Good morning and welcome to this presentation of B3 Consulting Group's Q4 and also full year 2023. My name is Katarina Lundqvist, and I'm the Head of Investor Relations at B3. I will soon hand over to Sverre Bjerkeli, who is the Acting CEO, and later in this program you will also meet Anna Abrahamsson-Hägg, who is the CEO of our company B3 Financial Consulting, and we will also meet Christian Lauritzen, who is our Chief AI Enabler. At the end of the program we will open up for questions, so you are very welcome to send your questions to ir@b3.se, or otherwise you can also click on the envelope next to this window. Okay, so I welcome Sverre. Thanks a lot, Katis, thanks a lot. We love questions, so please send them in. We have received already six, seven, eight in the morning, and Katarina and myself, we had a kind of a short walkthrough, and I liked all of them. So none of them have been thrown away, and we'll try to cover as many as possible. Before starting off on the presentation, just remind you that we have a new CEO arriving. He will take his new position when we hand over during the Q1 presentation. So I will do the Q1 presentation to the market, and then he will be introduced on screen at that day, obviously, and the next morning, Martin will be in charge. On this slide you can see a small sentence on the bottom of the slide, something we call Top 100. What we are doing in order to get this transfer to be as good as possible is to establish a list of activities sized 100, and we started 100 days before his takeover date, and are kind of ticking off these kind of 100 activities. It's not me shaking hands with Martin only, it's kind of a top management activity together with other key employees in the company, and also including the board. I have stole the recipe from McKinsey, so then you know. Always when we start an investor presentation we would like to put some focus on the culture of the company. What you can see on the screen here is that we this year, again in 2023, have a sky-high internal score among our employees. Our eNPS is 52, and you seldom see such a high score. We think that if our people enjoy what they are doing at work, they will do a better job, and they will transfer that kind of energy to their clients and our clients. When meeting you in a Q4 presentation, I will do as I kind of always do when I have a Q4 presentation. I've been a Chief Executive in a listed company for 15-20 years, and in Q1, Q2, Q3 I normally focus mostly on the quarter and then add year to date. But in Q4 I think it's better to take a slightly higher perspective. Have a look at 2023 in full and then add some comments on Q4. All figures are available both in the investor presentation and in the full report, so obviously they are all there, but I think to share a bit of perspective is probably okay. I have three messages today, and normally I do have three. One: 2023 is the second best year in history. We are a 20-year-old company, and this is the second best year ever, despite the fact that we have had a challenging market since Q2 2023. So I'm slightly proud on behalf of the employees in B3 to say that it's the second best year. It's not that bad, actually. However, Q4 is not a great quarter. It's what I would call, you could argue, it's pretty poor, but it's stable. The market is not worsening, but it is stable on a low level. So the first message is the second best year in history. The second message to you investors and to the market: it's still a challenging market. And the third message is that we will break, cut costs, and accelerate, invest at the same time, to get out stronger at the end of this market. We are up against one more challenging quarter, Q1, because Q1 last year was also a very good one. And then from Q2 and onwards we are up against pretty mediocre, I would say, quarters. So obviously we have an ambition to come back with good also quarterly figures, not only good figures on an annual level. Our EBITDA margin in 2023 is 9.4%, and the volume growth is around zero. This is the formal figures exclusive of Poland. I will be back in a minute and talk about it. The board has suggested a dividend sized SEK 350, which is according to our capital allocation policy, 50% of earnings per share should go to the shareholders, unless we have some better ideas to how to spend the money. We feel that this is a kind of an acceptable decision to take now. Half the result will go to shareholders, and that is SEK 350 in this year. On this slide you see a bit more information. In the bottom right corner there you see three to four bullets. We are saying that the cost savings in Q4 are slightly higher than planned. When we communicated our cost savings program to you a quarter ago, the actual result in Q4 is somewhat better than planned and communicated. I'll be back and talk a bit more about the Hedgehog cost savings program in a couple of minutes. As you have been used to, we are trying to be as transparent as possible and to update you on pluses and minuses on what's driving the volume in the company. As you can see on the slide, it's