Assa Abloy Aktie

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the ASSA ABLOY Interim Report April-September 2026 Conference Call. I am Sandra, the Chorus Call operator. [Operator Instructions] The conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. At this time, it is my pleasure to hand over to Björn Tibell, Investor Relations. You will now be joined into the conference room.

Hi, everyone, and welcome to the presentation of ASSA ABLOY's Q3 report 2026. My name is Björn Tibell. I'm heading Investor Relations. And joining me here are ASSA ABLOY's CEO, Nico Delvaux; and our CFO, Erik Pieder. We'll start this conference now with a summary of the report. And when we're done with that one, we will open up for your questions.

So Nico, I would like to hand over to you then.

Thank you, Björn Also good morning from my side. Q3 report, report with a lot of record top line. For the first time in our history, sales of above SEK 40 billion with a good organic sales growth of 4%, with the Americas divisions and EMEIA division contributing in the first place. Also a record high EBIT for the first time, above SEK 7 billion, and a record EBIT margin of 17.4%. Excellent operating leverage close to 50%. And cash flow, second best cash flow ever, an increase of the cash flow of 6% versus last year.

Also this third quarter, again, strong growth of our electromechanical product category. They had an organic sales growth of 9% in our regional divisions. And we completed 3 acquisitions, and we will also launch our new manufacturing footprint program, MFP 11Erik Pieder in Q4.

If we look a little bit into the numbers, sales of almost SEK 41 billion, 7% up, 4% organic growth, 2% net acquired growth. And this quarter, again, a positive effect on FX. That's because of the weak effect plus 1%. A record EBITDA margin of 18.7%, 80 basis points up. EBIT margin, like I mentioned, 17.4%, 60 basis points up. EBIT above SEK 7 billion, 11% up. And our earnings per share, 14% up.

If we make a little bit the tour of the world, starting in North America, and I would say a very similar market conditions, as I mentioned in Q2 and perhaps as in Q1 in North America, still very strong market conditions on the nonresidential side, commercial and institutional, where we continue to see very high activity. Residential, still much more challenging now definitely also with the [ Fed ] again, increasing interest rates, where we don't see that recovery on the new build any time soon yet. Where at least on the R&R side, we believe the market has bottomed out, and we see a slight recovery of the R&R business in North America.

Our logistics vertical, important for Entrance Systems. Also there, still a more flattish development of the market.

If we go to Europe, similar picture as in North America. Also here, a very strong nonresidential market conditions. Perhaps on the residential side, a little bit more positive than in North America. Here, we see R&R definitely coming back with a lower growth rate. And we even see new build in some markets like Finland and Sweden starting to grow again. And similar on the logistics side, also here, logistics side, no recovery. Even though that is something the market most probably still a little bit down in Europe.

And in Australia and New Zealand, similar as Europe and North America here, good strong market conditions on the commercial side, weaker residential in Australia and good residential in New Zealand.

LatAm, still good market conditions overall in most markets in LatAm. We have also now had elections in Brazil. Let's see how that plays out. Africa, smaller continent for us. And then in Asia, a very mixed picture where we see good market condition and good growth for us in India, in Southeast Asia. And where we see a continued challenging market conditions in South Korea with housing markets down double digits. And then also in Greater China, the market is not recovering where we also are still having a negative growth.

Some highlights from around the world. DoorBird expanded its portfolio with the world's first IP video door station with 4G/5G connectivity mainly for residential and commercial applications. Entrance Systems expanded their swing-door portfolio with a new door operator designed for interior applications, offering a more streamlined solution for everyday use. And then on the project win side, a very nice project win in Germany for a premium automotive manufacturer with our e-click solution, where the contract includes more than 15,000 cylinders, so very nice big project win.

There's now 7 quarters in a row that we see again positive organic growth, and I would say an acceleration of that organic growth, and still complemented with good growth through acquisitions. So top line that goes up and also an operating margin that goes up towards the higher end of the 16% to 17% bandwidth we want to be in. Year-to-date, we are at 16.6%. On a 12-month moving terms, we are at 16.7%. And EBITDA, like I mentioned earlier, also at a record high, 17.8% on a 12-month moving trend. So higher top line, better margins, therefore, also strong acceleration of our operating income, back of above SEK 7 billion for the first time and 81% up if we compare with 2021.

On the acquisition side, like I mentioned, 3 acquisitions completed in the quarter, 11 completed year-to-date. Those 11 acquisitions represent an annualized sales of around SEK 3.2 billion. If I highlight 2 of them that we did in Q3, Classic Brass, U.S. manufacturer of premium cabinet and door hardware, complementing, extending our core for the Americas division. They had a sales of around SEK 155 million last year.

And the PACLOCK, an acquisition that complements our organic development of PACLOCK product range in North America. Very excited about this acquisition. It's expertise in delivering, I would say, customized high-security solutions. They had a sales of around SEK 155 million last year.

If we then dig into the different divisions, starting with EMEIA. EMEIA had another very good quarter with an organic sales growth of 5%, with very strong sales growth in Central Europe. Good sales growth in Middle East and the Africa and the Nordics a small growth in South Europe and then a stable growth in U.K. and Ireland. And then an excellent operational execution with an EBIT margin of 15.8% with a strong operating leverage, 110 basis points driven by operational efficiencies, of course, the volume growth and then a good price versus cost realization.

FX was dilutive 10 basis points and M&A, 20 basis points. But we continue the positive journey, I would say, in the EMEIA division.

Also a very strong quarter for the Americas, with an organic sales growth of 6%, with strong sales growth in the North America nonresidential segments. A good sales growth in LatAm and in the North America residential segment. And then I would say excellent EBIT margin of 19.6%, 110 basis points up compared to last year, with an excellent operating leverage, 140 basis points, and M&A dilutive 30 bps.

APAC. APAC had an organic sales decline of 1%, a small sales growth in Pacific Northeast Asia and a sales decline in Greater China Southeast Asia where, as I explained earlier, you should see this as a double-digit negative growth in Greater China and strong positive double-digit growth in Southeast Asia. So a very different mixed picture. An EBIT margin of 9.8%, with a stable operating leverage. And FX and M&A, both dilutive 20 basis points. The M&A is more an internal transfer. We transferred the residential business from HHI in Taiwan to the APAC division.

Global Tech, an organic sales growth of 4%. We have strong sales growth in HID and a good sales growth in Global Solutions. And I would say, an excellent EBIT margin of 20%, even higher than the very high 19.8% number of last year. Also here, excellent operating leverage, 80 basis points, and FX and M&A both dilutive 30 basis points.

And then last but not least, Entrance Systems, an organic sales growth of 3%, strong sales growth in pedestrian and in perimeter security. A small sales growth in doors and automation, but then a decline in industrial. Good growth in service, and an EBIT margin of 17.1% with a strong operating leverage, 40 basis points. And then M&A, dilutive 70 basis points, that is related to the biggest Sentinel acquisition we did in Canada and then also related to acquisition costs for the upcoming Gunnebo Entrance Control acquisition that we are confident we will now be able to close in Q4.

And with that, I'll give the word to Erik for some more details on the financial numbers.

Thank you, Nico, and a very good morning also from my side. As mentioned before, we had a record high sales of -- the first time above SEK 40 billion, 7% up versus same period last year. 4% organic, 2% from acquisitions and 1% positive from currency. The impact, of course, in the SEK Continues to weaken. We expect when we calculate then from end of September, that we're going to have a positive impact from currency in Q4 of about 5%.

EBIT also record first time above SEK 7 billion, up 11%. Here, just to mention that we have released a mid-single dollar -- mid-single million dollar amount into our results, which sort of slightly helps it positively. EBITA, as mentioned, 18.7%, up 80 basis points. EBIT, up 60 basis points. Income before tax, net income and EPS all are up with 14% cash flow, also very strong at 6%. Should also keep in mind that we -- this quarter also had a higher CapEx which is related to -- that we have acquired 2 buildings in Entrance North America. If we exclude these 2 buildings, our cash flow would have been 13% up versus last year. Also encouraging to see that our return on capital employed is up with 70 basis points and are touching now the 15%. Operational value-added, also up by 10%, and is now close to SEK 12 billion.

If we look on to the bridge analysis and look on the organic price was a strong 2, which consequentially means that volume was a weaker 2. The currency, as I mentioned before, is related to the SEK. The flow-through ended at 47%, which is driven by the organic leverage then from price versus cost as well as manufacturing footprint savings this quarter, it was slightly above 200 million, as well as other kind of operational efficiencies that we can do.

And then if you look on M&A, it's up with -- it was top line, it was contributing with 2%. Bottom line, it's dilutive, but it has to do, Nico mentioned before, the Sentinel acquisition and also acquisition costs coming from that as well as acquisition costs related to Gunnebo, which we hope to close before the end of the year.

If we then look into the direct material or the cost breakdown. Direct material is 80 basis points better than last year. Out of that, if I call it, the true price versus cost, is plus 60 basis points. We see, however, in the market now that raw material, electronics, plastics are going up, but we are confident that we can mitigate that with additional price increases.

Conversion cost, 20 basis points better. As mentioned before, we have operational efficiencies, MFP and so forth. SG&A is at a similar level as where it was last year. We have been able to continue to invest in R&D as well as selling, and this has been offset by admin and back office efficiencies, including, I would say, the first results that we see of our AI initiatives.

Operating cash flow, as mentioned before, including the buildings, we are 6% better than the same period last year, excluding 13%. Whether if you look on cash conversion in the quarter, it was 117%. And if you look on the 12-month rolling, it's at 109%. Gearing and net debt to equity landed at 54%. We continue to drive also down the net debt to EBITDA and was now at 2.0. And if you look over a year period, we have been able to lower our debt with roughly SEK 2.5 billion. And we said we continue to have a very strong balance sheet, so we can continue our acquisition strategy going forward. If you look on the last slide, I mentioned the number before. Earnings per share was up with 14% versus same period last year.

And with that, some concluding remarks, Nico?

Good. So like we said, we believe, up to you to judge, of course, but we believe a very good quarter with a lot of record top line, with good organic sales development of plus 4%, record operating profit and record margin and the second best cash flow in our history. And like we mentioned, we will launch now in Q4, our manufacturing footprint program #11. I would say that we are proud of what we have accomplished in the first 9 months, and we are confident in our ability to deliver another strong year for ASSA ABLOY.

With that, I'll give the word back to Björn for Q&A.

Thank you very much. Yes, that means it's time to open up for your questions. [Operator Instructions] operator, that means that we are ready to kick off the Q&A session. Please go ahead.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from George Featherstone from Barclays.

The first one just on EMEIA Obviously, you talked recently about having some tailwinds from this needs to regulation and the growth has obviously been very strong again. So I just wondered if you could pass out for us what the contribution you think is from that regulation this quarter?

And then just on the margin, obviously, it's trending towards the sort of 16% it was before on the EBIT level in the region. But you're having good volume growth. What's the sort of next step to get us back above 16% from here?

George, I can say, we are very happy with the development of EMEIA over the last 4 quarters or so, you could say, because we have really seen organic volume growth coming back, and we have seen an acceleration of that organic volume growth. And I would say that is very wide spread. Yes, needs to contribute, but needs to contribute much probably around 0.5% organic growth. Because this to today is still very much DACH related, you could say, and Nordics related. It still has to pick up at a higher speed in the rest of Europe. And we are confident that, that will happen going forward because that's normally also how things happen in Europe, things first start in the Nordics and perhaps in the DACH and then it's spread more over the rest of Europe as also the local counter start to adapt the European directive into a local law.

But I would say it's much more widespread. We see a very good volume growth on the commercial side in most if not all markets. We have, of course, the emerging part within the Middle East and Africa that also contributes. And then like I said, on the residential side, we are a bit more positive than in North America, where we see R&R slightly coming back and where we even have seen new builds a little bit coming back in countries like Sweden and Nordics.

And then, of course, next to the organic volume growth, we have also the price component as we continue to see higher inflation. That also gives us then the possibility to further increase prices in EMEIA. When it comes to margin, you see if you have a little bit of organic volume growth and you see an acceleration of that organic volume growth, you see also a better volume leverage, and that volume leverage then leads to better bottom line results. If you see in EMEIA, the last 3, 4 quarters, they have been able to improve margin sequentially quarter after quarter. And I'm confident that, that will continue for the next quarters as we -- confident we will continue to see that organic volume growth. They have a very good cost structure that with a little bit of organic volume growth, we can get very good operational efficiencies.

Just a follow-up on what you said on Global Solutions as well, mostly in the release. You talked about this temporary depressed retail segment. Can you just give us a little bit more context and kind of how temporary that will be? When you think it will recover? Clearly, you can see something in the order book, I guess, otherwise in September.

I would not say it's depressed. It's perhaps more an operational execution challenge at 2 of our bigger customers for the InVue business. I think HID and Global Tech had a very good quarter, very good solid organic growth. Global Solutions, the same thing if you exclude InVue. InVue is very dependent on a couple of bigger customers that have placed very big orders with us. And they have some delays in operational execution of those projects, you could say. So some of that sales is now postponed until Q4 and most probably even to Q1 next year.

So I would say it's no drama, it's just a little bit delay in us receiving the sales. And in a way, perhaps it's even good for us because InVue is very seasonal. Normally, Q1 is very weak. So if we can get now some sales that we should have gotten in the second half in Q1 next year, it will help also due to the seasonality. So that's the reason why perhaps Global Tech is a little bit weaker than anticipated on the organic outside. And perhaps you see -- just a comment if you see then, if we have a little bit less organic growth, then we also deliver on our problem is that at least we will deliver the bottom line and the cash flow because you have seen very strong bottom line and cash flow. Sorry, go ahead.

I was just going to say that can you quantify the amount of the InVue slippage maybe in terms of organic growth?

I don't know. To be honest, I can't say exactly the number, but I would say it's between 1 and -- on Global Tech, the level is around 1%, I would say.

The next question comes from Phil Buller from JPMorgan.

Firstly, I was hoping if you could help us understand if there's any one-offs on the resi side in the U.S. Good growth here seems to be obvious with the leading indicators. So is that a one-off ahead of price increases? And is there anything one-off in the 140 bps operating leverage such as the tariff refund? That's the first question.

So specific for the resi, there is no one-offs. I would say that in general, it's a clean quarter for the group. That's also a clean quarter for resi. Yes. So we have seen some growth in resi, some price and some volume. And like we have said at many occasions, we don't need very strong recovery on the resi side to see very good margin improvement. As a matter of fact, we had a very good margin for Q3 in resi in North America, thanks to that volume growth because we have that construction now that a little bit of growth gives immediately very good volume leverage. It has nothing to do with price increases nor anticipation.

Then, of course, you should not read too much in one quarter neither. Like I mentioned earlier, we believe that new build is still very challenging in North America and it's definitely not improving compared to 3 months ago with the Fed now increasing interest rates and you see also market rates further going up. So it's already something I think the recovery of the new build will be further delayed in North America. But like I also mentioned, we believe that at least R&R has bottomed out and perhaps has started to grow very low single-digit numbers perhaps.

And of course, we have a lot of growth initiatives where we try to do better than the market. We have launched a complete new padlock range, a product that we did not have in our portfolio before. We have invested a lot in digital door locks and have a very wide product range today. We've also invested in renewing our mechanical core for Kwikset. So there's a lot of initiatives that we launched to try -- to do better than the market.

Perhaps just to add because your question was a bit related to tariffs. ThE mid-single-digit million dollar amount that I talked about, that affected Global Tech and Entrance. There's nothing in the Americas result.

Okay. And then as a follow-up on that macro uncertainty topic. Obviously, there is a lot of uncertainty out there and we've got a new restructuring program. Is that in anticipation of perhaps markets getting a little bit softer as we think ahead to 2027? Or is this more of a reflection that you've identified further cost out opportunities as part of the current program that you'd have looked at even if the outlook was less uncertain, I guess.

So it has nothing to do with market conditions. As you know, we do an MFP program every around 18 months. and it's 18 months ago that we did the previous one. And as we continue to buy companies, we continue also to buy factories, warehouses, sales offices that we then can further consolidate. And that's what we will do now also in MFP 11. So drivers are very similar as our previous MFP programs, I would say.

The next question comes from Ines Lefranc from Goldman Sachs.

My first one is just on the manufacturing footprint program. Could you give us any color on expected restructuring charges, targeted savings or payback period?

Not really because we are still finalizing the numbers, but I understand that you want to have at least an idea. So most probably, the new MFP will be a little bit bigger than MFP 10 because that's normal. We have further grown our company. If you grow, you can also do more reflecting. I think from a dynamic perspective, factories, warehouses, customer centers will be very similar. I think from which divisions contribute, it will also be very similar, and we are very confident that we will have a very good payback on this one as well. But too early to give you the detailed numbers. That will be something for the next call.

Okay. Makes sense. And if I could just ask one follow-up on the tariff impact, that mid-single-digit million dollar in Global Tech and Entrance. Is that a one-off for this quarter? Do you expect any tailwinds next quarter too? Yes, any color would be really useful.

I mean if we -- well, if I should sort of elaborate a little bit more on the tariffs. First of all, I would say that we have -- so far, we have received, I would say, a high double-digit million dollar amount in the result in Q3. We have, in reality, then we have a mid double-digit million dollar amount that has been then going to the results. But then most of that money, we have then used for, let's say, writing off PPA initiatives in R&D and so forth. Let's say, we have invested that in the business. So in Q3, out of that, as I mentioned, it was sort of a mid-single-digit million dollar that impacted the result. I mean if you have a high -- as I mentioned, a high, which means that we still have, let's say, many left also for Q3, we have to see a bit, let's say, how much will, in practice then, impact the bottom line. That is not really clear yet.

The next question comes from Aron Ceccarelli from Bank of America.

I have a 2-part question on North America. Your largest peers in the U.S. has been printing now stronger pricing, I knew, at least that's what appears from the numbers for a couple of quarters at least. I was wondering, is because of your deliberate action to potentially gain market share in a weak residential market? Or is something different? And do you expect this gap to persist?

No, I think -- it's not that we try to gain market share with reducing prices or keeping prices lower. First of all, our price is on group level and the price component has been higher than group average for the Americas division. That comes because the Americas division is also more steel related, and steel has seen an important pricing inflation.

I think another explanation is that we are the market leader. We're also the first ones to increase prices when things started with tariffs and also inflation. So our comparison with last year on the pricing component is also morE challenging.

I think if you look over a longer period and our colleagues also report price quarter after quarter. If you look over a longer period over the last 3 years, you will see that price component, most probably is very similar.

The next question comes from Gael de-Bray from Deutsche Bank.

I have 2 questions, please. Firstly, I'd like you -- to hear your thoughts on the new partnership between Apple and LG to develop doorbells and smart door locks. I think you already have many products that can integrate with Apple's ecosystem. So maybe just your views on the risks there would be obviously much appreciated. And perhaps a reminder of your actual exposure to the smart door lock business.

Yes. So this is an initiative in North America. I would say we like the initiatives very much because clearly, Apple has a much bigger marketing budget than we have. And I think it's good that people like Apple start to make more publicity in the market for digital door locks that will help the sales of digital door locks in general. And as you rightly said, we have a very wide range of digital door lock products that are compatible with the Apple ecosystem and with the Amazon and Google ecosystem and with all the new standards that you have in the U.S.

If you see also the positioning of this new product from Apple, it positions rather high in the market. You could say that it's a little bit a competitor of what we used to have with Yale when we were still the owner of Yale before that divestments when we acquired HHI. Today, with quick steps, we play much more in the middle segment. Yes, we have the ambition to move up to that, you could say, Yale high-end segment, but that is still today, a smaller part of the market. The big volumes are in that value segment.

So I think for us, it's a positive. I think it will create more marketing. It will create more noise in the market around digital door locks, then it will drive more, more business in that sense. When it comes to part of our business. I think the digital door locks are around 10 -- 5% of the Americas resi -- North America resi business. So it's a smaller part of our revenue today, you could say.

