Hello, and welcome to this presentation with ViaCon. We have the CEO, Stefan Nordström, and CFO, Philip Delborn, presenting the Q3 report and answering questions during the Q&A. And if you have any questions, please use the form located to the right. And with that said, please go ahead with your presentation. Thank you very much. And hello, everyone, and welcome to the presentation of the Q3 report. When it comes to the Q3, I will start with just some brief comments on it. I will also come into the market and the outlook, and then Philip will cover the financial parts of Q3. And I will return with a case study towards the end of the presentation, and then we have the Q&A. If we start with the Q3 in brief, the first quarters of this year, Q1 and Q2, we did see considerable market restraints given the higher inflation, interest rates, political or geopolitical unrest, also issues from an EU investment level in Poland. These constraints or restraints have continued into the third quarter of this year. However, we do see very clear indications and facts on increased activity in several of our key markets. This is, among others, based on a clear inflow of requests for quotations and the growth of the pipeline. We'll come back to that again in a few minutes, and this means that we see clear indications and thereby expect several of our key markets to recover, at least during the second half of 2025. But we also have some positive developments in selective areas. The good successes we've had in Turkey for Bridges and Culverts, they continue, and based on our unique solutions and the benefits for the customers, we see that we are gaining market shares on behalf of the alternative solutions. We have reported on this before, and then it has been driven very much by the earthquakes that happened in February 2023, but during this year, we have seen other effects into the regular investments in infrastructure, both when it comes to roads and railways. This means that we are really gaining on behalf of the alternative solutions. Also, when it comes to stormwater, we have seen the previous high demand for data center cooling using rainwater instead of freshwater, has continued into the third quarter. With these new orders we have received, we will have good deliveries in the coming quarters. In the Q2 presentation and report, we shared information on the initiation of initiatives and actions to deal with this situation with a lower volume. I can now report that several of those activities are under implementation, some actually already implemented, and they will position us very well for a good return to normal earnings levels when we see the growth of the markets into 2025. The initiatives, they follow our strategic agenda, which, among others, means we want to realize synergies between our production facilities. And one example here is that we will continue to serve our German customers and the German market with all products, but now instead produced in our plant in Poland. Full sales and engineering is, of course, kept locally in Germany. We're also focusing to support sales efforts in geographies and also for products where we see good profitability potentials. This means that we continue to exit low margin sales, and that we have done that over the past three to four years. So we continue to do this. And this means also that we reorganize the corresponding resources connected to these low margin sales. We are also focusing on growing the high margin geographies and products, and thereby giving a stronger support to geographies with great market potentials. And more and more are being aligned to that target. We're also streamlining, excuse me, our support functions. And this means we have reduced back office functions and management levels at several locations in ViaCon. So if we look at our view on the market and the outlook of the market, we do see a lower level of infrastructure investments this year compared to what we expect in the long term. And this means that there is now a contained demand for infrastructure investments for the coming years. And this in itself means that we do expect, of course, several of our key markets to recover in the second half of 2025. And as I said earlier here, together with our improvement activities, this creates very good conditions for returning to normal earnings levels during 2025. We have reported on the infrastructure market in Poland earlier, where the EU froze funds for infrastructure investments for several years due to the previous government not being seen as democratic and abiding by EU regulations. There's a new government in place for a year now. These EU funds have now gradually been made available to Poland during 2024. We have not yet during this year seen an increased revenue on our side. With those funds being made available to the country, the country has really sped up the release of new infrastructure projects and continuation of already initiated infrastructure projects. This means we see a very clear growth of our pipeline and also in the request for quotations. This means we have and will continue to grow a very strong backlog for Poland for all business units, actually, for 2025. Poland is just one of our key markets with this situation. We do see a similar situation in other key markets in ViaCon as well. So we look forward to 2025 with high expectations on a return to a more normal level. Combined with our efficiency measures, this will be quite good, we expect. Also, I just want to report on some top management changes in ViaCon. So as of 1st of November, Vibeke Gyllenram joined ViaCon as the new Vice President for Stormwater Solutions. And Michal Monka, he is since 1st of November also our Vice President for Bridges and Culverts. And this is a position he previously held in the company. He has been with the company many years and also during the time when he was not in this position. This means a good strengthening of the management team and good experience from our markets and good general management skills. Thank you. I hand over to you, Philip, on the financials. Thank you, Stefan. And as Stefan already shared, the third quarter, we experienced market restraints, which has impacted our sales and earnings. We had an organic growth in sales in the third quarter of - 17.5%. And this market situation is holding back the sales in the quarter in all the three business units. But also, as mentioned, we do see signs of recovery in certain geographies. Looking at EBITDA, we came in on EUR 4.1 million versus EUR 11.5 million Q3 last year. Last year's Q3 was an all-time high EBITDA for us so far. So it's a tough comparison period, but we came in below last year this quarter. And the initiatives that Stefan mentioned in terms of improving and