Good morning, everyone. Welcome to this Q1 presentation for NOTE. I hope that everyone had the time to read our report. As always, please put your phones on mute or your computers on mute. We take any questions after the presentation. For those of you that are on the Teams call on the computer, you can use the Raise Your Hand function, or you can just unmute and ask your question. We'll take them after this presentation. First of all, I have to say that we are quite excited about our presentation or our report. It's a quarter that has many different phases. We ended last year with some inventory reductions at our customers. We also saw that it was a bit hard to say where this quarter was going to take us, but we had the indications that many customers were seeing increases. We started the year in January with just marginal growth, and then the growth has come stronger during the quarter. We can say that March was by far our strongest month ever, both in terms of sales and in terms of profit. That is something that we try to capture in our guiding, where we expect that our growth will continue at a higher pace than we have seen the last year and also in the past years. We're quite optimistic. Of course, there are what everyone is seeing on the media. We have component shortages. We see that it's the semiconductor market that is tightening up. We have tried to mitigate that in a way where we have built the inventory. We have very deep discussions with all our customers to see how can we better together ensure that we get good availability on these components that are very hard to get at the moment. Q1, we have not seen any big push-outs due to this. We see that we are a bit delayed on some startup on new production, but it's marginal. We have not moved away any big volumes of sales from the first quarter into the later half of this year or the later part of this year. Q1 is fairly accurate as we see it. That with the introduction. [Non-English content] Okay. Very welcome to this NOTE presentation. As always, we try to keep everyone on mute. Please use your mute function on your phone or on your computers. If you don't get that working, please be aware that any sound that you make will appear in the conference. I would say that Q1 was a bit of a tricky quarter. When we ended Q4, we had some inventory reductions at our customers. We saw that it was a bit tricky to see where this quarter was going to take us. We started the year with a quite weak January, just marginal growth. We gained some speed in February. March was by far our strongest month ever in the group, both in terms of sales and in profit. We also saw that our order backlog was growing by the month. We also ended the quarter with a record high order backlog. We will come back to it a bit, but I would say the substance in the order backlog is a bit stronger than we normally see. We have longer order horizons with the customers, therefore we are expecting that we will not see so big push-outs of orders as we normally see. As I have explained earlier, we are always adjusting our deliveries to what the customers actually want, even if they have ordered, we are not forcing them to take on volumes that they don't need. Therefore we are predicting a bit higher order backlog than what we actually deliver. We are expecting that this time it looks more solid, as I would call it. This looks very promising. What we also see is that the year is gaining some speed. We see that the component market is getting tougher. Everyone that reads media sees that we are talking on a daily basis about companies that are reducing their forecast or sales due to shortages of semiconductors. There are a few supplier names that often pops up in these discussions. So far this year, we have not seen any big push outs of orders. We are seeing that the Q1 sales was fairly in line with what the customers had ordered. We did not move out so big volume so far. We are expecting that this year will be problematic when it comes to getting components. We have increased our inventories of these kind of components in the first quarter. We started this already last year, but we see that some inventory buildup that has pushed down our cash flow a bit. It's something that we see it as our service to the customers. We are working more or less on a daily basis with most of our bigger customers to try to mitigate the shortages. So far it has worked out fairly good. This will be one of the areas that everyone that are dealing with any kind of electronic manufacturing will talk about and have on top of their agenda for this year, at least as I see it. Okay. Moving on to the first quarter. It's, I would say, a promising start of the year. Sales up 6%. We have quite big currency swings compared to last year, minus 5% when we convert the non-Swedish into Swedish. Operating profit up 21%, up to 8%. It's a quite big margin strength that we see here. For those that follow us, we see that normally Q1 is our seasonally weaker year or weaker quarter. We have the Chinese New Year that are pushing down both sales and profit in China, and we have some startup effects in January that normally shows that Q1 is often our weaker quarter. We have a bit higher increase of our profit after financials and profit after tax up 37% and profit per share up the same, of course. 107 in profit per share is by far our best first quarter ever. Cash flow of SEK 4 million. We will see some effects. March was our strongest month in sales, and that is reducing our cash flow a bit. We are expecting a normalized cash flow, maybe not as strong as it was last year when we had more about 150% of our profit after tax in cash flow. We don't expect it to be that high, but we expect it to be good, positive numbers. As I said, order backlog increased with 30%. I would say also like this, that normally we are having maybe 70% of the sales in the next quarter on order and 30% on forecast. Today, it's even stronger when it comes to fixed and firm orders. We are more on a 90% of the quarter is on fixed orders and only 10%-15% maybe that are on forecast. We are having a better visibility, and this is something that comes with when the component market is tightening up. The suppliers are more willing to ship to us if we have firm orders. Our customers are placing more firm orders on the longer horizon than normal. This is just how this industry is working. We can say that when it comes to this, how should I say, the