Okay. Understood. So still pretty small indeed. And then the second question I have is -- I did not fully understand the rationale for selling the KPI business unit. I mean it has a strong margin. It includes the SaaS business. So why is it that you cannot grow the business further?

Actually, what we divested was a combination of 4 companies, 4 companies that came through acquisitions a long time ago, Active Identity, Identrust, Zero SSL and then Hydrant ID. And I would say Hydrant ID was the biggest part. It's a small business altogether, it's around $50 million, $60 million. But this Hydrant ID, they had this PKI, public key infrastructure certificates. And what they do is they do the life cycle management of those certificates, you could say. It's a very interesting business, fast growing indeed and highly profitable, but with very little synergies with the rest of what we do in HID and with the rest of what we do within the group. We are a small player in that field. We are far #4 or 5. There's a couple of very dominant players.

As you know, we have always the ambition to be a leader in what we do. So if you want to become a leader, we could not do that organically. We had to buy the #1 or the #2. And as these are pure software businesses, multiples are very high in this field. And so paying a very high multiple to become the #1, paying a lot of money for a business that has little or no synergies with the rest of HID and the rest of the group, we thought that there were better ways to allocate capital. And rather than sticking on an interesting asset and over time having the risk that, that would go down and dilute, we thought it was a better idea to sell it now at a good price at a good valuation and give it to somebody else that is clearly a better owner for that business than us in ASSA ABLOY.

And if I may, is there any capital gain you expect to book on the transaction?

Yes. We will come back to that in Q4.

But like Erik said, it's -- like we said, it's a small acquisition. So also from a dilutive perspective, it will not really move the needle on group level.

The next question comes from Alexander Virgo from Evercore ISI.

Could you talk a little bit to the gross margin and the Global Tech margins, I guess, it's 2 questions, but same question on margins. Gross margin is close to 44%. I think that's also something of an all-time high. So just wondering if you can talk a little bit to how we should expect that to evolve over the coming years? And in Global Tech, now, I guess, north of 20.5 ex FX and M&A headwinds and strong incremental margins there. Are we now back to a sort of a new level in Global Tech as well?

If I start with Global Tech, we have always said that we have an ambition for Global Tech to have margins above the 16% to 17% benefit. We should take more about something around that 18%. Yes, this quarter was extremely good quarter. Quarter 3 is always the best quarter for Global Tech. I think you should see this more over a business cycle and definitely over the full year. Today, we are, I think if you look at -- on a year-to-date trend, we are at 18.5% for Global Tech, so more in line with that 18% ambition that we have. For the time being, we believe this above the 17% to 17% to 18% is still the right ambition for us because, yes, we have a couple of very mature and very profitable businesses in Global Tech, like the PACS business in HID and hospitality business in Global Solutions. But we have a lot of smaller businesses that we want to invest in, in R&D in feet-on-the-street that are much lower margin and that we want to bring up volume-wise, size-wise to similar levels as PACS or hospitality. That's for Global Tech.

On the gross margin, of course, if you look back the last 2, 3 years, we have had a very good journey when it comes price to cost, light material versus price increases in the market. We have had quarter-after-quarter strong accretion of that price versus cost, that is one big explanation. We have done the MFP programs, like Erik said also, helping on the gross margin side. And I think we have done a very good job to our operational organization in, let say, using our scale and our growing scale to get also better conditions out of our suppliers.

And then next to that, all the operational efficiencies like VA/VE initiatives that we do in our factories and together with our suppliers, I think it's just a good operational job well done explaining the very nice gross margin improvement. I think that's across all divisions. I think all the dividends, you will see similar pictures.

And perhaps, Alex, also, if we look a little bit more short term, I mean, we expect also then for Q4 to have a tailwind on price versus cost. I mean that's a bit how far we see. And then we have to see how it goes in the first quarter of next year.

That's super helpful. Erik, just to follow up there on that 60 bps in Q3 then should be closer to 100 in Q4?

I said a tailwind. Normally, I would sort of say that I think you're way too high with that. I think it's going to be -- it's going to be positive. And let's see if it reaches the 60 bps.

But it should be another good significant occasion in Q4, Alex, because most probably not on the same level as in Q3 because you see material indexes further going up. You see definitely also energy inflation further going up, logistics inflation and general inflation. But on the other hand, we also continue to increase prices. So we will see how the pricing intention we have plays out in the market. Q4 should be another good [indiscernible] accretion price versus cost.

Before we jump over to the next question, could I just -- I'm being informed we just have one person in the queue now. [Operator Instructions] Operator, you can probably help with that.

Our next question comes from James Moore from Rothschild & Co.

Erik, Nico, I wondered if I could ask a little bit about the forward-looking picture. Maybe you could please talk about specification. I'm sorry if you said it earlier, I got cut off for a moment, and by region and globally and also talk about the momentum into October, if you could, please?

So this is question we normally get is how was the demand over the quarter and then exit rate and rate in October. That's the question now you ask James. I would say Q3 demand has been quite stable over the 3 months and now going into October -- sorry, we see a similar pattern. You should not forget in Q4, yes, in theory, we have one working day more. But what you see is, of course, that in October, which is an important month, you have one working day less, and then in November and in December, you have one working day more, but the working day in December is a working day more than a holiday month, you could say. So it's very similar from a working day perspective this year versus last year.

Spec?

The spec business, we have seen high single-digit growth for our spec business. Was a little bit better in the Americas and in Australia, New Zealand, a bit lower in EMEIA. But EMEIA, it was just a difficult comparison with quarter last year where we had a couple of very big projects that we quoted. If you correct for the -- you could say the outliners also in EMEIA, we had a similar high single-digit pattern. So still very, very positive on the specification momentum, still leave good driver going forward.

Could I just follow up with some color points on that? Like we've seen indicators and permits deteriorate in the last 3 months. And as you point out, rates have gone back up a bit. And so I was quite surprised to see your underlying U.S. and European results. It's just a bit better than many thought. And would you characterize that as the market being better before the pain of rates kick back in or that you have had the initiatives away from those that you talked about in HHI, which you seem to be taking some share in that market. But do you characterize the U.S. nonres or the European resi nonres performance as being a function of any kind of indicators or more just like mix where you've got naturally bigger exposure?

If you talk on the commercial -- on the nonresidential side, as you know, we are late in the construction cycle. But I would say that at least as far as we can look forward, perhaps a year or so looking forward, we don't see any slowdown. You could argue that higher interest rates indeed lead to less projects.

On the other hand, if you look, for instance, in the U.S., if you look at our 2 main verticals, education, schooling. As you know, it's a lot financed to local bonds, and I think local bonds have never been as high as they are today. So I don't think we see any slowdown there. And on the private side, it's money which is deployed in a different way. And like we mentioned at earlier occasions, if you want to be an indication today in U.S., upgrading your access solution is a license to operate with all the security concerns and all the shootings going on.

I think a similar picture on health care, which is our second important vertical in North America. The demographics of population and also the need for health care is not going down on the contrary. So we also don't believe we will see any slowdown there. So we are still very positive on commercial in North America, and I think similar to what I said for Europe.

We have a follow-up question from Aron Ceccarelli from Bank of America.

Sorry, I was on mute. I believe your tone on Europe seems incrementally positive. Perhaps can you give a little bit of a tour by country? What drives this level of confidence increasing?

If we start perhaps in the Nordics and perhaps with Sweden, you know that Sweden was the first ones to reduce interest rates. They were 9 months before ECB. So they are a bit, I would say, the canary in the mine. They indicate a bit what happens in the rest of Europe. And we have seen, like I mentioned at earlier occasions, residential market in Sweden coming back first on the R&R side. And today, we also slowly start to see it back -- coming back on the newbuild side.

A similar story is true for Finland, which are the 2 main markets for us in the Nordics. Commercial activity is high like it is in all the regions in Europe, but it's even further boosted by this NIS2 regulation where, like I mentioned, Nordics is one of the drivers in applying physical hardware around NIS2, and we have a lot of click sales and so on.

If you go to Central Europe, a similar story, needs to further boost our commercial growth in the DACH region. As you know, in Germany, we are -- or you could call it a niche player. We are not very small on the residential side. We are strong on the commercial side, definitely on the high end of the commercial side. So we profited that also a bit that we are in the best markets, you could say, in the DACH region, in Germany in particular. And we see there a very good high single-digit growth numbers, again, also boosted by NIS2.

Is Europe good on the residential and commercial side in our main markets like Poland? If you go to South Europe, I would say a bit more mixed picture. Spain, Italy have been maneuvering very good through the lower years last year and so on. And we continue to see good developments there where France has been much tougher. Definitely also last year in France, we have a little bit of advantage that we have now an easier comp. Then we will see how of all the unrest that we've seen in recent weeks in France plays out because France, together with U.K., are 2 important residential markets for us.

And the U.K. and Ireland, I would say, U.K. and Ireland has been flat since Brexit. And we have -- we have been hoping that U.K., Ireland would recover. It has not really happened so far. We see now at least some early signs that there might be some recovery definitely on the commercial side in U.K. Hopefully, those early signs gets confirmed now in the coming quarters.

And then we have the emerging part, like I mentioned, Africa, Middle East and India. Perhaps surprisingly, but we see still good development in the Middle East. We see very good development in Africa and India. We were late to enter India. We only entered India in 2018 when I started in this position, but we have seen since then, good double-digit growth in India, starting from a smaller level. And we are confident that, that growth will continue.

We have another follow-up question from Andre Kukhnin from UBS.

Sorry if there's some repeat. I had some technical issues here. I just wanted to start with NIS2. Is there any way you could help us quantifying the degree of help that this is creating for the market? And also, how should we think about it in terms of -- is this kind of a one-off boost that we need to think about comping at some point in 2027? Or is it more of a multiyear growth driver where the addressable installed base is so substantial that this will take many years to get through?

We also the question and perhaps you had a technical problem, but it's true for EMEIA, accounts for around 0.5% organic growth estimate. And the reason is that today, it's still mainly focusing on the DACH region and the Nordics, Sweden and Finland, where we have seen a lot of business for our click solutions, our electromechanical solutions. As this becomes more widespread in the rest of Europe, we are confident that we will see similar patterns in other markets like France, Italy, Spain, you name it, but they are traditionally always slower or later than the Nordics and perhaps also than that because they are faster in implementing those new European directives into local legislation.

We believe it's more a multiyear activity because even in DACH and in the Nordics, we are far from done. There's still a lot of companies, basically all mid- and midsize and bigger companies have to do something around cybersecurity, not only from a software perspective, but also from a hardware perspective. So even in DACH and in Nordics, we are not done yet. And then, of course, all the other markets still have to come. So we see this as a cherry on the cake, you could say, for EMEIA for several more years to come.

Great. And apologies for a repeat question. If it's another repeat, then just leave it and I'll come back to the transcript. But I wanted to ask about the MFP program that you're planning to launch during Q4. You indicated that it will be sort of similar to prior programs. But obviously, as the group gets bigger, I just wondered if those MFP programs should also be getting bigger or more frequent over time?

The strength of the message is in the repetition. So we also give an answer on this one. We have said that MFP 11 most probably will be a little bit bigger than MFP 10 because as you rightly said, we have grown in the meantime. And so we have also more possibilities and we have continued to do acquisitions. So we have more factories, warehouse sales offices that we can consolidate. But what we said from a from a mix and from a concept perspective, there will be -- it will be very similar to the previous 10 MFP programs with all the different divisions contributing. And we're confidently also a good payback for this MFP 11 program. But too early to give the exact numbers. That will come in our next call.

Ladies and gentlemen, that was the last question. I would now like to turn the conference back over to Björn Tibell for any closing remarks.

Thank you very much. Yes. Thanks, everyone, for your participation. If there are any follow-up questions, feel welcome to reach out to us at Investor Relations. That means we don't have much more to say. We look forward to speaking and meeting with many of you in the coming days and weeks, and we wish all of you also a safe and secure end of the year. Yes, thank you for your participation again, and have a good day.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, the conference is now over. Thank you for choosing Chorus Call, and thank you for participating in the conference. You may now disconnect your lines. Goodbye.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the presentation of ASSA ABLOY's Q2 report in 2026. My name is Bjorn Tibell. I'm heading Investor Relations. And joining me here in the studio are ASSA ABLOY's CEO, Nico Delvaux; and our CFO, Erik Pieder. We have set aside about 1 hour for this call, and we will now start with a summary of the results before we open up for your questions. So with that, I'd like to hand over to you, Nico.

Thanks, Bjorn, and also good morning from my side. Q2 results for us. We can report strong numbers for Q2 where we have seen an accelerated organic sales growth, an organic growth of 4% with strong sales growth in EMEA, good sales growth in Americas, Global Technologies and Entrance Systems, and a decline in APAC related to market conditions in Greater China. Then also a good growth -- complementary growth through acquisitions of net plus 2% and then a very strong operational execution with a record high EBIT and a record high EBIT margin of 17%, with an excellent operating leverage of 51%. Also, good balance sheet management with a very strong cash flow improvement, cash flow 16% up and a cash conversion of 106% in the quarter.

And then we continue our transition from mechanical to electromechanical. Our electromechanical products had an organic sales growth of 8% in the regional divisions. And then we completed 5 acquisitions in the quarter. So if you look into the numbers, sales of almost SEK 39.5 billion, 3% up, as I mentioned, 4% organic growth, 2% net growth through acquisitions and then a minus 3% negative currency effect. A very strong record EBITDA margin of 18.1%, 90 bps up. The EBIT margin of 17%. We had some onetime items in the quarter. Erik will come back on the details. If you correct for that, the EBIT margin was 16.5%, so still a record for Q2. And then the EBIT at SEK 6.7 billion, 9% up and EPS at SEK 3.98, 12% up, also a record. If you look a little bit into the different regions, starting with North America, plus 4% for us where market conditions have remained very similar to previous quarters where everyone is not residential, if we talk about Opening Solutions, America has been strong market conditions.

And then in residential, we see continued more challenging conditions, especially on newbuild side where the newbuild market continues to show a negative trend where the R&R side is perhaps flat, perhaps slightly up. Also, the logistic vertical is important in North America for Entrance Systems. There, we have seen also a more flat development of the market. If we go to LatAm, good market conditions, I would say, despite some challenging political situations in some of the markets plus 2% for us where we have seen for the Opening Solutions, Americas division, positive growth in all the different countries in LatAm.

Again, I go to Europe, a strong plus 4% for us. We have seen very similar market conditions as in previous quarters and very similar, I would say, to North America. I think that is nonresidential, very strong. And then residential also in Europe still more challenging. Perhaps a little bit better than in North America, but definitely on the renewable side, also still no improvement, but perhaps a little bit better on the R&R side. And also Europe, the logistics vertical, very important for Entrance Systems, where we have continued to see a negative market development.

We then go to Africa, minus 12%, you see Africa is a very small part of our business. It's all project related, and it's timing on those projects for HID, so nothing significant. If we go down to Oceania, a strong plus 5%, where we have seen very strong development in our core markets as well in Australia as in New Zealand. And then in Asia, minus 2%, I think we should make a distinction between Greater China and South Korea on one side and all the rest. All the rest has shown very good result with good market conditions and also strong positive development for us. Whereas on the negative side, South Korea has been more challenging to give you an idea on the residential side. Housing completion in main South Korea was down 50% compared to a year ago. It's a very tough market conditions. And then Greater China continues to be also very challenging with the market double digits down and also our results strongly double digits down. Some highlights from around the world. Very excited about our new product lines of backlogs for the North America market under the Weiser brand for Canada and the Kwikset brand for the U.S., very nice comprehensive full new range of padlocks. And then a new partnership for Yale that partnership with Lodgify to integrate smart locks across Europe with this leading vacation rental platform.

And then as a soccer fan, also a very nice application. We provided access solutions for several stages for the world soccer tournament in the U.S. and in Canada. If we look at the numbers, so you see an acceleration of our organic growth and then, like I said, complemented with good growth acquisitions. Our sales 49% up if you compare with 2021. Our operating margin now on a 12-month moving trend in the middle of the band, which we aim for and moving further up in that bandwidth. So at 16.5% 12-month moving trend EBITDA at 17.6% on a very high level. So better top line and better margin, therefore, also acceleration of our operating income to a record level and 76% up compared to '21. In the acquisitions, we remain very active on the acquisition side with 5 acquisitions completed in the quarter, 8 acquisitions year-to-date, they represent an annualized sales of around SEK 2.5 billion. We also completed our 400th acquisition in Q2. That was the acquisition of Rollerdoor, a sectional door manufacturer in Portugal. Strengthening our position in South Europe for sectional doors. They had a sales of around SEK 640 million last year.

And then another highlight of an acquisition, Sentinel Dock &Door, very excited about this acquisition. It's a commercial dock and door service company based in Canada, strengthening our direct channel presence, including our service business in Canada. They had sales of close to SEK 1 billion last year. If we then zoom in into the different divisions, starting with EMEIA, we see a very strong performance of EMEIA with an organic sales of plus -- growth of plus 5% with very strong sales growth in Central Europe and in the Middle East, India and Africa, a strong sales growth in the Nordics, small growth in South Europe and a stable development in U.K. and Ireland. And then excellent operating leverage 270 basis points, giving us an EBIT margin of 16.5%. And then you can see the effect of FX and M&A. So overall, we continue to see the positive trend in EMEIA. It's not 3, 4 quarters in a row that we see an acceleration of that organic growth and therefore, also very strong margin improvement. Also America continues their successful journey. They had an organic sales growth of 4%. We have a strong sales growth in North America, Nonresidential segment and in Latin America and then a small sales growth in the North America Residential segment, I would say, despite very tough market conditions.

Then a good EBIT margin at 18.7% with an excellent operating leverage. And here also you can see then the FX and M&A effects. We then go to Opening Solutions APAC. An organic sales decline of 4% with good sales growth in the Pacific Northeast subdivision and a significant sales decline in Greater China, Southeast Asia subdivision. Like I mentioned earlier, that's because of Greater China where we have seen high double-digit negative growth while on the other hand, in Southeast Asia, we have seen very good double-digit positive growth. An EBIT margin of 9.2%, we have a stable operating leverage despite the negative organic sales growth, so good cost management. And also here, we have done the effects of FX and M&A. If we then go to the global division, starting with Global Tech and organic sales growth of plus 4% with a strong sales growth in Global Solutions and a good sales growth in HID and a strong EBIT margin of 19.7% with excellent operating leverage here, more important dilution of FX, 60 bps. That's the dollar SEK related and then the 20 bps on M&A.

And then last but not least, Entrance Systems, with, I would say, a very good organic sales growth of 4% despite also tough market conditions here on the logistics vertical. We had a strong sales growth in perimeter security and in pedestrian, a good sales growth in industrial, a small sales growth in doors and automation and then also good sales growth in service. And also a good EBIT margin of 16.7% also in this division, excellent operating leverage, 60 bps up and then dilution from FX and M&A, both 20 bps. And with that, I think I give the word to Erik, our CFO, for some more details on the financial numbers.

Thank you, Nico. And a very good morning from my side as well. As mentioned before, the sales in the quarter were up with 3% of which organic was 4%, the net from acquisitions was 2% and then we have a negative currency effect of 3%, but it's much more, as you remember from the Q1 where it was minus 10%. Now if we look into Q3, we estimate today that it's going to be flat. However, it's going to be a slight negative dilutive impact on the margin.

EBIT at almost SEK 6.7 billion. It's up with 9%. EBIT is at 17%, 80 basis points up. However, already Nico mentioned that we have a few onetime items. If you would exclude from this, it would be 6.5%. And let's say, in order of magnitude, the 3 ones that we have: One is earn-out reversals, two is the divestment gain within Global Tech. And then we have a little bit of tariff refunds as well. Income from before tax, net income and EPS are all up with 12%. As mentioned before, we had a very strong cash flow at SEK 6.3 billion. It's up 6% versus the same period last year. Return on capital employed improved with 40 basis points and operational value added increased with 5% and is now for the first time above SEK 11 billion. If we then go to the bridge, if you look on the organic part, if you look on the sales there, roughly 2% of the 4% is price, and consequentially then about 2% is the volume.

