Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Doro Audiocast with Teleconference first quarter 2022. Throughout the call, all participants will be in listen-only mode, and afterwards, there will be a question and answer session. Just to remind you, this conference call is being recorded. Today, I am pleased to present CEO Jörgen Nilsson and CFO Isabelle Senges. Please go ahead. Thank you very much, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to the Q1 2022 webcast for Doro. With me, I have Isabelle Senges, our CFO, and I'm Jörgen Nilsson. Let's proceed. We'll start with our key highlights, then we'll have a look at the first quarter of 2022. We'll have some concluding remarks, and it's also open for Q&A sessions. We've received two questions from one person already in the US. Let's proceed. Key highlights. The three top key highlights of this year is that we've, despite the declining sales in most of the consumer electronics business, Doro actually managed to grow our net sales by almost 3%. In addition, we've had very positive feedback from some of our major customers for our continued ability to supply, in general, but also on time and with very good quality. Thirdly, we have now launched our new range of smartphone and feature phones in all our regions. In addition, and maybe more importantly, the innovation product, the new categories for the innovation products are continuing as per plan. If we proceed, we can zoom in a bit on them. Q1 of 2022, we had expected to be the first quarter to return to normal, let's say, post-COVID. Alas, what we initially saw is that this meant that customers, after two years of shopping consumer electronics, now turn their interest to mainly services and experiences instead of home electronics. Naturally, to add to this, the Russian invasion of the Ukraine, which we've seen has caused spikes in electricity and food prices, triggered inflation, and made a previously difficult situation with regards to our supply and especially logistics even tougher. Also, and maybe more importantly, the Russian invasion has, in general, negatively contributed to raising concerns and worries among the European population. With this situation, two years of already shopping home electronics and the general inflation and the general worry from the Russian invasion, we have seen very little activity in our customer shops during quarter one. The buying has very much come to a standstill. Nevertheless, as said, we still managed to increase our sales, even though it's slightly to almost 3% compared to the same quarter last year, which I think is very strong, given, as I said, that Q1 has been challenging for the entire consumer business as a whole. I would also like to say that in addition to the growing of sales, we have had almost overwhelmingly positive feedback from some of our major customers, and we're talking about major operators and retailers, for our way of successfully continuing to managing both our inventory and customer delivery despite the general severe supply logistics challenges. Of course, the Russian war in Ukraine has further triggered a problem with transportation because now transports can no longer fly straight from Asia to Europe, have to circumvent both Ukraine and Russia. In addition, as I said, we have launched our new smartphone and feature phone ranges across all the regions. We had a bit of a sneak launch already by Q4 in the Nordics, and we're really happy to see that. We think that those, together with the price increase that we've communicated for Q2, should also help us regain our margins. Because to be honest, our growth margin did decrease to 32% during Q1. The main reason for that was, of course, that component prices and the continuing challenging logistics, as I just said, transportation prices have gone up a lot. Also, in terms of new products, we are on a path where we are focusing heavily on innovation. We have planned for three completely new categories to be launched during the year, and everything is progressing as per planning. We still hope to release all three new categories at the IFA show in Berlin in September or late August, early September. What more can we say? Our EBIT margin went down a little bit, but maybe I can just do it here. Our EBIT margin was quite down compared to same quarter last year. This is of course, as I said, a much higher COGS, much higher cost of goods, and of course, also higher OpEx as we have now rehired the people that left us in combination with the split, plus as we're investing now heavily in new products and developing the organization. I think that's pretty much what we could say on that one. If we zoom in on our regions, we've had negative development both in the Nordics and what we call Frabel or Western South Europe. The main reason for that is that we had very good Q4s in both of these regions. As our customers stopped coming to the shops, our customers have had very little sell-out, so they all have good stock levels going into the new year. On the upside, at least in the Nordics, we've seen a very nice traction in the Baltic countries through our new 2G feature phones there. That's good. In Frabel, and especially in France, the inflation, the prices, the price spikes, but also the general focus towards the French election, presidential election has meant that customers have been having their focus elsewhere but in electronics. Our two positive regions have been UK, Ireland and DACH or Central and Eastern Europe. In UK you could say that the big rise that we're seeing 65%, almost 66%, is of course in the light of the poor Q1 in 2021, which was then completely locked down because of COVID. During this Q1 we also saw a major intake from one of U.K.'s biggest retailers who will now have a promotion. So you will see the Doro feature phones, the Doro senior phones to be listed in this major retailer's all shops during the year to come, which is of course very happy. In terms of DACH, Central Eastern Europe, our net sales increased by almost 20%. Here the region