Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Nederman Holding Audio Casts Telecom Conference first quarter 2022. Today I am pleased to present CEO Sven Kristensson and CFO Matthew Cusick. For the first part of this call, all participants will be in listen-only mode, and afterwards there will be a question and answer session. I will now hand over to your speakers. Thank you. Yes. Good morning, and welcome. Thank you for taking the time in listening to us in this hectic and interesting days around the world. We are presenting Nederman Group's first quarter 2022, and we can start by stating it was for a first quarter, a record strong first one. We had very good operating profit close to SEK 100 million. It's actually the highest ever profit in krona for a first quarter, which is normally not our best quarters. We have had still high level of activity in our main market, we will come back to the concerns later. Strong order intake in all divisions compared to last year's first quarter. We have also extended and sustainability-linked refinancing agreement which we have signed during this quarter. As you all know, reading newspapers, watching news, we are living in interesting times. Some continued concerns that we have is geopolitical concerns around Russia, and we have paused our operations there. There are still component availability issues, material and component prices, the volatility is extreme. There are transport difficulties, tangible supply chain problems have impacted sales negatively. We have seen shortage of components in MCT. We have had early on in the year also closed down or limitations in our capability due to COVID outbreak, etc, and then we have the lockdowns in China. You could, if you want to see it in a negative way, there's a lot of things going on, but the result is such that we've been able to manage this and, like some of our divisional managers taking their quotes from Clint Eastwood, adapt, improvise and overcome, and that's what we're doing, and so far we've been reasonably good at that. We are very pleased under these circumstances for the results we could present. If I take over now and take a few slides on finance related matters. As Sven already mentioned, we have signed sustainability linked credit facilities during the quarter. This means that our financing is now directly linked to our sustainability activities. In concrete, it means we've increased our debt capacity to a combined total of SEK 2.5 billion, which clearly increases our financial flexibility. These sustainability link facilities are with Handelsbanken as the coordinator, sustainability coordinator and SEB and Svensk Exportkredit also involved. There are interest discounts and/or penalties depending on achievement or non-achievement of sustainability targets. The targets that we have in the facility include those towards both energy intensity and CO2 emissions from our own production. Moving on to slide four and sticking with the numbers. As Sven said, very good order intake. Sales could have been higher had we not had some of these issues that we mentioned, and we'll come back to, but that of course means that our order backlog has continued to build. Incoming orders were SEK 1.345 billion in the quarter, which is a 23% currency neutral growth versus the same quarter last year. Sales were just shy of SEK 1.1 billion, which again is an increase, it's 19% versus Q1 2021 currency neutral. On slide four, there's a couple of slides that show some quite interesting reading. You can see that the row on the left chart, the rolling four quarters or the rolling 12 months incoming orders are approaching the SEK 5 billion mark. On the right-hand chart, the sales figures, you see we're around SEK 4.3 billion on a rolling four quarters. Like I mentioned, backlog has continued to build and we expect the revenue to ramp up accordingly. If we talk profitability in the first quarter, this was a record profit for the first quarter for the Nederman Group. SEK 11 million higher than the first quarter last year, SEK 98 million adjusted operating profit, which gives a margin of 9%. Very slightly lower than last year's 10% in percentage terms. Obviously, quite a lot more krona on the bottom line as earnings per share increased from 1.63 up to 2.01 krona for the quarter. I think I'll move on to slide number six and talk cash flow and net debt. It was a weaker cash flow quarter. The quarter 1 for Nederman is typically the weakest cash flow quarter of the year. There's a couple of reasons for this. The first and foremost being quarter 4 is typically a very big quarter for order intake in the Process Technology division. Large order decisions come in in quarter four. We receive down payments typically very close to the end of the year, and we then commence work on them in the first quarter, which reduces the cash flow position somewhat on those. This year is no exception. I think on the bottom left chart, you can see 2019, which perhaps was the most recent normal year, a non-COVID year. We were actually significantly more negative than this year. We're not so concerned. We expect this to move up as the year progresses. Net debt basically remained flat versus the previous quarter. We've reduced our debt significantly since the same point last year by well over SEK 300 million, which is a positive and creates opportunities as well, we could say. If we move on to the operations on slide number seven, Sven, I'll let you talk about Extraction and Filtration Technology and what's going on there. Extraction and Filtration Technology is our largest division, and they have a very solid 2021 behind