Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the ICA Investor Conference Call. I am Valentina Di Coro, Call Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the ICA Investor Conference Call. I am Valentina Di Coro, Call Operator. I would like to remind you that all participants will be in listen-only mode and the conference is being recorded. The presentation will be followed by a Q&A session. You can register for questions at any time by pressing Star and 1 on your telephone. For operator assistance, please press Star and 0. The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Frans Benson. Please go ahead. Thank you and good morning, everyone. Frans Benson, Head of IR at ICA Gruppen, and welcome to this call on the back of what we announced earlier today, that we are divesting our Rimi Baltic operations. With me in the room here, I have Åsa Skogfors, Head of Treasury, and today's presenter is Fredrik Lagercrantz, who is joining us from Riga, who will run through a few slides before we open up for Q&A. So Fredrik, please go ahead. Thank you, Frans. So we're having this call in connection to the news that was announced earlier today, that this morning we signed a share purchase agreement with Salling Group, where ICA Gruppen will divest the Rimi Baltic to Salling Group. And we will divest all the shares in Rimi Baltic, and the valuation is at EUR 1.3 billion enterprise value. But then you need to take into account that there is some debt in the group, mainly IFRS 16 debt, and the total debt is EUR 0.5 billion. So the capital gain for ICA will be around SEK 7 billion, and we will have a positive cash flow effect of approximately SEK 9 billion. And the actual transaction will be booked in our accounting once the transaction is completed, but as of today, it will be reported as discontinued operations. And the transaction scope is that we will divest all of Rimi Baltic's business, and that's all the stores, all the warehouses and logistics centers, the online business, and the Rimi trademarks. So we will have no remaining operations in any of the three Baltic countries. And closing will take place when we have approval by relevant authorities. It's the European competitive authority, but we also need a Lithuanian approval for foreign direct investments. So ICA has been the sole owner of Rimi Baltic since 2007, so why do we divest it now? And the background is that we want to focus further on our Swedish operations. So we have a strong food, grocery retailer. We also have the financial services with the ICA Bank and our insurance company. And then we have Apotek Hjärtat pharmacy, who is also co-owner in the online doctor Min Doktor, and we have our own real estate company. So we want to focus on our Swedish operations and our offering towards Swedish customers. And ICA Gruppen has no ambition to grow outside of Sweden. And with this transaction, we can release funds that can be allocated to strengthen and develop our core businesses and develop our customer offerings in Sweden. And besides the funds, it will also increase the focus on how we develop our Swedish business. So for us, this is a fairly natural step to concentrate our business to only be in Sweden. And if we look at Rimi, where the project name has been Plommon, that's why it says Plommon. In 2024, in euros, they had net sales of EUR 1.9 billion, and the EBIT, and that's excluding then IFRS 16 leasing effects of EUR 74 million, which corresponds then to an operating margin of 3.9%. And both the EBIT and the margin is then also excluding items affecting comparability. In 2024, we did investments of EUR 42 million, and in total we had 315 stores across the three countries and around 11,000 employees. And the total blended market share in the Baltics is 13%, where we are in total the second player, but with the strongest presence then in Latvia. And if we look back a bit, so the first store was opened in Latvia in 1997, so that's about 28 years ago, but we have owned this fully as a sole owner since 2007. We have had very strong development, and we are super proud of the business as it looks today and being able to sell such a strong business, strong offerings to the customers, and strong team to the Salling Group. If we look at the financial development, sales has developed strongly over the last 20 years. If we look at the last 10 years, we have had an average sales growth of more than 4% per year, reaching then the €1.9 billion in sales 2024. If we look at the profitability, and this is now operating profit again, excluding IFRS 16 effects, over the last 10 years almost, the EBIT has grown on average by almost 6%. In the last few years, we have stabilized the margin on 3.9%. I think it was very special circumstances during the COVID pandemic, where in 2021 had a strong tailwind, which inflated the profitability. So I would say that underlying 2024 is our strongest year in history. And if we then look at the impact it will have on ICA, so this is a table where