Good afternoon, and welcome to our presentation for the second quarter, 2023. I hope you all can see the presentation in front of you on the screen. I am Mats Johansson, and I will start to present the Q2 report and overall level, and then I will let Philip Carlsson, our CFO, to go a bit deeper into the numbers. In the end, I will conclude, and then we will have a Q&A. Next slide, please. Let me briefly start by giving a short overview of Assemblin for those of you who are new to the company. We are a leading provider of smart and sustainable technical installation and service solutions with presence in Sweden, Norway, and Finland. We are more than 7,000 employees, more than 20,000 clients, 3,000 ongoing projects, and more than 100,000 service assignments on a yearly basis in more than 100 locations, meaning that this is a business of a lot of diversification. If you look on our numbers, on the LTM basis, the business consists of 42% service and 58% projects, where the majority is smaller projects. We are organized in five business areas, and 70% of our business is in Sweden, 15% in Norway, and 15% in Finland. We believe we differentiate ourselves as the leading provider for smart building tech solutions. We also are focusing on technical competence over and above geographies and contract types. Thirdly, a strong entrepreneurial but disciplined culture, focusing on profitability before volume makes us different, we believe. You can see here also the LTM Q2 numbers in terms of revenue. Net sales, SEK 14.4 billion, an EBITDA margin of 7%, and a cash conversion of 72%. On top of that, we have a strong and solid order backlog of SEK 9.6 billion. I will say that, after a strong profitability journey that started in 2016, when EBITDA was 2.6%, we reached the 7% level Q3 2021, and have thereafter had eight consecutive quarters with an LTM EBITDA of 7% or better. At the same time, top line has increased with 43%. I'm of course, super proud about this, showing stability and predictability on a high level compared to the overall industry, but of course, not at all satisfied as we are aiming higher. It feels extremely good that we and Triton the last six months, have been able to establish a new fund ownership with primarily new investors, and in connection to this, we have secured a new long-term financing of the group all the way to 2029. This is a great foundation for us to be able to succeed with our long-term targets for the new phase of our journey and to become best in class. Let us remind ourselves about our long-term targets. You can see the long-term targets here on this slide, achieving more than an adjusted EBITDA margin of 8%, a net sales or a growth above 8%, and you see also the cash conversion and a sustainability target here that push us towards climate neutrality. A high impact action for us for the climate neutrality target here is really in relation to how we conduct our business, and in then, specifically, I think, is our big car fleet, which we now have for real, has started to rearrange towards electrification. Next slide, please. If I then move over to the key highlights for the quarter, we have sum up the quarter with increased order intake and long-term financing secured. Compared to Q2 2022, we decreased our adjusted EBITDA margin from 7.1% to 6.8% in the quarter. Also looking year to date, meaning Q1 and Q2 together, we increased it with 0.3%. When it comes to growth, we had a more decent growth with 8%, which is aligned with our long-term target, and I do not see that it should be read anything in relation to the decreased profitability in the quarter. We have our solid Swedish and Norwegian business could differ a little bit from quarter to quarter in relation to performance of certain branches and projects, so I'm overall satisfied with their performance. Of course, specifically electrical in Sweden. I am disappointed about that part of our Finnish business turnaround takes a bit longer time compared to what we expected, but I'm at the same time confident that we will succeed with it. I will let Philip here present business areas in more detail later. Our order intake is strong during this quarter, especially seeing the light of that it only consists of smaller and medium-sized projects. It increases with 16.5% compared to Q2 2022. With expectant from private finance, new build, residential, and commercial, the market is good. With continued activity level, even if we compared, even if the competition in the market has increased, I would say. We can also see that for many clients, decision takes a little bit longer time than it did for a, for a quarter or two ago. It's more important than ever to be close to the local markets, the clients, and react towards market decline in demand, if and when it will happening. If you look at cash flow, we had a seasonally normal cash flow conversion that was stronger than Q2 2022, but LTM is lower than our long-term target, mostly due to higher net working capital. Let's see if we comment this later in the presentation. If we talk about acquisitions, we did three acquisitions during the quarter and one divestment, but let me come back to these two. If I move over to some more comments about the market situation, I can say that despite the economic slowdown, the installation