them and continue to develop very well also in Q1. We have seen a very solid order intake growth, and we have seen strong trends during all sales channels, and actually most markets. We will come back to China later. We have had interestingly five larger solutions orders which were lacking a little bit of that in fourth quarter. We are also growing the aftermarket, which is a positive thing in this area. If we go to the regions to start with, we can say that basically all markets with natural exceptions of the Eastern Europe, in this we have had interesting new orders from the long-term standing relation with the an American world-leading manufacturer of batteries. We have worked since long time in U.S. with them, helping them with a recycling business mainly. Now we have had the chance to also move that cooperation into Europe, and we've landed a large order for battery manufacturing in Spain. Metal extraction in U.K., the traditional one, wind turbine blades in Denmark, long-standing relations, but also in the wood sector, window manufacturing in Poland. Where we see some issues in is the automotive industry that are struggling. We are complaining about supply chain issues. I would say it's nothing compared to the issues that they have in that industry, which of course have an impact on their ability to take on new projects and investment at the moment. If we move west to the Americas, we also had a very strong order growth during the quarter, which is natural with the size. The USA is the primary driver, and it's the biggest markets. It's growing in all areas, and we have also been able to move forward with the aftermarket efforts. In Americas, we are very dependent on secondary wood and some other applications. It's mainly been here where we've seen that our position has further strengthened as the leading supplier of systems into that application area. APAC has been a challenge the first quarter. There's been a small decline in orders received there. A week ago, 40% of all large major Chinese cities were under hard lockdown, and of course, that has an impact on our ability to do business. We have, however, been able to continue to develop the aftermarket, and here we've seen that they have had some success. Some of the key activities is, I think I mentioned it before, since we have seen a difference in business behavior and how to meet customers during lockdowns, travel restrictions, etc. We have launched a Clean Air World Tour, where we with a digital event on most recent trends in air filtration, industrial process, et cetera, has been rolled out in the Nordic markets. We will continue U.K. and Central Europe later in the year, but we are focusing here on sort of enlightening and teaching our potential customers and existing customers on what can be done to meet the requirements. Again, material cost has continued to increase. They have been able to handle it reasonably well. The freight problems has also continued to affect the supply chain. That's been challenging in getting our supply in time. There has been additional work to meet customer needs, replanning, etc. We are coming back to the adapt, improvise, overcome, and of course, it takes resources from other activities in order to do this. We have so far had good support internally, good support from our customers, and I believe that we have had pleased customers that we have been doing our very best, yeah. Financials for Extraction and Filtration Technology, rather briefly, incoming orders increased by almost 14% currency neutral to SEK 513 million. A very good quarter for them. Their sales, SEK 467 million, is an increase of 12% currency neutral. Adjusted EBITDA is up by approximately SEK 17 million- SEK 81 million, which is actually an increase to EBITDA margin despite these pricing pressures and the supply issues. The EBITDA margin up to 17.4%. Like I say, SEK 17 million up in EBITDA is something we can be rather happy with for this division. Moving on to slide eight and Process Technologies, Sven. Yes. Process Technology, where we have large process-critical installations, mainly very large, long projects. The development during the quarter has been that we have seen a continued strong ordering pace. We have improved sales, and the order backlog has more than doubled in the last year. We still have a very strong working capital position. In the textile and fibers, where we mainly sell under the brand name Luwa, we have seen continued strong performance. We have had very good ordering pace in all markets, with one exception, and that is China. The lockdowns have continued to impact our ability to do business, not only ours, but also our customers and potential customers, in that. We booked three major orders, large orders even for this division, totaling SEK 80 million. We continue to book order. We have had a very strong development that bounce back. You remember a year ago, a year and a half ago, when India was in total lockdown. They're now coming back, projects that have been halted, investments are moving forward. Good development in textile and fiber. We've also been able to increase profitability here. Foundry and smelters, rising demand for our solution in European recycling industry. We have focused a lot on recycling in different areas. It's very interesting and it is a growing area. We have, again, got some large order here. Where we have the most difficulties is in the customized solutions. We've got several medium-sized order. We have a very strong quotation pipeline, but it's very complex projects with long horizons. That has been presenting challenges in managing the volatile raw