The organic flow-through is strong at 51%. However, as mentioned before, the onetime items, if we would exclude the onetime items from the organic column, it would land at 38%. Currency due to the weakening -- the weaker, let's say, U.S. dollar, it was minus 3% on the top line, and it has a 30 basis points negative impact on bottom line. Acquisitions there, it was 2% on top line. On the bottom line there, of course, we have the divestment gain. The divestment gain was roughly SEK 50 million. If you exclude from that I look on the rest then on the acquisition, you can see that obviously, the margin is a bit lower, and that is affected then by the integration costs that we have had for the recent acquisitions. Go to the cost breakdown on direct material, it's 30 basis points better than what it was last year. We have a slight positive mix, but that is offset by that we had a reclassification of a cost item, which sort of impacted negatively.

So if you take, let's say, the true direct material price versus cost, that impact is 40 basis points for the quarter. Conversion cost remains flat versus last year. So the inflationary pressures has been taken off by sort of efficiency improvements. As an example, I mean, we have MFP savings in the quarter of about SEK 130 million. SG&A is 70 basis points better than the same period last year. And there you can see that our good cost control has sort of managed to keep -- to make that a positive number. Operating cash flow, as mentioned before, very strong in the quarter. Cash conversion is at 106%. This comes from that we have, I mean, a strong earning as well as we have been able to continue to do a very good work when it comes to working capital management. Then go to the gearing, net debt to equity at 61%. Net debt to EBITDA is at 2.2%. If you remember, Q1, it was 2.1%. But then during the quarter, despite that we have had a very strong operating cash flow, we have, of course, paid half of the dividend as well as we have been busy on the acquisition front as well.

If you compare our net debt a year ago versus today, we are down with about SEK 2.5 billion. So we can sort of continue to see that our good cash generation also makes it feasible for us to continue our acquisition strategy also going forward. Last but not least, I already mentioned the number before. Earnings per share was up with 12%. And with that, I hand it back to Nico for some concluding remarks.

Thanks, Erik. So a good Q2 for ASSA ABLOY, with accelerated sales, I would say, despite challenging market conditions, a good organic sales development of plus 4%, complemented with growth acquisitions of net 2%. A very strong operational execution with a strong record EBIT and a strong record EBIT margin with excellent operating leverage of 51%, good working capital management with very strong cash flow improvement, 16% up and a cash conversion of 106%.

And then okay, it's clear that we continue to operate in uncertain and swiftly changing operating environment, but we have proven in the past that our decentralized and empowered organization is ready to address those changing market conditions and that would also be the case going forward, whatever market conditions come to us, we are confident that we will be able to continue to deliver good results. And with that, I give back the word to Bjorn for Q&A.

Thank you, Nico. Yes, it means it's time to open up for your questions. [Operator Instructions]

[Operator Instructions] And today's first question comes from Daniela Costa from Goldman Sachs.

It's [indiscernible] speaking for Daniela Costa. I just wanted to ask a quick question on whether you could give us some color on the 3Q start so far. And also on any commentary on pricing in 2H that you expect?

So yes, Q2, as we mentioned, Q2 started on a similar level as Q1 for the first couple of weeks. But then we have seen a drop towards the end of April and also May was weaker. And then we had a very strong June. Okay, June had 1.5 working days more. But even if we correct for the working days, June was much stronger than the first 2 months. And then now July, it's a little bit difficult to say where July is because July and August are holiday months and Q3 is normally made in September, not in July and August. But you could say that July started on a similar level as June.

And then pricing, we have said that -- at the beginning, we said that we should calculate 1.5% or so for the year. We had then revised that upwards in a previous call to something around 2%, perhaps slightly north of 2%. So I think that is still a good number for the full year. You have seen what we announced as price increases for Q1 and Q2. So if it's a strong 2% for the full year, that means that also in the second half, you should expect something around that 2%.

And the next question comes from Vivek Midha from Citi.

Thank you very much, everyone. I hope you can hear me well. My main question is around entrance zooming in on the industrial business that was slower in the first quarter. You've now said that's shown good organic growth. I was wondering if you might be able to give us more color on how you saw that developing through the quarter by region and so on.

Yes. So the Industrial segment is a segment that is most exposed to the logistics vertical. Like I mentioned, logistics vertical, I think market conditions are still not good in North America market conditions, I think, are flattish, you could say. Whereas if you look in Europe and you look at the bigger projects, I think the market is still down.

So we're not really helped by stronger market conditions. It was more that we had still some projects in the pipeline that we then invoiced in the quarter.

And then we also had a better service performance in the quarter. And then also the smaller projects and the nondirectly big warehouse vertical-related projects were better in the quarter. That explains the growth for the industrial segment.

And my follow-up is, unless I missed it, I don't believe you commented on how your specification activity developed through the quarter. I was wondering if you could give us some color around that.

Yes. So the specification value was up high single digits on group level. I would say, similar in the different geographical divisions. If you take year-to-date in all 3 geographical divisions, our spec activity is up either high single digit or low double digit for the respective divisions.

And the next question comes from Andre Kukhnin from UBS.

Can I just start with a follow-up on pricing. You implied around plus 2% for the second half. But did you implement price increases during Q2?

Yes. Yes, we did. As one basic materials at least at the beginning of Q2, continue to go up. We have, of course, still all the tariffs we have also important logistics inflation. So we did that. I mean what you should not forget is, of course, is that you should compare with last year. And in Q2, we started to see some compensation for the tariffs and that came in full effect into Q3 last year. So Q3 from that aspect is, say, the biggest or the most challenging comparison with last year.

Right. That Enhance the plus 2%. Great. And can I just ask on the Americas or U.S. residential market, what are the trends you're seeing there? And especially, you mentioned, I think, before that there were some signs of maybe life emerging in the R&R where people started to take a view that they won't leave any time soon with the current rates and hence, starting to maybe go ahead with a bit more renovation activity on existing homes. Is that something that is kind of picking up as a trend? Or is that just a blip?

So yes, we had a small low single-digit positive growth of our residential business in North America in Q2. I think we should -- if you first look at new build, new build for single houses, we don't see an improvement. As a matter of fact, we see the market further down. We don't expect the market to come back this year. Hopefully, that will be something for next year. You see some more activity on the multifamily side, but the multifamilies is obviously a much smaller part of the business and single houses.

On the R&R side, if you can believe economists that forecast the future, they believe that R&R could grow a couple of percent in the second half of the year. If that's true, that would, of course, be good news for us because we are more exposed to R&R than we are to new build. It's Clear that interest rates stay very high.

They are at that 6.5% level. So we will not be helped by interest rates. It has more to come from people that start to do refurbishments on their house because at the moment, if your house ages, it's time to refurbish and perhaps people start to think, let's refurbish the house. If I don't have to consolidate in a year and 2 years, I will have a better resale value for my house.

But we don't really see a significant improvement of the market. It's perhaps a little bit different in Europe where we believe the R&R side is a little bit in better shape than in the U.S.

And the next question comes from Aron Ceccarelli from Bank of America.

The first one is on organic growth. It was nice to see volumes coming back, 2% up in the quarter. Perhaps can you talk a little bit in terms of confidence, what confidence do you have for volumes to continue to grow perhaps in the second half?

Yes, we should perhaps comment on the different divisions. If you take the geographical divisions, like I mentioned earlier, we see still very good momentum on the nonresidential side, commercial side, where we have had a higher single-digit growth in our different divisions and we -- we are confident that, that continues.

We have our spec indicator. There was also some external indicators that we believe that should continue. And then like I said, on the residential side, although market conditions remain challenging in the U.S. and remain to a certain extent, also challenging in Europe. The comparison, of course, becomes easier. And at least on the R&R side in Europe, we are a bit more optimistic.

I think also we should see further acceleration of the organic growth on the global tech side, where in Q2, we still have seen like in Q1 that noncritical CapEx related industrial investments are a little bit being delayed. People have this wait-and-see attitude. But of course, you build up a pipeline in a certain moment that, that pipeline starts to roll, and we are confident that, that will happen in the second half of the year.

We also had a bit lower hospitality business in Q2, which is just a timing issue. And there also we should see an acceleration now in the second half of the year.

Then, I mean, growth will not come from Greater China that will continue to be challenging in the second half of the year. And I already commented on the challenging market conditions in the warehouse vertical.

And my follow-up would be on the 50 basis points on EBIT one-off. Could you split out the impact from tariffs refund?

So like Erik mentioned, we had 3 items and the biggest item was an earn-out -- reversal, sorry. The second biggest item was a capital gain on a small divestments we did in Global Tech. And the tariffs also the smallest one of the three. It was in the single-digit million-dollar range.

And the next question comes from Alexander Virgo from Evercore ISI.

I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the EMEIA margins. 16.5% is a great number to see after such a long time. So you're obviously showing real benefits from MFP. Operating margins were, what, close to 70%. Again, really encouraging to see. So I wondered if you could just talk a little bit about structurally where we are here? Is there something now we can think about as sustainable? And then as the market recovers, actually recovers maybe at some point, then those margins can move higher still?

And then as a follow-up, I wondered if you could just -- if I could just check where those gains fell divisionally and making sure we're not seeing anything in those margins in EMEIA in particular that might have been supported by the earn-out or the divestment.

Yes. So it's correct that EMEIA was -- it was mainly in Global Tech and in EMEIA that we have had the onetime item effects. So if you correct for the onetime items effect in EMEIA, our EBIT margin was...

15% flat.

15 flat, and we had a volume leverage on the on the 5% organic growth of 38%. So I think underlying still a very strong performance and a very strong improvement compared to the same quarter a year ago. But we have always said is that EMEIA over time should come to that 16% EBIT level. We've said that for that 2 things had to happen. We had to have a stronger SEK because they had a lot of dilution from the SEK over recent years. Obviously, that problem is solved because the SEK became stronger since 9 months or so.

And then we have said they need some kind of organic volume growth to get that volume leverage efficiency. You've seen now since 3 quarters or so that EMEIA has accelerated and continues to accelerate that organic volume growth. That was again, the case in this quarter.

And then you see that you get very good volume leverage and therefore, very good margin accretion. We are confident that, that will continue in the coming quarters and that they will continue confidently the EBIT margin trajectory upwards.

And the next question comes from Gael de-Bray from Deutsche Bank.

Yes. The first question I have is and sorry to belabor the point, but just a clarification on the one-offs, once again. So you said that it should be around SEK 100 million for the EMEIA division for the reversal of the earn-out provision.

And then I heard SEK 50 million for the divestment gain within Global Tech, which leaves about SEK 50 million for the tariff refunds, right? But then you talked about a single-digit number there. So I'm just trying to reconcile all these numbers. So that's the first question.

In total, it's around SEK 200 million, the one-offs. And we also had some -- earn-out reversal in Global Tech. So that's what you're missing in your calculation.

Perhaps if I go through, I mean, Gael, you're absolutely right when it comes to the SEK 100 million in EMEIA. So you go from, as I said before, 16.5% in EBIT down to 15% go from an organic leverage from above 50% down to 38%. The other one where you will have an impact is in Global Tech, and you have sort of 2 impacts. One is the divestment gain of -- I mean, first, start with the numbers. If you look on their EBIT is, if you look on -- without anything, the margin is 17.9%, 18% flat.

And then you already know the SEK 50 million, sorry, that goes into the divestment gain. But then you have also earn-out reversals within Global Tech. So there, if you look sort of their operating flow-through ends up at 32%.

So which means that you have, okay, Nico is always rounding a bit. if you want to have the true number, it's actually SEK 70 million that you should put in there. So if you add this all together, you are about SEK 220 million, that was sort of those effects. And then as mentioned before, the tariffs is marginal when it comes to this.

Okay. Understood. And what are the 2 businesses related to the earn-out reversals.

The companies you mean?

Yes.

One was in EMEIA in U.K. And the other one was in Global Solutions in Netherlands.

Okay. All right. I'll try to find out. And then the second question I have is around underlying margin performance. Obviously, the underlying execution was very strong again, but with different drivers this time maybe compared to Q1, it was clearly less about direct materials and rather more about SG&A efficiency. So is it -- is it the beginning of a new, let's say, margin sort of trend from here? And especially do you still expect the price cost to be positive in coming quarters?

So I would say that -- I mean like Erik mentioned, we had net 40 bps price/cost gain. So I think it's still significant. It's just 10 basis points less than in Q1. And we are confident that we will continue to have a good price/cost gain also in Q3, then we will see Q4 and Q1 next year, our material prices evolve and what we do with pricing. But we should continue to get help from price versus cost. We should not forget that the 2% price, of course, has a positive effect on all the lines in the income statement.

But it's definitely also true that if you take the residential segment in North America, as an example, that we have further adjust our cost structure to the lower top line reality and all these day-to-day cost efficiency measures, our lean initiatives in our operations, I think also good negotiation with suppliers.

And then like Erik mentioned, our MFP programs that continue to kick in. All that together gives us the good efficiency gains that you have been able to see on the other lines.

And the next question comes from Delphine Brault ODDO BHF.

Yes. You mentioned some pressure in Europe in Global Tech, on project related businesses. Can you be a bit more specific and provide some color on how you see this segment evolving for the remainder of the year. So the project-related business segment?

I think you should make a distinction between projects that are really business-critical customers have to do the project or they're out of business or they don't have a solution. And then you have other projects where -- they buy our products to get efficiency gains or to get improvements in the way they're under processes. And it's that second part of kind of projects that are not really very urgent and very business-critical, where we see that perhaps people sometimes visited and say, "Let's wait a quarter, let's see our things move or how our results are before we take that decision.

And there, we have seen a buildup of projects in the pipeline where we are waiting for people to take this decision. But ultimately, people will have to take that decision, of course. And we are confident -- and we have seen that at the end of Q2 that those projects start to move again, and we are confident that, that will not continue in the second half of the year. We've seen that also a little bit in Entrance Systems. We have seen that mainly in Global Tech.

And then you highlighted 900 potential targets in your pipeline. What are the main regions and segments you are focusing on?

We target is even close to 1,000 because every time when you do an acquisition, that acquisition then comes also with new ideas to buy other companies. I would say it's very, very wide spread, and we don't really have an opinion in which division or in which geography, if it's a good project, we do it on first come, first base, first half base in the sense that for those acquisitions in the EUR 30 million, 40 million, EUR 50 million new range, we are not limited by our balance sheet. So if we can do 5, we do 5, you can do 10, we do 10. And it's more -- we are talking to many of them. But then, of course, to conclude, you have to agree on both sides.

And when that happens, we will do the acquisitions. There's only one location where we have said that for the time being, we would not do acquisitions is in Greater China, where we want to see more stabilization of the market and also stabilization of our business before we do any acquisitions.

And the next question comes from James Moore from Rothschild & Co Redburn.

Yes, morning, everyone, Nico, Erik, thanks for the time. Could I ask about the speed of E-MAG versus MAG either globally or by region with or without GT? And also, if possible, where you are on the innovation ratio and your thinking there?

And thirdly, where recurring demand speed was in the quarter, software versus service as well, if that's possible.

So like we mentioned, our E-MAG growth in the geographical divisions has been 8% in the quarter. And when I say that we had high single-digit growth on the commercial side, it's, of course, in the first place, thanks to that shift from mechanical to electromechanical and digital. And we continue to see that trend moving in the geographical divisions and also in Global Tech.

And as our installed base on electromechanical products start -- continues to increase, we also continue to see more recurring revenue opportunities in the first place, again, in the Global Tech division, but also in the geographical divisions.

Our recurring revenue was also up again double digits this quarter. And today, it's more than 6% of total revenue. If you look over the last 3 or 5 years, the recurring revenue part, that solution has been the fastest growing, I would say, product or offering in our portfolio. The third question was recurring revenue?

Innovation ratio.

Innovation ratio...

Yes, if you see today, products that we developed over the last 3 years, how much do they contribute to revenue? That is one of the KPIs we follow. That's around 25%. So 1 out of 4 dollars we make euros we make comes from a product that was developed over the last 3 years. So quite happy with that. We obviously want to further improve that. We have invested a lot, as you know, on R&D.

And I would say not only on the electromechanical side and the whole move to mobile credentials. We have also reinforced our activities on the mechanical side, also on the more value segment on the mechanical side.

If we take residential North America is a good example. I think if you take the last 6 or 9 months, in HHI, we developed -- or we launched more products than HHI launched over the last 3 years before we bought them. So that's a very good clear example of acceleration of R&D activities.

I think we wrote also in the comments since I started back in 2018, we launched more than 400 -- 4,000 sorry, new products of product families. And we also filed for more than 2,000 patents. I think that shows a little bit our R&D strength. And we see R&D really as a way for us to differentiate us in the market.

I have been informed that it's just one left in the queue. So if you have any more follow-up questions, follow the instruction of our operator, and we'll probably have time for them.

[Operator Instructions] And the next question comes from Philip Buller from JPMorgan.

There's 2 for me, please. Firstly, just on the price increases you've been putting through. Have there been any signs of prebuy anywhere?

And the second question is on Global Tech margin. Obviously, the price cost has been very well managed in Q2. Is there anything to call out in terms of phasing on the cost side or potential headwinds in H2? I'm thinking about memory prices or other inflation topics that you might have exposure to that might require further price increases in H2 in Global Tech, please.

The first question was again on?

Price increases pre-buy.

So it's not that we do all our price increases for the whole group at whatever, the first of April. I mean they're always phased, and it's also not like perhaps prior to core that we would do one price increase per year. And that's it. We have now much more regular price increases, and they are much more sequenced.

So yes, for sure, there is going to be always some prebuy by that when one specific product family, we increase the price increase, we will have some prebuy there. But I think in the bigger picture, it's not really something that moves the needle because we have had so many price increases over time.

And also last year, we had price increases also there, we had prebuy. So I don't think it's something that is significant to talk about.

When it comes to Global Tech. We have always said that we aim for first on organic growth, higher than the group ambition, so more higher single digit. And to that, we want to do that with an EBIT margin within the 17% to 18% bandwidth. And I think we are delivering on that ambition. I think that's the numbers that you should have in mind also going forward.

And the next question comes from Aron Ceccarelli from Bank of America.

It's on cash flow, I see that Americas and Global Tech were the standout in terms of cash flow. Well, I noticed the Entrance systems was a bit weak -- mainly due to working capital. Was it an element of perhaps higher receivables that boosted the organic growth that we saw in Entrance System?

Was the first assumption?

Yes. No. I mean on Entrance Systems, it's also so that we bought a building in Monroe, North Carolina, which has negative impact. So if you would exclude for that, they would also still continue to have a good cash flow. Global Tech in Americas, I mean, they are -- I mean, they have good earnings. They also have good, let's say, working capital management and that sort of is just continuing. So it's nothing strange. As I said, with the exception of Entrance Systems where you have sort of -- that we acquired the building.

Is the building accounted in CapEx or in working capital?

It's CapEx.

And the next question comes from James Moore from Rothschild & Co Redburn.

Nico, I just wanted to dig in to Entrance Systems. and GT a little bit. On Entrance Systems, you obviously have some challenges after the great stay at home post-COVID, logistics market in recent years and growth has slowed. On the industrial side of the business, where do you think we are in the cycle? Do you think we've found a level how do you think that can now move?

And what do you think that can do to the overall entrance system sort of growth rate in the coming couple of years?

And on Global Tech, you mentioned a very strong Global Solutions performance, but a strong performance in HID. Given where we are in technology cycles, do you think that the sort of speed of HID has been hampered in recent times by any internal topics. And do you see that sort of changing going forward? And where do you think you are in the HID kind of multiyear growth cycle?

I start perhaps with Global Tech,HID and Global Solutions. When I was talking about the last -- or the noncritical CapEx investments in Europe that are a bit postponed. That's really why you see that in HID. And I also said that I'm confident that, that will improve in the second half. So I think we should see an improvement of that part in HID. I don't think it's linked to internal issues in HID. As we have divested our passport business, but that was already last year.

