Good morning, everybody. I'm Tomas Carlsson, and with me here today, I have Susanne Lithander, our Chief Financial Officer. This is the last report from Susanne Lithander that you will hear as she is starting to phase in to her retirement. From tomorrow, we will have a new Chief Financial Officer for NCC. I'd like to take this opportunity to say thank you, Susanne, for all these reports, and also welcome to Katarina. With that, we move on to the summary of the quarter. The way to think about the quarter is it's a good performance for the group. We have yet another quarter with high levels of orders received, SEK 14.1 billion. We have business area Industry, Stone and Asphalt having record high Q2 earnings. I'll get back to that in a little while with SEK 448 million. We have improved margin in the contracting business, and altogether we have a stable group EBIT of SEK 635 million. If we look at it a little bit on the underlying earnings, it looks like this. Contracting, robust earnings, improved margins. However, lower sales as we've been talking about for some time now due to low orders received in the beginning of Q1 2025 and also in the end of 2024. We have really good orders received in recent quarters, and we have higher quality in the order backlog. Industry record high Q2 earnings. Actually, I would say it's a record high first half year earnings. We're actually on a better level than we were last year, and last year was a really good year at SEK 448 million. Property Development, SEK 8 million earnings, no profit recognitions in Q2, one property sold in the beginning of the third quarter. The underperforming part, other and eliminations. It's lower, quite significantly. It's all explained due to higher costs for legal disputes, and I'll get back to that in a little while. Altogether, stable for the group. Higher operating profit from operations was offset by the increase of the cost from legal disputes. This is the high-level summary of the group. If we move on to earnings, stable earnings. As you can see, this is the level where we've been at the second quarter for some time now. I don't think it's worth commenting that more, but what's more interesting would be what's driving this. If we move on to the next waterfall chart. I think about it as fundamentally three parts. It's the contracting parts, Infrastructure, Building Sweden. Very stable. Small changes driven by lower net sales in Infrastructure and Buildings, and Building Sweden managed to actually improve despite lower net sales. Very strong improvement from Industry. Stable from Property Development and other. The big change here, the big difference here is the legal or the dispute cost. Now we've always had dispute costs in our business. Since the termination of the Korsvägen project last fall, our dispute cost has increased, and we think it's appropriate to report that separately. If you look at the report, it's on page 13. How can you think about this going forward? We think that unfortunately this will probably continue for some years. It will have a high degree of variation from quarter to quarter, but it may have significant numbers on individual quarters. We think that going forward this year, the second half will probably be pretty much the same as the first half of this year. We move on to orders received. You've heard me say frequently, don't pay too much attention to an individual quarter or actually even two consecutive quarters. Now we have something different here. We have three consecutive quarters with high orders received on the back of five quarters with a little bit lower orders received. First of all, it's the explanation of the lower net sales in the beginning of this year. Then I think it's the testament to the strong demand that we see in the market. We have these strong orders received while still maintaining a very prudent approach to tendering. Moving on to the order backlog. This has, of course, an implication for the order backlog. We've increased the order backlog. On the first half, we have a book-to-bill of 1.2, and in the quarter, we have a book-to-bill of one. I think it's well worth noting that We've increased the backlog with SEK 5.2 billion over the last six months. If you add to that we have phased out a number of zero-margin profit recognition projects from the order backlog, and also that we have a larger proportion of early collaboration projects that tend to have a better quality and a better stability. I think it's fair to say that we have a higher quality in the order backlog. If you would like to see some examples of projects that we have in the orders received and in the order backlog from the last quarter. We have, for example, a new sorting plant for LKAB in northern Sweden. We have a school and a sports hall in Lilla Edet. We will be refurbishing the National Archives in Helsinki, in Finland, and refurbishment of residential homes in Upplands-Bro, in Sweden, as a few examples. We are also winning early involvement projects. These are some examples or try to give you some flavor. We won the new hospital in Kiruna, Sweden. We've won a center for social psychiatry in Trondheim in Norway, a couple of large defense buildings in Sweden. I think it goes without saying that we cannot communicate where and what they really are. It comes with the territory, so to say. Net sales, stable, particularly considering that a large volume of bad non-performing projects are