about utilization rate, which is the most significant factor. In Q4 there is something technical, sized SEK 11 million, where we have kind of redefined some types of subcontractors. Last year we took the full volume from those subcontractors. This year we have changed technique and how we calculate and sum up these kind of figures. We call them pass-through consultants. So some volume, namely sized SEK 11 million, disappears. However, the margin is still there. So it has obviously no effect on the bottom line. But it is the utilization rate that is the challenging setting in the volume figures of the company. The utilization rate is low in Q4, but it's not lower. It's flat, and when entering a new year it's neither improving nor getting worser, so far as we can see it. When we meet next time we will go deeper down on utilization and update you more precisely what is the utilization rate. Is it 80 or 75 or 85 or another figure? All those three figures are relevant figures. When we meet in Q1 we will update you on last year's utilization rate and 2024 utilization rate. This is not normal practice in the IT consultancy sector in Sweden, but the bigger consultancy companies in other sectors like AFRY and Sweco, they are delivering these kind of figures to the market all the time. We are always trying to be as transparent as possible. So a bit more of facts will be available for you when we meet next time. Okay. When we meet you investors, we would like to share the bad stuff and the good stuff with you. Again, try to be open, transparent, and explain to you what's really going on. As you know, we have a strategy supporting growth linked to establishing a new set of companies, new startup companies. It's a part of our strategy to grow into the future. I have said to you earlier that you should probably expect that one of four or one of five startup companies will fail. Now one has failed. And that company is called Grit. It's not a very old one. It's somewhat 15, 16, 17 months old. And we are basically closing down the company, so we didn't do good enough work. I think it's also fair to say that top management, me and the management team and those before me in that kind of position, we were too late and did too little. It shouldn't be necessary to lose more than SEK 10 million on such a startup. You should implement corrective actions earlier to avoid spending that many millions on a single failure. However, at the bottom of the slide here you can see the kind of good stuff is that the other five out of the six last startups, they have accumulated, delivered better than planned. And we have named those companies, and I haven't picked the good ones. These are the six latest ones. So trust me on that, or challenge me if you would like to in that area. So we have missed on one. We are learning, improving. Hopefully it won't be too many, but it's a part of life, a part of our business. You should expect. If you never, ever fail, we probably do too little. You have already heard me say that the market outlook is stable on a challenging level, but we adapt quickly. We accelerate, we break, and we get out on the other side as a stronger company. I'm totally convinced we are capable of doing that. And hopefully you trust me. If not, you should trust Christian sitting here, not coming. Wait a little bit still, Christian. And Anna, who also is online and soon ready to start to speak. This slide is the same figures that you saw on the previous slide, except from the fact that this is including the Polish business. And if you take the 2023 perspective again, you will see that the underlying reality of this company is an EBITDA level sized 10.2 and an EBITDA level sized 7.8 in Q4 2023. On the bottom of the slide here, you can also see that Poland is doing better than Sweden. We have actually one daughter company doing even better than the Polish one. So that's good for us sitting here in Sweden. But Poland is the biggest daughter company and is very, very managed. And it is growing 15.7% in local currency, which is what matters in the longer run, more in Swedish Kronor, as you can see on the slide here. And they have a 16.2% EBITDA margin in the full year 2023 in that area. So I think that this slide here demonstrates the fact that this might be the second best year in history. 10.2% EBITDA underlying, even if you take Poland away, it's a good EBITDA level. However, on the volume side, we are only kind of flat, +2.2%, as you can see here. And I come back with one more argument at the later stage when summarizing, explaining why this is the second best year in history. We win new business with a lot of customers, as always. There is one new startup to come. The startup has been signed. The two first people are on board. We know who they are. We know the name of the company, but we will not disclose the name of the company and one of the partners right now. But they will be up and working in March to try to strengthen our position in the Linköping and Norrköping area, which is a significant IT consultancy area in the Swedish market. As you have heard