I think if you see our main business, they have a stable organization, stable performance. So there's more this CapEx or noncritical CapEx related decisions in Europe that have been postponed.

If you take in Global Solutions, they had strong growth despite a weaker hospitality in the quarter. And like I mentioned, hospitality, weaker quarter. It's just the timing this year with hospitality, we have a better view on projects. So it's just that some of the projects did not fall in Q2 and they will come later. So I think that is also not an issue going forward. It's more a onetime effect that we have seen in Q2.

And then entrance in industrial.

And then Entrance on the industrial side, our logistics vertical is around 15% of Entrance Systems. Industrial segment is around 40% of Entrance systems, and most of the industrial segment is loading [docks] you can calculate that it has a very big exposure to the logistic vertical for the Industrial segment.

Going forward, it's difficult for me to see where we are in the cycle. What I can say is that the market development in North America is flat. We don't believe it's going to get worse. When it's going to get better, we don't really know.

What is affected in Europe is that if you look at the bigger projects of, say, the Amazon and the type of Walmart or the bigger companies doing those big logistic projects in Europe, that market is still single digit down today.

So I don't think it's going to get worse. But when are we going to see improvement? We almost stand that we don't know.

I think there are no more questions left, which means that it's time for us to round up this conference. If there are any follow-up questions later on, please feel welcome to reach out to us at Investor Relations.

And with that, I guess it only remains for the 3 of us to wish you a wonderful day and a wonderful summer, and we look forward to speaking to you again after the break. Thank you.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the presentation of ASSA ABLOY's first interim report in 2026. My name is Björn Tibell, I'm heading Investor Relations. And joining me here in the studio are ASSA ABLOY's CEO, Nico Delvaux; and our CFO Erik Pieder. We'll start this conference now with a short summary of the report, and then we will open up for your questions as usual. And we have set aside about 1 hour for these event.

So with that, I'd like to hand over to you, Nico.

Thanks, Björn. Also good morning from my side. We can report a good start of the year with a continued strong execution in the quarter. We had a good organic sales development of plus 2%. The good sales growth in Americas, Global Technologies and EMEIA, but a stable sales in Entrance Systems and APAC. Then net organic sales complemented with growth through acquisitions of net 2%. And then a strong execution with a strong EBIT margin improvement, 40 basis points better than last year, and EBITDA at 15.3% with an excellent operating leverage of 51%.

And then again, cash flow also highlights this quarter, a very strong cash flow, 30% up compared to last year. Electromechanical organic sales continues to outgrow the rest of the business. We had a 6% organic growth for electromechanical products in the regional divisions. And then we complement the 3 acquisitions -- or we completed 3 acquisitions in the quarter.

So if we look in numbers, sales of almost SEK 36 billion, 2% organic growth, 2% net acquired growth, but then hit in an important way by FX, minus 10%. So top line, minus 6% in total. I'm very happy with the EBITDA margin evolution, 50 basis points better than last year at a strong 16.4%. And we have the EBIT margin, like I mentioned, at 15.3%, 40 basis points better than last year. And EBIT in absolute value close to SEK 5.5 billion.

If we look a little bit in the market conditions. And perhaps I'll start to comment for the opening solutions geographical divisions in the 3 main markets. I would say there is no difference compared to previous quarters as well in North America, as in Europe, as in Oceania, we continue to see a very good strong momentum on the nonresidential side, on the commercial side, and we continue to see a more challenging situation on the residential market.

If I comment for those 3 markets for the other divisions. For Global Tech, mobility is important, and we still continue to see very good mobility in all 3 regions. So it's good market conditions for Global Tech. The deviation is perhaps in Entrance Systems, where we see in North America, Europe and Oceania, good momentum for everything that is retail related. We see good momentum for our perimeter security business in North America. But we see more challenging market conditions for the residential garage doors. They are linked to residential market conditions. And then we have seen also a slower recovery of the logistics vertical in North America than anticipated.

And we don't see that recovery yet in Europe. As a matter of fact, we see the logistics verticals further going down in Europe. We've seen in Europe also a little bit slowness, I would say, on, let's call it, industrial CapEx-related decisions for project business, mainly in Entrance Systems, also a bit in HID. So that gives us then the plus 5% organic growth for North America, the flat development in Europe and the plus 3% in Oceania.

Very good market dynamics in LatAm, where we have seen a very good growth in all our markets, a plus 2% organic growth. Africa is a very small part of our total business, minus 8%. That's mainly related to a difficult comparison with projects that we took last year for HID and Global Solutions.

And then the plus 2% in Asia, a very mixed picture between Greater China, where the market continues to be double-digit down. And then the rest of Asia, where we see good momentum, and where we also ourselves see a very good high single and double-digit organic growth.

If we then go to the highlights for the quarter. Some project wins. HID was able to secure a solution offering mobile first access via Apple and Google Wallet, with kind of hybrid support for physical credentials for Buró Property, a big important customer for us in LatAm.

Kwikset continues to launch new products on the digital side, the Kwikset Aura Reach Smart Door Lock, a connected deadbolt enabling hands-free intelligent home access with Bluetooth and Matter connectivity. So another, I would say, product launch in that field. Very happy with that.

And then on DoorBird introducing the world's first IP video intercom system with integrated 5G, enabling flexible and cable free access to residential and commercial buildings. Very excited about that new product launch as well.

When I look a little bit at the sales growth, 2% organic, 2% acquisition, a bit lower than the previous 4 quarters, but you see that our 12-month growth trend continues. Operating margin at a good level, but hit because of the currency on the top line. And then -- sorry, operating margin -- sorry, at a good 16.3% and then operating income on a good level, but hit by the currency on the top line. Nevertheless, [ 73% ] up compared to 2021.

We continue to be very active on the acquisition side with 3 acquisitions completed in the quarter. They represent an annualized sales of around SEK 550 million. And now in the beginning of April, we announced another acquisition, that's our 400th acquisition since we were born 32 years ago. Very happy also about that acquisition. It's a residential garage door company in Portugal serving South of Europe, so complementing also our residential offering in Europe.

If we zoom in on one of the acquisitions of Q1, Sennco is a U.S. provider of asset protection technology and solutions for retail security. So really complementing our InVue offering in that vertical. A very nice complement to an exciting vertical. They had a sales of around SEK 330 million last year.

If we then go into the different divisions, starting with EMEIA, a very good start of the year for EMEIA with an organic sales growth of 3%. Strong sales growth in Central Europe, the Nordics and the Middle East, India, Africa region, but in a sales decline in U.K., Ireland and in South Europe. Also a very good improvement of the margin, 14.8%, 100 basis points better than last year. You see that, that organic volume growth continues to boost the bottom line. Strong operating leverage of 40 basis points and then also helped by FX, the only division actually did that this bottom line held by FX, 80 basis points, M&A dilutive 20 basis points.

Also Americas, a very good start of the year with an organic sales of plus 4%, with strong sales growth in North America, nonresidential segment and in Latin America, and then a sales decline in North America Residential segment. Also here, a very good EBIT margin improvement at 17.9%, 80 basis points better than last year. We've also here excellent operating leverage and hit by currency and acquisition, 2 times, 30 basis points.

APAC, a flat organic sales development with good sales growth in Pacific, Northeast Asia and sales decline in Greater China and Southeast Asia, where we see a big difference between Greater China, double-digit down; and Southeast Asia, double-digit up. Nevertheless, despite a flat organic sales development also here, nice EBIT margin improvement, 100 basis points better than last year at 5.1%. Also here, excellent operating leverage and then hit by currency, 30 basis points.

Global Technologies, an organic sales growth of plus 4%, with strong sales growth in Global Solutions and a good sales growth in HID and a strong EBIT margin for Q1 at 15.3%. We've also here, excellent operating leverage hit in a very important way by FX, 100 basis points dilution, and helped by M&A, 40 basis points. That's mainly the divestment of Citizen ID business last year.

And then last but not least, Entrance Systems, a flat organic sales development, with strong sales growth in Perimeter Security and in pedestrian, but a sales decline in Doors & Automation and in the industrial segment. And a good sales growth in service. Despite a flat top line development and therefore negative volume, we managed to support a very good EBIT margin at 16.1% with a stable operating leverage. And then FX and M&A dilutive, respectively, 40 basis points and 20 basis points.

And with that, I give the word to Erik for some more details on the financial numbers.

Thank you, Nico, and also a very good morning from my side. You've heard a lot of the numbers before, but sales were, in total, down with minus 6%, with plus 2% in both organic as well as acquired net growth, but were hit in an important way by the currency, minus 10%. Of course, I mean, as you probably are aware of, there is quite a lot of movements in the currency.

So if we look into Q2, right now, we sort of foresee that it's going to be a minus 2% impact for the second quarter. EBIT was -- in value, was 3% down. If you look on EBITDA, up with 50 basis points. EBIT was up with 40 basis points and then a little -- we're a little bit helped by the interest rates. So both income before tax, net income as well as EPS is at a similar level as what we had a year ago.

Cash flow, as mentioned before, was very strong at SEK 3.1 billion, 30% up versus the same period last year. We also saw an improvement in return on capital employed, up with 20 basis points. As we introduced in the last quarter, operational value added, which is EBIT minus the interest cost that we have for our capital employed, there we also were able to improve that with 1% in absolute value.

If you look on the bridge and dissect the organic part, on price was a strong 2%, which means that volumes were flat. You see an excellent flow-through of 52%, where you can see that, okay, there is a bit of a positive mix, but also we have positive tailwind that comes from price cost, MFP savings of about SEK 120 million as well as other operational efficiencies. The currency hits us both on top line as well as on bottom line, 10% on top line and then a dilution of 30 basis points on the bottom line. And then there is a small dilution this quarter of 10 basis points that comes from acquisitions and divestments.

Cost breakdown, direct material, positive with 90 basis points, out of which about 40% -- sorry, 40 basis points comes from mix, which is predominantly mix within the divisions. So let's say, the true impact is 50 basis points from price versus cost. We see, of course, now that raw materials are increasing, but we're mitigating that with price actions. Conversion costs due to the lack of volume was down with 40 basis points. SG&A was flat despite that we continue to do investments in R&D as well as in sales, but we were able to offset that with efficiencies within our administrative expenses.

Operating cash flow, as mentioned before, 30% better than the same period last year. Conversion was about 60 -- cash conversion was about 60%. And if you look on the last 12 months, our cash conversion is at a very high 110%, and we have had an operating cash flow positive of about SEK 23 billion. And that, of course, has an impact on our gearing and our net debt. If you look at net debt to equity, it's going down. So now it's about 60%, net debt to EBITDA is at 2.1. And if you look on the lower bar, that we have reduced our net debt with more than SEK 6 billion, where if you remember in Q4, it was a lot related to currency. Now the currency has a much smaller impact. And you can see that our cash flow is really paying off in reducing our debt. So we continue to have a very strong balance sheet, so we can continue the acquisitions that we want to do in line with our strategy.

Last but not least, from my side, EPS, as mentioned before, was at the same level as previous year. If you look on dividend, we have since 2021, paid out SEK 27 billion. And if now the AGM approves this afternoon, we're going to pay out another SEK 7 billion.

With that, I hand the word back to Nico for some concluding remarks.

Thanks, Erik. So like I said at the beginning, a continued strong execution in the quarter with a good organic sales development of plus 2% to 2.3% to be exact, and good complementary growth through acquisitions, net 2%. A strong EBIT margin improvement, 40 basis points better than last year, EBIT at 15.3%, with excellent operating leverage of 51% and then a very strong cash flow improvement, 30% better than last year.

Can I repeat what I said in previous quarters, we live in a very uncertain world where things are also changing day by day. And we are still convinced that our decentralized model, where we will empower people in the local markets close to the customer really gives us a competitive advantage. And through that, we are also prepared for whatever operating environment, economic environment comes to us.

Thank you. And with that, I'll give the word back to Björn for Q&A.

Thanks, Nico. Well, that means it's time for us to open up for your questions. I think you know the rule. So please limit yourself to one question each and a follow-up. And then if you can put in your interest again for another question.

Operator, this means that you can kick off the Q&A. Please go ahead.

[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from Ines Lefranc, Goldman Sachs.

I just wanted to ask, could you give us some color on the impact from weather and the impact from the Middle East in the quarter, please?

First part was the weather and the Middle East, okay. So yes, we mentioned after the Q4 call that January started a little bit slower because of bad weather, mainly in the U.S. And for sure, construction customers have lost some days in some parts of the world through that. And that also is an explanation why our year starts a little bit slower. I would say if you look at the total quarter, that is not really something that moves the needle. So I think it's not really an explanation for the results we have.

If we then go to the Middle East, the direct impact is rather small in the quarter because, as a matter of fact, January and February, very good in the Middle East. We only start to see a decline for the Middle East in March. And also Middle East is a relative small part of our business, it's only around 1.5% of total sales. Then of course, there will be and there is some indirect effects of the Middle East situation when we talk about oil and gas prices, about logistics, which drives inflation. And like Erik said, we, of course, will compensate that inflation through further price increases in the market.

The next question comes from the line of Andre Kukhnin.

I just wanted to ask about how the Q2 progressed so far versus that sort of relatively slower start of the year with a few things that you highlighted. And then I've got a follow-up on that on Global Tech, please.

So like I mentioned, in Q4, January started a bit slower because of weather and perhaps other things. But also February continued to be rather slow. So the move -- we were a little bit concerned, but then we had a very good March, giving us the results that you have seen for Q1. We can say now that April has continued on a similar level as March.

That's very helpful. And just on Global Tech, Nico, can you help us with thinking about the sort of the quarterly cadence of growth there. I know in the past, you said the stars were aligned and you printed 9% growth in 2025 Q4. Before that, we had only 3% in Q3, again, high single digit in H1. Is 2027 going to look like that, in your view, from what you can see right now from the order book from customer indications? And we just had one of those kind of slower quarters? Or do we need to kind of rethink Global Tech, 7% growth potential for the year?

Indeed, Q3 was plus 3%. Q4 was plus 9% before stars aligned, and now we have again plus 3%. So it goes a little bit up and down. We have always said that Global Tech is a division that should grow faster than our 5% ambition. We should have ambition for Global Tech to grow higher than single digit. And we're still convinced that, that is the case over a business cycle, but you will continue to see this ups and downs quarter by quarter.

This quarter, all the stars were not aligned. We've also seen a little bit of hesitation, I would say, on the project side. But similar, like I mentioned, for Entrance Systems in Europe where I would say noncritical CapEx, industrial CapEx related decisions are perhaps taking a little bit longer because people want to understand a little bit better what is going to happen with the world around us. But again, I'm confident the long-term drivers continue to be strong for Global Tech. We stay with our statement that this is a division that should grow higher single digits over a business cycle.

The next question comes from the line of George Featherstone, Barclays.

I just want to start with a question on Entrance Systems, if possible. I just wondered -- like it's basically a division that has been lagging, I guess, the group for some time now. And I just wondered, in your assessment, how much of this is just purely cyclical effects and how much of it might be structural and whether or not you're reviewing any parts of the portfolio in terms of whether they are suitable for the long-term ambitions of ASSA ABLOY. That's the first question.

I think perhaps we can take a little bit per segment. If we start with the smaller segment perimeter security, the fencing business, which is for us only a North American business. I would say this is a very strong business that has performed on a very high level for the last years with a very strong positioning in the market.

If you then take pedestrian, perhaps to some of you are surprised, we really like retail business and the retail business like it is going today. Because yes, it's perhaps true that there is less shops being built, but the shops are upgraded to more nicer shops. And so all the manual doors disappear and you get more sliding doors. So that's good business for us. And pedestrian also has performed very good in Q1 and the same -- it continues the same trend that we have seen for several years.

Then we have our residential segment, which is today mainly a North America segment, and that's very linked to residential market conditions, on which I commented quite a lot this quarter and also previous quarters. But we don't see that recovery on the new build side and where the R&R recovery is also rather small.

And then last but not least, the industrial segment. The Industrial segment depends very much on the logistics vertical, where we start to see a small recovery in North America, where people start to invest again in new warehouses, but perhaps a smaller recovery than we had hoped and anticipated for. And that recovery, we don't see yet in Europe, that logistic vertical market is further down in Europe, and that hits our results in Europe. That together with what I mentioned earlier that in Europe, we see a little bit of hesitation on noncritical industrial CapEx-related decisions.

So I think what we are in today with Entrance Systems is really market related. We don't have any ambition to change our portfolio. We believe that the 4 segments are very good segments to be in from an equipment perspective and also from an aftermarket perspective, we have continued to see relative good growth on the service side. It's just a matter of time for the -- in the first place, logistics market in Europe to recover, to see again, stronger organic growth for Entrance Systems.

Okay. And just a follow-up on the pricing comments. You've obviously made reference to some inflation pressure. So can you let us know a little bit about whether you've already taken some proactive action on price? What kind of levels are we talking about? And whether or not you see incremental headwinds from any Section 232 changes as well, please?

You see -- and Erik also commented on the accretion price versus cost. The 90 basis points were 50 basis points is pure price versus cost. So we are doing well in compensating to a price increase, but also through operational efficiencies, negotiation with suppliers to compensate for that higher inflation.

And then it's true that recently, we have seen material prices further going up. You can name whatever, steel, copper, zinc, aluminum, everything is up. On top of that, we have the logistic cost inflation, labor inflation, general inflation. So yes, we continue to increase prices. We have increased price at the end of last year, beginning of this year, and now towards the end of Q1 and now also in April, we have further increased the prices.

So when I mentioned earlier that we could reckon with a price between 1.5% and 2%. For this year, we can inflate that number a little bit depending on how successful we will be with the price realization of the recent price increases that we announced. But I think if we should calculate now with a price increase north of 2% for this year. With that remark now, of course, in Q2 that you should not forget that the price carryover from the tariffs of last year is gone. We had very nice price carryover in Q1 because last year, there was no tariffs yet. And then in Q2, obviously, those price for tariffs started to kick in.

The next question comes from the line of Gael de-Bray, Deutsche Bank.

Can I just follow up on the pricing side and especially regarding the residential segment for you. Obviously, it's been fairly weak for a number of quarters now. But I was wondering if there is any need to adjust the pricing perhaps based on the lower demand or at least the need to absorb internally a bigger part of the inflationary pressures.

So I suppose you talked specifically about residential North America or residential in general?

Yes, North America.

So our North American Residential segment had a small single-digit negative growth in the quarter. But if you then take price into account, of course, volume was negative. So only price will not help us or will not do the trick to further improve margins.

So we also have taken more cost measures in the residential segment. We unfortunately had to let go quite a lot of people. I think we have -- if you take the last 18 months, we, unfortunately, had to let go more than 1,700, close to 1,800 people in that segment to adapt the costs to the new top line reality. But that led, together with the further realization of the synergies in residential that led to continued margin improvement for Q1 now compared to Q1 a year ago.

And yes, we also increased prices on the residential side. Yes, it's true that it's more challenging in a DIY segment and for, let's say, a relatively smaller end customer. But we realize also prices for residential direct and also through the introduction of new products where we have really accelerated the new product development for residential in North America.

The next question comes from the line of Rizk Maidi, Jefferies.

Nico, your commentary around March being stronger than January and February. Do you think there's an element of prebuying because you've been obviously implementing few price hikes? Also seeing lending rates creep up. Does this change your view on the sort of recovery in U.S. resi and the Nordics?

So one on prebuy, no, I don't think it's something that has moved the needle in the sense that we have increased prices also in November, December, January, February, March, April. So it's an ongoing exercise, and we did the same year before. So that is not something that moves the needle.

The second part, interest rates, yes. Yes, I think we see interest rates going up again a little bit in North America. That's obviously not helping a faster recovery on the residential side. Like I mentioned earlier, I think R&R is -- has bottomed out and is growing again or recovering again from a low level at a low speed, but we don't see that recovery on the newbuild side yet. If you look at 12-month moving trend for new single-family houses in the U.S., I think it's 14% down. So the new build recovery will not happen in -- on the shorter term.