material prices and supply chain disruptions. These are complex, large projects that, where you plan for a long time. Here you have seen difficulties, even if our clauses when it comes to increasing raw material prices, etc, it doesn't cover everything. It's also a matter of being able to supply. The key activities, we have signed the first subscription contract that when a customer pays monthly fee for Nederman to perform regular service and monitoring, it's basically on our vision, the cleaner as a service. We have continued to invest in our facilities to have a leading position. We will grow our capabilities in our German factory for what is foundry smelter space, a competence center in Friesenheim, Germany. We have, as mentioned, people managing the challenges in the supply and logistics chain. We have continued growth in the service business, and it needs to continue because this is a crucial part of our strategy to grow our profitability in the division. Financials for Process Technology. Incoming orders very strong again in the quarter, SEK 522 million is a 33% currency neutral growth. Sales a little lower than anticipated due to the reasons Sven has explained, SEK 343 million is still 33% higher than last year, of course, we must remember that. EBITDA has increased somewhat to SEK 10.5 million, which is a margin of 3.1%. If I move on to slide nine now, Sven, Monitoring & Control Technology. Yeah. Monitoring & Control Technology, we have seen the development of good order intake in the quarter. However, a bit disappointing on the sales side because manufacturing has been impacted negatively by component availability at this moment. Also in the beginning of the year, we had, due to this, COVID cases in the Nordic factories, some supply issues in that. There's a lot of people working full time searching for components, making sure that we can supply, which has, for this division, had most severe impact. EMEA orders received grew strongly versus 2021. As mentioned already, the COVID case in our production and component challenges had been a problem. Production is now back on normal levels. When we're talking about production, some of the key people doing the clearance have a university degree in physics, so it's not so that you can just go and get the new one if someone is away. That has been a challenge. It's worth mentioning that it's very specialized competence that we have. Gasmet had a strong order intake, and that includes a very significant order from a German power producer. APAC, despite lockdowns and so on, we had a strong trend in orders received, especially for Gasmet, but also for NEO Monitors. We secured several, but one especially significant emissions monitoring order for Gasmet. Sales, as I mentioned, slightly disappointing. It was only in line with Q1 2021 due to production challenges. Again, the new COVID lockdowns in China, of course, had a negative impact here. We'll see for April. Generally speaking, we are very positive for the time to come. Americas orders received increased, and we have a growing activity among customers in the region. We spent time to try to educate on European technology and availability of that, and we see that as a new potential market for the future for us. What has been the key activities? Again, management of freight problem. Yeah, you heard it before, I mentioned it, and I will continue to mention it. It is the same issues. Again, adapt, improvise, overcome, and we managed to do it in reasonable way. We have continued the integration of the U.K. company Energy Save Systems that we acquired late last year. It works according to plan, and they are now within the Nederman Group. Still, merger activity is ongoing, but we have received orders that actually exceed our expectation or exceeded our expectation in the beginning. The financials for Monitoring and Control Technology, what we notice here is that the order intake grew faster than sales. This is as a result of what we've said already, that we didn't get out as much as we in terms of sales as we would have liked to. Nevertheless, order intake, which perhaps is the most important thing for the future, that it grew by 13% currency neutral, 11.2% organically. Sales were basically flat currency neutral, slightly higher in prevailing currency rates, so up to SEK 132 million. Adjusted EBITDA, SEK 17.5 million or 13.2%, would obviously have been significantly higher if we had, for example, got out 10% or 15% more sales in the quarter. What you see, contribution margins for this division are significantly higher than the other Nederman divisions. Moving on to the fourth division, last but not least, we can say this time, Duct & Filter Technology. Sven, over to you again. Yeah. Duct & Filter Technology, Filter and Ducting Systems, we have had strong orders in both subdivisions. The backlogs are at the highest level ever. The larger share of sales of filter has impacted markets negatively, but high profits, again, in real dollars or krona have continued to grow. If you looked at Nordfab, which is the brand name for the ducting, we have had a very strong growth compared to last year's Q1. Of course, the U.S. growth is to a certain extent, to a large extent, price increase driven. Small changes in volumes at the moment. Cost levels continue to increase as a result of very high inflation in the U.S. We've secured again, working with batteries, working with the recycling, etc, is important for us. Here we again see how we successfully land large orders in that application area. In Europe, orders received grew strong compared with both Q1 and Q4 last year. The cooperation