market remains strong in the Nordic region, although the signals are mixed. While privately financed new residential construction has more or less been stopped, we are experiencing stable high demand from public sector and industrial customers, as well as increased demand, for example, for security technology and solutions for intelligent buildings, where we are very well positioned. We experience high interest in green technologies and energy improvements, but in a shorter perspective, we have seen that decision takes longer time due to the interest rates increase than lower energy pricing. We expect this short-term hesitation to disappear soon. To overall sum up the quarter, continued but more normalized growth, increased results, but slightly weaker profitability, three acquisitions and one divestment, high order intake and a solid backlog, a stable demand despite mixed market signals. I think we are very well positioned for future opportunities, both in connection to business scope and also now structurally with our new financing set in place. Next slide, please. If I look a little bit deeper into the growth and profitability numbers for Q2, we can see that the net sales improvement of 8% were 2.3% organic and 4.7% acquired, and on top of that, we had a currency effect that gives us another 1%. If we continue with the profitability, as said here before, we slightly decreased our adjusted margin to 6.8% compared to 7.10% in the same quarter, 2022. If I then look at the next slide for moving over and the order intake and order backlog, we had a high order intake in the quarter of almost SEK 4 billion, which is 16.5% higher than Q2. It's strong from the fact that the quarter's order intake only consists of small and medium-sized projects, and I'm very satisfied with that. I think a very strong diversified order book would support our development going forward, even if now our overall order book declines slightly. Next slide. Moving over to acquisitions and divestments. As you can see here, there are acquisitions we have done during Q1, Q2, and Q3 so far. Totally nine acquisitions with a net sales of contributing of more than SEK 670 million. We also divested a small manufacturing unit for ventilation ducts that is not long-term core business for us. These acquisitions are all very aligned with our strategy, and I would like to welcome all these companies and their staff to Assemblin Group. Always in this, you can go to the next slide here. We try to highlight something each quarter that helping us pushing the future agenda. We talked previously about customer solutions, efficiency tools, new sectors, and exciting projects. This time, I wanted to highlight the Swedish market solution for optimizing heating and water. We have a unit within heating and sanitation in Sweden that with cutting-edge expertise in adjusting and optimizing heating, cooling, and tap water system, where we have in-house designers, energy technicians, work supervisors, product managers, and energy engineers. This solution is primarily offered to property owners, also who has geographically dispersed property portfolio, as well to housing cooperatives. Create these intelligent energy optimization solutions for heating a water system to drive energy savings, lower operating costs, as well as improve the environment for the tenants, and on top of that, reducing carbon footprint. This is something that I am super excited about. I think with that, let's move over to numbers again and take a little bit deeper look into the performance of our five business areas. Over to you, Philip. Thank you, Mats. Looking closer at the development of our business areas, starting as usual with Sweden. Compared to previous quarters, we've seen a normalization of organic growth in Sweden, especially compared to the equivalent quarter last year, which was enhanced by material inflation that has now slowed, as well as that we're using somewhat less subcontractors on some projects. Still overall, positive growth, even the margins increasing overall in Sweden, especially electrical being the standout this quarter, partly offset by smaller decreases in HNS and ventilation. Looking at the order intake, increasing with the more mid-sized projects in this quarter compared to the equivalent quarter in Q2 2022. As Mats said, no larger SEK 100+ million orders in the order intake this quarter, and the order book remains at similar levels as in 2022. Moving on to Norway. Norway shows growth, driven largely by organic expansion as well as strong order intake, but margins are a bit lower than normal this quarter, due to a variety of factors for this specific quarter, but we really see Norway remaining as our most profitable business area on a full year basis. Looking at Finland as well, showing organic growth combined with positive FX translation effects, but order intake is decreasing there as opposed to the overall trend in the business, since we are downsizing certain operations, which is offsetting growth in the stronger green tech segments. EBITDA is improving as we kind of move to a more normalized delivery situation. The restructuring of certain units is ongoing and is offsetting some of the positive margin momentum we are seeing in Finland. A bit more work to do there, as Mats was