Think interest rates are important. Disposable income, of course, for the average American is also important. And then on one side, we have, of course, the inflation and the higher inflation and the higher gasoline prices on that plays on the other side, also perhaps lower taxes. So we'll have to see how that plays out going forward.

And then just price cost, 50 basis points, now the carryover is lower in Q2. How should we think about price cost over the coming quarters, please?

Again, it depends a little bit on how much of the price we will realize now in Q2, but we are confident that we will get good price realization. Therefore, I think you should calculate with another good accretion price versus cost in Q2. Perhaps a bit -- slightly lower than in Q1, but still a good significant occasion. And then Q3, Q4, we will see where material prices go and what we further do with prices.

The next question comes from the line of Aron Ceccarelli, Bank of America.

The first one is on your P&L. Gross margin was up 60 basis points and strongly up, and SG&A was flat. I believe in the past, you mentioned that you're expecting for the full year, SG&A expected or sales to be up year-over-year. Can you maybe help me understand, if you change your view today, what should we expect on SG&A? You think that you can, in fact, offset increase in R&D full efficiency for the rest of the year, please?

I don't remember saying that we expect SG&A to go up. It's real if you look over the last couple of years, most of the accretion has come from price versus cost on the material side because we have continued to invest in sales and in R&D to boost that organic growth.

In this quarter, the SG&A has been neutral, and that is despite the fact that we have continued to invest in R&D and that higher sales cost for the people that we invest on the sales side is in the books. Explanation is on the operational efficiency gains that we realized, especially on the admin side. We are working a lot on lean in -- not only in our operations -- physical operations, but also lean in our offices. And then, of course, we start to see the first results in our finance from the AI activities and other automation activities that we are carrying out on the admin side.

A follow-up would be on Global Technology. Before, you mentioned customer hesitating a bit. Could you help me understand what type of visibility you have in this type of business that -- in terms of backlog, please?

It depends very much our visibility. It depends for the different businesses we have in the group. If you take residential aftermarket in Europe or in the U.S., you would say -- you could say that our visibility is a couple of weeks because we have delivery times over a couple of days. Now of course, if you go to a new project on the commercial side, you have a little bit longer visibility.

The longest visibility we have is for loading docks because there, I mean, if you get an order today, you deliver in 6 to 9 months. HID is a little bit in between. They have a lot of day-to-day business for the aftermarket, I would say, is the major part of HID, but then they have a project business in Identification Technologies and in IMS, where we have obviously a bit longer visibility. And I would say the same is true on Global Solutions where there is a lot of day-to-day aftermarket and then the projects, like for hospitality or for Marine and the other verticals, we have 3 to 6 months, sometimes 9 months visibility.

I can maybe just signal to those of you who are in the queue, we had just had 2 people in the queue. So if you have more questions, there might be a possibility to ask questions.

The next question comes from James Moore, Rothschild.

I wonder if I could, Nico, ask some growth rates on specification globally, regionally and Elmech and software, just understanding how all of that lot growing in the quarter?

So still continued good momentum on the specification side. We had a high single-digit growth of specification in Oceania, Australia, New Zealand. We had double-digit specification growth in EMEIA. We had low single digit in Americas. And before you start to it, something negative in that, that was mainly in education and health care verticals, the 2 main verticals for us, and that was mainly because of a very difficult comparison with a year ago. So as a matter of fact, also in North America, we don't see any slowdown on the specification business for our commercial segment. So that continues to be strong. We continue to see a shift from mechanical to electromechanical on the specification side. And in Europe, we also continue to see a shift to more request for sustainable offerings.

Would it be possible to talk about the speed of Elmech versus mech growth in the quarter at the group level and also, how your software business is developing in here?

So if you take the Elmech growth for the geographical divisions, that grew with 6% in the quarter. If you include Global Tech, if you take the global -- or the total group, we grew Elmech with 7%. And the division is also partly explained by the higher growth of Software as a Service recurring revenue part, which sits for the main part in Global Tech, in HID and in Global Solutions. Today, our recurring revenue part is more than 6% of top line. So it's our fastest growing, you can say, product or solution.

And I wondered if I could just come back on your comments on HHI or U.S. residential. You talked a bit about some new product launches. And I wondered if you could put any kind of numbers to that in terms of innovation ratio or number of products like what you did in the past? And like has that impacted sales in the first quarter? Is that a benefit that's yet to come? And do you see it shifting market share and shifting growth relative to the market?

I think if you look at market share, you should look over a longer period, everybody can say that they grow market share in 1 quarter. But we definitely believe one of the ways to improve our relative position in the market is through new product development. That's why we accelerated new product development as well on the mechanical side, where we also extended our product offering with some new exciting families, but definitely also on the digital offering for Kwikset where we came, I think with 4 or 5 new platforms of digital door locks.

As a matter of fact, I think we launched, over the last 9 months, more products for Kwikset that they launched over the last 3 years before we bought them. So true acceleration of new product development. Same is true on the Baldwin side where we extended our offering in a very nice way and as well for national hardware. So if you look a little bit under the hood, I think we see definitely in those subsegments, on the digital side, for instance, those new product developments helping on boosting the sales, yes.

The next question comes from the line of Andre Kukhnin, UBS.

Can I just kick off the M&A? How much do you have now for the year from the acquisitions that you've announced? And how is the pipeline looking for the rest of the year at the moment, please?

If you look today, it's about 2% that we have already acquired. And we have a healthy pipeline. You heard from Nico before that we already have closed acquisitions in April. So I think it's pretty healthy.

Great. And yes, sorry for another technical, but just on FX, you mentioned 2% for Q2. I just wanted to make sure I've got that right. And what are we calculating for the full year at the current rates? Just making sure I got the right number.

I mean we sort of calculated with 2% for Q2 and it is, I think, 3% then for the full year. But remember, I mean, this is period end as a margin. I mean there is some fluctuation in this, but that was sort of be, as I said, 2% for Q2 and 3% minus then for the full year.

The end of March rates or the current rates?

End of March rate.

End of March. That's great. Can I just follow up on pricing, it's a bit more interesting question. So you mentioned that you're continuing to push price increases, but the U.S. tariffs carryover is kind of done as of end of Q1. But from where I recall last year, the tariff-related price increases were kind of prolonged through kind of -- from obviously, the Liberation Day, it took a while to get that going from beginning of April, and then there were kind of variations in tariffs that were kind of also reflected subsequently. So it sounds a little bit strange to see that tariff was done already in Q1, and there's nothing for Q2 or the rest of the year given how gradual it looks during 2025. So I guess the bottom line question is, you've indicated more than 2% price for 2026. It sounds like we can get quite close to 3 or am I miscalculating something there?

Well, we want to stay to our statement that it's going to be more than 2%. It's true that we will still get some carryover in Q2 from the tariffs. I want to explain that in Q1, we had 0 carryover -- so sorry, we had 0 in Q1 and that therefore, we had full carryover, that in Q2 will be significantly less. But yes, there will be still some carryover in Q2 and even in Q3, yes. You're correct.

The next follow-up is from Rizk Maidi, Jefferies.

Just maybe on the savings, I think MFP, Erik, you said it was SEK 120 million. Can you just talk about what are the other initiatives? I continues to be surprised by how strong the organic drop-through is.

No. But if we first talk about MFP, as you know, I mean, we had SEK 120 million then for Q1. Right now, based on what we have today from MFP, we will be a little bit shy of SEK 120 million, but we are also initiating an MFP 11. So I think we're also going to see projects coming in from that.

The other part, which is, let's say, non-MFP related is what Nico talks about, for instance, when we talk about HHI because there, of course, they do let's say, personnel reductions, then where you don't need to have restructuring money, like if you do in the U.S. and like you do in some places where they have the factories. So those are the other things that are then kicking in and helping us from an operational efficiency.

And you also saw an admin as well where we talked about that. We also see efficiencies then in admin, where -- I mean, Nico talked about, let's say, efficiencies in the processes. Those kind of things also helps, in order then to get a good, I would say, operational efficiency.

But I would add that also, I think our operations teams are doing a very good job and day-to-day operational efficiency improvements to automation, amortization and to good negotiations with our supply chain. I think that's also an important part of the -- that explains the volume leverage together with mix and a lot of other things, of course.

And then secondly, maybe just -- I probably missed this on the call, but how should we think about sort of M&A dilution from the second quarter? Whether there is any seasonality in the businesses you're acquiring?

I mean if you look on Q1, I think you see it more in Q1, where let's say, the larger -- I mean, you see, InVue has a seasonally weaker Q1, and you see that in Global Tech. Also SKIDATA is also weaker in Q1, even though I must say that they have improved their result year-on-year, but it's still negative. So I would say those would be the 2, let's say, larger acquisitions that we have done, which have a seasonal impact.

The next follow-up is from Gael de-Bray, Deutsche Bank.

I wanted to ask about your exposure to Section 232 and specifically, the proportion of your business that has a metal content that is greater than 15%. So that's the first one.

And the second one was on the M&A side. I mean, how does the M&A pipeline look today and whether you're seeing an increase in competition on the transactions?

On the first one -- okay, we are still finalizing the calculation as you understand, it's another complex matter. We believe it will not really move the needle for us. It's most probably will be slightly higher cost. If it's a slightly higher cost, we will, of course, compensate through price increases in the market. But it's not really something that will move the needle.

When it comes to acquisitions, we are very happy with the pipeline we have, like we always say, happy, but not satisfied because we can always do more. But we are confident that there is several more acquisitions coming now in the coming months. And then we have a good sales pipeline of people we are talking to.

When it comes to competition, we don't really see any difference as compared to a year ago. As you know, very often, the acquisitions we do are acquisitions where we have been talking to the other side for a long time. And often, these are one-on-one discussions with this acquisition targets. So no real difference as compared to previous quarters.

[Operator Instructions] The next follow-up question is from Aron Ceccarelli, Bank of America.

I have one on [ resi ] demand in the U.S. I think you said that demand is bottoming out. I was wondering, firstly, if volumes have started to expand again? And secondly, as demand improves, do you see consumer leaning towards mechanical products or more sophisticated Elmech products?

I didn't understand the beginning of the question.

The first one is demand in the U.S. Volume demand rate, right?

For residential?

Volumes have actually started to expand again.

For residential, you mean?

Yes.

No, like we said, we had a smaller single-digit negative organic growth for the residential segment in North America. So that means if you take the positive price out, that we had a negative volume.

And second question, is it the mix between mechanical and Elmech and so forth?

And we see -- like I explained before, we have invested as well new products on the mechanical side as on the digital side. We see a relative better performance on the digital side and on the mechanical side because of the product launches that we have done in that field.

There are no more questions at this time.

Excellent. Well, that means it's time for us to round up this conference. If you have any follow-up questions later on, please feel welcome to reach out to us at Investor Relations as usual. In the meantime, we thank you for your interest and participation, and we'll meet many of you in the coming months. We look forward to that, and have a good day now. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to ASSA ABLOY Sustainability seminar in 2026. My name is Bjorn Tibell, and I'm heading Investor Relations. Before we dig into today's agenda, a word about safety, please ensure that you know where your nearest emergency exit is located in case something unexpected happens where you are located.

Four days ago, we published ASSA ABLOY's annual report for 2025, including our second CSRD report. Today, the objective is to go through our sustainability outcomes in 2025 and also discuss our new sustainability program, which will finish in 2030.

Our first speaker is ASSA ABLOY's CFO, Erik Pieder, and he will give you a high-level overview of our work with sustainability. Erik will then hand over to Charles Robinson, our Head of Sustainability, who will discuss the outcome of our sustainability program to 2025. Allan Cooper, Chief Human Resource Officer, will then discuss our HR-related outcomes in the 2025 program and also talk about the target set for 2030 before Charles Robinson will come back and go through our new program to 2030 in some more detail.

Our new sustainability program to 2030. In that program, we have introduced a new target relating to innovation, which Anders Fosland, our Head of Product Sustainability will go through before we will round up the presentations. In total, we expect these presentations to take around 50 minutes. And after then, we will open up for your questions. You can submit your questions through the chat function that you see at the bottom of the webcast window, and you can start to submit them already now. All speakers who you will see now, they will be ready and available to respond to your questions when the Q&A session starts.

So with that little introduction, I would like to hand over to Erik Pieder to start. Erik, please go ahead.

Thank you, Bjorn, and good morning, good afternoon or good evening, wherever you are in the world, and thanks for taking the time of participating in our seminar. If we look a bit sort of how our approach is to sustainability. We don't want to consider sustainability to be, let's say, outside of our normal operations.

We sort of be integrated because we believe that when we integrate it, we can also unlock both, let's say, sales growth potential such as, I mean, say, related to, let's say, regulations, EPDs, which would then sort of mean that the customers are willing to -- let's say, to pay a premium or to use light products or it should be, let's say, from a cost perspective, where by using less material or using less energy, we would be able to reduce our operational costs. So in reality, if you put these 2 together, we see sustainability as a part of accelerating our profitable growth.

As I started with, I mean, sustainability is integrated in the ASSA ABLOY's strategy. If you look at our strategy house, it is one of the fundamentals that we have in the house where we clearly mark our sustainability. But on top of that, it floats into a number of the areas where we work, okay, within the mission and the vision. Of course, this also helps us with the financial targets.

But also, if you look on strategic objectives, like, for instance, growth through customer relevance. If we are relevant within the sustainability area, we're also relevant for our customer, which will also help us, let's say, as I talked about before in our growth is the same when it goes to, let's say, cost efficiency in everything we do is just another example or evolution through people.

As you saw in the video, we have now successfully completed, I would say, our fourth program, but this goes back way back. So I mean our first program was started in 2007, and now we're up to the fourth program. And today, Charles will also talk about the fifth program that we're now launching. I think a very important part, which we did already 2020 was that we committed ourselves to science-based targets.

And as I'm sure that you're all aware, you know that the science-based target is also related to the Paris agreement, where within the Scope 1 and 2 we should have an emission reduction of 50%. Scope 3 is about minus 28% by 2030. And then we should be net 0 by 2020. It's one thing here, which I mentioned before that it's integrated.

And one thing here is that we consider, let's say, funding through, let's say, when we do a CapEx investment we sort of use the same rule when it is sort of more a sustainability funded CapEx -- sustainability CapEx as we do on the other ones. So once again, the message is that it's integrated and we believe that we get the best traction if we consider it to be a normal practice or normal operation within our companies.

How far have we come so far? If you look by 2025, if you look on the Scope 1 and 2, I think we have delivered according to our promise. So that by sort of so far, we are minus 34%. So we are sort of on our way to reach the 50%. Scope 3 emissions, as you know, that one is a much more broader and also, I would say, a little bit more difficult. But at least you can see sort of by 2025, we're halfway. And as you sort of -- as you will see later on, we have, of course, plans and ideas in how to reach the target then for 2030.

Now I'll briefly mention this, Charles will come back to it. As I mentioned before, we have successfully completed the FORWARD program. And now we're sort of launching the fifth sustainability program. You can see that it's more, I would say, embedded with the science-based targets where you see clearly that we have that as a part of this on the 1, 2 and 3. And that is the way that we want to drive it. On top of that, I would say, in order to reach these goals, we need to increase our ambition level, and that is something that we clearly will show when you see sort of the targets that we have for this program.

Finally, as you've heard me allude to, I don't know, how many times already, sustainability is integrated into strategy, innovation, operations, et cetera. And I think sort of we are setting also the long-term foundation for successful, sustainable growth for the future. One thing that -- and you've heard me say this before, if there is one thing that you should take with you is the slide that is sort of the diagram that you see in front of you. Where it is feasible to increase our sales, but at the same time, lower our admissions.

You can see that in this period, we have increased the sales with 62%, simultaneously then we have been able to achieve a reduction of 34%.

With that, I sort of have done the introduction, and I hand it over to Charles for a bit on the sustainability program 2025. Go ahead, Charles.

Great. Thank you very much, Erik. Hello, everyone. I'm Charles Robinson, VP and Head of Sustainability for the group. As Erik touched on in this section, I'll give you an overview of how we progress against our sustainability program 2025.

So as a reminder, our program was based on a 2019 baseline year across 3 different areas of operations, supply management and people. So taking a little bit of a closer look specifically on our operations. So in broad terms, we had, on average, a 25% reduction target against our 2019 baseline.

When it comes to carbon footprint here for Scope 1 and Scope 2, very much linked with our science-based targets. The majority of our Scope 1 and Scope 2 carbon emissions come from our energy consumption. So our Scope 1 and 2, our carbon footprint is very closely linked with our energy intensity, and I'll come back to that shortly on an update on our science-based target specifically.

We then take a look at our water intensity target, a 25% reduction target. We reduced by a whopping 59% against our baseline. So this is where we carried out infrastructure upgrades and increase the efficiency of our most water-intensive processes. And I'll come back with an example and case study of that shortly.

When it comes to our waste, so both for our hazardous waste, nonhazardous waste, making good progress where we again exceeded our target. For organic solvents, we had an ambitious 50% reduction target, and we realized a 69% improvement against that. So there are 2 key areas where we drove that improvement. One is for our components and parts degreasing and washing processes. We've reduced the solvent component as part of that decreasing process, but also for our painting processes predominantly for our doors, we switched from solvent-based paint to water-based paint, and that's allowed us to achieve that significant reduction.

When it comes to ISO 14001 Environmental Management certificate and program, we had a very ambitious goal to have 100% of our relevant manufacturing sites certified by the end of 2025. Now we did realize 88%, so quite a significant improvement against 2019. We did have some challenges in some of our more recent acquisitions where we needed to prioritize turning the business around. We are firmly committed to getting those sites certified over the next year or so.

With that one on how we realize some of these targets, we have a short video to take you through on our most recent solar PV installation at our site in Guli in Chongqing, China. Please play the video.

[Presentation]

So as we saw there in the video, our solar installation at our site in Guli, the largest in the ASSA ABLOY Group by over 4x compared to our significant arrays. As we continue to roll out the implementation of solar PV that, of course, helps us to reduce our carbon emissions, helps us to reduce on our energy costs as well, but it also helps to reduce our risk exposure to volatile energy markets, which we've seen over the last couple of years and indeed to today as well. So it helps us to become a little bit more energy independent, at least to a base level, which helps to reduce business risk.

Another example, as I alluded to earlier, is that our Porto Feliz factory in Brazil within our Americas division. So a little background. The site was consuming in the region of 50 million liters of water per year at a cost of nearly USD 0.25 million. So this is the first time where I've seen such a combination of different technologies in order to reduce. At first, they implemented a reuse system, specifically on their plating line, the water-intensive process. They then couple that with a reverse osmosis system. And then we're able to implement an upgrade to an ion resin exchange and lastly, couple that with a vacuum evaporator as well. So by doing so, they were able to reduce the water consumption by a whopping 98%, saving about $240,000.

But in addition, it also reduced the amount of chemicals needed for the process as well. So all in all, total saving of almost 100% of the water consumption but from a financial perspective, saving USD 0.5 million as well. So a true win-win project.

In each of the seminars over the last 5 years, we've taken a deep dive look at one of our largest, most intensive factories, and that's Ameristar in Tulsa, Oklahoma as part of our Entrance Systems division. So back in 2021, we had a video and overview with Kristian Uldall Director of Sustainability locally. Kristian and the team have been doing an incredible job to drive sustainability initiatives locally.

And we can see on the bottom right hand of the screen that the company has grown by 81% and over the 5-year period, but at the same time, managed to substantially reduced their water consumption by 38% and their solvent consumption by 81% as well. So an incredible achievement substantial growth while also reducing the footprint of the site as well.

And a brief update on our science-based targets commitment. So for our Scope 1 and Scope 2, we have the target to reduce by 50% in absolute terms against our 2019 baseline. We have our 4-pronged standardized strategic approach, which we use across each division, each segment, business area, business unit and then down to site level.

