Dear all, a warm welcome to this webcast, where we will present the first quarter report for AFRY. My name is Jonas Gustavsson, CEO of AFRY, and together with me I also have, of course, Juuso Pajunen, our CFO, sitting in Helsinki, and Juuso will support me with a few financial slides as always. Again, a warm welcome to this. We will run through the presentation rather quickly, and then we will have time for any questions when we have presented a few slides to all of you. I will start up then with the first slide, which is basically a summarizing slide where we actually assess them. If you look on the first quarter, we believe it's a stable result. We have delivered a margin of 8.6% EBITDA margin compared to 9%. You have all, I guess, noted that we have made a change in how we account for the salary costs. Adjusting for that, we would be on 9.2%. Juuso will take you through the details related to that. Sales came in basically on SEK 5 billion, compared to SEK 5.2 billion. Here we can also adjust for both one working day less and also quite a negative currency effect, and if you adjust for that, we would be on 0.5% growth, which I think is a step forward. We are now showing growth again. If you compare that number, 0.5%, to quarter four, where we were at minus 6.5%. Clearly, we see now that AFRY is moving back to growth. I would say that across all divisions, we continue to see a stabilization in the market. It differs, of course, between different segments, and yet, as we have seen, some of our divisions are really delivering good growth and also a high EBITDA margin. I’m also happy with the fact that we have now ramped up the acquisition agenda. So far this year, we have announced seven acquisitions, some of them smaller, but they add up to more than SEK 200 million in addition to our revenue. I think we are getting back on organic growth, and we are also starting now to ramp up the acquisition agenda. There are things that we would have liked to have been better as always, but it is clearly a step in the right direction for AFRY as a whole. Looking on the market then, it's fair to say that for sure we are still in the effects of the pandemic, and it differs quite a lot between different countries. We have quite a big operation in Brazil. They do very good, you know that they have a lot of fighting with the pandemic. Overall, we could also note that in the quarter, we have seen an improved utilization. I think we started a bit slower, we also picked up a bit better at the end of the year. In Infra, a big part of our business, continued stable demand in the transport segment. I would say that the real estate is still not back on track where we would have liked to have it. Okay. We have to take a two-minute break because, for some reason, Microsoft Teams has gone down. I apologize for that. Our chief technicians are trying to get Teams back on track. Okay. I think we are back with Teams, with picture and sound. As you know, we are doing this on Teams, but also having a YouTube broadcast, and I just want to wait for a signal that this works. All right. We are back on track, and I hope that you followed me when I went through the summary and started to do a market update, saying that [Non-English content]. For some reason, we have a problem getting Teams to work, so we will now move fully over to using YouTube. We want to have the team that was in Teams link in on YouTube, and we will also open up for sending questions to Cathrine Sandegren, Head of Communication, and she will then read the questions, and we will answer them. That's what we need to do, and we are so sorry for this. We will just wait for people to move from Teams to following us on YouTube. Juuso, are you still there? Yes, I am. I'm here. All working. All right. We are back now, and we hope that you all have joined through the YouTube link because Teams has been very unstable for us today. I am going back to the summary because I was also informed that you did not hear me. I will start again with the fact that we see quarter one as a positive start to the year. A stable result. We delivered 8.6% EBITDA margin. We also made changes in the salary accounting. Juuso will take you through that. Adjusting for that, we would be on 9.2%. EBITDA then SEK 432 million and sales SEK 5 billion. This is less than last year. We have adjusted for currency, and it is also one working day less this quarter. We are on adjusted organic growth of 0.5%. That number we can compare to -6.5% in the fourth quarter. We clearly see a sequential improvement. We are getting back to growth. We are also ramping up the acquisition agenda. We have announced seven so far, some of them smaller, but positioned in a way to support AFRY, as well as our organic growth initiatives, adding some SEK 200 million to our top line. We start to have a good pipeline of potential acquisitions moving forward. I'm happy with that. The market is becoming more and more stable. Of course, it differs a bit. We are still not out of COVID, as you know. I will say that in general, all segments start to have a