saying. Moving along to the report mandated in our offering memorandum for the bonds issued 2019. Again, please note that these bonds have been redeemed here in July. We will be changing our reporting in our Q3 report, aligning to the new bonds issued by our new parent company. The EBITDA that we have used to track net leverage has contained certain adjustments that we've summarized in this bridge. The first adjustment is a negative SEK 148 million, relating to IFRS 16 accounting. However, we won't be doing this going forward, as we will be moving to using IFRS 16 EBITDA in our Q3 reports. Normally we would have an adjustment for items affecting comparability. However, for the LTM period, positive and negative items actually cancel each other out, so the net is zero for the period. This brings us to SEK 1.122 billion in adjusted EBITDA, and then we further adjust that with the pro forma effect of all acquisitions made up until the 30th of June 2023, adding an additional SEK 62 million, and excluding all acquisitions made after this date. Looking back a couple of slides, where Mats was presenting the acquisition in the Stockholm area, made in electrical here in July, is not included in that figure. Based on these adjustments, we arrive at a pro forma EBITDA of SEK 1,184 million. Again, please note that this is lower than the EBITDA we will be reporting in Q3 and thereafter, since we will stop adjusting for the IFRS 16 effect and effectively move into IFRS 16 accounting. Moving on to the next slide, LTM cash conversion has increased from 67% in Q1 to 72% now, with the Q2 2023 being somewhat better than Q2 2022. We're still below our target of 100%, due to the working capital buildup we experienced in the latter half of 2022, especially. We're continuing our efforts to improve working capital, but we've also seen structural headwinds as some of our more capital-intensive businesses within green tech and service are showing strong growth, and we remain generally cautious in reducing our buffer inventories because we don't want to risk any production momentum. As I assume almost everyone on this call knows, we've redeemed our outstanding bonds in July and reset our financing commitments to our new parent company, providing us with a strong liquidity position and an unutilized credit lines of now SEK 1.1 billion and long-term financing to 2029. I know that several of you listening in on this call participated in this process, and I'd just like to take the opportunity to thank you for your participation and continued support of our journey. All in all, an increased order intake and long-term financing secured. Back to you, Mats. Thank you, Philip. I wanted to conclude the quarter here. As you know, we put the headline of this report on increased order intake and the long-term financing secured. If I sum it up again, continued, but I will say more normalized growth, still in line with our long-term targets. Increased results, but a slightly weaker profitability, as we talked about in some of our business areas. We have done three acquisitions during the quarter and one divestment, but so far during Q1, Q2, and Q3, we have done nine acquisitions and close to what we think we should do on a yearly basis. We have a lot of good stuff in the pipeline and are going to continue for pushing to find the right type of companies. To acquire. I think that's the part that I'm most proud about in this quarter, is the high order intake in connection to we talked about smaller and medium-sized projects, and the solid order backlog that we have. We see stable demand in the market, even despite mixed market signals connected to certain segments that we talked about. I think we are very well positioned for the future, both in connecting to, the whole, energy efficiency, electrification, and all the big drivers that we will see that comes into reality now. At the same time, as both Philip and I talked about here, the foundation, being now on a new journey, in a new Triton fund and, with a new, long-term financing in place. I think, and I said a couple of times here, it is more important than ever to stay close to our local markets and its clients to address changing market demand conditions and, if necessary, adapt our operations accordingly. That's the way we work, right? So far, good demand in the market, apart from certain market segments. With that, I think we. Let's open up for questions. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, if you do wish to ask an audio question, please press star 11 on your telephone keypad. You can also submit your question in the Q&A box on the web. There will be a brief pause while questions are being registered. We're going over to our first question. Our first question comes from Andreas Dahl Jensen from Capital Four. Please go ahead. Hi, and thanks for taking my question, and thanks for the presentation. Could you just remind us as new investors about the restructuring in Finland, what the situation is, what steps are required, and why it is taking longer than expected? Yes. Right. Mats, I'll take a crack at some of the financials. Yep You can talk a bit about sort of the operational overview. Is that fine? Yes. Sounds good. Great. Hi, Andreas. Well, the background is essentially our legacy installation