This then rolls back up in that standardized way to make sure that we have a good overview and controls to ensure that we're on a good track to be able to realize that. And as I mentioned earlier, the majority of our Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions are principally driven by our energy consumption. So as we substantially increased our energy effectiveness and efficiency that one helps to reduce our energy cost, reduces our risk exposure and also our Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions.

So we've made a 34% improvement against our 2019 baseline. We're ahead of target, something we're incredibly proud of. But it's important that as we head towards 2030, it's going to get more and more difficult to realize the balance of that 50%. So we need to continue to push to be able to realize our targets out to 2030.

A little on our Scope 3. So as Bjorn had mentioned earlier and as well from Erik, Scope 3 makes up 95% of our total footprint. So quite a substantial heavy lift there. We're making strong progress against our targets, just about halfway towards that 28% reduction. Again, we see on the bottom right hand of the screen here, we have the same standardized four-pronged approach to be able to realize our Scope 3.

We're making good progress against the baseline but I believe that we can continue to do more, and we need to accelerate. We have a great pipeline of projects identified. We now need to accelerate the implementation of those projects.

Wrapping up the sustainability program 2025. From a supply management perspective, we had a target to carry a supplier sustainability audits for 95% of our direct material spend. This is a mature process that's been in place for over 12 years, and we carry out over 700 on-site audits with our own auditors each year with our most material suppliers.

We also had a target then to have all of our suppliers to sign and adhere to our code of conduct for business partners. And when I say all there, I mean both our direct suppliers and our indirects. So we had a target to have 95%, we realized 89%. I think it's important here that when we had our 2020 targets, it was for direct material suppliers only, so in the region of around 9,000 suppliers.

In our 2025 program, we then added in indirect suppliers. So adding in 50,000 additional suppliers. So that was quite a heavy lift from where we were in 2020. Although we didn't quite realize the 95%, we came from a 68% to 89%. So something that we can be proud of, and we continue to push in our future program to 2030.

From a people perspective, we continue to make strong progress, in particular for health and safety and a very good improvement on gender diversity. But to take us into a little bit more detail about our approach to our people I'd like to hand over now to Allan Cooper, our Chief Human Resources Officer.

Allan, over to you.

Thank you so much, Charles, and hello, everyone, and thank you for joining the Peoples section. I'm Allan Cooper, the Chief Human Resources Officer here at ASSA ABLOY. And being part of the leadership team. My focus is to ensure sustainability is embracing all aspects of our culture and organization.

At ASSA ABLOY, we're proud to be the global leader in access solutions, driven by a clear purpose helping people feel safe, secure and experience a more open world. And people are the foundation of everything we do and the engine behind our success. So today, I'm pleased to share the strong progress we've made and the commitments that will guide us and move us forward confidently towards 2030.

So let's start with that strong progress we've achieved over the past 5 years. Safety is a clear priority across all our operations. Over recent years, we've consistently advanced our together, we are a safe program, which brings together standards, processes, procedures, training and a strong focus on behaviors and culture.

A key driver of this progress has been the effective integration of newly acquired businesses into our safety framework. As a result of these collective efforts, we've reduced our injury rate from 3 to 2.2 over the past 5 years, demonstrating measurable, sustained improvement.

At the same time, we've worked on the 2025 targets to strengthen diversity within ASSA ABLOY. Through transparent merit-based practices and development initiatives, we see an increased representation of women. This progress helped us foster diversity of thought and build teams that better reflect the markets and the communities we serve.

Internal mobility is a top talent priority for us. And here, we've also made strong progress in strengthening our internal talent pipeline by increasing our focus on internal mobility and providing career advancement opportunities we've encouraged more employees to grow their careers within ASSA ABLOY.

So as we successfully closed our 2019 to '25 sustainability program, we're well positioned to take on the next phase of our journey. I'm proud to introduce our new people strategy towards 2030, anchored in a simple belief, people make it happen. The people strategy is designed to deliver the new ASSA ABLOY's strategy towards 2030. Our people vision is to empower individuals to reach their full potential, enable a safer and more open world. This vision is brought to life through the 3 core focus areas: culture, talent and social responsibility.

At ASSA ABLOY, our people are united by a shared purpose and a strong culture. This is why we've developed together we, a program that combines our common culture, rooted in the values empowerment, innovation and integrity. This shared culture connects us across the organization and across borders is something we'll continue to actively live and strengthen every day. It serves as the foundation for successful collaboration acts as a compass that aligns our diverse global workforce. This enables us to grow and succeed together.

Talent is a powerful enabler of sustainable growth. We start to be a place where people can develop, grow and build meaningful careers. By attracting, developing and retaining the skills and capabilities we need for the future, supported by strong leadership continuous learning and a stronger focus on internal mobility, we unlock potentials of individuals and prepare our organization for what lies ahead.

When it comes to our third strategic pillar within the people strategy being social responsibility, this acts as our guiding compass in how we operate and make decisions. By prioritizing safety, well-being and the diversity of thought, we create fair, merit-based growth opportunities for all our employees, fostering inclusive and supportive workplace. In doing so, we contribute to long-term social sustainability and a stronger future for both our people and our business.

So looking ahead, we've set ambitious goals for 2030 that directly support our long-term sustainability journey. We aim to continuously strengthen employee engagement while creating more internal mobility and growth opportunities. Our safety aspiration together to 0 reflects our unwavering commitment to ensuring that every employees goes home safely every day. By 2030, we're targeting a further 20% reduction in injury rates, building on the strong progress already achieved.

We also aspire to create environments and leadership teams that foster broad thinking, innovation and inclusion. It's about unlocking stronger, more resilient decision-making through building and nurturing diverse teams. Together, these ambitions reflect our firm belief that sustainability is ultimately achieved for our people, enabled by a strong culture, leadership and a continuous commitment to improvement.

So in conclusion, our sustainability journey is partly a people journey. The progress we've made and the ambitions we set for 2030 reflect a clear belief the sustainable success is built through strong culture, responsible leadership and empowered people. By continuing to invest in safety, engagement, talent and the diversity of thought, we are not only shaping a resilient organization, we're creating an environment where people can thrive, grow and contribute to a safer, more open world. This is how we turn commitments into impact, and this is how together we'll create a safe and open future.

So thank you again for the opportunity to share the people update with you. And of course, feel free to read all about our achievements and future ambitions in the annual report.

And now I would like to hand back to Charles.

Great. Thank you very much, Allan. So I'll take you through a little bit on our new sustainability program 2030. So as Erik mentioned earlier, we had our first program back in 2007. In 2010, we set our first set of 5-year targets. And since then, we have continued to build on the momentum and success of each program.

Leading out to 2030, I'm pleased to say that we are again raising our ambition level. I think this demonstrates our commitment and our willingness to lead our industry to a more sustainable future. And in addition, in the new program, we have also included product sustainability, which I think is a fantastic inclusion.

So a little bit on the program itself. In the top swimming lane we have there our climate. So this is the one set of targets where the baseline year is 2019. In short, our climate targets are our science-based targets out to 2030 and then net 0, no later than 2050. For each of our other targets as part of our program, 2025 is our baseline year.

As I mentioned, we've included product sustainability and innovation, and Anders will take us through that in a little more detail shortly. From an operations perspective, we've again raised our ambition level where we have our 30 by 30. So that's where we're targeting a 30% reduction by 2030, which includes energy, water, waste to have at least 30% of our energy coming from renewable resources by 2030 and that's both purchased and on-site renewable energy and then to have 95% of our sites, a relevant manufacturing sites certified to ISO 14001.

From a supply management perspective, we have retained the same level of target. So to have 95% of our direct material spend to be audited with our supplier sustainability audits and have 95% of both our direct and indirect suppliers to sign and adhere to our code of conduct for business partners. And then as Allan touched on, from a people perspective, we want to further reduce our injury rate and injury lost day rate by an additional 20% to help and keep our people safe and sound.

So how can we realize some of these targets? One of the approaches that we have within our operations is to use the Kaizen methodology. Kaizen comes from lean manufacturing. It means ensure continuous improvement. So what we do is we leverage on our lean manufacturing skill set.

And instead of looking at typical waste that we would from a lean perspective, whether it's movement, materials, time, et cetera, one is to look at energy waste, water waste or the creation of actual waste in itself. It's a systematic process that typically yields between 50 and 100 improvement projects, and these vary anything from low cost, no cost to projects that require some investment but may have a rapid payback of a year or less. And then everything in between then to the projects that may have a long payback.

We -- also we encourage all ideas within this brainstorming process. And the reason being, just because something might not have a payback now, it may do in the future. So when it comes to technology improvements, we've reached that price parity where it makes sense to invest in that technology. We're doing this in the right way, it substantially contributes to a strategic objective, cost efficiency in everything we do. By reducing our resource consumption, we reduce our costs, reduce our risk and improve our profitability as well.

Another approach that we have to help to realize our targets is where we have updated what we call our Green Team playbook. We launched a Green Team playbook 10 years ago within ASSA ABLOY. The purpose of the Green Team playbook is to enable any site anywhere across the group to get to a foundational level of sustainability. This is realized by what we call our Green Team maturity tree. So across several different areas of how teams locally can increase their maturity or get to a more advanced level of sustainability. So the Green Team playbook serves as a very clear guide for our teams to be able to realize that.

We have a short video to give you an overview of the Green Team playbook. Please play the video.

[Presentation]

So as we saw there, our Green Team playbook brings us to that foundational level across the group. So there's no one single approach on how we can realize our sustainability targets out to 2030, it's a multipronged approach.

In addition then, a key focus for ASSA ABLOY this year and looking forward is on the circular economy. Now the linear economy, take, make waste has served us ASSA ABLOY incredibly well over the last 100 years or so. we need to further explore and understand opportunities of how we can make our products and solutions more circular.

How can we keep that closer relationship to our customers? Is there an opportunity to upgrade our products to extend their useful lifetime to provide additional value add for our customers, want to help them to reduce their sustainability footprint and also to extend the useful lifetime of our products.

In October last year, we appointed our first Director and Head of Circular Economy, Louis Ericsson; and Louis has 3 key focus areas for this year. One to further develop a circular economy strategy for ASSA ABLOY to establish a framework for all of our divisions so we can all pull in the same direction.

And then on the other hand, to -- from a circular economy, education and awareness perspective to help our colleagues to understand what does the circular economy mean, how is it relevant for me. And then to identify circular economy pilots and opportunities and to accelerate those to drive growth initiatives.

We're convinced that if we embrace circular economy in the right way, it can boost our growth accelerators. So as to further generate recurring revenue to increase our service penetration to actively upgrade our installed base.

As I mentioned earlier, we've included product sustainability and innovation to the sustainability program 2030, but I'd now like to hand over to Anders Forslind, VP and Head of Product Sustainability to give us a bit more of an insight as to what that means. Anders, over to you.

Thank you, Charles. So my name is Anders Forslind, and I'm VP and Head of product sustainability. And I will talk about how innovation and product sustainability will contribute to the sustainability program 2030.

Going first into looking on the actual target where we have product sustainability process for science-based target Scope 3 reduction and this process should be applied on 80% of the revenue.

And what does this really mean? We have an internal development process and in combination with tools where we -- that helps us to understand where do we have the carbon footprint hotspots in product, in product portfolios and also within the divisions. By that, we can find the levers, the levers we want to use to ensure that we have initiatives on those areas that enables us to reach the targets in 2030.

And when it comes to the 80% of revenue covered, it is really to ensure that we are targeting the areas that is relevant for our customers. So going more into details and starting most to the left, what do we actually do on a lower level when it comes to this. When it comes to the product and the product portfolio level, it's really to understand what can we do in the products and in the portfolios.

When we come to the portfolios, we are multiplying the product carbon footprint with amount of sold units and this is to focus development and sourcing efforts on the products with the highest carbon-reduction potential.

Aggregating this, up to the additional level, we get much more insights how to ensure that we are reducing the right business entities and establishing our carbon-reduction road maps on the additional level.

Going further on then to the ASSA ABLOY levels. Here, we can see that we very clearly addressing the levers that makes us reach the science-based targets, Scope 3 reduction goals. So it's a model where we go from lowest detail up to the highest top and the more to the right, we move in this picture the more strategic we get.

Besides the science-based target, we are also looking into 4 areas where we will work a lot up until 2030. Especially, as we had mentioned before here, the strategic support to science-based targets Scope 3. We have our tools. We have our internal process.

We will continue to develop these tools to ensure that we support the organization in the best of ways, so they understand where they should focus activities. And we also have tools for ensuring that we are developing sustainable solutions. Those that have been in these meetings before recognize the sustainability compass. And during this year, we will come with a new release on that one.

Then when it comes to commercialize sustainable products, it is to ensure that we support sales and marketing with sustainable sales material. And one of those things that really support sales is environmental product declarations. And here, we are introducing an internal process to ensure that we can develop those fast and efficient.

Last but not least we have a product sustainability compliance area. And here is really to ensure that we have a robust product sustainability compliance to reduce regulatory risk and highlight commercial openings.

We have been using the sustainability compass since 2016. And it's really to ensure that we have -- we are using environmental data early in the development process. Since 80% of the carbon footprint is determined in the early phases of design and the sustainability compass creates sustainability awareness and guides towards sustainable solutions. And what we do in the sustainability compass is always that we compare existing solution with a new solution. So we know that we have a continuous improvement when it comes to our development.

Looking then on the new sustainability compass 2.0. The first bullet is same as in the old one, ensure that we are guiding development towards sustainable solutions and also aligning with the goals science-based target and also ensuring that we are compliant with the regulations at hand. Then when it comes to competitiveness free market differentiation, there we are looking into how it actually looks in the market, where do you want to place our products, where are our competitors when it comes to carbon footprint and also delivering value propositions so that customers understand what they are buying from a sustainability point of view.

The last one is to support what Charles mentioned just before here when it comes to circularity and to ensure that we are bringing this into our both business models and into our products. So here, we will have support for both the business model part and design guidelines to ensure that the products that we develop today will be possible to have circularity on in the future.

Then when it comes to environmental product declarations and to start with what is an environmental product declaration. An environmental product declaration is a standardized third-party verified disclosure of products environmental performance across its life cycle, providing credible and comparable sustainability data.

So what can we use in EPD, Environmental Product Declaration to? Of course, we see a lot of new upcoming regulations. For instance, digital product Passport. There we would need a carbon footprint data that is very fine. So there it will fit very good and also to enable our customers to get certification, both in LED and REA and also to be able to show our customers, what kind of carbon footprint level we are at. And to be able to create EPDs on a very fast efficient way, we have introduced an internal EPD process where we work a lot now to take this from external consultants and do it in-house instead. And by that, having both faster and more efficient process.

Then to summarize when it comes to our strategic focus to 2030. It is to support the science-based target scope free, ensure that we develop sustainable solutions and utilize this when it comes to commercializing on sustainable products and also that have the product sustainability, compliance and all the regulations in our headwind we are developing the products. And then when it comes to the new target, it is to focus our efforts where they create maximum impact, targeting the areas with the greatest potential for science-based target Scope 3 reductions.

And by that, I hand over to Erik.

Thank you Anders. For some key takeaways. I mean, I think that -- I hope that you have seen that we have shown that sort of that we sort of are on a good way of reaching, let's say, the targets that is set up for the science-based targets. We have now completed the fourth program. And as you have seen, we have shown a number of examples.

We have also shown the way that we work in order then to be able to comply or to sort of to fulfill the promises that we have made and that you've also seen in our ambition level, which we're raising then for the 2030. You can also read in our annual report where now the CSRD report, we are actually on the second one. So I think that we were early in the process already last year. Now we have refined it for the second year.

And sort of what you have seen also both, I think, from Charles, Allan and Anders is you can see how it's integrated in everything we do. And especially then if you go to Charles and Anders, you see that you have seen examples, both ways of, let's say, this on the EPDs when it comes to helping to increase our sales as well as from Charles, when you have seen this on the solar panels in Guli or the part on Ameristar then to reduce the material that we're having.

So once again, I show you my favorite diagram when it comes to sustainability that it is possible, and we have shown it, and you can see it by fact to increase our sales at the same time to reduce our Scope 1 and 2 emissions. And we're also in a very good way when it comes to reaching our target for the Scope 3, which is, as mentioned before, which is the most difficult one.

So with that, I thank you, and I presume then we go over to Bjorn, who will then lead the Q&A.

Thank you very much, Erik. Yes, it's time to open up for questions now. And we have received questions, but feel welcome to continue to submit your questions through that chat function that you have at the bottom of webcast screen. So I'll start now from the first question we have received and work myself down the list.

So the first question goes like this. Have you been able to decouple sales from emissions in Scope 3 as well? And I think I'll hand that one to Charles to start with.

Yes. Thanks, Bjorn. Yes. So I think we've seen from Erik's last and favorite slide, if I believe you to tell, Erik, where we demonstrated our decoupling of sales in Scope 1 and Scope 2. So if we were to benchmark Scope 3 in there as well. So over the same period, we've reduced our Scope 3 footprint by 14%, while we've driven growth in the region of 62%. So in short, yes, we've demonstrated that we can decouple our Scope 3 reduction as well as our Scope 2.

Now I think it's fair to say it's not at the same magnitude, whereby we reduced Scope 1 and 2 by 34%. Scope 3 in comparison is down by 14%. But I'm convinced if we can continue to accelerate and remain focused on our Scope 3, we can further decouple that while obviously, we're committed to growing the organization at the same time.

Thank you, Charles. We can then continue to the next question. And this one will be for you, Allan. Congratulations on great achievements between 2019 and 2024, lovely decoupling of Scope 1 emissions and sales. Welcoming the 2030 program, in particular, the enhanced strategy on product sustainability.

All targets included in the 2030 program are highly relevant, but please elaborate around the decision to not proceed with the target for gender diversity and management positions as well as how we, as investors, can follow up on the people's strategies ambitions around diversity of perspectives, what indicators will we be able to follow, Allan for you.

Okay. Thank you. Thank you so much for your question. Firstly, I'd like to assure you that in no way have we lowered our ambition when it comes to diversity. Our commitment to an inclusive workplace remains completely unchanged. And gender representation, gender pay gaps will continue to be tracked and transparently disclosed through our CSRD aligned reporting.

We have refined our approach to strengthen our focus on fostering an inclusive work environment and -- based on our progress, I see a strong pipeline of female leaders, especially from an early talent perspective, where we have ratios of 40% and plus. So therefore, the strategic challenge really in the 2026 to 2030 is more on sort of structural merit-based talent practices that really support sustainable progress.

Operating with our decentralized organization, so many different legal contexts as well. But we see if we can convert that pool of talent into senior leadership, we'll continue the good progress that we've seen so far.

Thank you, Allan. We'll continue with the next question then. Over 90% of emissions are in Scope 3. At what point does supply climate performance start to affect sourcing decisions preferred supply status or commercial terms. I think we hand that one to you, Charles.

Yes, for sure. I mean, super relevant, absolutely spot on. More than 95% of our Scope 3 emissions are in Scope 3. 72% of that is within our category 3.1. So that's purchased goods and services, which sits directly in our supply chain. So we've already started the process to work with our suppliers from a science-based targets perspective.

So we have carried out multiple rounds of science-based targets summits. Last year, we held 4 different summits at different stages, 3 sessions in English and 1 in Chinese then for our suppliers in China as well. So we clearly set out our agenda in terms of here's what our commitment is that we would like our suppliers to get to the same level, to the same commitment level and in particular, for our preferred suppliers that we work with them to support them from a maturity perspective.

So to give some context, we already support our suppliers from a lean manufacturing maturity, quality maturity, health and safety. So by working closely with our suppliers to improve their maturity, so to help them with their Scope 1 and 2, can we make their -- help them to become more energy efficient. Then looking at their Scope 3, can we help them to reduce their materials to switch to low-carbon materials as well.

That, of course, will support us from a Scope 3 perspective. But it also helps -- we're not the only customer who has sustainability on the agenda. So for our suppliers, if they can embrace that in a good way, it also helps them to be more competitive with their other customers as well. And if they can do it, leverage on sustainability in the right way to reduce their costs, helps to make them more profitable as well as more competitive.