out. As I've said, we have somewhat lower sales in contracting due to the lower orders received in the end of 2024 and beginning of 2025. With that, our financial targets, we are at SEK 13.2 at the earnings per share on a rolling basis. As I've said, we expect the contracting and Industry to contribute more to the earnings per share, we need profit contribution from Property Development to reach the SEK 16 target. Net debt on 2.05x. I think it's well worth noting that we have seasonally low cash flow, always in NCC in the second quarter. This quarter, I think it's for particularly good reasons, and the change is largely driven because of the strong performance from Industry, i.e., accounts receivables have not yet been converted to cash. Dividend policy is same as always. With that, we move on to health and safety. We are on the trajectory going down. We are now at 3.3x. We have seen improvements in many areas, but we still have some way to go to our target of 2.0x. Well worth noting, this is a very low level. Then, before I hand over to Susanne, we have a continued positive market outlook. General good market demand, particularly where we are well-positioned. For Infrastructure in a wider sense, include not only rails and roads, but also energy generation, water treatment, energy distribution and water distribution and things like that. Industrial construction and public buildings, strong demand. Strong demand for asphalt in all markets where we are active, and slightly higher market activity in commercial property. I am not saying that because we sold a part of Bromma Blocks, but in the dialogues we have and in the statistics that we see from the market, it seems to be a slightly higher market activity. With that, I hand over to Susanne. Thank you, Tomas. First slide here is the summary of our contracting units. We have a Green Industry Transformation and Building Nordics, had a strong order booking in the quarter. For example, as Tomas mentioned, we had the next phase in the sorting plant in Gällivare from LKAB. Building Sweden continued to improve and higher earnings and margin on lower sales. The overall lower net sales and higher margins reflect our more selective approach to picking the right projects and improving the quality in our backlog and portfolio. This slide shows the backlog in dark blue and in lighter blue, the net sales on rolling 12. Even though the sales volumes are a bit lower at the moment from lower intake the past year, both building units have solid high-quality backlogs now. In the picture here, we have also shaded the area of sales for the West Link projects in the rolling 12 number for sales in Infrastructure. Infrastructure has several large projects in early phases, not yet converted into order booking. An example is the Atløy tunnel, which is SEK 1.4 billion that was registered in the order books right after the closing of the quarter in the first days of July. So it looks fairly good also for Infrastructure when it comes to a good backlog. Continuing on with net sales and margin for the contracting units. Net sales in Infrastructure is down, which is primarily explained by the West Link projects. The margin improved slightly due to improved quality in the project portfolio. In Building Nordics, net sales is lower, mainly due to currency effects and lower volumes in Norway and Finland. The lower volumes there are somewhat compensated by growth in Denmark. Earnings and margin is lower due to the temporary lower volumes in Norway and Finland. NCC Building Sweden continues to improve, they have lower sales due to the disciplined order intake, but the improved quality is clearly reflected in the higher margins now. Moving on to NCC Industry. They continue their strong overall development, earnings are on a record level for a second quarter. Asphalt demand is strong, the volumes are really high, stone material had really good development in prices and product mix. This slide shows the volumes in tons for both asphalt and stone material. Compared to the same quarter of last year, the asphalt volumes have increased, which is also what drives the earnings improvement in that division. Stone material business had lower volumes, but they still improved earnings due to better product mix and a good pricing. Earnings are at SEK 448 million in the quarter, and the margin on rolling 12 is now improving up to 7%. Capital employed increased due to increased working capital, as always, when operation starts up in the second quarter for NCC Industry. It increased a little bit more than usual this year due to the high amount of receivables, thanks to the increased sales. The return, however, is strong at 21%. Moving on to NCC Property Development. NCC Property Development have a higher net operating income for the completed projects in the quarter. We do see some signs of increased market activity also when it comes to letting. End of the second quarter, we still had six unsold completed projects and three sold ongoing projects in the portfolio. To be noted, we did sell a part of one of the completed projects, Bromma Blocks, after the quarter ended. This will have a positive impact on sales and cash flow in Q3, but no impact on earnings. Letting was pretty much on the same level as Q2 of last year, with four contracts and 3,600 sq m let. We also had a couple of letting contracts signed right after the closing of the quarter in the beginning of July. The completion