business in Finland that we've owned for quite some time, that has been difficult to sort of have ever get strong profitability in, and where we've had especially big problems during towards the end of 2022, and decided to simply restructure to sort of downsize that business very, very significantly. In, as part of that, we end up with a project portfolio that we need to then run off, in an environment where we're not really taking new projects of any kind of that kind of size, which has proven to be a bit more challenging than what we saw in Q4 of 2022. We are progressing that well now, we think, but we would have obviously liked to see that restructuring, come through faster. I'd just like to add as well, that this is, we're taking the cost for this through our ordinary P&L, so there are no restructuring charges within items affecting comparability. So it is all affecting kind of our regular EBITDA, to our annoyance. Mats? Yeah, I think just adding to that, Philip, no, it's absolutely a good way of explaining it. I think that, again, it's part of the, of the business we have in Finland. There are projects that are phasing out later this year that we are still struggling with. As you might remember from the other process of how we described also that all of this is due to, like, a change of strategy in Finland, where we acquired some more, I would say, more progressive, future-oriented companies like Fidelix into the whole smart building segment, and also a bigger company, Tom Allen Senera, who is in the energy efficiency business, and these companies are doing really good. It's a limited part of the Finnish business, but it's still very disappointing that we can't really, do that, turnaround. We feel comfortable that it will happening here, and it's just a question of time, where most of the projects are phasing out in the end of this year. Okay. The background for the problems is it then fair to assume that it, you know, you took on potentially larger projects that have had cost overruns, or how should we? Yeah. Those are the ones being phased out? Exactly. I think that. Yeah. Go ahead, Philip. Yeah. Yeah. Okay that's exactly right. We had a larger project business that we've had kind of struggled to make more than, say, 1%-2% margins on, that took on projects in actually in 2021, that we then ended up sort of seeing sort of this isn't this is actually doing even worse than the previously sort of weak-ish performance. We've then taken steps to sort of exit this business altogether. That's the sort of the restructuring that we're going through now, which is obviously painful, but will build our long-term margins, and instead sort of pivot towards the service and green tech businesses that we've developed and acquired in Finland. That's very helpful. Do you have a target for what sort of margins you hope to achieve and the timeline for that? Or is it still very much up in the air? We definitely see Finland being sort of, a contributor to group margins, to put it that way. We would want to see that happen over the course of the next couple of years, but we're going to be cautious in how quickly we think that might play out, but it's definitely, we want to make sure that we dot all, cross all the T's and dot all the I's and so forth. There's a lot more long-term potential in Finland than what's currently coming through the figures. It will be obviously to the price of lower volumes, because we'll simply be getting rid of these loss-making volumes, which will obviously be impacting organic growth in Finland over the next 12 months. Yeah. Okay. Do you still envision there will be a lot of restructuring costs going through the P&L, or is it mostly over? You could have some more here in Q3. I don't think we're all the way through yet. It's a controlled situation, but it's still going to be weighing on us. Even when coming through, then we will have production on projects written down to effectively zero, which will be a drag on margins for a few quarters to come here, inevitably. Yeah. Okay, great. Maybe just as my last question, as you noted that the margins in Norway had also dropped down a little bit, and you mentioned those as temporary. Could you just point to what are the main drivers and why they're considered temporary? I guess it's across a different things in a number of different units have kind of conspired against us to give us a bit of a negative perfect storm in this specific quarter. Looking at it's nothing that means that we think that Norway would be on a full year basis, achieving significantly lower margins. It's not really a one factor explanation, it's very sort of specific to a number of different branches, which is why we kind of had to give a sort of a more overarching type of answer to that one. Okay. That was it for me. Thanks for answering my questions. We're now going over to our next question. Our next question comes from David Alty from Arcano. Please go ahead, sir. Hi there. Thanks for the call. If I look at the Q2 like for like EBITA growth, it looks to me like it might have been flat or slightly negative, maybe. I'm just wondering if you can talk through that, how much of that is because of Finland, how much is general slowdown across the Nordic markets? My second question is, if I look at your number