between the divisions units we have had in U.K. and in Denmark, they have now worked around the Brexit effects and they have stepped up, and we see good progress here on the European market. Also, our Thai operations saw good growth in orders. On the Menardi, where we do with filter elements that are used in Nederman and other filters, we see a growth in our orders received, and we have a very high backlog in this area. When it comes to the key activities in this division, one is that we are continuing to develop our business in Thomasville, North Carolina, U.S. We will have an extended building, significant extension. We will also extend our capability. The decision will be taken to add more manufacturing capability as well. We will here reduce delivery times and efficiency, we will have more efficiency in the production. We estimate to be ready during Q1, fully operational during Q1 2023. It's a big step forward for a very successful business. Also the new easy-to-use interactive 3D tool, QF3D. It was last launched successfully in America last year, and I think that you remember that we proudly announced that we got the innovation award in the good exhibition in Las Vegas last August. Proud of that. It will now be launched in Europe during the second quarter of this year. Another step, easy to do business with Nordfab this way. Again, proactive work monitoring and adapting prices to meet and manage volatile material costs. That continues and is an important part of daily work for all involved. Financials for the Duct & Filter Technology. Incoming orders saw a very strong increase, 36% up and up to SEK 165 million for quarter one. Sales, 176 million SEK, is also very strong, 25% currency neutral growth there. Adjusted EBITDA is most importantly, like Sven mentioned, Swedish krona, we're between SEK 6 million and SEK 7 million up versus quarter one last year. Now at 32.2 million SEK in EBITDA. That's a slight reduction in margin to 18.3% versus 20.2% last year. We must remember that inflation and price increases dilute margins in percentage terms, but nevertheless, we've handled things very well in this division and have increased our profit in Swedish krona, which is what most of our owners are most interested in, I dare say. If we move on to this short summary, Sven, of the quarter. Well, let's have a short summary. We have a record strong first quarter, very strong order intake in all four divisions. Various supply chain problems has had a negative impact on our capability on the sales and delivery. We have had the highest ever profit for a first quarter, and we have secured sustainability in financing during this period. The continued concerns are, as mentioned, geopolitical component availability, transport difficulties, Chinese lockdowns and the list, but still, summarizing, we've handled it well in the first quarter, and we expect to do so going forward. Moving into our outlook then, Sven, slide 12. Yeah. Our base business and strong digital offering is benefiting us in the current market. We now see that demand for large and mid-sized project has been gaining momentum. We see, however, an increasing risk that the problems in our supply chain and the higher price of materials and diesel will impact both customers' investment decision around production and ability to deliver. Geopolitical volatility has also clearly increased further. Despite this increased volatility uncertainty, we are cautiously optimistic about coming quarters, due not least our very strong order backlog. Nederman's long-term potential continues to strengthen in a world in which the insight into the damage that poor air does to people is increasing. Nederman, with its leading range within industrial air filtration, has a key role to play and nearly unlimited possibility for growth. What is needed and missing is even more political will throughout the world to use regulation incentives to reduce the risk that millions of people need to die prematurely each year from breathing in dirty and hazardous air. Finishing up this, so the summary of the outlook is that we are positively looking at the future. There will be disturbances which we will have to handle the best we can. For me, on slide 13, briefly, the financial calendar. Our Annual General Meeting is on this coming Monday, the 25th of April, for those of you who have registered. The interim report dates we have already released for the coming three quarter ends. With that, I think we can open up for if there are any questions. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, the Q&A session starts now. If you wish to ask a question, please press zero-one on your telephone keypad. If you wish to withdraw your questions, you may press zero-two. There will be a brief pause while questions are being registered. Thank you. We have a question from Anna Lindström from Handelsbanken. Please go ahead. Hi, Sven and Matthew. Thank you for taking my questions. As you mentioned, you've had a really strong order intake in the first quarter. I'm quite curious on how the trend has been, you know, within the quarter i s the, you know, the general feeling on the market that the optimism might be fading in the later parts of the quarter? Have you experienced that in any way? No, I wouldn't say that the optimism has been fading. We cannot say that. It's normally so actually that March is the best month normally in the first quarter. And it's continued to be so. I think we have had good momentum through the whole quarter, and we are cautiously optimistic also for April. April will have its challenges because you have Thai's New Year, you have