reductions and the recoveries that we see in our industry, we are seeing that normally our reductions are coming a bit stronger than we expect, than we see in the forecast and in the orders. Also the recoveries are faster than we expected. We are expecting a quite solid recovery for the rest of this year and also going to 2022, when we are expecting the world economy to be fairly strong. We are expecting a very strong recovery this year. If you can say a recovery after a plus 6% in organic growth, but we see it as a recovery up to our expected plus 10% in growth. We are expecting a very strong year. If we look at our margins, we have talked quite much about that we have been seeing that Western Europe are performing on a good level, or on a very good level, but rest of the world has been struggling a bit. We have invested quite much in efficiency programs in China and Estonia. We are now seeing that, first of all, the sales is going up fairly good in this region as well. It's mainly China that are recovering well. We also see that our profitability in these two sites are starting to climb up to where we want them to be. 7.4% is a good operating profit, even though it's weaker than Western Europe, but it's stronger than most of our peers that we measure against. Even though we still believe that there are more to get out from this area, we are performing those sites on the, as we see it, very good levels. If we look at the rest, we are actually, if we include also the head office, we are roughly 1,100 people. If we go back two years, we were 1,100 people. The growth that we have seen has been done without increasing our headcount. We are gaining efficiency, we are turning more sales per headcount, and therefore we are reducing our cost base, and that is what we see on the profit level, that this equation is very favorable if you can manage to do it. Growing without increasing headcount will add more numbers on the bottom line, so to say. We are expecting that this development will continue. We will, of course, grow headcount, but with a lot less in percentage compared to the sales. That is our expectation. We will see where that leaves us. We are investing. We're investing in automation, we are investing in better machines, we're investing in increasing our site's footprint. I come back to that a bit, but the majority we are investing in getting a more efficient production through our sites. As we have talked about many times, we are not jeopardizing our performance. We're still seeing that quality and delivery is on, what we call, world-class level. We are often saying that we are best in class here, but everyone is not reporting the same way, so this we can always debate about. We don't see any big customer complaints in this area. We are seeing that the customers are very happy with our performance in general. Okay. Moving on to our segmentation from the customer side. We have changed this. We have taken away two segments, high-end consumer and defense, and we have replaced it with Green Tech. The two we have taken away were combined maybe 8% of our sales, and we felt that they were too small to adding value in our presentation. We have also seen that the Green Tech area has increased quite much over the last two years, and therefore, we wanted to highlight this in our reporting. In Q1, it stands for roughly 20% of our sales, with more than 100% increase. We can say that this area is one of the areas where we are harvesting a bit from our sales work. We are putting quite much energy in attracting new customers in this area, and we have seen that some of these customers have really taken off in the first quarter. They started already last year, but Q1 was a very good development. Industrial, still our largest segment. We are reducing a bit, 4% here. A lot of that comes to U.K., where we still see a quite big reduction. We were minus about 25% in U.K. for the first quarter, which corresponds to maybe SEK 15 million, SEK 12 million-SEK 15 million. Most of the reduction in industrial segment is coming from that. There is, as always, big swings between the customers here. Some customers are growing fantastic and some are being a bit lower than last year. Communication, still struggling. It's still problematic for our customers to install the equipment in the field. We are expecting that to bounce back a bit in the second half of the year, but we are now maybe 40% below two years ago. We had the reduction last year, and we still see that this segment has not flattened out or started a recovery. We expect it to happen this year, but it's a bit tricky to say exactly when it is. It has now gone from maybe 25% of relative size down to 10%. We expect this to recover also, but we are not certain that it will happen in second quarter, but in the second half, we do expect it to recover. Medtech, we are gaining more customers there. We are winning new accounts. We see that our customers in this segment are very, how should I say, they are growing. They are introducing new products, and we are in a good spot there. We know that one of our Medtech customers had a really high take up in the first half year last year, and then they did some refurbishment of the factory and did not order for four months when they were moving the production. We are measured against a quite strong Q1 last year. Medtech, we have high expectations so for this year. We expect it to start to show double-digit growth already from the second quarter. All in all, I think that we will see that with exception for communication, we will see growth in the rest of these, on the three segments with quite decent numbers when we are summarizing second quarter. From April and onwards, we know that we are measuring our sales in the U.K. towards the Corona reduced sales levels. That reduction that we have seen in first quarter, we will not see going forward, since the measurement are against a very weak sales instead of a very strong sales. We are expecting U.K. to continue the recovery that we have seen. Moving on. I've talked about most of this, but it's quality delivery, or I call it operational performance, and that is something that we are focusing a lot on. If you take below these numbers, we are working heavily in reducing our throughput times in our factories. We are reducing our middle or in production warehouses, so we try to get a better order flow. We know that this is improving our delivery performance. It's