earlier, we are getting a lot of prizes and positive focus out there from different organizations in the market. In my opinion, it's kind of underpinning the fact that we have a strong culture. We like what we are doing. We have energy, and we energize others as well. So there's a proud list of activities you can see here. We are happy about it, and we'd like to use a few seconds to share it with you this time as well. Okay. When we then are accelerating into 2024, I will just remind you that we are not one company, but we are around 25 companies. We launched a new management education program at 1:15 P.M. today, later today. There are 78 managers meeting for a 24-hour session in that area. And then we will kind of discuss what kind of opportunities, which one is doing very well up in the right corner here, and who is having a challenging time, those in the bottom left corner you see here. Again, we are not a company. We are many companies in many markets, but we have a common target in order to be the best consultancy company in Sweden. That's our vision statement. Here is an update on the break initiative called Hedgehog. What you can see here is that, one, we are increasing the cost-setting target. Two, it's moving faster than planned. When the market continues to be challenging, we have seen the opportunity to both raise the cost target, and we have been capable of moving faster. And on this slide, we are, and this is not kind of an illustration. This is the actual timeline for taking those savings back home. What you can see is that we have a plan to reach 100% quarterly effect when we enter Q3 2024. The pink line here in the left corner of this slide, down in the left corner, is an illustration showing that we are moving faster than what we said to you a quarter ago. A quarter ago, we said we would reach SEK 10 million at the end of the year. We are today at SEK 13 million. Last quarter, we said that after Q1, we will reach SEK 12 million. Now we say we will reach SEK 17 million. The full area effect you will have at the later stage. But on a quarterly level, we will have the full effect entering Q3 this year. Everything else equal, we will be more profitable than last year. But remember, everything else equal. It's not necessary the way life is designed. Then, to our Chief AI Enabler, Christian, feel free to talk to the investors. Great to be here. My name is Christian Lauritzen. Background is as a serial entrepreneur, and I'm so excited right now. Generative AI, I would say, is the most transformative technology ever. It will affect every role in every company. Fundamentally, it will affect consultants, but moreover, it will affect every one of our customers. Having the opportunity to be in a company like B3, where we, from top management level, decide that we will invest 100,000 hours throughout the company group in generative AI, couldn't be more exciting. Of course, that many hours must be smartly invested in education, so mainly on board on paid customer projects. Generative AI, it's so broad and can be done in so many ways. This training needs to be adapted to each and every company. They are doing a little bit different. So how they can leverage Generative AI for themselves and for their different clients will vary a lot. The plan here is not to push it centrally, but actually make every company be an engine in this Generative AI effort. It's quite a good situation because there are so many clients that are struggling with understanding how to do this. From my mind, if you are a consulting company and you don't bet heavily on Generative AI, I would say you are out of the game. Yeah, we have a head start. We are doing a lot of Generative AI in a lot of different areas. And that can segue over to my colleague Anna, and she can tell a little bit about what we are doing within this area with one of Sweden's largest banks. So thank you, Anna. Thank you. That was if somebody could switch page. [crosstalk] Yeah. Thank you. Thank you, Christian. So my name is Anna Abrahamsson Hägg, and I'm the CEO of B3 Financial Consulting, one of the two companies within B3 Consulting Group focusing on bank, insurance companies, and financial institutions. We work closely with B3 Visab, where Susanne Nordvall is the CEO. Together, we have about 65 employees. However, in 2023, B3 had approximately 150 assignments in the financial sector. Bank, finance, and insurance stand for 20% of the total revenue of the company groups. These figures tell that there are other B3 companies that are also engaged, contributing with specialized skills at these clients. We do enjoy to create possibilities together. Next slide, please. B3 Financial Consulting has had a positive revenue growth in 2023 with 19% and maintained profitability. In order to stay relevant, we have sharpened the organization in three desired skill sets: agile management, test management, and system development. However, when adding the industry experience in every role, we become more competitive. 