out a dividend, [ in fact ] SEK 57 million, but we also have a negative currency effect as we have subsidiaries outside -- in countries where we translate it into Swedish krona have lost SEK 19 million. And we still have quite some cash and we also have some bank loans. And why we're not amortizing this cash -- the bank loan with this cash is that we have cash in countries like Bangladesh, where we want now to invest. I come back to that later. We're looking for a quite big factory in Bangladesh. That's proven to be a key of our success to have the local production in Bangladesh where our clients can trust us in a sustainable production. And for us to take out the cash in Bangladesh would cost some tax -- quite some tax money. And as we intend now to invest quite soon in Bangladesh, we think it's better to keep the cash stand there. Key financial indicators, but not to mention all of these. We'll not go through all of these. We have now almost 600 employees in the group. In Borås, where we are sitting here in Sweden, we are 45 people. And here, we have the sales office for the Swedish and Norway and Finland operation. But we also have the head office, and the head office consists of the design, center design, central IT, central retail information services, that is the IT connected to the client where we connect our system with the clients, and we have central finance as well. So we have central functions and even though -- so what I want to say with that, we are very an international company. We're not huge, but we are -- we have in 18 countries, employees and so on. So we are small in Sweden, but we're international. That is also a reflection of the effect that we see in the currency. Split by product groups. If you compare '22 with '23, you can see that we have increased, especially in the packaging, going from 13% to 18% of the total turnover and the labeling has decreased slightly. And that is in line what we -- our goal is to increase adding on sales to our existing clients by adding on more and more product groups. And you're looking at the sales in 2022 was SEK 943 million, and now at SEK 866 million, where you can see the decrease of the labels where we have the biggest market share and still have the biggest market share, of course, then have the biggest impact on the decrease. But you can see also a decrease in packaging. Summary of the CEO comments in the annual report here is that the organic growth is back, even though it's only 3%, we are very glad that we now can see a trend shift and also more positive when talking to the clients. It's too early to say about the outdoor and stock because we don't see a clearly shift here. We think once they -- but talking to the client, they think they will come out here in Q2, Q3 to be normalized, then we will also see a further shift in the stock, I would expect here because we still have some stock for these brands. As I mentioned, we see positive development in the luxury segment, Italy and France, and we have a momentum here. And I think we can see more of that in the future. And especially in Scandinavian, U.K. and Germany, where we have the outdoor brands that we have seen a weaker development. As I mentioned, volumes moving up from China, Hong Kong with the benefit from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Portugal. And now when we're starting up Vietnam, we will move even more from our operation in Hong Kong to Vietnam. Today or in the past, we have been supplying Vietnam from Hong Kong. So that will be even more now in -- moving that client basis from Hong Kong into Vietnam. Turkey is a weak market, and we will see what happens here. We also know, in general, the whole textile market suffers here in Turkey due to the weak currency and high inflation and high cost. The establishment in Vietnam goes according to plan. We have a management of employed and so on. So that is just starting now. We decreased stock level, as I mentioned. We will invest in new production capacity, both in Vietnam, in Pakistan -- sorry, in Bangladesh and in Portugal. And we will continue to invest in Nilörn:CONNECT. Nilörn:CONNECT is -- I'm coming back to that slide later here. That does also mean due to manage all these investments that we're doing, offensive investment, the dividend has -- the Board has proposed to decrease the dividend to the Annual Shareholders' Meeting. We have a strong balance sheet. So we are well equipped to handle both challenges, opportunities in the market, and we see more and more activities. It has been in the previous quarter, very tough to even get a meeting with the client, but we see that now it's more -- clients is much more active. And as we released yesterday, Nilörn's entered into a strategic partnership with Worldfavor. Worldfavor is a renowned company within empowering of sustainable data. So what they're doing, they're helping their clients to connect data and fulfilling the journey towards the digital product passport. So that is a sustainable platform, enables organizations to access and share the data. And as you know, there's a lot of legislation coming from EU. And so that will be part of that. They have 3 main legs, textile apparel, food and beverage, and pharma and health care, and we will work with them in the textile apparel area, where we will represent them. Well, I mentioned this in the last time I had the presentation of Nilörn:CONNECT, where we're now going into more and more, also supporting our clients and helping them in their journey towards a digital product passport and the circular economy, and also meeting the demand from the European legislation. And there is what in the EU is the EU Green Deal set by the net zero emission greenhouse gases by 2050. And then there's surplus collaborations. And then the digital product task force is a structured way of processing this data and supplying the data where we will be part of this. And we have -- now our Nilörn:CONNECT is where we scan the QR codes. We -- our clients, they have this variable data label with us. And we add on a QR code. And in this QR code, they -- when the end consumer scan it, we could provide information about the global footprint, about the garment and recycling and so on for the end consumers. And Nilörn has quite good view -- thing here. And also that's why the connection with Worldfavor is so good is that they have the system where they can help the end consumers, and we will connect our systems together. So we have our Nilörn:CONNECT and we have Worldfavor. And together, we will connect the systems. So our client can connect in Nilörn:CONNECT and they will also get linked into the Worldfavor, and helping us to manage the ESG data and doing what they have demand to do is the supply chain mapping and so on. So by the cooperation with Worldfavor, Nilörn:CONNECT take a quite a big step forward for us to be a more complete solution in this area. Instead of doing this -- develop this system ourselves, we think this is a much better way because we get someone that is really professional in this area, and we can focus in on the labeling. And together, we will be strong in this. So I think this is a positive. And this is supposed to be launched now during the spring time here, and we will build together the systems and so on. So by this cooperation, Nilörn:CONNECT will be much more complete and a more attractive offer towards our clients. This is not a new area. This is an additional to our labeling and also for our client and for us to be a more complete supplier towards them and giving them a more wide product range. I mentioned earlier that our financial target is to have a growth of excess 7% and operating margin of between 10% to 12%. And last year, we were a little bit behind that. But we are looking forward to the new year, and the goal is still the same with the growth and so on. Yes, that was a presentation from my side and see if we have any questions here.

Actually, we haven't received any questions. And as we are out of time now, that might be a good thing this time.

Okay. Very good. Thank you very much for listening. And don't hesitate to come back if you have any questions or if you want to have some more clarifications on, and we will try to help you out with that. Looking forward to an exciting 2024. Thank you. Bye.

Thank you.