we show what ICA would look like excluding Rimi Baltic, and just note that this is performance unaudited, but net sales for the remaining ICA Gruppen then would be SEK 135 billion, and we would have an operating profit of more than SEK 6 billion. And if you look at the operating profit excluding items affecting comparability and excluding IFRS 16 leases, it's SEK 5.3 billion, and that corresponding margin would be 3.9%. Profit for the period excluding Rimi Baltic would then be SEK 3.7 billion, and the cash flow SEK 7 billion, and in total investments of SEK 3.5 billion. Moving on then, I think there will be a clear focus, and we can focus on our different markets. We can focus on Sweden, and Rimi together with Salling can focus on developing the Baltic market, and where Salling has a clear agenda for international growth. Besides being very strong in Denmark, they also have a presence in Germany and Poland, so I think Rimi gets to a group where they're part of a more clear international agenda, so we see clear benefits for both companies. That was the end of the presentation. Now we hand over for questions or open up for questions. We will now begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press Star and 1 on their telephone. You will hear a tone to confirm that you have entered the queue. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press Star and 2. Questioners on the phone are requested to disable the loudspeaker mode while asking a question. Anyone who has a question may press Star and 1 at this time. The first question comes from Daniel Schmidt from Danske Bank. Please go ahead. Yes, good morning, Fredrik and Frans. A couple of questions from me. I think you sort of said that you want to focus on the Swedish market through doing this divestment, but could you give any more specific reason why you're divesting the Baltic business now? That seems to have been performing quite well in the past couple of years. Yeah, it is performing well, but it is a strategic and commercial decision by the ICA Group that we want to focus on Sweden, where we have a stronger position, and we can also see that by combining and finding offerings that go across our different legs in Sweden, we can build an even stronger customer offering. So we think that we can increase the focus on how we meet the Swedish customers and also free up some capital to invest behind strengthening our offering. Yeah, I hear that, but has anything sort of accentuated this action recently over the past year? Has anything sort of forced you to do this now? Do you see the competitive situation in Sweden being much more fierce than you expected a couple of years ago, and that is part of the reason why you want to focus more on Sweden? Is there anything sort of in the competitive landscape that is accentuating this? No, I wouldn't say so. Okay. So it's more the fact that you find sort of this is the good timing, you have a buyer, it's doing well, and sort of it's time to move on to be pure Swedish play, basically? Yes, you can describe it. Yes, I think that's a fair description. When you talk about an even stronger offering and sort of strengthening the customer offering, you guys have been doing a lot when it comes to changing the perception, when it comes to price and value for money in the food retail business, and it has been paying off quite nicely in the past five quarters. Is that part of what you see going forward to continue to push that value for money perception change, or is there anything else when you talk about a stronger customer offering? No, it is. It's part of pushing the value for money, and I think our customers, the consumers, they will have an ongoing and also increasing focus on that if you take the long-term perspective of what's happening, not if you kind of disregard the short-term fluctuations in the macro environment. But I mean, overall, it's a strong push for value from the consumers. We can see that across Sweden and European markets. But then I think there's other things we can do. We have a lot of ideas, and then of course we need to prioritize, but how can we strengthen our logistics system? How can we have, for example, a better logistical setup to serve the Stockholm area? There are many things in digitalization that can be improved where the development is very quick. How do we develop our both communication but also the setup around our loyalty program so we get our customers to engage more with the different ICA companies? So there are many things we can do, I think. Okay. You do get quite a significant release of funds here, so I assume that much can be done with much less money than €9 billion in cash flow. That's a lot. Is there any sort of plans of going outside what you currently are in, sort of bank, pharmacy, real estate, and food retail within the borders of Sweden? As you know, we are constantly developing our offering. The last few years, we have ICA Paket, which is a delivery service for online retailers. We