And so for sure, our supply chain incredibly important when it comes to Scope 3. We continue to work on that relationship that we have to work with and develop long-term partners and preferred suppliers.

Thank you very much, Charles. Let's continue with the next question then. Do you have any variable remuneration targets relating to sustainability? And I think we'll start with you, Allan.

Yes. Okay. Thank you. Yes, we certainly do. Climate and other sustainability-related targets are factored into variable remuneration for all members of our executive team reporting to the CEO as well as many management tiers throughout all the divisions. These targets are usually linked with decreasing our energy consumption, which is a key driver, of course, for decreasing our Scope 1 and 2 carbon emissions.

The reduction targets aligned to our annual emissions reduction as part of our science-based targets. This and other sustainability-related targets such as health and safety, employee engagement are typically in the form of our sort of short-term variable remuneration and usually 3% to 5% of the total short-term variable remuneration targets.

Thank you, Allan. Erik, did you want to add anything on that? Or shall we continue?

No, I think that Allan summed it up quite well. And I mean, as you heard, everybody reporting to our CEO has qualitative target related to sustainability.

Thank you. And the next question is like this. How does sustainability influence product development in practice, Anders I think this is for you.

Thank you. Yes. As I showed before, when it comes to how we work with sustainability on the product level, we use the sustainability compass to guide us towards the right direction. We know that we take different areas in consideration when developing our solutions. But in addition to that, we also have easy carbon footprint calculators.

So we in on every product can go in and calculate what is the impact if you change material to another material, if you have more recycled content in the product or if there is a possibility to reduce the energy use. And as I said before, looking on the hotspots in the product and by that starting to develop new products with lower carbon footprint.

Thank you, Anders. [Operator Instructions] I'll continue to the next one. Under what conditions would offset become part of your strategy, presumably here to reduce emissions. And Charles over to you for that one.

Yes, for sure. So I think in short, especially out to 2030, offsets will play no role in how we will realize our science-based targets. Over the last couple of years, there have been very public examples where different offset programs have actually been exposed to be bogus and whether they're double count or just outrightly falsified.

So unfortunately, as it stands, there's no global standardization. There's no EN program, ISO program that I'm aware of for offsetting. I think it will play an important role into the future. But for now, for us within ASSA ABLOY, we want to prioritize real reductions because we have significant opportunities. If we do that in the right way, we can reduce our cost and improve our profitability.

But we are committed to realizing net zero no later than 2050. And I'm convinced as we push to realize our net zero target, offsets will play an important role. But I think over the next decade, I strongly anticipate that there will be a global standardization, a framework that companies and institutions can reliably trust offset programs because I know that there are incredible projects, programs, technologies out there such as carbon capture and storage.

But we need to be able to trust and rely on those. And I think an international standardization is the level that's required. So again, we prioritize real reductions. We have great opportunity that will drive business benefits. But then when we push closer to our net zero goals, offsets will play an important role in the future.

Very good. Thank you, Charles. And I'll continue to the next one, which I'll pass -- hand over to Erik. At what point could sustainability-driven cost savings or pricing premiums become visible in margins?

I think that we don't talk so much about it, but of course, it has sort of impacts already today. I mean, if you look on what Anders talked about with the EPDs, which then goes into the green specifications, which we clearly see we have a double-digit increase in the green specifications year-on-year in Europe.

In reality, that sort of generates more business or if you look on our result when it comes to price versus cost, sort of when we can -- either it can sort of be that we get the premium out of it or so that it's related to, let's say, material reductions or, let's say, reductions when it comes to logistics. I mean it's there, but I believe that we have greater sort of -- I think greater sort of potential than if we look sort of in the years to come.

So I think that, as I said, it is there. But as I've also said, we take this as an integrated part of our business. So we don't sort of pinpoint it out in that way, like, for instance, when we have the quarterly reports, but perhaps that could be something when they are larger than there is today, that is something that we could see in the future to come.

Thank you, Erik. There are 2 questions left on my list. So I'll start with the first one. It is a complex world for a multinational company as ASSA ABLOY such as trade policy, conflict, geopolitical tensions, et cetera. What external factors or events post the largest challenges to the targets and the areas -- target areas in the 2030 sustainability program. I'll pass that one over to you, Charles.

For sure. So yes, incredibly relevant and pertinent question. I don't think there's any one thing really that we could point to that could be an external factor that creates a challenge, potentially an extraction. So a couple that come to mind is current conflict, potential future conflict as well. We continue to see significant energy cost increases.

Principally, that was from the conflict with Ukraine, now the challenge in the Middle East. And of course, that will have a knock-on effect from an overall increase -- cost increase, not least to potentially interest rates as well. And then we, of course, then always have the risk of a potential economic slowdown or even eventually a recession as well. But for us, within the group, we're very clear on what we do when it comes to sustainability.

We do not drive sustainability purely for the sake of sustainability. It needs to contribute to the group's overall strategy to our strategic objectives, to our growth enablers and our growth accelerators. And it boils down to 3 things that we need sustainability to do. One is the initiatives, do they reduce our cost? Do they reduce our risk exposure and do they generate growth opportunities.

I think if we continue to focus on that purpose with clarity, it doesn't really matter what the external challenges are because this should be a business enabler that supports us to become increasingly competitive whatever the challenge may be.

Thank you very much. Erik, did you want to add anything there?

I think that is also the part there is exactly what Charles says. I think for us, as we sort of -- it should -- for us, in general, of course, the sustainability should either reduce cost or create business opportunities. You can also say that some of these things that is happening is also, in a way, helping us to even use this more.

I would say that the geopolitical situation is, of course, one thing that could jeopardize. And of course, it's also so that we see certain, let's say, winds who are blowing in different directions across the globe. I would prefer that they would all -- when you look from a sustainability perspective, that they would all blow in the same direction.

But unfortunately, they are not. So I think that could also be something which is a bit slowing down in certain parts of the world where in some other parts of the world, we can see that it's increasing. But that's a bit also part of when you're managing sort of a worldwide organization that this is sort of normal, but that could be another one that could jeopardize. .

Thank you, Erik. Well, I just have one question left here. So let's take that one. Allan, how do you ensure improved safety in your highly acquisitive model? So that requires so many companies.

Yes, it's a really relevant question. We are very acquisitive. And acquisitions potentially pose one of our biggest safety challenges. But maybe just on a more general point, first of all, I mean, we continuously work to improve our work environment on enhancing our processes, removing hazardous risks.

We work with behaviors and attitudes that collectively form our safety culture, which is grounded our values and safety beliefs. And we're building a safety culture and engagement involvement through, for example, the rollout of several workshops with tens of thousands of participants focusing on risk and behavior.

So the new entrants into ASSA ABLOY come into that culture of that environment. So therefore, we systematically implement our health and safety programs, coming processes, governance, behaviors and culture transformation to get closer to 0 injury vision, and we bring our acquisitions on board with that.

Very good. Well, thank you very much for that, Allan. This means that I can't see any more questions. So we have come to the end of this year's sustainability seminar, which actually is the 15th since we started off with this sustainability roundtable discussions back in 2010.

All of us, we hope it has provided you with a greater understanding of our work with sustainability, and that it goes obviously hand-in-hand with commercial interests. And that you also feel confident about that we are on a journey of improvement.

As our Chairman actually said last year -- at the last year's seminar, we focus on sustainability because it makes commercial sense, but we also do this because it's simply the right thing to do. So thank you again for your interest, and thanks for your questions. And if you have any follow-up questions or feedback to us, please, as always, feel welcome to reach out to us at Investor Relations. So have a good upcoming weekend now, and goodbye.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the presentation of ASSA ABLOY's Q4 report for 2025. My name is Bjorn Tibell. I'm heading Investor Relations. And joining me here in the studio are ASSA ABLOY's CEO, Nico Delvaux; and our CFO, Erik Pieder. We will now, as usual, start this conference with a short summary of the report and then open up for your questions.

And with that, I'd like to hand over to you, Nico.

Thanks, Bjorn, and also good morning from my side. We can report a strong end of a very good year for ASSA ABLOY. We had a good organic sales development in Q4, an organic growth of 4%. We have strong growth in Global Tech and Americas, good sales growth in EMEIA and in Entrance Systems and a sales decline in APAC, mainly again related to depressing market situation in Greater China.

A good organic sales complemented with also good growth through acquisitions, net 3%. And then strong operational execution with a record EBIT margin of 16.8% in the quarter and an operating leverage of 80 basis points. Good work done on the working capital side, also giving us a strong cash flow and a cash conversion of 137% in the quarter.

Also this quarter, again, the shift from mechanical to electromechanical continues, and we have seen an electromechanical organic sales growth of 8% in our regional divisions. We've been also active on the acquisition front in this quarter with seven acquisitions complete.

If we look a little bit into the numbers, sales north of SEK 38 billion, 4% organic, like I mentioned, 3% net acquisition, and then unfortunately, hit in a strong way by FX, mainly weak dollar versus strong SEK. So 10% negative effect on top line. Therefore, sales top line minus 3%.

And EBITA margin also at record level of 17.9%, and we see the gap between EBIT and EBITA further growing as we continue to buy quality technology companies. It's important to look also at that 17.9% EBITA margin. And the EBIT margin, like I mentioned, 16.8%, 30 bps up, and EBIT at SEK 6.5 billion.

Look a little bit in the world, I would say I can say the same as I said in previous quarters. We continue to see a good momentum on the nonresidential side, on the commercial side in our three main areas, in North America, in Europe and in Oceania as well on the normal commercial side as on the institutional side.

Whereas also in all three, we continue to see more weakness on the residential side. And there is two markets we have seen a pickup on residential that is in Sweden and in New Zealand. In New Zealand, we see good recovery as well on new build as on R&R. In Sweden, we see that recovery mainly on the R&R side, not on the new build side. That's the two markets that start to cut interest rates first.

So we will have to wait a little bit longer for Europe on the ECB-related countries to see that recovery. And the same thing is true in the U.S. where interest rates stay around at 6%. And you know that 72% of the households in the U.S. that have a loan on their houses have an interest rate below 5%. So there is still that gap.

On a positive note, we see -- that's an interesting statistic that 55% of the houses in North America are older than 40 years. So that R&R really should start to kick in on the -- hopefully in the near future.

You see the numbers by region. Another important vertical for us is the logistics vertical, where we see a recovery in North America, not really a V recovery, more a U kind of recovery, slower recovery, which in a way is also easier from an operational perspective. Unfortunately, we don't see that same recovery in Europe. As a matter of fact, we believe that logistics market in Europe is even further down.

So our numbers, plus 4% in North America; plus 12%, very strong Latam; and plus 3% organic growth in Europe; minus 2% in Africa; strong Australia and New Zealand, plus 8%; and then a very mixed picture in Asia, where we have seen good growth in the rest of Asia and higher double-digit negative growth in Greater China.

A couple of highlights. This new product. It's a new range of garage door openers that we sell under different brands also under the Kwikset brand, and integrating this garage door opener in the home automation ecosystem from Kwikset together with our digital door locks.

Very good collaboration between the Americas division and the Entrance Systems division. And also good to see that in a, you could say, a more mature market with mature products, our R&D team still found ways to really differentiate. We've announced a unique security feature. So quite excited about this new product range.

A couple of project wins. Circle K in Germany, Entrance Systems won a service contract from around 2,000 industrial doors. Comcast U.S., our new recent acquisition, InVue in Global Solutions, equipped their stores with a total of 17,000 units for secure display of their electronic equipment.

And then here in Stockholm, HID, public transport, access to metro bus lines, trains, interesting project. And just to clarify, this is not the wrong picture. It's just a picture with a lot of ice on our reader, and that's one of the reasons why we were chosen for this project, our capability for our equipment to work in extreme weather conditions. So I'm also quite happy with that project.

So you see now that since 4 quarters, we have seen an acceleration of our organic growth, also an acceleration of our organic volume growth, and we continue to complement that organic growth with good growth through acquisitions.

Our sales is up 65% over the last 5 years. And then our operating margin, well within the 16% to 17% bracket on a 12-month moving trend at 16.2%, and an EBITA margin even above that bandwidth at 17.2%. Therefore, also a good operating income, 107% up compared to 5 years ago.

As mentioned, we continue to be active on the acquisition front with seven acquisitions completed in the quarter, 23 acquisitions over the full year. They represent an annualized sales of around SEK 6 billion.

If we highlight two of them: Sargent and Greenleaf, an acquisition for the Americas division, a U.S. manufacturer of high security mechanical and electronic locking solutions and safe hardware, really strengthening our access portfolio for the Americas. They had a sales of SEK 430 million last year.

And then International Door Products, IDP, U.S. manufacturer of standard and custom fire-rated steel door frames and doors. Also for the Americas division, complementing nicely our door offering. They had a sales of SEK 220 million last year.

If we then zoom into the different divisions, starting with EMEIA. EMEIA had a very strong Q4 with an organic sales growth of 4%, with strong sales growth in the Nordics and in Central Europe, good sales growth in Middle East, India and Africa.

Sales declined in U.K./Ireland and South Europe. U.K./Ireland, mainly related to delay on the commercial project because some new government legislation. And then inside Europe, mainly because of France where the residential market remains challenging.

Also very good EBIT margin at 15.3%, with good operating leverage helped by FX 90 basis points accretion. It's the only division that profits from the stronger SEK. And then M&A dilutive 50 basis points. That's mainly related to transactions of acquisitions we did in EMEIA, so more you could say one-offs.

Americas, another very strong quarter for the Americas with an organic sales growth of 5%. We have a strong high single-digit sales growth for the North America Non-Residential segment. Good sales growth in Latam, and then a stable sales development for the North America Residential segment.

Strong EBIT margin at 17.9%, with an excellent operating leverage of 120 basis points. And then dilution, 50 basis points FX, dollar-SEK again, and M&A dilution also 50 basis points. Also here, mainly related to the acquisition-related costs that -- for the two acquisitions that I showed earlier, so some more one-offs, you could say.

APAC, an organic sales decline of 2%, with a good sales growth in Pacific, Northeast Asia and a sales decline in Greater China and Southeast Asia. Greater China, Southeast Asia is really a mixed different picture. Greater China, high double-digit negative growth, and Southeast Asia, high double-digit positive growth. A good improvement of the EBIT margin at 7.6% versus 5.4% last year. Excellent operating leverage, and also here, hit by currency, 70 basis points.

Then we go to Global Tech, I would say extremely good quarter for Global Tech, with an organic sales growth of 9%, with strong performance as well in HID as in Global Solutions, and then also a very strong EBIT margin at 18.9%, with good operating leverage despite a strong hit of FX, 90 basis points, and a small accretion on M&A of 20 basis points, that's mainly linked to InVue.

And then last but not least, Entrance Systems, a bit lower organic sales of only 2%, where we've seen strong sales growth in Pedestrian, good sales growth in Doors & Automation, but stable sales in Industrial and Perimeter Security, and good but lower sales growth in service.

And then still strong execution with an EBIT margin of 18%. And a very good operating leverage, I would say, despite only 2% organic sales of 90 bps. FX hit us with 40 basis points and M&A has been neutral.

And with that, I give the word to Erik, our CFO, for some more details on the financial numbers.

Thank you, Nico. And a very good morning from my side as well. I think you've heard a lot about the quarterly numbers from Nico. So if I focus a bit on the full year.

On sales, we were up with 1%. If we then dissect that, 3% organic growth for the full year. We reached our target when it comes to acquired net growth of 5%, but then we were hit by the currencies for the full year 2025 with minus 7%.

You see here the FX calculation that we did end of December, where we then for Q1, thought that -- I mean, when we did the calculation was minus 11%. Now end of January, we are for the first quarter in our calculation, minus 13%. And for the full year, we are at minus 8%.

EBIT full year, we are up with 2%. EBITA margin for the full year, up with 10 basis points. And on EBIT, we are at the same level. Income before tax, net income and EPS, we are up with 2% for the full year.

We had -- as mentioned before by Nico, we had a strong cash flow. Okay, we're a bit also there hit by the currency. So we are minus 2% in actual value. But of course, if you look on our cash conversion, it was 137% in the quarter. And for the full year, we were at 106%.

Return on capital employed, minus 20 basis points year-on-year. We have now added, as we have talked a lot like on the Capital Market Day about the Operational Value Added or OVA. For me, I think it's a very good measurement because you combine the income statement with the balance sheet.

So what you do is that you take your EBIT and then you deduct the interest rate on your capital employed. We also include goodwill there. And our weighted average cost of capital or our interest rate there that we use are 8%. And as you can see, we are at the same level end of 2024 as we -- we are at the same level at the end of 2025 as what we were end of 2024.

If we look on the bridge, dissect first the 4% organic growth. We had a weak 3% on price, and consequentially then, you get a strong 1% that you have on volume. The flow-through, very good at almost 40% or an accretion of 80 basis points.

This comes from the, let's say, the difference between price cost, which I will show you on the next slide. We had MFP savings in the quarter of roughly SEK 180 million. And then you have other operational efficiencies as well.

The currencies, you've seen on the top line, minus 10%, but you also see that it has a negative impact because of the dollar versus the SEK, also on the bottom line. This quarter, it was 30 basis points. And this is something that will continue at least on the same level, I believe, in the quarters to come.

But if you take acquisitions aside, we reached actually an EBIT margin in the quarter of 17%. The acquisitions are slightly dilutive. It comes mainly from acquisition -- costs of acquisitions that were closed during the quarter.

If we then move to the next slide, direct material continues to sort of -- we continue there to have a tailwind versus last year. So we were 70 basis points better than a year ago. The mix impact of that is roughly 20 basis points.

So if I call it the true sort of -- the true impact is 50 basis points. It's positive to see that the conversion cost is, also this quarter, better than what it was a year ago with 30 basis points. You can see for the full year, we are actually 20 basis points better than the year before.

This, of course, comes with when we can have volume growth, you see it immediately that we can sort of have a positive conversion. SG&A, negative with 50 basis points, but this comes from investment in R&D as well as investments in our sales organization.

Cash flow. We are now for the third year in a row, we have a cash conversion above 100%. This year, it ended at 106%. We sort of continue to do a good net working capital management.

If you look between the years, you would see that CapEx, that it looks at least slightly higher this year than what it was a year ago, but that is due to that last year we had some divestments or sell -- we sold some buildings in EMEIA as well as in APAC. But all in all, I mean, a cash conversion of 137% in the quarter is strong.

If you look on the gearing, continue to sort of have a positive trend here. If you compare versus last year, we are down from -- on the net debt to equity from 65% to 63%. And on net debt versus EBITDA from 2.3 to 2.2 (sic) [ 2.1 ]. So we still have a very strong financial position and we can continue with our acquisition strategy going forward.

If we look on the earnings per share, as mentioned before, it's up versus last year. We will propose a dividend. The Board has proposed a dividend that, of course, needs to be approved by the AGM of SEK 6.4. And if you look on the dividend of percentage of EPS, it's over a period since 2020, it's at 43%, and the EPS growth -- yearly growth is 14%.

And with that, I hand it back to Nico for some concluding remarks.

Thanks, Erik. So like we said, a very strong end of a very good 2025. We have very strong execution in, you will agree with me, challenging market conditions. So a good organic sales growth of 4%, complemented with good growth through acquisitions of 3%.

A record EBITA and EBIT margin in the quarter, an EBIT margin of 16.8% with excellent operating leverage, and then also very good working capital management, giving us a strong operating cash flow and a very strong cash conversion.

Like Erik mentioned, the Board then proposes a dividend of SEK 6.4 per share that we propose to, again, pay out in two equal tranches like we have done in recent years.

And then last but not least, Bjorn has asked me to remind you that there is, at least for those that are interested, a sustainability seminar on March 20, where you can also find the registration link on this slide.

So as a conclusion, I think 2025 was a good year. And again, what we always say is that whatever the market conditions come to us, our decentralized model, our proven strategy, we are convinced that we will also continue to deliver good results going forward, whatever market conditions come to us.

