Hello. Welcome to today's Finwire broadcast presentation with ViaCon Group. After the presentation, there will be a question and answer session, so if you have any questions, you can submit them using the form on the right. With that said, I'll hand the floor to you. Please go ahead. Thank you very much. This is Stefan Nordström, the CEO of the ViaCon Group. I will go through the Q1 in brief, talk a little bit about our market and the outlook in the market. Our CFO, Philip Delborn, will go through the Q1 financials this year. As stated, we have a Q&A through the chat function afterwards. If we start with the Q1 in brief, we did unfortunately see a decline year-over-year in the EBITDA. Very much driven by the very challenging weather conditions, primarily in January and February, and also quite a strong comparison period, Q1 2025. The underlying EBITDA was EUR -2.1 million versus EUR 3 million last year. That EUR 3 million was a record high level last year. As we perhaps all remember, there was quite wintry conditions all over Europe for January and February. That meant that a lot of our customers' infrastructure projects were halted and simply couldn't be performed at the planned pace. Towards the end of the quarter, the situation improved quite a lot, and we saw the weather conditions normalizing into March, and customers resumed their activity levels. As I said already, Q1 2025 was very strong, driven partly by sales outside of Europe to the mining industry. Looking at the order intake, it was quite good in the quarter. We have seen this trend continuing into beginning of Q2. Order intake in Q1 was EUR 41.7 million compared to EUR 38.9 in Q1 last year. The second quarter has also seen in the beginning a good order intake, as we can see in the little graph below here, indicating the 2026 level in the dark black line and the 2025 in the lighter gray color. From 1st of January 2026, we have a new reporting structure following a new organization that we have reported on earlier that was launched full out from January 1 this year. In addition to the group numbers, we will, from Q1 and onwards this year, report two business areas. It is the Bridges & Culverts Solutions and then what is called the Water & Ground Solutions. The business area, Bridges & Culverts, is more or less unchanged since earlier, whilst the Water & Ground Solutions is a merger of the two previous business units, GeoTechnical and StormWater Solutions. As reported on before, the new organization aims to strengthen our offerings, the coordination between the two different business units, primarily in GeoTechnical and StormWater earlier, and thereby create a more scalable platform for profitable growth going forward. It also aims at reducing the internal administration in the group. If we look at the market and the outlook, as I said on the previous slide, the order intake was quite good in Q1 this year. This confirms the underlying demand for ViaCon's solutions and that those demands remain quite solid. During Q1, we have taken several larger orders with deliveries for the coming quarters in 2026, partly also into beginning of 2027. The positive trend on the order intake did continue into the beginning of Q2, and also with a promising pipeline of further new opportunities. We see this to be in line with the increased investments in infrastructure that have been announced in the recent years from several countries in Europe, and also supported by EU financing. It's important to still note that although we see quite a positive trend here, the general market activity is not yet fully back to normal levels after the pandemic. In addition to this, the ongoing war in Iran has also impacted us, but more to a limited level. Primarily, we have seen a sharp increase in raw material prices during Q1, and especially for plastic raw materials. This primarily affects the production cost that we have of plastic pipes, which is in the business area, Water & Ground Solutions. We are, of course, actively working on managing these cost increases, including adjusting our customer pricing but also through internal production efficiencies. So far, the financial impact has been limited, but it is a change compared to before the Iran war. With this, I hand over to Philip, our CFO, to go through the numbers. Thank you, Stefan. Let's start with the group summary, where we can see an organic growth of -23% in the first quarter. As Stefan mentioned, it's weather-related and also a very strong comparison period in Q1 2025, where we had strong sales outside Europe to the mining industry, which we have not had this year in the first quarter at least. If we look at the EBITDA, we came in at EUR -2.1 million compared to EUR 3 million the previous years. This is, of course, also an effect of the lower top line. From a financial perspective, the increases in plastic prices and the cost for plastic raw material has had a very limited impact on Q1. If we look at the order intake, on the other hand, we see an organic growth of +10.6%, it has continued in a good pace also in the beginning of the second quarter. The long-term market outlook remains positive. If we take a look at the two BAs or business areas and starting with Bridges & Culverts. Here we see a quite strong negative organic growth in the quarter, -38%. As mentioned several times, it's very much impacted by the first two months of the quarter with very tough weather conditions. Also it's in this business area where we had the very high levels of sales outside Europe last year. This lower top line also impacts the EBITDA, of course. We came in at EUR -1.7 million in the first quarter compared to EUR +2.4 million in the previous year. If we look at the organic intake in Bridges & Culverts, we see a very strong development, +35.7%, and the demand remains solid with the investments going on in Europe across many geographies. We see that the demand for our solution is high and continue to be on a strong level. If we then move over to the, so to say, new business area, Water & Ground Solutions. Here we can see a slight decrease in the top line. Organic growth was -6.3%. We had also in this business area issues related to the weather situation across many geographies. That also has an impact on the EBITDA, where we see a decline from roughly EUR -1.1 million-EUR -1.5 million. However, also impacted by a negative business mix during the first quarter. The organic growth in order intake was slightly negative, -6.7% in the first quarter. A couple of words on the cash flow and the financial position. Our cash flow from operating activities was EUR -8 million, slightly better than the year before, where we had EUR -8.9 million in the first quarter. The effect from a change in working capital was EUR -2.6 million this year compared to EUR -5.9 million the previous years. Fairly low level of CapEx in the quarter, only EUR 0.3 million in Q1 compared to EUR 0.9 million in Q1 last year. Looking at our net debt, we were