easier for us to communicate with customers if we know that we don't get any products that get stuck in warehouses in the production. This is parts that we are focusing a lot to improve, and that results in better quality. It results in better delivery performance among a lot of other things, but very important for us. We also see that we are attracting new customers. We have communicated a few wins. Some customers are not willing to disclose, or that we are showing their names, but it's very good customers that we expect a lot from that we have been awarded. We are working quite enthusiastically with new companies, which actually are making me more pleased that we are getting more and more orders from our existing customers. That is a proof that they are approving what we do. If we would start to lose on them, we would have very tough work to fill up lost sales with new customers. We are in a good position where we are winning new business from existing customers and we are attracting new customers. Therefore we have high expectations of the future. We can say that the market is normalizing second half year. It was a bit of this, we talked about these inventory reductions. We are expecting that this year will be better. We have said it before. Not so much more to say. I've touched upon it. We are also investing in our business. We are focusing a lot on getting better and more efficient machines. We are not only looking at our SMT lines, we're looking at automating other parts of the production. We are investing a bit in automatic warehouses and other areas where we can get what I call indirect, direct persons, the ones that are on the shop floor, but not adding value to the products. We try to reduce the number of those individuals as much as we can by introducing new and smarter technologies. So far, this has worked very well. We are in the middle of a significant expansion of our Torsby site. Torsby is, I would say, one of the largest sites. It's probably the largest site when we are summarizing this year, and the expansion of the capacity has been very necessary. The site will be ready for us as it states now in November 1st, and this is very important for us. We have talked about the tough market, and this has resulted in some kind of inventory buildup. As those of you that are working in this area will recognize, it's not so easy to build up inventory when there are shortages. This is a bit of a limbo discussion, but we started already maybe in August, September to increase the inventories there, and this has so far resulted in a fairly good result as we see it. There are, of course, shortages, especially if you would launch a new product today where you have not forecasted or ordered these products, you will have to wait a long time. That is the problem as I see it. For running business, we are still sorting or managing to get the inventory, even though it's a lot of work behind it. For new products, it's quite challenging. Return on operating capital, we are at 23%. Target is 20%, and we were at 23% already in fourth quarter. We are not expecting that this will go down, actually. We are expecting that we will remain at the high level. We will maybe see a quarter or so that will be weaker, but over time, we will improve this number as well as we see it. Continuous strong balance sheet, a bit weaker with 49% in equity rate. We were at 51% in Q4. The strong March is reducing it a bit where we have increased the working capital. We are also expecting this number to remain or improve, actually. We are looking at how can we take a bigger part of this market that we're seeing. There are good growth opportunities. It's quite turbulent. We see that many of the companies in our industry are actually performing fairly okay. 2020 was not the best year, but it was not as weak as many would have thought. There are very few that are in financial difficulties as we see it. There are good opportunities. We are pursuing a few of them, and we are expecting that we will come back during the spring with more information about where we are in this segment. We are also focusing a lot on growth opportunities within our existing business, meaning that we are investing in more capacity. We are enabling our customers to grow with us. That is also an area that we feel that is very important to ensure that we never run out of capacity. If you look at what we expect from the future, first of all, currently all our plants in Europe and Asia are fully operational. There are no restrictions. Basically, we still have some distancing in our U.K. sites. We expect that to go back to normal within a quarter or so since U.K. is quite far further ahead when it comes to vaccinations. We expect U.K. business life to be back to normal sometime after the summer. We still see the strong demand in E.U. and China, and when I read this, I realized that we could have said we are in stronger demand recovery for all our sites because we are only in E.U. and China. All our sites are seeing good positive trends in new customer wins. We are seeing that the current customers are increasing their orders. We are in dialogue with several very interesting global OEMs. We are seeing that despite the difficulties where we cannot meet each other at the way we want, we cannot travel, but we still attract good new customers, which has actually surprised me a bit, but I've said it before, so now I'm not surprised, I'm just impressed. This is something that we're very proud of. With all this said, if we look at our order status, the order backlog is actually a bit stronger than we communicate, but since it's longer, that's why we have reduced it. It's actually somewhere about above 40% if we would measure it as we normally report it. We see that the order horizon is a bit longer, and therefore, we have only reported it as above 30%. If we look at in our books, we are expecting the year to end at the higher end or above our guiding. We are also a bit nervous about the component shortages and so on. The order intake and the customers' forecasting is really solid, and we are expecting that that will show off in our books in a good way for this year. We also expect 2022 to be very good as the economies around the world is opening up and we see that this will also be a boost for our sales. My last picture. If we look at sales, always measured in sales in Swedish, we had a very small drop in the fourth quarter. We bounced back in the