feeling of positive development, where demand is getting back. Maybe most of all driven by the overall industry segment. If you look at the infrastructure, still stable, but in real estate, the big building projects are still not back on track. That's clearly an area where we see not as good development in the market as we would have hoped. Industry and digital, food and life science, which we have highlighted for some quarters, are still very strong. We can also see automotive starting to pick up from lower levels, though. The process industry and energy are stable and good. I would say the hard work we have done over the last years in energy starts to yield really good effect. I think we have a very strong position in the evolving energy landscape. Also, the process industry, which is of course, then joining forces with Pöyry and ÅF, has proven to be very stable and strong. We have a good pipeline also solid margin, and good growth. The management consulting business that we have is really strong. There are things that we would like to have better, but overall, it is a clear step in the right direction. Juuso will highlight the fact that our order backlog is as strong as ever. We are booking a lot of interesting projects, highlighting a few here. For example, the frame agreement with Vattenfall, SEK 800 million over three years, is very important for us. We have a good agreement in Denmark for the Danish Road Directorate, and also projects in Norway, et cetera. I think when we look at our product portfolio on big assignments or projects, it is as strong as ever. This is just highlighting the companies we have announced so far this year. There are, of course, a few small ones. Starting to get hold of really interesting companies that add on to our position, then. We had then last week, I think, announced Evolve Technology Sweden, which is a digital company in Gothenburg that adds on to AFRY's total digital agenda. I think we start to be happy with the pace. We are looking into interesting acquisitions. As you remember, in 2019, after the acquisition of Pöyry, we ramped down smaller acquisitions. 2020, of course, was all about meeting COVID. Now we are ramping up acquisitions again, which has been a part of the success story for our company. I'm really happy about that. Sustainability. It's clear that we see now in all customer segments the need for getting support to transform into sustainable solutions. We can see automotive, of course, going to full electrification. We can see initiatives in the base industry, like the steel business. It's fair to say now that all end segments, all our clients are finding ways to transform into sustainable business models. Of course, now we have great opportunities in AFRY, 16,000 experts, and we are also now pushing a lot to make sure that we can explain how we can help our clients to become more sustainable. We are also focusing a lot on moving into the EU Taxonomy. We are working on both the front end and the back end with our sustainability agenda. We have a lot of corporations. We announced a few weeks back that we are joining forces with Norrsken. Gapminder is another one. We have joined the 1.5°C Business Playbook. We have a lot of activity in boosting diversity in AFRY because we know that a more diverse company will perform better. It's part of our culture. Only in my four years in AFRY, I see now that also in the area of sustainability, we are moving in all areas, and I'm happy about that. Before I leave over to Juuso, last year, we announced that we would ramp up our digital agenda. We have a long tradition of building digital competence in AFRY. Last year, we announced that we are also forming AFRY X as an accelerator. Together with all divisions and business units, we will join together, triple, that's our ambition, to triple our digital revenue in the next five years. We have now formed AFRY X. We are starting to bring people from all our divisions into AFRY X together with solutions, and we are also recruiting from outside. We announced that we have hired Per Kristian Egseth coming from Hitachi, who has a long experience from both IBM and Hitachi in formulating and selling digital solutions, and we are very happy about that. Last Friday, we had a launch of our digital agenda together with Norrsken, and we also highlighted a few solutions. We had a good discussion with Trafikverket and Vattenfall as an example, who are, of course, looking to transform part of their business, or they have a big need for digital transformation in each of those companies. I'm happy with what we have been doing. Of course, now we will push for a new business model, recurring revenue, on top of pushing digitalization across the whole AFRY. I would say sustainability and digitalization are two big things going across the full AFRY as a company. With that, Juuso, I will leave it to you to take us through the financial slides. I will click on your mark, starting with the net sales. Thank you, Jonas. When we talk about net sales development, we ended up pretty much at the SEK 5 billion mark in