ratio for our total portfolio was 72%, the letting ratio improved in Q2 to 84% for the total portfolio. To that, we can add our own move, the HQ move to Bromma Blocks. That will add 14% additionally in letting ratio. EBIT was SEK 8 million in the quarter, which is an improvement, that's due to a better net operating income in Finland. The capital employed has decreased, that's due to the write-down of a couple of completed projects in Q4 of last year. Other and eliminations. The second line here on this slide is the dispute-related costs. In the first six months, there is approximately SEK 100 million impact on EBIT from increased cost for disputes. As Tomas said, but needs to be repeated, we have since the Q4, chosen to have these costs in other and elimination instead of in the BA Infrastructure, as they have increased substantially since Q4 and are anticipated to remain for some time. To comment on the other items, the HQ costs are slightly higher, but within normal variation between the quarters. Internal gains are negative as we continue to invest and build on our ongoing property projects and have no profit recognition on properties. In other adjustment, the change relates to IAS 19 pension accounting adjustments. The income statement. The segments added up to an earning of SEK 635 million. Our financial net was SEK 24 million, which is lower than previous year, primarily due to lower interest rates on our debt and also more capitalization of interest to our property projects. We also had higher pension assets and lower leasing debt that had a positive impact on our financial net. We have a high tax rate of 26% due to the limitation of interest deduction for primarily Finland and Norway. Our net profit was SEK 452 million and an EPS of SEK 4.62. Our cash flow is seasonally negative as Industry start up their business in the second quarter. This year, the change in working capital is more negative than last year, primarily due to the increased sales in Industry that generated a higher level of accounts receivable. We also have less customer advances from Infrastructure that have a negative impact on our working capital. We also increased our investments in ongoing property projects. We have added Yrket in Solna that we are also building on. Finally, our corporate net debt is SEK 2.7 billion, SEK 1.3 billion higher than last year due to the more negative cash flow and the increased investments in ongoing property development projects. Last year we also had cash in the beginning of the year from the sold properties in the end of December 2024. This we didn't have this year. Our net Debt-to-EBITDA target is to be below 2.5x, We are below that at the ratio of 2.05x after Q2. With that, Tomas, I hand back to you. Thank you, Susanne. I will only wrap this up with the summary of the quarter. We think it's a good performance in the quarter, We think we have a positive outlook. We base this on high level of orders received, not only in this quarter, but in three consecutive quarters. We have record high earnings in Industry, in asphalt, and stone, improved margins in the contracting business, a stable operating profit. With that, operator, I open up for questions. We will now begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and one 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 two. Questioners on the phone are requested to disable the loudspeaker mode while asking a question. Anyone who has a question may press star and one at this time. The first question comes from the line of Julia Sundvall from ABG Sundal Collier. Please go ahead. Hi, good morning. Just a couple of questions from my side, starting with Building Nordics. I hear you say the weak margin is due to the lower volumes. We see the order intake is up. Should we expect the margin to gradually come up, or should it be a shift quite fast, or how should you think going forward? I think the margin in Building Nordics is generally on a good level. We expect it to gradually come up above that level in Building Nordics. Okay. Yeah, thank you. You say Finland is strong in the order intake. I was just wondering, is it improving margin overall, or is it just the bits and pieces of the market that you have been able to win? I think that the most important thing is that we've been able to eliminate bad projects. The wins are generally of good quality. Yeah. Should you say that with the wins overall, the overall new orders, can you say anything about the margin there? In generally, you have a somewhat higher margin than the average in Denmark, and you have, in general, a slightly lower margin in Finland due to less demand in Finland compared to Denmark. Yep. Perfect. Thank you. Moving on to the sale of the Hangar 5 Bromma Blocks. I know this will be a hard question, but I have to ask you, can you say anything about the margin on the project? No, we have an evaluation of the entire project, and we intend to report the result when we have sold all the three parts that this project consists of. So far, we will do zero profit recognition, and we will only recognize the revenue and the cash flow in Q3. Yeah. How close are you to the sale of the rest? I hear you say that you see some light in Property Development in the market. How close would you say you are to a sale of the Bromma Blocks? Right now, it is not imminent. Okay. Yeah. Thank you. That was all from my side. Thank you. The next question comes from the line