of employees in your ventilation business, it seems to have decreased. I'm just wondering is that Finland ventilation business, or is that something that you're doing on a wider scale throughout the business, maybe to reflect the new operating environment? I guess, We'll take the ventilation one first, since it's a very simple answer. We've divested our manufacturing operations, so we used to manufacture ventilation ducts in our Swedish ventilation business, and since we've divested that, we have less employees there. It really isn't connected to anything else. Looking at sort of the development, obviously, we are not seeing the type of very strong, arguably too strong organic growth that we had in previous quarters. We're more seeing a normalization of growth, which is in line with the expectations we've been trying to project that. Again, I mean, looking further forward, we are seeing some negative market signals on the new build side, but continued sort of strong signals on sort of renovation and the less cyclical parts of our business. Mats, you might want to add a bit there. No, I think it's a good summary, right? I mean, we come from extremely high growth numbers, of course, pushed by inflation to a more normalized environment now. It is mixed, as I tried to talk about here, a mixed market situation. We are relatively low exposure to new builds, especially residential and commercial. There are so many other sectors that we see a good growth projection in the public work, in the industrial work, and so on, at least to where we are. Of course, we need to be cautious as everyone else. It is a complex environment we all have around us. What will the implication be also on us in the mid, medium term or long term here, right? I still feel like we have a great demand. There are progressive sectors, there are less progressive sectors, but we are mainly exposed to the one that public, industrial, all the green tech and all of that we talked about. I think we are in a good place, but we also need to be modest, and we need to be cautious and staying close to the local market to see if there is a change in the market. We can't see that yet, apart from the residential and new builds commercial. Okay, to that, we see an order intake increase actually in this quarter compared to the equivalent quarter last year. Yeah. both without kind of having any sort of large projects in either quarter. Just to, because obviously there's some inflationary effects going through in the top line and in the order intake, probably. On a like-for-like EBITDA basis over the next 12 months, you still expect to be able to grow a little bit? I mean, we are seeing growth within our green tech segments as well as service, which makes up 40% of our business, and also a higher margin part of our business. The renovation part of our projects business being more stable, but then softness on the new build part. Where exactly that nets out is hard to say in advance, but we're not seeing sort of any, as yet, any kind of meaningful decline going forward. Hopefully, we will be able to continue to increase our EBITDA. Okay, thanks. Just a quick reminder, if you want to ask the question via the telephone, please press star one one. There are no further questions on the telephone at the moment. All right. Thank you, Steve. I'll do a few questions then we have coming in written here. We have Chris Norman. Hi there, Chris. Two different questions. One is, what is the extent of your exposure to privately funded projects? It's a good question. I mean, we've just been through a new financing process, so we've been asked this a lot. Just taking a step back, I mean, obviously, 40% of our revenues is from service and maintenance, which is kinda hard to say whether it's privately funded or not, but it's kinda more required. Then we have 60% of our business coming from projects where roughly two-thirds of that coming from renovation and another third coming from new builds. Then within... Where we see in of that, it's hard to tell exactly what's privately funded. Most of those revenues come through private contractors, but in themselves, then have publicly funding behind them. We would expect the most cyclical part of that to really be the sort of, say, half of new builds that comes from that's privately funded and new builds, which is then roughly, say, 10%-15% of our business. Obviously, there is within renovations as well, a part that is privately funded, where we have kind of obviously, headwinds from this business cycle, but also a lot of tailwinds from energy efficiency and just generally need for renovations. I believe Chris had two questions here. It's the second question has to do with if we can discuss further the Norwegian margins. I guess, you know, what we have was kind of what the previous questions there to Andreas, that it is a number of one factors in different directions in Norway, but it doesn't really impact our view on sort of the Norwegian margin potential going forward. Then we have a question from Rosalind Dalton here. If we can confirm the pro forma leverage versus that of market. Yes, I mean, basically, it's fairly simple. If you add back the IFRS 16 adjustment, you'll basically get back to an EBITDA slightly north of what was marketed, so which. Obviously, cash