first quarter, we are expecting that, how should I say, that the curve will start to point up in a more steep way when it comes to sales going forward. We are saying that the last five years we have an annual growth of 10%. Despite the 6% in 2020, we are still seeing that we had the last three year we were at 14% in annual growth. That is a number that we are of course expecting that we will hit or improve by this year. What I'm more optimistic is that when I started there, I started in the later part of 2018, no one really expected that we could break the 7% in operating profit barrier. I think that what we have shown the last maybe one and a half year is that this is very doable, and we are expecting that we will continue to improve this number. Growth is of course of essence if we are to hit this, but we're seeing that we can do better, and we are expecting to do better than where we are. Even though we are quite proud of seeing that we are at the trailing 12 month, we are at 8.2 or 8.3% in operating profit. I think that if I would have guided that when I started, no one of you would have believed me, but this is where we are, and we are expecting that we can do even better. We are optimistic of where we are, both from in terms of sales and also in margin. I think that I will stop there and open the floor for questions. Thank you, everyone. This is [audio distortion]. I have a couple of questions. First of all, congratulations on the great results. It is really impressive. Thank you. You've given a lot of color, which is great, on both order backlog and the semiconductors shortage. I just have one follow-up question on the prices of components. Are prices in US dollars starting to move because of the shortage, or are prices stable and it's just a question of availability? I would say that the prices on the semiconductors are increasing. The last number I heard was that the global price level was up maybe 20%. It came from this Taiwanese company that are doing parts that are included in basically any semiconductor that is sold. We are expecting to see a 20% increase of the semiconductor, give or take. This will be higher on some parts and lower on others, and it depends a bit of how long our customers have secured availability and pricing. We are expecting the prices to go up. In our price models, we are getting compensation for this, so we don't expect this to push our margins down. This 20% number, is that fair for the type of components you are buying, or is there other types that are more stable in price? I think it's too early to say. We are seeing some components have increased much more, some are still managing to buy at the basically flat pricing. It's not so easy to answer the question. It's a big variation between the different components. Moving on to profitability, as you also addressed structurally in the past, Western Europe has been more profitable than rest of world. Is there any structural reasons behind this that means that rest of world should be below Western Europe in the long run or not? This is a very tricky question as I see it. If we go back five, six years ago, we saw that our profitability was actually higher in the rest of the world than in Western Europe. With the structure we have today where production is moving back to Western Europe, I would say that in the near future, say the next two years, I still expect Western Europe to be stronger in margin. From a structural point of view, there is basically no reason for it. It's more that we are where we are, and we are improving from where we stand. I don't see any reason why rest of the world could not hit 9%, maybe 10% in operating profit over time. It's more that we have been struggling, we have had challenges. We have addressed them. It takes some time to get the full benefit out of the improvements that we do. We are seeing this quarter, or we also saw it already in the second half of last year that the rest of the world was improving. This quarter it came in fairly, or as we see, very good, the best in many years. Just a follow-up question on the order book. This increase in component prices, is that also showing up in the order book or is it not? I guess 20% increase in component prices would be not very significant, but the material in the order book, if it's included in the order book. First of all, it's on the semiconductor. It's not the full BOM. It's only one or two components on each board. They are quite expensive, so they are maybe 20% of the BOM cost on a board and sometimes even higher. It's not the full palette of components. It's only this component that we have seen the increase on so far. Normally, we are adjusting the prices closer to when we sell, so they are not reflected in our order backlog. All right. Trying to figure out how much market share you are gaining. Is there any way you can help us understand how much the underlying market is growing? Yeah, we have looked at our peers a bit, and if we look at 2020, we would estimate the market in the Nordics to be fairly flat. In local currency, maybe a few% growth. Say that we gained maybe 5% market share last year would be a good assumption. We expect this year the market to grow with maybe 5% or so. We are expecting to continue to take market share, but this is based on how we look at our peers. A final question, what kind of investments do you need to make to maintain this growth in sales or in production capacity or other areas? I would say that if we hit the higher end of our guiding with, say, 20% growth, we would have to invest maybe SEK 60 million-SEK 75 million in new equipment. To gain another SEK 400 million, we would invest SEK 60 million, SEK 65 million maybe, and say that maybe 40% of that is replacement investment. The additional is maybe SEK 40 million, SEK 50 million to gain another SEK 400 million would be my best answer on that. It depends on where the growth is coming and if there are any very unique processes that needs high automation or so. In rough numbers, I would put it like that. Thank you. Congratulations again, and keep up the great work. Thank you very much, Thomas. Hi, I have another question. [Plaid], is it within the segment Green Tech? Yes. Okay, super. That was all. Thank you. Any other questions? If not, I thank you for attending, and I hope that you are happy with the report and that you remain as a shareholder. Thank you very much.
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