strengthening our position will have an effect from the fourth quarter this year and beyond, of course. Looking at the order intake, we had an organic growth of - 7.3%. This decrease is coming from Bridges and Culverts Solutions and Geotechnical Solutions. I will go through the BU, sort of the business units, in a bit more detail now. Let's start with Bridges and Culverts. Here we can see a decline in the top line, and that's coming from the challenging market conditions that we've mentioned. We have a negative organic growth of 19% in the quarter. We continue to see the high volumes in Turkey, but also we have the hyperinflation, and that is impacting both our sales and our cost base in Bridges and Culverts. The decline that we see in the EBITDA margin is related to these lower volumes that we can see overall. The order intake is actually in local currencies in line with last year's Q3. The reason why it's a drop in euros is related to the FX development in Turkey. Then if we move over to Geotechnical Solutions, this market has not yet recovered to the normal levels, which means that we have a negative organic growth in sales also here. That's reflected in the volumes in the quarter, and it's mainly related to the solutions that's based on externally produced products. The products that we produce internally are holding up quite well, but it's a drop in the externally produced products or the solutions related to that. And the decline in EBITDA that we can see here in Geotechnical Solutions is similar to what we saw in Bridges and Culverts related to lower volumes. And also here we can see a drop in the organic growth in the order intake. And then finally, we have Stormwater Solutions. Here we see a positive growth in the order intake in the quarter. Organically, we had a 5.9% growth in the order intake. However, the growth in sales organically was - 24.1%. This decline in sales is mainly coming from the markets in the U.K. and France, and the decline in EBITDA is linked to the lower volumes in the quarter, then briefly looking at the cash flow and the financial position, we had a cash flow from the operating activities of -EUR 0.9 million, and I can see a typo here. It should be compared to +EUR 7.8 million the previous quarter. We had an effect from the change in working capital in the quarter of -EUR 0.4 million, and the main reason for the lower cash flow in the quarter is linked to the lower earnings compared to last year. In terms of CapEx, we are more or less in line with the level we were a year ago, EUR 1 million in CapEx during the quarter. If we look at the financial position, we have a net debt of EUR 107 million ending Q3, which is to be compared with slightly lower than EUR 102 million at the same period last year. If we adjust for lease liabilities, we're at EUR 96.9 million in net debt after the third quarter. And in terms of cash and cash equivalents, we're at EUR 16.4 million compared to EUR 17.8 million the year before. But we have now drawn our revolving credit facility of EUR 15 million. Equity level is - 6 in the quarter compared to - 1.2 a year ago. So that was the summary of the financials. And Stefan, I leave it to you to present the case study from Stormwater Solutions. Perfect. Very good. Thank you, Philip. So if we go on there, a customer of ours in the U.K., and they wanted to plan and construct the commercial development at Newlands Park in Luton in the U.K. And they needed soak-away tank solutions for this commercial development. But they ran into challenges when they thought that they needed a bespoke soak-away tank solution. The initial borehole testing by the customer showed that at the standard depth, which in this case was seven meters below the ground, the ground had insufficient percolation opportunities to take care of the water that was going to be let out in a controlled way from our tanks. This meant that the tanks instead had to be dug down to a deeper level, 10 meters in this case, and that, among others, led also to a higher load of masses on the tanks. We developed a unique soak-away steel tank design, which could store the required volumes while still allowing the water to permeate the surrounding soil at that 10-meter depth without having any structural problems in the design. And our solution, in the end, outperformed all the alternative materials and solutions. The advantage for the customer here was that our solution, of course, matched the unique needs. And we did provide an end-to-end expert consultation to identify our solution specifically to the challenging problems that no one else could solve. And in fact, our installation here is the only solution in the UK market that works structurally at this depth and can take care of the problem. And our solution also included a full suite of design drawings together with structural calculations, of course, for the customer. I should also add that when you do a tank like this, you have to, of course, create the holes to allow the water to permeated by the ground, and this tank had a diameter of 3.3 meters and a very high thickness in the steel of 3.5 millimeters, and to punch the steel with perfect design and alignment with the customer's needs was a challenge in itself, but we also found a very good solution for that, so this is just another case that shows how unique our steel tank solutions can be and what benefits they bring versus the alternative materials. All right. I think that ends the formal presentation of the Q3, so we open up for Q&A. Thank you very much for that presentation. And let's jump into the Q&A section here. Can you explain the revenue drop in the Baltics? Yes. Baltics is just one area in Europe where the market has been a lot softer this year, given the inflation rates and interest rates, also geopolitical concerns that make customers wait with their decisions. So same situation there as we have seen in several of our key markets in Europe. Thank you for that. Can you share some of the personnel costs and other fixed costs in the Baltics? No, we don't share those details to the outside world. What we share is what we have in the quarterly report. Thank you for clarifying that. How would the group's margins look like if you were to exit the Baltics market? I mean, in the Baltics, we sell all our products. So the combined margins in that part of Europe are very much the same as in other markets. We have no plans of leaving the Baltics since it wouldn't bring big benefits to ViaCon, but of course, as I said in the beginning of the presentation here, with our activities, which means also leaving some low margin sales, which we have in several key markets, albeit at a much lower level now compared to several years ago, this also concerns Baltics, so reducing that sales and