flow has been in line. We are continuing in line there, but we will be releasing sort of figures that are set up as according to the latest OM in our two-three reporting. Further question here from Rolf Garvilson. Hi, Rolf. Earlier today, Bravida's CEO, so that's one of our main competitors, Mattias Johansson, gave a picture of an unchanged multiples in acquisitions. They have not come down, but they did not rise in the past years. Do you share that view? I think that's pretty good. I think Mattias and Mats are well in agreement there. What would you say, Mats? Yeah, I agree. I agree. I share that view. Yeah. We have, and I'm gonna mispronounce your name potentially here, but Tapio Jokisaari. Hi there, Tapio. Order backlog seems to be down year- on- year. Could you remind me of the development behind it? Yeah, its order backlog is increasing here in Q2 compared to Q1, but it is down year- on- year, and the reason is mainly that we have, we are in our revenues, producing on a few larger projects, and we have in the sort of the LTM period, very few larger projects. Those are, by definition, lumpy, so we have prospects there. They're not really tied to the business cycle. They tend to be sort of publicly funded. A good example is the Malmö Hospital, where we are in the process of building that and have been throughout the last year. Obviously, that's in SEK 1 billion+ if we look at the contracts in some there that we have, and that we have no kind of equivalent project in our, in our recent order intake. It's really just a change in sort of the proportion of large projects within our order backlog. Number seven here from Marko Moilanen. Again, apologies for mispronouncing your last name, Marko. Organic growth in Q2 slowed down to 2.3%, including inflation. What was real growth negative already, or is it possible that we see negative organic growth in the coming quarters? Have there been any cancellations of orders? Okay, three parts to the question. There haven't been any cancellations of orders, and we very seldom, if ever, see that, because that does require the customers to pay quite substantial penalties. We could obviously see negative organic growth in coming quarters, probably mostly relating to Finland, where we're actively downsizing our business. But we, you know, it's perfectly possible that we would have negative organic growth within our new build project segment, where on a margin term, we might be able to balance that with service, which would lead to overall lower volumes. We'll see how that plays out. In terms of how the inflationary effect on organic growth here in Q2, it's come down a lot. Remember, Q2 last year, we had very significant organic growth, and it had so for a number of quarters. What we can see now is that the actual material inflation, which has been the main driver of inflation for us in terms of top-line drivers, that inflation has actually come down quite substantially. We're not seeing growth in materials and haven't for the last couple of quarters, so we are now seeing sort of that effect level off in terms of how much inflation would be driving our top line. It's really tough to say exactly what real growth was, but I wouldn't have expected it to be negative. Since we're probably looking at, say, negative material inflation by now, but it's really difficult to tease out price from volume in this business. A third question here from Chris. So should we expect Norway margins to return to previous levels in Q3?" Well, exactly what our individual business areas perform in respective quarters, we're obviously not going to provide guidance on that. I would say that we would expect Norway to, on a full year basis, continue to perform roughly in line of what they have in previous years, which has been around 8%, which we, and that would then remain our most profitable business area. We have a further question here from Hai Yong Ding: "Do you expect working capital release during H2 '23, and how much of the working capital release would be achieved?" Again, there are factors working for a working capital release in H2 of '23, especially as, so to say, production processes normalize and we need to sort of purchase less material in advance and hold less inventory. However, there are also headwinds, in the sense that we have a growing service business and a growing green tech business, and as they grow in proportion to the rest of our business, they actually consume working capital. We are cautious in how much we want to promise in terms of working capital release, but we at least feel we should be able to not grow working capital further in the last part, latter part of 2023. Obviously, we will be growing working capital in Q3, but that's a seasonal effect. We grow working capital every Q3, then we always have a working capital release in Q4, and we're expecting to see the exact same trend here in 2023. I don't know if we have anything more. Steven, do you have anything more? There are no further questions on the telephone. Mats, would you like to round off? I mean, I will just say, thanks for listening in to us here, and have a great summer. Thank you. This now concludes our presentation. Thank you all for attending. You may now disconnect.
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