of Erik Granström from DNB Carnegie. Please go ahead. Thank you. Good morning. I would like to start with the Industry segment. It seems like asphalt volumes are up about a percentage point or so in the first half of the year, but volumes and sales for Industry is up something like 4%. Obviously prices seems to be driving this. Can you talk us through how you are able to push, I would assume, increasing input costs over to clients? Should we expect this sort of profitability to continue for the second half of the year? We have no reason to assume that we should decrease profitability in general. The overall profitability of Industry depends a lot about what kind of weather we have in November. Remember, if you do an extension of the season into November, it has a positive impact on contribution to cover fixed costs. Going back to your first question, it's a mix of more efficient production, both for stone and asphalt. For stone, it's a combination of a better product mix, i.e., higher value products that we've sold, but also higher prices. You might see a variation depending on where exactly how the demand materializes during the fall. For asphalt, it's a mix of better production cost and higher prices. Okay. With that, we could touch upon the fact that you mentioned in the report that there have been volatility within energy prices, following the geopolitical situation, and that you're monitoring it. Could you say something about what the effects you have actually seen, and what effects you are monitoring? What are the key areas you're focusing on going forward? If we stick to Industry, we are closely monitoring the price and availability of bitumen, and we're confident that we will have bitumen available. Then we're monitoring the price, because pricing in new tenders becomes really complicated with these type of volatile prices. What we've done is that we are updating prices at the very late stage when we are tendering. We are shortening the period when the price is actually applicable. We are using indexes to the extent we can. We are hedging as much as we can. For all of the business, we're watching transportation prices quite closely because direct and indirect transportation cost is quite a large part of our cost base, and that is impacted by the oil prices. Then for the contracting business, we're looking at general price increases that we've seen some, and make sure that we have index clauses with our customers. If we can't get that, we try to make a prudent approximation of where the prices will go and try to fix the cost base as early as possible. As I've said in a number of interviews this morning, price increases are hard enough to handle. I think we're doing it quite good right now, but you never know. The really difficult thing is volatility, because then indexation may work, not only in the way that you would like it to work. Okay. Fair enough. Then perhaps moving on to other and central eliminations. The cost related to the dispute, could you say, are these running legal costs or are they also provisions to some extent? They are not provisions, they are running costs, mainly legal costs, it's also other costs related to the dispute, that's why we use legal dispute. It could be experts that we need. It could be fact-based material that we need to compile. It's actually also cost for own staff that works with these. It's not provisions. Okay. You mentioned that you believe that the cost will be about the same for the second half of the year as the first half of the year. Given these things tend to take time, should we expect this to some extent to run into 2027 as well? I think you should expect it to continue for a few years. It will not be the same type of cost continuously because there's an initial cost in compiling all the material, there's an extension of the time between negotiations and court proceedings. It will have a certain amount of variability, we will try to guide as well as we can. Our best estimate right now is it will be the same for the second half as the first half this year. You can expect it to continue into next year to a yet unknown extent. Okay, fair enough. Then my final question is regarding the Green Industry Transformation part, which is also reported within Central. Could you say, is that business overall running currently at a loss, given that it's in a startup, or is it generating a profit? If not, when do you think it will start to actually contribute to the group? I would say right now, we're really happy with the development of Green Industry Transformation. Right now, it is at the black zero. Okay, basically no contribution. Do you think that it will contribute by the end of this year, or do we have to wait until sort of 2027, 2028 for that to happen? For major contributions into next year. Okay. Thank you very much. Those were my questions. As a reminder, if you wish to register for a question, please press star and one on your telephone. Ladies and gentlemen, there are no more questions at this time from the phone. Back over to you. Thank you very much. Andreas, do we have any questions from the web? There are no questions from the web right now. Very good. With that, I thank you all for listening in. Again, thank you, Susanne, and welcome, Katarina. See you in the coming months, or if not, see you for the third quarter report. Thank you very much. Have a good summer
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