2023 is a year when we have seen a little bit of difference in the types of assignments that we normally have. We had an increase in team assignments. A vast number of projects have been driven by regulatory changes, financial regulatory changes, of course, but also cybersecurity and sustainability. We've seen a high activity in the payments area and in the same savings area. As Christian also said, Generative AI-related assignments as well when we had the possibility to both have training sessions, presentations for one of the largest banks in Sweden. At last, a little bit about our team. Our team is not uniform in any way. We take pride in our differences when it comes to age, gender, and our backgrounds. What we do have in common is that we have a great interest in the financial sector and are curious to change and to improve. When we meet up in our team, we love to team up during a traditional Swedish fika and share insights. And we coach one another, and we celebrate the good examples. And sharing insights from our assignments on a regular basis really brings the team together. And finally, some of the success factors looking back in the mirror, we have increased leadership presence and sales presence in order to stay close to both consultants and our clients, of course. And while shaping the organization, we also had to tune our recruitment strategy to align with the roles and industry experience in order to stay relevant. And close collaboration with B3 and B3 Visab has been key and, of course, maintained customer focus. That was it. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you, Anna. So thanks to Christian and to Anna and to you kind of you are so kind listening to us. Christian is not kind of only our leading star within the AI area. He is also one of the two founders of a daughter company called B3 Indes that has been running successfully for five years. So congratulations with your deliveries together with Kasper and the team in Indes, Christian, but now kind of also spending parts of his time on challenging our B3 organization to implement and to make all the kind of AI opportunities we have in that area. Anna, together with Susanne in Visab, are, as you will have guessed, two of the chief executives in our companies up in the right corner in the bubble slide you have seen already. So thanks a lot, Anna, and thanks a lot, Christian, for your kind presentation. The summary before we open up for a Q&A session is that we have an ambition and we are convinced that we will emerge stronger from a weaker market, not meaning weaker that we expect it to be even weaker than Q3 and Q4, but we are stably on a kind of lower level here. So we have an ambition to get out there stronger in the other end, accelerating and breaking at the same time. It is the second-best year in history. Our earnings per share is up from SEK 5.32 to SEK 7.12, and SEK 5.32 is the 2021 figure. Then we had a very good 2022, and then we are on the second-best level in 2023 with an EPS of SEK 7.12. Our cost ambition is raised to SEK 41 million, and we move faster, and we will have full effect of that cost program entering Q3. We believe in the model. We continue to win prizes. We think we have a strong culture, and we really look forward to the future. And then we are on the Q&A now. So feel free. Thank you very much for all of your questions. And I think we will start with the AI area. So, Christian, will you? And the first question is, should all employees receive the same amount of training in AI? Are the 100,000 hours equally distributed? That's a very good question. The answer is no. There will be employees that are super passionate about this area. They will have more hours. And we will also do projects where some employees get more training. But the point is that we will have a minimum basic foundation in every single role because this affects everyone. And we need to be the best in the market in this area. So we will go broad, but it will not be cut off exactly one share to each employee. Okay. Thank you. And maybe this is also a question for Sverre. How will the 100,000 hours invested in AI affect the result this year, and also did it affect last year? Okay, s o basically, not at all in the short run. Those invested hours, and we will start counting these hours and come back and to give you a brief update on it in a later stage. As always, when new technology arrives, we are involved in a large number of client projects involving the newest technology, like AI, and what leads up to AI. So a lot of these kind of activities will, as always, be funded by the clients. There will obviously be some initiatives taken by other individuals on their own. They do not have an AI-relevant case to work with at the moment. And then hundreds of people in B3 will invest some of their own time into it. And obviously, there will be some license fees, etc., also on our side. But I would call that more like normal business. It's not significant. And you will not hear us say anything during 2024 saying that profitability has a hitback due to investments in IE. That is not the situation. Okay. Thank you. And Christian, how do you view the future in AI? Is