instead focusing on the high margin sales means we have also reorganized and restructured the connected resources for this, so no, it would not bring benefits. Can you share what you believe are the reasons for the revenue decrease in Sweden and Western Europe on a year-to-date basis? The same reason as I mentioned on the question on the market for Baltics and that we have in general referred to all the way here throughout Q1 and Q2 as well. It is a much softer market this year, given the reasons I have referred to several times. So there is nothing that sticks out in any direction in any market here, apart from Turkey and apart from other examples like the high demand for cooling of data centers, for instance, that continues to be a real good success story for us in ViaCon. Okay. And with signs of increased activity in key markets, what specific indicators or metrics are you monitoring to assess sustained recovery? And how confident are you that the recovery will materialize in the latter half of 2025? Yeah, I think that's a great question. We are continuously, of course, following up through our CRM systems, the pipeline development of new projects, new demands, new requests coming into us. And we see a clear positive trend in new requests coming into us in several of our key markets. So we monitor this very, very closely. It means we, of course, this is early indicators of order intake, which is developing in a positive direction now. And also in the end, of course, our backlog, which is developing also in a positive direction. So to the question of confidence, compared to this period last year, we see clearly higher activity, stronger backlogs being built in ViaCon for several of our key markets. That gives us strong confidence on a much stronger development into 2025. Given that the order intake has declined overall but shown strength in segments like Stormwater Solutions, what factors drive these disparities? How do you plan to capitalize on these high-demand areas? I think that's also an interesting question, the disparity. Why can we see some areas developing positively and the majority so far not? In the case of stormwater and driven very much by cooling data centers, this is very much driven by the investments being done in artificial intelligence, which requires more computing power by several big software companies and data server operators around in Europe. These investments are still done and very much needed to sustain the investments to drive artificial intelligence. This is a unique solution. It also proves the drive and the entrepreneurship in ViaCon to find these solutions and use those opportunities, not only for one quarter, but continuously use such opportunities. When it comes again to where we see the weaker development so far this year, the reasons are the same, as I have mentioned now several times. Another good example of what's happening here is also in Turkey, where there is a big, big demand for building up a more solid infrastructure, and the strength of the ViaCon organization and our products and solutions shows that we are now really starting to gain market shares on behalf of the alternative materials in that market, so even in tough times, we are able to find the growth opportunities. Together with the initiatives we are now fully implementing, it means we are very well positioned for the market returns, which we feel at this stage quite confident of for next year. The EBIT margin declined from 14.8% to 4.5% year -over- year. What steps are you taking to manage or improve margins in this restrained market? And how much of a margin recovery do you anticipate in 2025? I mentioned in the beginning of the presentation some examples of what we do, utilizing production synergies within the group, also continuing to leave low margin sales, which is not a new thing for us. We have done this. We done this. We do this basically every year gradually, but also restructure the connected resources for this. But not only reducing the weaker parts, but also strengthening the high-margin products and solutions and the stronger geographies. That combination is under full implementation. And also restructuring our back offices in several of our areas and geographies is reducing the total cost, of course, and specifically the fixed cost in ViaCon, so well positioned again for the market returns into 2025. Okay. And you've already mentioned several initiatives to enhance your efficiency and also growth, such as optimizing production synergies and streamlining support functions. Can you maybe provide some more or some specific examples of these initiatives and expected cost savings or performance improvements? I think I have mentioned by now probably two, three times examples of what we do. When it comes to each and one of these initiatives, these are many, many different initiatives. It's probably 50, 60 different initiatives. I will not share what every initiative will bring in itself. But connected to the previous question as well, this will, combined with the growth of the markets and return of the markets, given the factual situation we now see, really strengthen the EBITDA margins during 2025. This we feel quite confident on based on current facts that we have in our CRM systems and in our planning for 2025. Okay. I will take one final question here. With high performance in regions like Turkey and challenges in others, how are you adapting your sales strategies to leverage growth in stronger performance markets while mitigating risk in weaker ones? If we need to strengthen our teams in Turkey from a commercial perspective or an engineering perspective, then of course, that's what we are looking into. Also, in general, supporting them from the other areas in ViaCon, which currently has a lower utilization. This is a way of utilizing the unique benefits of ViaCon being a pan-European group instead of several of our competitors that are acting more on a local basis. We have the opportunity to utilize the key competencies across the national borders of Europe, including Turkey and within the group. So this means that we don't need always to add resources in local places. We can work together. During this year, that fact has increased quite a lot. This keeps focus on growing where we can grow. It also means a better cost utilization. I think this year we are really proving to ourselves internally that we can work together in a very, very efficient way across the group. Okay. Thank you very much, Stefan and Philip, for presenting and also answering all our questions. And thank you, everyone, who followed this presentation with ViaCon Group. And I wish you all a great rest of the day. And until next time, thank you very much.
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