revenues. That amounts to -4.9% as a total growth. If we look a bit further, we had quite a significant FX impact rising, we have one calendar day less. All in all, we can say that adjusted organic growth was positive 0.5 percentage points, which I'm really happy about. At the same time, this also excludes the M&A impact. We have roughly 0.3 percentage points on the M&A-driven growth. As you may have noticed, many of those announced M&As have happened in the latter part of the quarter or even after the quarter. Those start to contribute as only at a later stage, once we have started to consolidate them. On the FX component, it was 208 million, give or take. Our biggest exposures are in EUR, CHF, NOK, GBP, and BRL. With that type of portfolio, you can expect, still in the second quarter, especially, the negative FX impact to continue. In the latter part of the year in 2020, we started to see stabilization at the levels where we are today on those parts. It is very good to note that we have very strong development, especially in process industries, energy, and management consulting, when we look at the adjusted organic growth. Also very consistent coming back in the industry and digital solutions, with the star in there being the food and life sciences growing heavily. We are still burdened with the real estate, especially the commercial part of that one. Automotive. In all of those segments, we have also seen sequential improvement during the quarter. March was looking better than January and February and so on. We are seeing positive on that side, too. At the same time, if we are looking at our order stock and order intake, they continue to be on stable levels, and we are happy to go forward with such an order stock. Let's talk about EBITDA, if you can, Jonas, change the slide. On the EBITDA, basically, we amounted to SEK 432 million compared to the previous year, SEK 474 million. It has been impacted by the change in the salary accounting method. I will come back at a later stage on that one, a bit, what it means. If we had adjusted that SEK 28 million, we would have been on a margin level at 9.2%, so SEK 460 million to a SEK 5 billion revenue. That would have been better than the previous year, when we marked 9%. All in all, I would say that from an efficiency perspective, we have been faring quite well, especially when you compare delivering improved margins on a pre-COVID or materially pre-COVID quarter to a now, is it a middle COVID, hopefully late stage of COVID quarter, with one working day less. If we look at the underlying results, four out of five divisions are delivering clear underlying improvements, while one, being Infra, is rather stable if we adjust for the salary impact. All in all, we can say that our operational performance is quite good. Obviously, then we see that we have a positive impact from the efficiency programs continued and cost savings arising, both from measures we have taken, also underlying COVID impacts, no travel, and such. All in all, I would say that our EBITDA development, the 8.6%, is quite solid in the market conditions we are living in today. Going forward, a couple of words on the salary accounting methodology. Just to clarify, what does it mean? We have now gone live with our new ERP system in parts of the world, and Sweden is the first place to be impacted by that one. At the same time, we have improved our back end in both HR and CRM systems. Basically, we now have the capability to record salaries when they occur in an easier manner than earlier. What we are basically doing differently compared to earlier, if February had 19 working days and March had 23 working days, in February, we had 19 working days' worth of salaries, and in March, 23 working days' salaries. February salaries were smaller, and March salaries were higher during that period. Now, as most of our employees, north of 90%, are on fixed monthly salaries, we are showing the same salary amount both in February and March. That basically means that when we have a quarter like the first one, which is shorter than the average quarter during the year, it has a negative impact. The second quarter has 66 working days, so it has 60 working days or 60 points some working days, but it still has the same amount of salaries as in quarter three, when we have 66 working days. That creates volatility in the salaries, but on a full-year basis, it is zero; it is how we face the monthly salaries during the year. Once again, to repeat that if we had not taken this improvement in the salary accounting methodology, we would have recorded SEK 28 million better EBITDA in Q1 compared to the old methodology. When the main part of this one is coming from Sweden, that continues to impact them in Q3 and Q4 also. If we talk about the systems, I'm really happy to tell you a bit about the system landscape upgrade that is progressing according to plan. Already in 2018, there was an initial decision to improve the system landscape and start working on it. The Pöyry merger came in 2019, which basically put the system upgrade process and