benefited mostly from the strong export business. Here there is, we're talking about PMRs, walkie-talkies and stuff like that. It's not the natural Doro. But also we had a very good development in our group and distribution channels which showed a positive trend. Overall, between the regions, the distribution between the regions in terms of sales were quite similar with Frabel, Western South Europe being the biggest. Central Eastern Europe, DACH being the second biggest, then Nordics, accounting for almost a fourth, and UK, Ireland for slightly south of 20%. Okay. I'll leave the word to you. Yes, I will take over and give a bit more numbers. Some will be repetition from Jörgen, but nevertheless. The net sales in Q1 amounted to SEK 204.6 million, which is an increase by 2.9% compared to quarter one 2021. As Jörgen mentioned earlier, the quarter was quite challenging for the entire consumer electronics sector. The people's focus has been elsewhere. We can see that the consumer's attention is more on buying basic goods now, such as energy and food. I think we can be quite pleased with being able to report a growth in sales and especially pleased to see the development in UK and DACH, our two regions which have been struggling and have had some tough quarters previously. The gross margin for Q1 ended up at 32.0%. It's a decrease of 3.1 points compared to Q1 2021. This decrease is not of course satisfying, but doesn't come as a surprise. The component price has increased many times in the last period and are now hitting our cost of goods. We also have a higher inbound freight, as we all know the situation for the transport and the logistics from China. Other costs included in our gross margin are pretty much stable, like our warranty costs, our outbound freight and so forth. Most probably the pressure on the margin will continue in the coming months considering the situation for the coming quarters. We do however continuously look for measures to mitigate this. There has been a price increase early Q2 and we optimize our portfolio all the time to try to recover good margin levels. We can have a word on other operating costs, also called OpEx. There is also here a slight increase in Q1 in OpEx versus previous year. Again, this was expected. Jörgen mentioned that the activities did start again at beginning of the year. Obviously sales and marketing activities, visit to customers, participation in fairs and et cetera. We also have another full cost of being standing alone in our own organization after the split with Careium. We have costs associated with our strategy of broadening our portfolio and going into new categories. Of course, this margin and those costs affect the profit and EBIT amounted to SEK 3 million in Q1 this year. It corresponds to an operating margin of 1.5%. We can just mention that in our EBIT is also hit by SEK 1.2 million of legal costs from the separation with Careium. If we go over to cash flow and financial position. Cash flow from the operating activities ended up at minus SEK 4.9 million, which is better than previous quarter at minus SEK 36.4 million. Of course, this cash flow from operating activities is affected negatively by the lower profit, but there is quite a positive effect from a better working capital. than previous year, having in mind that previous year's cash flow numbers are including the care business. The cash flow from investing activities was minus SEK 4.8 million versus minus SEK 11.2 million previous year. We did not have a very high level of investment in Q1. It's mostly a timing effect. It is usually like that in our business. We see investment going up in the coming months and quarters. Again, last year investment includes care business. Our free cash flow ended up at minus SEK 14.2 million versus minus SEK 47.6 million last year. Cash flow from financial activities were minus SEK 77 million. This is due to us reimbursing a part of our bank loan at SEK 75 million. The cash and cash equivalent ended up at SEK 91 million. The net equity ratio is 49.9% versus 66.4% last year, again including TR business. Our net debt was -SEK 8.1 million, so quite at a break-even between liquid funds and interest-bearing liability. As a conclusion on this, cash flow and financial position, we do have a negative free cash flow in Q1. It's often the case in our business, but we have quite a strong financial position. Thank you, Isabelle. We'll just come with some concluding remarks, and then we'll open up for Q&A. On the positive side, as I said, even though it's been a very tough quarter for the entire consumer electronics, we did have a small increase in sales versus the same quarter previous year. We have continued to have very efficient management of our supply and warehouse. Big thank you to our operations department for that. We've also had very good customer feedback in general on our ability to continue supplying both during these two years of COVID, and also now during the first quarter when others had difficulties. In terms of our challenges, of course, as I said, the general economic anxiety with increasing inflation, food and electricity prices in general, and then of course the war in Ukraine, which has set people in Europe worrying and being less or more hesitant to spend money. Also, after two years of home shopping, if you like, it with a lot of focus on buying home electronics, people have now started turning to other products than consumer, especially experiences and maybe service. As a result, the activities in our customer shops have almost come to a standstill. There are very few customers in the shops. Therefore, in terms of our priorities ahead, number one is that we need to start stimulating sales to get sales back into the shops. That is not only us, it's the entire business. We will also continue what we call a transformation of our DACH region. We know that we are transforming our DACH region to become in the same setup as all the other regions, so we can get it back on a, on the very good trajectory that we hope that will