there a risk that it will lower the entire consulting industry? This is a very insightful question. I would say any technology shift affects the consulting industry, typically in ways you don't expect. What we can see now is that we get requests from basically every company saying that, "Help us do this. How should we work differently?" And when speaking to programmers or developers, there will be a shift in what they do. Rather than crunching code, they will level up and work more with design and problem-solving and sort of raise in the value chain. The interesting thing is that this efficiency gain will manifest throughout every company, throughout all value chains, which means that the demands also will increase. So I don't see that as a risk. I would say rather we will get in the short term a higher demand from the customer side and then eventually level out to normal levels. Thank you, Christian. I also received a question for you, Anna. The banking and insurance area seem to be an area where B3 is very successful. What are the opportunities for further expansion within this area? I would say that the opportunities are of course, many opportunities out there. And still so many, as I said before, there's so many external regulations happening. And of course, AI is also happening to the bank and insurance companies. And so many things are going on at the same time. But I'd say the regulatory changes are what's happening now, the technology, and in order to also keep up with the smaller actors in the market. So I would say good opportunities. Thank you, Anna. And now we have some financial questions, Sverre, I think. What is the one-off expense to employees of SEK 3.8 million in Q4? Okay. There are some layoffs in Q4 where we had to negotiate a kind of normal exit type of situation. So we took that cost in Q4 and are off the hook entering 2024. Pretty normal. And regarding the utilization rate, has it stabilized, bottom out, or do you expect a further decline? It's stabilized. So we have seen a pretty stable situation now since June last year in that area. What we are trying to do is to maneuver in a way so that if the market continues to be equal to today, that we can fight this up again. And if this is lasting for too long time, we may reduce some more cost in some areas. But it has stabilized. No changes in Q4 relative to Q3 and entering 2024. Some macro analysts that have a pretty good sight of the market, they are talking about a potential recovery in the second half year. I think that's difficult to judge. What we have seen in history in an earlier difficult situation where Sweden or Scandinavia has been challenged financially, the market is always coming back. And it will this time as well. Exactly when? We can't know, do we? We think it might happen in the second half year, but we don't plan for it. So we have to plan for that it might last for longer in that area. But let's wait and see. It's stable at the moment. And another question, given your previous statement that buybacks are more prioritized than dividends, did you consider launching another buyback program instead of proposing a dividend payout? I'm not quite sure whether we have expressed our capital allocation policy exactly in that situation. So we gave our capital allocation policy to the market after Q2. And we said that we would normally pay a dividend sized 50%. And we could additionally spend money on buyback situation. And you have seen that we have done that during the last quarter. So what we are looking for now is investment opportunities outside the area of buyback and dividend. So there are M&A situations that we are considering as we speak. We have some investment opportunities in that area. So since we haven't announced another buyback program today, we are kind of saving some kind of financial capacity to see whether there are opportunities that arrive in the next quarters to come. We have a new nice office here in Stockholm and a new studio as well. How does the new office arrangement in Stockholm affect the cost base? Okay. So you saw in the previous slide I was into that we are investing SEK 8 million more in 2024 relative to 2023. At the same time, we are reducing headquarter cost with SEK 41 million. So the increased headquarter cost, the office cost in Wallingatan, it's a beautiful place. People love it here. Much, much better than the previous office we had here. So that office cost is obviously higher than what we had in 2023, but it's within the 8. And we're in the target of an accumulated cost saving in headquarters sized SEK 41 million. So you shouldn't worry about it. It's in the figures that we have communicated to the market already. Okay. And given all the current efficiency initiatives, are you confident that the profitability target for 2025 will be met? Yes. Yes, I would say yes. What we have said to the market is that our long-term EBIT target is 10 over a cycle in that area. And I am pretty confident that during, for instance, a cycle called 2024, 2025, 2026, we will deliver on that [guess] 10. So the answer is yes. Now we are