project into a reassessment period. After being reassessed, we have gone forward with the whole integrated system landscape, where ERP is one component; we have a global CRM system, global employee systems, and also some other components in the background. We have now gone live globally in the CRM and HR systems during Q4 2020 and Q1 2021. We are happy with that development. Now, we have also started the ERP system, going live entity by entity. So far, everything has gone as planned. We are very happy with this progress, and at the same time, looking forward to the next steps. So far, so good, definitely seeing improvements throughout our organization. Talking about the EBITDA bridge. Basically, if we compare to the previous year, we have the calendar impact of approximately nine hours. You can evaluate a bit what it means. You take our number of FTEs, you take our utilization, you take whatever you guess for our fee per hour, you would end up with an impact somewhere around the SEK 70 million on that one. It is a material impact on the top line and then obviously flows to the bottom line. The salary accounting change means that the full calendar impact is always making our top line volatile, and it's not adjusted at the cost level. If we look then a bit at divisions, infrastructure is facing issues in the dampened real estate market. Industry and digital solutions, actually, have quite a good performance, remembering that the automotive issues started to materially impact only the fourth quarter. It was like 27, 28, and 29th of March the previous year when the bigger impact started to be visible. Process industries, energy, and management consulting have very solid development despite being impacted by the negative translation differences. Those ones amounted to a total of SEK 25 million downwards. I need to remind you that it's a translation difference, so we are hedging the projects, but when you translate EUR revenues and EUR profits into SEK, they are translated on a smaller nominal amount when March 2020 EUR was roughly 11 points some SEK, and today it's rather SEK 10.1. It comes with an impact. If we then go to the next slide and look a bit deeper at growth and profitability per division. First, we have the very solid performance that comes to process industries, energy, and management consulting, all three in double-digit profitability, all three on solid adjusted organic growth numbers, 7 and 7.1 in process industries and energy, and management consulting 16.6. Profitability is, respectively energy 10.7%, management consulting 14.6%, and process industry is 13.1%. I would say that this is a very solid performance compared to the previous year. Once again, remembering the translation differences with one working day less. Very happy with that one. Industry and digital solutions delivering 7.3% compared to 7.7% previous year, being also impacted by the salary accounting. Actually, they are quite strong compared to the previous year. Once again, remembering the one working day less. Minus 1.2% adjusted organic growth pre-COVID, late COVID. Also, there, very solid, consistent sequential improvement quarter by quarter. We have Infrastructure, minus 1.0% in adjusted organic growth, being impacted by the commercial real estate segment. Profitability 7.6% compared to 9.1% previous year. This is something that has room to improve. Once again, if we look at those numbers a bit deeper, we take the salary accounting impact, roughly SEK 13 million in infrastructure. We take that one into account and the one working day less. It is still a solid performance, but not a great performance. All of that combined amounts to the group performance, which, once again, I would say that it is, given the market conditions, quite okay. If we talk about a couple of words on the balance sheet. We continue to have strong liquidity. We recorded net debt of SEK 2.9 billion to SEK 2.8 billion in the previous quarter, or SEK 4.4 billion a year ago. We are quite steady, 1.7 net debt to EBITDA when taking the items affecting comparability into account. We saw positive operating cash flow, but there has been normal seasonality in net working capital, so we have tied up a bit more capital, especially when you compare to the previous year's Q1, where we released net working capital. It has not been as strong, but still, I would say quite a positive quarter in total. It is quite typical in our business that in normal seasonality, you tie net working capital in the first quarter, and then in the second half, you start to release it with peaking in the fourth quarter. All in all, a solid balance sheet, happy to take the M&A deals as we have now announced seven, and continue forward with this balance sheet, looking for growth. With these words, I would hand it back to you, Jonas. Thank you so much, Juuso. As always, crisp and clear. I will just summarize this one, and then we will go to the questions. I hope you have taken the chance to send questions to Cathrine Sandegren, and she will read them, and we will do our utmost to answer your questions. Looking