Easter, you have all of that. So it's a very few working days. But again, then May and June, we can come back. We still see that there's a good demand for our product. We believe that we are moving forward, further strengthen our position as a leading supplier in this field. So it's still good momentum in that. What we then say is that we will just have to deal with the problems, call it the practical problems, around it, and it was of course a challenge. One thing we could point out in terms of momentum is there is a little. You probably picked this up already, but there is a little bit of difference between the regions with potentially probably the most momentum in the Americas right now, then followed by Europe, not far behind, but America leading the way, and then Asia is more dampened due to the fact that their Asia is so heavily Chinese impacted. Perfect. Thank you. Just a follow-up on that. Due to the lockdowns in China and so on, are you directly affected in any way? Do you usually have some orders from these regions that are affected by the lockdowns, or is it a sort of indirect effect within the region? I would say the effect is mostly that we have three factories in China supplying mainly the Chinese market. Some of what Luwa is doing is going to neighboring countries in Asia. It's not going to Europe or U.S., typically. So it's been mainly affecting the APAC business. Just to follow up a little bit on that, we do have very, very much of our supply chain is built around what we produce in Europe is staying in Europe, or, what we produce in U.S. is staying in U.S., and the same goes for APAC. We have little, movement outside of Asia. It's in fact so that we ship significantly more from Europe to Asia than the other way around. Great. Thank you. Just in terms of the price increases that you had to do towards the customer to sort of, you know, handle the increased costs, do you have any idea of how much of the growth that comes from volume and from prices? That one, I can take that one, Sven. It's very difficult to answer. What I can say is it differs significantly between the divisions. If you take Process Technology, the order intake momentum has been very good, so the increase you can see is actually more related to more projects or more volume, if you can call it volume for that business. Whereas if you take Duct and Filter Technology, particularly on the duct side, like we stated, the large chunk of the increase on the top line comes from price increases. You're probably in that division, I dare say you're well over 50%. It's probably halfway to 100% from there. There is some volume increase, but it differs very much between the divisions, and then the other two divisions are somewhere in between those two. I don't dare say and give you a figure. You're definitely a growth force of the more products, more volume. We see more volume there. We see EFT, we mentioned it as well, we've seen more. It's the larger orders. They're for the Nederman Group, they're kind of mid-size, but they're large orders for that division. Those have definitely increased and the base business is solid. There's definitely a volume increase in EFT. There's more to do in the factories than we had six months ago. Absolutely. Okay, perfect. Thank you. Just, you know, thinking ahead, if you have any sort of idea on how we should think about the sort of conversion rates within the segment. Because usually when you have a bit more to say normal growth and not these exceptional growth that you've had, you've been able to reach quite good conversion rates. But just looking at, for example, Process Technology, what sort of delivery capacity do you think that we should maybe estimate ahead? Do you dare to answer, Sven? No. I think in Process Technology what I can say is Process Technology was definitely behind what we had hoped for quarter one. I personally expect it to ramp up from where quarter one is not the volumes we expect for the rest of the year. That's where a bsolutely not where we are. They have a backlog that's there. What's also important to remember is that Process Technology is not. We have our own production in Friesenheim in Germany, but we're not overly reliant on our own production globally for that division within the Luwa business, but overall. Luwa has the factory in India working on a double shift. There's further capacity there. It's more external factors that are slowing our ramp up. What you can say is if you start seeing movement or easing up on any of these challenges with supply chains generally, you will see a ramp up in Process Technology revenue as well. I dare say that. Then also we ought to mention Monitoring and Control Technology, where they we had, like Sven mentioned, issues with highly qualified production staff who basically weren't allowed into the office because they tested positive for COVID at the start of the year when Omicron was there. That hurts sales. I mean, we've got capacity back up, but. We're working to catch up, but it's not that you can put huge volumes, more volumes through. We're back to normal capacity and you ought to expect an increase in that, a clear increase in that division again in Q2. They've got a very high backlog that is positive. We would rather it was on the income statement than in the order backlog, but that's where it's better that it's in the backlog at least. Yeah. Perfect. Then I have one last question or maybe it's three in one, I don't know. Looking at your inventories and the working capital for this quarter, and you've mentioned the sort of Q1 effect that is usually seen this season. How should we think about