be. Finally, and I think this is the most important, is that we will have success in the launch of our new three innovation categories. As I said before, everything is still progressing according to plan. We hope to be able to show and launch them at the IFA show by end of August, early September of this year. I think by that, we open up for questions and answers. Ladies and gentlemen, if you wish to ask a question, please press zero one on your telephone keypad. If you wish to withdraw your question, you may do so by pressing zero two to cancel it. There will be a brief pause while questions are being registered. We have a question from Rebecca Gjedro from ABG. Please go ahead. Hi. Good morning, Jörgen and Isabelle. Thank you for the presentation. One question from me. You have earlier had a very good supply chain management and, but I noted that you mentioned that the prices have increased in this quarter and will probably continue to do so. What do you expect? Will there be any transportation problems? Will you likely not be able to deliver due to these component problems or and what? Could you give us a flavor about the outlook, and what do you believe in about that, please? Yeah. No, it's very true what you say. In general, the transportation is a tricky situation, and it did of course not become easier with a big war breaking out when transportation has to go further, detour. What we have done now is that we've been basically signing deals, so we've been buying transportation capacity for the entire year at a fixed price. In that way, we have both secured transportation for the entire year, and we also try to hedge the price of transportation for this full year. That in itself was a tricky situation to manage to get that through, but our operations department did. That we think they are not at price levels where we would have liked to see them. Of course, they're much higher than they used to be. At least we have this predictability, and also by securing this for the full year ahead, we have secured the possibility of transportation. That said, things can still happen. The war can expand. There can be further supply problems in Asia in terms of components. Even if we might still be able to transport, there might not be enough component. So far during these two years, and especially during Q1, our operations department has been very successful in securing the components and shipment. We have also secured components, so our inventory has gone up, which you might see in the report. Our inventory has gone up quite a lot because there was Chinese New Year, there was a war breaking out, so we made sure that we secured components and started shipping them into Europe. Not sure if that responds to your question. Yeah, very good answer. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, just a reminder, in order to ask a question, please press zero one on your telephone keypad. to say maybe that we've had two questions via email from Niklas Sävås from Redeye. Should I just read them maybe? Yes, of course. Please go ahead. Yeah. They were written in Swedish, so I'll do a translation as we go. It's from Niklas Sävås from Redeye, and he says, "Can you please describe how your initiative to develop the new products developed during the quarter?" I elaborated or I touched upon it before, I can elaborate that everything is still progressing as per plan. We still have very good hopes that we will be able to show and launch our three new non-phone categories by IFA show in late August, early September. For those of you who might have followed us, you might know that we're saying that our new categories, we divide them in smart home and smart health. Without going into the specifics of the types of products, I could say that two of the new categories are within the smart health area and one is within the smart home area. As of late as this week, I have not seen anything to the contrary than that everything is progressing as per hope. We've had some sneak previews with some of our customers who thought this was very interesting and that they're very happy to see Doro coming back to the consumer arena. Hopefully, we'll see you all at IFA, and you can actually try out the new categories. I once again just want to emphasize, these are non-phone categories, so it's new things from our point of view. The second question from Niklas Sävås at Redeye is, "What measures are you taking to minimize the problem of increased costs, and how much room is there for a price increase?" I think that ABG also touched. Rebecca Gjedro touched on that before. One of the things that we said is that we have secured transportation for the entire year at a fixed price. Once again, it was not a price that we would have liked to see two years ago, three years ago, of course, but at least we secured the transportation capacity, and we know what price we probably have to work with for the rest of the year. Yes, there is a room for price increase, or rather, we have already communicated to our customers that as of Q2, there is a price increase. That will take into effect now in April basically. We're still continuously optimizing our portfolio, as we call it, but we're trying to always get rid of products that we're not making so much money of. We do a constant evaluation of which products give a better margin and better prices. We push those, and we try to end of life the other ones. We're also further trying to focus on our online sales, which we will try to boost. I did see here now that, after COVID, now basically in Q1, the online sales are starting to drop back to the normal ratio from before. Hopefully that answers a little bit of your questions, Niklas Sävås. Otherwise, you have to mail us ASAP. Are there other questions maybe? Thank you. We don't have any further questions over the phone. Back to you. Thank you. Well, we thank you for your attention. The next report will be our Q2, which is mid-July. We wish you all a very good weekend. Yes. Have a good weekend.
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