forward, and of course, where we are now, we will push for growth. It's clear that we have growth opportunities across the whole company, organic but also supported now by the acquisitions. To integrate them in a good way and together with the acquired companies, we will push even more. Also, keep a good pace on the M&A agenda. Juuso showed you we have room on the balance sheet to continue to be offensive on M&As. I think the digital agenda. Over the last few years, there has been a continuous digitalization across all segments, also on our client side. Clearly, digitalization is nothing new. We can also see now, with the transition in many segments with new business models, new offerings, there is an increased need for digitalization also in some of the segments, being a bit more late in the whole digitalization process. Clearly, some segments like automotive, banking sector are very advanced, but utilities, energy, process industry are more in the beginning, and that's also where we have a deep industrial knowledge. Increase our digital agenda using our vertical or sector knowledge together, we believe is something we will push even more moving forward. To scale AFRY X, also find a new business model, being even more professional in developing a platform system where we can use our expertise to support our clients in improving their operations. That's what we're looking for. Sustainability, we have said it several times, both in the back end, EU Taxonomy, but also in the front end to be even more sharp on how we can help our clients become more sustainable. Juuso mentioned that over the last year, we have been working quite heavily in improving our system landscape, and we took decisions already in 2018, and then, of course, we joined forces with Pöyry, but we are super happy, and I'm impressed by what our organization have been able to cope with at the same time as the pandemic, at the same time as integrating Pöyry. To integrate and put new systems in operations, HR system, state-of-the-art, a new global CRM system that will improve our work together with the clients in operation, and as Juuso said, we are now step by step starting to take the ERP system into operation. It puts a lot of pressure on us, but so far, I think the organization has been able to do this in a fantastic way. With all of that, we will continue to push for growth, but also keep a good eye on, I would say, the operational platform. We have been working quite heavily, also in 2020, to optimize and find a cost-effective platform. We mentioned also last year now, when we are getting back to growth, we need to make sure that we can now get the full benefit from growth and not grow our cost base at the same pace as our top line. That's, of course, something that we will now look very closely into, but clearly, using the positive momentum we have now across AFRY to focus a lot on going back to growth, and quarter one was one step in the right direction. With that said, I will now apologize again for Teams. I guess Teams, the system Teams, is as tired as we are of having Teams meetings. We have now tried to maneuver with YouTube, and I think Cathrine Sandegren may be leaving it to you that you have a few questions that you picked up that we will try to answer. Yes. Thank you, Jonas. If you have any questions, please send me an email at cathrine.sandegren@afry.com. We have the first four questions, actually from Johan Sundén. The first one, why was the group's cost SEK 36 million higher in Q1 than the previous year? Juuso, did you pick up that? I think that's a question that fits well with your profile. Good. Thank you, Johan. I think that's a valid and good question. When we look at our cost structure in general, we have been progressing a lot. If we take the total impact, it's highly positive. At the same time, when we are working with the group, that is always a residual and comes from a certain level of the platform. Today, for example, our last 12 months' revenue is SEK 18.8 billion, give or take, and that doesn't satisfy our ambitions on that level. We have set our group cost structure from a perspective where we can allocate when we grow further. This is more or less a residual, and I wouldn't take it as an indication of how we look in total. Going forward, I would say that we have room to improve there, and the further we go to growth, we need to remember that how we have phrased our efficiency program is that we want to have a continuous margin improvement, meaning that the top line needs to grow quicker than the expenses grow, and that will bring the margin improvement. Obviously, then, if we do not see top- line growth, then we have our ways to go deeper into our platform, and I think we have shown that we have all the capability to do that one upon it. Thanks, Juuso. That was question number one, Cathrine. Yes, why did we see such big swings in the net working capital during the quarter? Juuso? There's basically, if we take a couple of different views, you always need to put the cash generation into a wider perspective than one