the high backlog as we see continued cost increase based on the working capital that you had and that we should see ahead and also your inventory build up? I mean, we built some inventory up, and that was actually intentional. Combined with actually just building the volume of inventory up, you've got obviously price increases which do impact cash flow negatively. What I don't want people to get too hung up on is the chart that I put into this presentation on slide number 6, I think it was. We have been overachieving on our cash flow from operating activities. We've been well over SEK 500 million on a rolling four-quarter basis. Now for a company that's been, we were around SEK 460 million last year in EBIT. That's not quite sustainable there. We don't see a major risk that we need to increase inventory significantly more now. You ought to expect some more normalization of working capital development for the rest of the year, is our feeling right now. I push our divisional CFOs very hard on working capital management, and they have actually done a very good job throughout the whole of this COVID period in particular. Especially on the receivables, we've been very good. Yeah. Okay, great. That was my last question. Thank you so much for your answers. Thank you, Anna. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, let me remind you, in order to ask a question, please press zero one on your telephone keypad. Thank you for holding. The next question comes from Gustaf von Sivers from [DNB]. Please go ahead. Yeah. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning, Gustaf. Just there are two questions. One here on the supply chain problems and freight costs. Do you see that as getting worse or being constant or is it easing off going forward? Do you have any feeling for that? I mean, aside from China, that is of course big, but in other markets. On the supply chain, there was a very specific European one where the large number of Ukrainian truck drivers in Europe, which is unlikely to improve as these guys are all heading back to Ukraine. That has actually had quite an impact on some of our European deliveries. That challenge is continuing, we suspect. Price-wise, I don't dare say what will happen there. Okay. Now, it's very difficult. There of course they have problems. The fuel prices have skyrocketed, and that also puts pressure on it. I don't think it's becoming worse. On the contrary, I think it's more, again, adapting to a new situation where this is the new normal, so you plan in a different way. It's not the shock wave that came in the beginning. I would rather say it's easing up. Again, we will see continuous. We will have to live with this situation for a couple of months more, I think. If people learn how to handle it in a better way. Okay. Thanks. The next question about, you know, the Process Technology, we've been on that before. You know, looking at the Nederman Group, you have the other divisions coming in with margins around 15 and 20, sometimes over 20% this fantastic year. You have this Process Technology division that's hovering in 3-5. I know Matthew always says that's a good, you know, good cash flow, people pay in advance, but I feel like looking from a stock market view as an investor, it drags the total impression of your group down. I mean, how are you gonna do about to change that? I mean, I think you said before you can't reach 10% more in that group. Where is the long-term plan for this? The long-term plan is to bring it up to the performance, a performance that gives us a very good return on capital employed. Our long-term target for this, as also I don't think it's been communicated, is to do around 8% EBIT margin because then it's in a very profitable pool. It's a very strange market. We see that a lot of our competitors, because, and I can say that with confidence since we get lots of teasers every week, on this, are having negative profit at the moment. There will be some changes. We are working very hard together with the digitalization, the MCT offering, to add growth in the aftermarket. That could be an even more significant part of it. We can see that our Luwa part has gone from when we acquired a very, very low profitability has increased significantly over the years and is contributing very well. We see that we are gradually increasing in our configured solutions, I would say. It's still large, complex, but for smelters, recycling, etc. We are introducing that type of product also now on the U.S. markets. Where we have challenges, severe challenges is Asia, China, lockdowns problems, supply chain problems. Where we have issues in is in the special complex sort of large system, where they are working now on what they call the MikroPul Solutions Lab to work closely with customers so we can be extremely picky with what we are going into. We have a clear plan to develop this further, and it has also good reasons to believe that the work we do together with the MCT here. We are sticking out. We get better paid for our project due to our future-proof solution. Yes, I can agree, we are definitely not happy with 3%. We are continuing to work, and we will succeed in doing that. All right. Well, that sounds good. Thank you. That was my question. Have a nice weekend. Bye. Thank you. Thanks, Gustaf. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, let me remind you, in order to ask a question, please press zero one on your telephone keypad. There are no further questions. Dear speakers, back to you. Thank you very much, everyone, for taking your time listening to us, and we wish you a continued good day. Thank you very much.