have developed and are testing specialty concepts when it comes to pet food and other pet-related things. So there are constant testing and development of our concepts, but we have not communicated any big other investments that this money or these funds could be used to. So primarily, we will invest in strengthening our current offering, and then, as you all are aware, we still have a significant external debt that is larger than the proceeds we will get. So if not anything else, we can always take down the debt level. Okay. Thanks a lot, Fredrik. If I could barge in here, I have two questions that have popped up from the web, and we didn't say that, but you can also ask a question if you're following this through the webcast. And they come from someone named Andreas, and the first question is, are Rimi stores in the Baltics, i.e., real estate, also part of the deal? And I can take that immediately. Yes, it is. And then perhaps, Fredrik, the next one goes to you. What is your take on the valuation? Please comment on achieved sale multiple. Yeah. And just on the first one, so on the Rimi stores, the majority of the Rimi stores in the Baltics we lease, but some of them we own the real estate, and that real estate is also part of the transaction. And when it comes to the valuation, there's always in a situation and discussion between two parties where there's one potential seller and one potential acquirer, there's always a discussion on what's the price level and how do we get to a level that's acceptable for both parties. And since the deal comes through and we can sign an agreement, that means we found a level which both parties think is acceptable and beneficial from their own perspective. So yeah, we think the valuation in terms of the transaction is beneficial to ICA, and we are, but I think it's a fair representation of the strong operations that Rimi is. Then you need, and I talked a bit about that in the beginning, you need to understand that the EUR 1.3 billion is for the firm value and that there is debt also going over EUR 0.5 billion, and the majority of that debt, or roughly EUR 400 million, is IFRS 16 related debt. So if this transaction would have been done 10 years ago before IFRS 16, it would have been expressed differently. Okay, operator, back to you. The next question from the phone comes from Lina Berg from Danske Bank. Please go ahead. Yes, thank you very much, and thank you for taking my questions. So I was thinking of the EUR 9 billion cash flow. Can you say anything of how big part that will be used for developing and strengthening your Swedish operations? No, we have not communicated any such split or how that proceeds will be used exactly. Okay. And on the developing part, is there any specific area within ICA Gruppen that you will focus extra on here during 2025? No, I wouldn't say it's any specific part. This enables us to have a stronger focus and also possibilities to invest more, but already before this transaction, we have invested historically high numbers in 2024 and 2023. So it's not that we've been behind on investments going into this, but this opens up the capacity even more to invest in opportunities. Super. Great. And my last question is if you plan to do any extra dividends here during the year? We have not communicated anything like that. No. Okay. Thank you very much. The next question comes from Daniel Schmidt. We have a follow-up question, actually, from Danske Bank. Please go ahead. Yes, me again, Fredrik. Just a follow-up in terms of investments. I didn't sort of ask you before, but the fact that you're sort of increasing focus on Sweden, is that also increasing the likelihood to be more aggressive on Maxi store openings? It's very hard to express the likelihood of being more aggressive. As you all know, Maxi is one of the formats that is developing strongly, and we have an ambition, and we also see opportunities to grow that banner further. There are still white spots out in the countries where there are many customers that would like to have a Maxi closer by. But we had plans already before this to open additional Maxi stores. So I think that maybe it's a difference if how much of the actual real estate between the Maxi stores that we could finance ourselves, or if we would do it in other solutions. But it's more about finding the right opportunities and locations where we think a Maxi store would fit. Yeah. I'm just thinking, given that you're entirely focused on Sweden, you have all these funds now, and given the allocation of funds historically, some must have gone to the Baltic region. And anyway, okay. Thank you. That's all for me again. Ladies and gentlemen, that was the last question from the phone. I would now like to turn the conference back over to Frans Benson for any questions from the web or any closing remarks. Thank you. There are no further questions on the web, so I guess that wraps this up. Thank you for participating and your questions, and take care. Bye-bye.