at EUR 98.1 million end of March, which is to be compared to EUR 111 million the year before at the same time. Our cash position, cash and cash equivalent amounted to EUR 16.2 million, which is higher than the year before. Even more important, if we look at the total available cash including our credit facilities, we have EUR 21.2 million this year, which is to be compared to EUR 14.6 the same period a year ago. Finally, a comment on letter of intent that we signed regarding a sales and leaseback of our property in Rydzyna in Poland. We signed that now in April. If it's completed, it's expected to have a positive cash flow effect later this year of approximately EUR 7 million. That's the numbers in summary, Stefan. Very good. Thank you, Philip. This means we can open up for the Q&A if there are any questions that have come in. Thank you for your presentation, Stefan and Philip. Now we open up for questions. First question is: You recently announced a sales leaseback transaction in Poland. Are there any other sales leaseback candidates in your property portfolio? There are, and they can be pursued if we need them. There are smaller opportunities than what we have done so far and what we are planning to do with this sale and lease back in Poland, as Philip reported on. Thank you. Next question is: The Q1 2026 interim report notes a good order intake despite challenging winter conditions. Could you quantify the financial impact or project delays caused by this winter condition on the net sales and EBITDA margin for the quarter? We haven't done it on such a detailed level year-over-year, so it's hard to give an exact number of that. There are actually two reasons for the lower Q1 this year than last year. One is the very wintry and snowy conditions across Europe, but also quite a tough comparison period, Q1 last year, where we had a pretty big and good order that was delivered to the mining industry. We are now pursuing such opportunities on a more regular basis, but many of those opportunities are quite project-related from the customers, so they are very hard to predict in time. A direct comparison or a direct number response to the question, we don't have. Thank you. We go on with the next questions. Following the strategic reorganization announced in February 2026, how much of the targeted cost savings were captured in the Q1 results? What is the timeline for realizing the full run rate impact? Oh- Yeah ...rely on Philip. I don't know that. For the merger of the two previous business areas into Water & Ground Solutions, we have some efficiency savings, I would say, but they are quite limited. They are not of the magnitude that we saw in the larger restructuring program that we ran end of 2024. The main purpose of this reorganization is to improve our offering and our way of working towards the market, and also to realize commercial synergies between our previously two business units that we now have merged. In a nutshell, the cost takeouts are fairly limited in Q1 and also for the full year. The big benefits comes from our commercial improved strength, I would say. Thank you. Next question is: Q1 traditionally carries seasonal working capital variations. How is operating cash flow progressing compared to previous years? What are the working capital expectations as you move into the peak construction season? Yeah. We more or less always have a negative, we can see that from the previous slide here, a negative cash flow development in Q1 and Q2 due to the seasonality of our business. However, we are fairly used to this. We have tools and ways of managing these liquidity swings that we see across the year. On top of that, we have a stronger cash position end of Q1 compared to a year ago. It follows a fairly normal pattern with a negative development during the first half of the year and then a strong second half of the year. Thank you. Next question is: You recently signed a letter of intent to sell the property in Rydzyna, Poland. Following previous asset sales in the U.K., and France, what is expected net cash inflow from the Polish transaction? Are there further non-core real estate assets in market for divestment? Yeah. The expected positive effect from this sale and lease back this year is around EUR 7 million. It will most likely be towards the end of this year. These processes tend to take some time. You never really know if there's some special investigations or processes that needs to be taken. We've done two sale lease back during 2025 successfully, and we're quite optimistic on closing this one as well with approximately EUR 7 million positive cash flow impact. As Stefan mentioned, we do have other properties. They are not of the size as this property in Poland. They are smaller, but they do exist How have the completions of recent property sales, like St. Helens in late 2025, successfully altered your leverage ratios and current liquidity cash on [inaudible]? We did the first SLB last year during the summer in July. The positive impact on our liquidity was around EUR 8 million at that time. We did St. Helens in the U.K. in December. That was approximately EUR 6 million positive impact. That's the liquidity impact. Of course, from an accounting perspective, you also get some IFRS 16 adjustment, which is linked to the lease length and the lease size. That's more a technical perspective or an accounting point of it. I think the important part here is that we are strengthening our liquidity, and you could say the real net debt is strengthened by these SLBs. Thank you. We have a couple more questions. The first is: How are order trends shifting across your three core segments, Bridges & Culverts Solutions, GeoTechnical Solutions, and StormWater Solutions? Which segment is proving most resilient against the macro headwinds in Europe? So far, we see the business area one, Bridges & Culverts, progressing quite well. Also parts of business area two, Water & Ground Solutions, are also developing quite well. A lot of this is driven by the increased investments in infrastructure across Europe. That's quite positive. They show a positive trend both in the revenues but also primarily in the order intake, I should say. Now we have a question about geographic trends. Given historic organic growth drivers in regions like Central Europe and Turkey, which specific geographies underperformed or outperformed during the first quarter? We don't report on numbers on a country level. We report on the Group and on these two business areas. In general, I can say that the trend on the order intake is quite good in several countries in Europe, including Poland and Turkey. That's all we can share at that level. Thank you. There are no more questions at this time. I give the word to you for some closing remarks. Well, I think we have covered what we need to cover, and we thank you for all the questions. We come back later this year with the Q2 report to start with. We can sign off from our side.
Loading workspace