quarter. Within one quarter, you are highly impacted by how quickly your clients pay their invoices, whether the last day of the month hits a weekday or a weekend, and so on. Looking at one quarter's cash flow is a bit shortsighted. You need to always look at a longer perspective. Last year in Q1, we benefited from 2019 sluggish net working capital development. In 2020, in general, we were able to release net working capital partly because of our own actions and partly because of the declining revenues. Now we are converting back to growth, which starts to tie a bit of net working capital. The second part is just normal seasonality. Sometimes you have a strong Q4 like we had the previous year, and then you have a bit of backlash in Q1. I wouldn't draw too many conclusions. I would keep my eye on 12, 18, and 24 months rolling EBITA, rolling net working capital, and I would just make sure that it is aligned with the development in total. That is inherent in our business, having a bit of volatility in the net working capital. Thanks, Juuso. Question number three, Cathrine. Yes, it's regarding the Process Industries segments. Q1 is usually a quarter with lower margins for the Process Industries segments, but still, you managed to report margins of about 13% in the segment, the same as in Q4 2020. How much of that improvement can be extrapolated? I can start there. Maybe to make it quick, I think we have a fantastic position in process industry with the combined ÅF and Pöyry. We talked about that over the last two years. We also see that the bio-industry segment, as such, is tremendously interesting. We are very strong in CapEx. We are also improving our operational focus, meaning that besides big CapEx projects, we will also be a partner for our clients in operational improvement. If you then add digitalization and sustainability, I think the process industry, as such, where we also include mining and metals, is a very interesting segment to be in. I think we can just leave it with that. Of course, we will push Nicholas Oksanen and the whole division to continue to perform high margins. If you go back even to the joining forces with Pöyry, it's been very stable and solid, and we will continue to push on high levels. Next question. Yes, the final question from Johan Sundén. It's regarding the energy segment. You have earlier mentioned that the EBITDA margin in the energy segment should be 8%-10%. For two quarters in a row, you have been about 10%. Have you reached a new level, or should that still return to 8%-10%? As you know, then, I would say that segments related to CapEx projects and especially energy, with a big transition going on, I think it's fair to say that we are still keeping the 8%-10%. We have also said internally, I know Richard Pinnock and the guys are pushing a lot that with the interesting development in energy right now, there are tremendously interesting business opportunities, and I think we are well-positioned to grasp some of them. I think the team has worked a lot on efficiency and also the position in the end market. Let's see if we can push them to stay on over 10, but I think it's fair to say that we still have that 8%-10% margin corridor. Let's see. I don't know what you say, Juuso, but they have started in a very good way, internal performance, but also the market sentiment. Yes, I would say that is absolutely correct. At the same time, we need to remember that it is a large project business, and sometimes you have several large projects at a very hectic stage at the same time, and that can yield you for momentarily excess profitability. This is something that is good to note, and we currently see in our nuclear offering, especially in this type of situation. That also, in a way, when the previous question was on process industries, sometimes also in there, you have multiple large projects in a hectic implementation phase, and that creates a bit of volatility in the profitability. Jumping to two big conclusions from one quarter, I would avoid that one, both in process industries and energy. I fully agree with you, Juuso, but I also believe that if you look ov er many quarters, there's a strong stability, and I think that's good. You will always have some variations on the margins. If you look at our energy position now in AFRY versus three years back, it's a different game. We are very happy about that. Absolutely very happy and saying that we have 8%-10% corridor, as you said, and then upgrading that to higher numbers would merit a couple of more data points. We'll get back to that, hopefully. Okay, Cathrine, more questions. There are actually no further questions. There are no further questions. It probably means that we have been very clear, as always. I'm again apologizing for Teams not supporting us. This presentation, I hope you were able to come through using the YouTube broadcast. We will try to improve for the next quarter. With that, I would like to thank all of you for taking the time to listen to us, and looking forward to meeting you soon again. Thank you so much.
Loading workspace