talking about EBIT level, not EBITDA level. EBITDA figure will obviously be higher than the EBIT level. You talked about the startup, if you agree. Will it continue to generate loss after it has been consolidated into the group? Okay. There will be smaller losses in Q1. I think we had a loss in that entity in January sized SEK 300,000, if I remember correctly. I think I do. And that is, as we see it today, shrinking in that area. It's a large number of people have left already. But we have a group of people that are being transferred to other entities in B3 family. Good people, good consultants with clients out there. So it's not really a kind of a black hole. It's not. We failed, but there are good people with good clients that we think will generate some kind of profit from Q2, SEK 300,000 loss in January on a level to be lower every month. That's what we see at the moment. Okay. And one question about the cost saving program. Your cost saving program seems to be successful. Are there savings to be made in other areas? Okay. We might see other cost savings opportunities outside what we have seen now. What you have seen today is that the headquarters cost program is running faster and better than expected. And we have raised targets. Obviously, we are following up over DOT companies closely as well. And what we can see is also because three quarters with a poor market. So in some areas, Anna and others are doing a lot better in 2023 compared with 2022. But in some areas and in some companies, we are doing worse. And obviously, if that continues for too many months, we have to consider cost initiatives on a daughter company level as well. So that is subject to discussion at the moment. I don't think it will be necessary with anything very significant. But obviously, we have to look at it, obviously. We take one more question now. The other question that we haven't covered, we will get back to by email afterwards. So the last question. Now when the company is decreasing in EBIT and EBITDA, is there a risk that we will return to the old levels? Okay. Because when I entered the board in May 2020, it's a bit more than two and a half years. So in three years now, I basically accept the question in a way that in older days, it was a good company, a fast-growing company, but it was not really a profitable company. So B3 had some of the worst margins in the Swedish markets for many, many years. I think we have an appendix with some figures. Is that right? I have to look at the computer here. Okay. So here, this is presented to the market here. So what you see on this slide is that in 2021, 2023, we have a bit more than seven, a bit more than seven, and a bit more than 12, which adds up to around 9% EBIT level. And if you calculate the EBIT level in the previous three or five-year period, you can see that we are more on five or something like that. So meaning that we have moved from an average sized five on EBIT level, higher on EBITDA level, to around nine. And that period, 2021, 2023, is one very good year, 2022. A rather poor year, 2023. So I think it's fair to say that you can see that B3 actually have changed level of profitability. So we are at the moment on a higher level than in earlier years. Obviously, it's possible to draw a line from 12 to today and onwards. That's possible. But that's the reason why we have initiated cost savings programs on another company. Obviously, we are doing everything we can with sales and utilization out there in the 25+ companies. As you have seen, they are doing different results in that kind of market environment we have. And if necessary, there will be new actions to take in order to make sure that we will not end up in older days' 5 percentage points EBIT level. So I do understand the question. Absolutely. And I think that it's not perfectly illustrated in the slide you see here now. But it's acceptably illustrated. We could maybe go a bit more back in time and try to explain that the new normal now is at the moment possibly around nine, targeting 10. And obviously, you understand that we have an internal target to be higher than 10. Why wouldn't we? It's possible in that area. So thanks a lot for reminding me about our history and giving me the opportunity to express my opinion, at least. I saw some of the questions you arrived, Kattis. They are pretty detailed. Some of them are so detailed that I cannot really answer on the spot here. But as always, when we are closing down the meeting, we will kind of share information with you, also relative to those questions we didn't cover on the fly here in this meeting. So thanks a lot. My summary: second best in history, still a challenging market. We will get stronger out of it at the other end. Thanks a lot. I will go to the management training program starting at 1:15 P.M. a bit later and meet 78 managers from the B3 family in an 18-month program that will, Christian, end in September 2025 in Oxford, possibly the best AI university in Europe. That's the reason why we go to Oxford in September 2025. Thanks for listening. Have a nice day, everybody. Bye-bye.