And with that, I give the word back to Bjorn for Q&A.

Thank you, Nico. Well, yes, that means it's time to open up for your questions. And as usual, could we ask you to limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. And when we've been through the list, then we can start over again with you can register yourself to ask a question again.

So with that, operator, it means that we're ready to kick off the Q&A. Please go ahead.

[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from the line of Daniela Costa from Goldman Sachs.

I'll ask them one at a time. But mainly starting out in terms of sort of where we've seen some strong steel moves, especially in the U.S. We have also seen PPI of locks going up. There's FX. Can you talk a little bit about how you see the cadence of these potential headwinds or tailwinds from raw materials and FX panning out throughout the year? And also, you mentioned U.S. resi is stable, maybe also comment on that.

Perhaps if we start with market conditions, if I understood the question correctly, Daniela, so we -- like I mentioned earlier, we continue to see good momentum on the nonresidential side, especially on the institutional side.

But our spec business, for instance, was again double digit up in Q4 with most, if not all, verticals showing positive growth. And again, our more important verticals, education, K-12, universities and health care, driving that growth. So on the commercial side, we remain positive, and was also translated in a high single-digit growth in Q4.

The residential side, like I mentioned earlier, remains more challenging. We definitely believe that the residential market has bottomed out. And that from here on, hopefully, confidently, we will start to see some recovery. We don't believe that we will see the recovery on the short term on new builds because of the gap on the interest rate mainly.

But the fact that the housing installed base, so to speak, starts to age, should lead sooner than later to some recovery on the R&R side. And if you can believe the economists that forecast the future, they at least start to see some recovery in the R&R side already this year.

And then the other thing on the logistics vertical in the U.S., as we mentioned, we have seen a recovery, not a V recovery, but a slower U recovery. In a way, we are happy with the slower U recovery because that helps you also on the operational side to ramp up in a more easy way.

When it comes to some headwinds. Of course, yes, some natural things that we can't change. We had quite some bad weather, as you know, also in January that affected temporary, I think, to a certain extent, the business. That, of course, should just be a temporary thing and I'm quite confident that if you look over the quarter, longer period that, that will not be significant.

US dollar-SEK, we can only look back at the past and see where currencies stand today. We don't know how they will evolve in the future. But like Erik mentioned, they will continue to have a very important effect on the top line. He mentioned the number in the call.

It will also have a more important negative effect on the bottom line definitely now in Q1. You've seen it was 30 basis points in Q4. We believe it might, and it will be even a bit higher now in Q1. And going forward, we will see what happens with the currencies.

And then on the steel side?

Yes, right. If you look at material indexes in general, I think they are going up in a significant way, copper, zinc, nickel. Steel has been more stable, and you know that we are most exposed to steel. But we will do like we have done in the past. I mean if material indexes go up, we will try to compensate them through price increases.

We have already increased -- announced price increases end of last year and beginning of this year. And we will see. If the market follows, we obviously will continue to do price increases, and we are confident that we will be able, like we did in the past, compensate for material increases through price increases and defend the margin.

Perfect. My follow-up is just on your comment now. You're right on the 16% to 17% that you want to be on the long run margin at the top end of that. What would have to happen to see you above that? Is that something that you definitely don't want to go above because M&A will always dilute you back?

Or would you have to see it for a number of years above it, and then you would consider changing the target? Is there a possibility that at some point you would consider increasing the target? Or you rule that out given the structure of the business model?

I would say let's not answer hypothetical questions. I think let's work hard first to get more higher up into that bandwidth. That's also what we have said in the Capital Markets Day. We are today at 16.2%. We have the ambition to get more comfortable in that bandwidth, perhaps also more to the higher end.

And of course, there is a couple of main drivers there. Clearly, if you take the Americas, we have our residential business, where we have said that within the first 5 years after the acquisition of HHI, we will realize $100 million bottom line synergies.

If that happens, we can bring HHI to that 16% EBIT margin, including PPA and so on. So that is definitely is something that, over time, will move the needle for the Americas division. Of course, we will need some help of the recovery of the market for achieving that.

I think the second important driver is SKIDATA, where we know that we bought SKIDATA at very low single-digit margin and where we have the ambition to bring it to, let's say, around 14% over the first 5 years. If that also happens, then, of course, also because it's a EUR 300 million business that also has a more important effect on the margin.

And the third one, as we mentioned at several occasions, we still believe that we have upside on the EMEIA margin, where over time, that should come closer to that 16%. So I would say that are the three main drivers that should help us to further improve EBIT margin.

The next question comes from the line of Andre Kukhnin from UBS.

Can I just start with a follow-up on the -- so on the pricing intentions for 2026, can you tell us at this stage what we should be thinking about with current raw materials and FX for pricing for 2026?

So like you rightly said, it will depend a bit on where material indexes go going forward. And under the assumption that tariffs stay where they are today because also that seems to be moving target, I think you should calculate with a price somewhere, I would say, between 1.5% and 2%.

Of course, we live in a slightly higher inflationary world than, let's say, prior to COVID. Prior to COVID, our price component was perhaps a low 1%. This obviously should be a little bit higher with higher inflation. And then we have, of course, some price carryover from last year still on -- mainly on the tariff side.

And can I just ask about the demand trends as you started the year compared to kind of the exit run rate of Q4. I think you've covered the U.S. but if we could just go around maybe EMEIA and Asia on kind of which way we're trending as we go into the year. And I guess part of that, could you comment on the specified activity in EMEIA as well, please?

Yes. So I mentioned already for North America that we have seen double-digit growth of spec quotations. The same is true in EMEIA, and we have seen high single-digit spec growth for Oceania.

So on the spec side, we continue to see good momentum. I would say the answer is the same as we gave the last 3, 4 quarters. So a good healthy commercial activity level I think also translated in good organic growth in all three regions.

And a comment on the residential side would be also similar still, yes, definitely bottomed out, but no real recovery yet for the residential market. With the exception, like I mentioned earlier, for New Zealand, a smaller country, and then Sweden, where we have seen the recovery in the R&R side, but don't see the real recovery yet on the new build side.

The next question comes from the line of Gael de-Bray from Deutsche Bank.

The first one is on the M&A side. I mean, I think that based on the already announced acquisitions, the M&A contribution that's baked in for 2026 is just around 1%, which is lower than it was at this point in the previous 2 or 3 years, I think. So I'm wondering if you could provide any -- a bit more color on the M&A pipeline and perhaps a range of the potential M&A contribution for 2026?

So it's true that the carryover on the M&A side is 1% for the full year. It's around 3% for Q1. We have an active M&A pipeline. As you know, we have identified more than 900 potential targets. We are not talking to all of them, but we are talking to many of them.

We are confident we will continue to close some of the acquisitions we are talking to in the coming months and quarters so that growth through acquisition for the year will go up. And as you know, we have the ambition to grow through acquisitions 5% per year over a business cycle. We realized that 5% last year.

We will do our best to come as close as possible to the 5% or so this year. Like I mentioned, we have high activity then. To close the deals, you depend on two parties. Both parties have to agree. But we are happy, never satisfied, but happy with what we have in pipeline for the time being.

Okay. And the second question is on the organic growth dynamics or more specifically on the volume momentum. So I think it was around 1%-ish this quarter. So roughly the same as in the previous 3 quarters, really.

So I guess my question is whether you kind of see any signs of acceleration going into 2026 or whether that's too early. And if basically, you're comfortable with the consensus expectations for volume growth of 3% to 4% in 2026?

But it was not really the same over the last 3 quarters. If you look 3 quarters back, it was very low, 1%. In Q2, it was closer to 1%. And now in Q3, it was above 3%. So you see an acceleration of the volume growth. It's true that you don't see an acceleration to 2%, 3%, 4%, whatever. But at least you see an acceleration over the last 3 quarters.

Then of course, going forward, if you now look in Q1, the comparison is more difficult than in Q4, because I think last year, in Q1, we grew 2%, where in Q4, we had a slight negative growth. So that is one difference. And I think market conditions, like I mentioned earlier, are still very similar. So there's two things to take into consideration if you look now for organic growth in Q1.

The next question comes from the line of James Moore from Rothschild.

Nico, I don't know if you mentioned it earlier, my line was dead for the moment. And Elmech, is it possible to talk about the organic growth speed in the quarter for the global and the regional picture? And then I have a follow-up I'll come back to.

Yes, the organic growth for the geographical divisions in the quarter was at 8%, with good contribution from all three regions. And the growth for Global Tech was higher, around double digit.

And I wondered if you could talk about the opportunities and the threats of the Aliro smart lock digital key wireless ultra-wideband near-field standards that are coming. I mean, I see pluses and minuses, and I wondered if you could help us navigate it in the sense that it enables digital smartphone key wallets, and maybe that helps with Elmech adoption.

But is there a risk? And how should we think about the loss of proprietary ecosystem lock-ins with crossband interoperability? Does it commoditize the software layers? Do you worry about Apple and Google becoming gatekeepers? Just trying to think about what this means.

I think you should -- if you look at our Elmech business, which is around, what is it, 32% of sales. If you look at that part, more than 90% is on the nonresidential side, on the commercial side. And of course, all the things you talk about have an effect in the first place on the residential side.

And on the residential side, those standards, we see it as an opportunity because, like you said, it will accelerate adaptation. And I mean, really as one of the strong players in this field, if you see an acceleration of that market, we will obviously profit from it together with the other players in the market.

And then if we can do a good job and come with more innovative products and wider product ranges, then hopefully, confidently, we will also take a bigger part of that market.

Great. Lastly, I wondered if you could just talk a little bit about software recurring? It's obviously been a great growth engine. Does that continue in the quarter? And do you feel happy with the pace going forward?

You know that I can be happy but never satisfied, and that is the same, James, with recurring revenue. I think we see recurring Software-as-a-Service as the fastest growing, you could say, product or solution. That continues.

When I started back in 2018, recurring revenue was around 2% of top line. Today, it's close to 6% of top line. So very strong acceleration and relatively becoming more and more important, and you know that you also make very good margins on that type of business.

You see that as well in the geographical divisions and then also mainly in Global Tech as well on the HID side as on the Global Solutions side. And as we move more and more from mechanical to electromechanical, on, I would say, the nonresidential commercial side, we get more and more opportunities for that Software-as-a-Service. So we are confident that we will be able to continue that trend also for the foreseeable future.

The next question comes from the line of Lush Mahendrarajah from JPMorgan.

It's on Entrance Systems and just a commentary around perimeter security and sort of the stable development there. And I think maybe that's sort of a slight change of toe versus sort of Q3, and I guess, particularly given sort of data center growth, I thought that was an area that benefited. So just kind to understand, I guess, what you're seeing there in the quarter.

I didn't understand the question.

Data centers, how that's impacting Entrance, I think.

So as we also mentioned on the Capital Markets Day, data centers today represents around 1% of our top line sales. And if you consider that data centers are growing 50%, you pick the number, that means that data centers can give us an extra 0.5% organic growth. That 0.5% organic growth comes in the geographical divisions because they sell doors and door hardware to data centers.

But the one most exposed, which will profit the most, is indeed perimeter security because they do all the fencing around the data centers and they have done also a very good job in coming with vertical-specific solution around fencing for data centers.

The quarter had been a little bit weaker from an organic growth perspective. It's more a timing issue and a more difficult comparison with last year. If you look to perimeter security, they have been growing close to double digit for the last 2, 3 years.

And we are confident now, not only with the data centers, but also with need for fencing around high security applications and also with warehouses coming back that perimeter security growth will also continue now this year.

And just as a follow-up on the Entrance Systems margin as well, obviously, strong performance there. I mean, is there something going on there with the steel component and maybe some of your competitors importing more of their steel? Have you been able to sort of price a bit better and take some of that margin?

So yes, Entrance Systems is exposed in an important way to steel and I would say, aluminum. And there, the same answer as before. If material indexes go up for steel and aluminum, we will increase prices and try to compensate for those cost increases through price increases with the ambition to maintain margins.

The next question comes from the line of Vivek Midha from Citi.

My main question is on EMEIA. Nice to see that the growth recovery is continuing, led by the Nordics. You mentioned that Southern Europe remains relatively weak within EMEIA. Can you maybe talk about whether you see any visibility on a recovery there, the sort of expectations on the shape of any recovery?

So if you take EMEIA, I think we have two important growth drivers, that is North Europe with Finland and Sweden, in particular. And then we have the DACH region with German, in particular. I think both are also profiting from the NIS2 legislation, cybersecurity legislation, but you also have to improve your physical security.

And we see this is a European legislation that then has to be translated into a local law in the different countries. But you see that Germany and the Nordics are perhaps a little bit ahead of the other countries. And you see more activity there.

So that NIS2 is an important driver in those two markets. And then like I mentioned, in Sweden, of course, you have, to a certain extent, the recovery on the residential side.

What is also a good driver in EMEIA is emerging markets. So India and Middle East, Africa, and some markets in East Europe. Two challenging markets are the U.K., but we have said at a couple of occasions that we were confident that they had bottomed out and that we would see a recovery. We still believe that is the case.

On the commercial side, there is a challenge with some of the legislation -- government legislation that has changed, and therefore, some of the bigger projects are on hold. Once those are released, we are confident we will see that growth on the commercial side for U.K. and therefore, that recovery that we mentioned already a couple of quarters ago.

If you take South Europe, it's little bit a mixed picture, where Spain, Portugal and Italy, to a certain extent, show good results. It's mainly France that is down. France is also in Europe, one of the countries where we are most exposed to the residential business, and it's still the residential business that is challenging in France.

There again, we believe we are confident that we see light at the end of the tunnel and that in the foreseeable future, we should start to see recovery of that business in France.

And my follow-up is just a quick one on one of the small divisions. But in APAC, actually, quite a good margin print. I think it might be the best margin for the full year since 2019. Do you see a path to recovery to a 10% margin over the midterm here?

Yes. I think because if you look at APAC, again, you should make a difference between Greater China and the rest of APAC. I would say the rest of APAC has margins, let's say, similar to EMEIA, whereas in Greater China also last year, we had a small loss.

And as in the mix, Greater China becomes also less important and the rest becomes more important. And as in the rest, we also continue to see good operational efficiency gains. Yes, we aim to further increase that margin for APAC. Over time, I think it should be possible to go to double-digit also in APAC.

The next question comes from the line of Aron Ceccarelli from Bank of America.

My first one is on U.S. residential. You talked about the market bottoming out. I was wondering if you can provide a little bit of an idea of how pricing within different part of the market? If you can talk a little bit about perhaps the Kwikset brand versus Baldwin, it would be great. And also talk a little bit how the pipeline is shaping up as we enter the first part of the year.

Yes. So first on the market, to repeat what I said before, we don't believe that we will see, on the short term, a recovery on the new build because of the gap on the interest -- mortgage rates, where perhaps we are a bit more positive on the R&R side because of different facts.

And the main fact what I said earlier is that 55% of the houses in the U.S. are more than 40 years old, so sooner or later, that R&R has to come back. And there for us, as a strong market leader in that field, it's very difficult to do better than the market.

What we try to do is come with a lot of new product development. If you take, for instance, the Kwikset brand, on the digital side, I think we launched, over the last 6 months, more products than Kwikset had launched over the last 5 years. So really a very strong acceleration of new product development.

And I would say the most extreme example is the digital side for Kwikset, but we are doing the same thing for Baldwin and for all the other verticals on the residential side. And that's also an indirect way, obviously, to get price increases through into the market.

Because if you can come with a new product that you then also can develop at a lower cost, you can create a new price positioning for that in the market. That's not directly calculated in our price, but it's obviously an indirect way to increase prices.

And that is also translated in our bottom line where we continue our trajectory to the ambition that we have set over time of 16%. Again, there, it would -- that will not be possible if we don't see the recovery also of the market and get a little bit help of the market because only the synergies, the $100 million bottom line synergies that we have identified, will not do it.

Because if you look at the top line today, we are 60%, 70% below the peak from some years ago. That's also why we have taken extra measures in the residential segment in North America last year.

We took out and we had to take out, unfortunately, more than 1,500 people to adapt our cost to the local reality and defending and further improving our margin. And that's things that we will continue to do now. Also this year, we will adapt our cost structure to whatever top line we will see.

And my follow-up is on Global Tech. The organic growth was very strong in Q4 despite the 2-year stack was relatively easy. But can you unpack perhaps the main drivers behind the performance? I would like to understand if you're seeing a tangible market share gains or our performance is mainly coming from white space opportunities created by new technology adoption?

If you look at the two main business in Global Tech, on the HID side, we have PACS. PACS after all the turbulences with semiconductor shortages, recovery and so on, I would say is back on that, I call it, decent growth path. So mid-single-digit growth, steady growth with good profitability, and we believe that it's going to continue.

But what's good in HID is that we have seen very good growth for the other verticals, the smaller verticals where we invest a lot in feet on the street, a lot in R&D to make them significant bigger, then also helping them on the margin side. And so we have seen good development of those verticals in the quarter.

And the same is true for Global Solutions, where obviously, hospitality is the biggest vertical where we have also seen a good continued high single-digit growth momentum, but where also the other verticals delivered on a high level in the other business areas -- segments delivered on a high level in the quarter, contributing even more to the overall organic growth.

So you could say, in that sense, it was all stars aligned from an organic growth perspective for the different business areas as well in HID and in Global Solutions.

The next question comes from the line of Rizk Maidi from Jefferies.

Just going to start with a follow-up on the hospitality side. I think some of your peers have flagged that U.S. hotel occupancies have dropped, and this is affecting the appetite of hotels to invest into their own assets. So I'm just wondering whether it's something you're seeing or not?

We have seen good momentum of our hospitality business around the world and also in the U.S. So we have seen good growth of our business in U.S. in the quarter.

Perfect. And then second one is just if we could elaborate on the -- your pricing commentary. How much did you achieve in the U.S. out of, I think, the 3% to 4% sort of targeted? And if you could just give us a split of that 1.5% to 2% for full year '26%, how much of that is carryover versus incremental price increases?

So as Erik mentioned, our price component in Q4 was a low 3% for the group. And obviously, a good part of that has been related to tariff compensation, and tariff compensation is only in the U.S. So the two or the three divisions that had a higher price component than the group average are obviously Americas, Entrance Systems and HID because they have relatively important part of their business in the U.S.

So the price increase for Americas was a little bit higher than the average for the group. We've always said that on the tariff side, price in the U.S. should be around, let's say, 3%, prefers a little bit higher than 3%. We now have seen that it's a little bit lower than 3% because we were able to further move parts, subassemblies and products to more tariff favorable destinations.

So if you calculate with, let's say, 1.5% tariff impact for the full year 2025 on group level, and if you take into account that most of that has come in Q2, Q3, then you can also see what that gives us now in 2026.

And then the rest of the 1.5% to 2% I mentioned for the full year is then the normal price increases that we do at the beginning of the year to compensate for general inflation, material inflation, labor inflation, you name it. And then depending on where material indexes go, we will continue to try to increase prices as we go.

[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from the line of Andreas Koski from BNP Paribas.

I just want to follow up on the price discussion here because when I look at your price development through 2025 and now your comment about new price increases at the end of last year and the beginning of this year, I get to a price component in the beginning of 2026 of around or even above 3%, again, which means the price component at the end of the year must be around 1% to get to 1.5% to 2% for the full year. Is that the right thinking? Or what am I missing?

I think in global terms, I think it's a good thinking. It's more or less in line with how we see things then. Again, everything will depend how costs evolve going forward and how successful we are or not in realizing the price increases that we have announced and are announcing and that should kick in later in the quarter.

Understood. And if -- I mean, in 2025, you've had a very strong drop-through -- organic drop-through of around 50% for the full year and it was close to 40% now in the fourth quarter, which was also a very good number. But if volumes will account for a larger share of organic growth in 2026, what do you think is a reasonable drop-through for you? Do you think that should come down towards 30%? Or what is a good guess?

I think everything depends on organic volume growth, and there is most probably somewhere an ideal organic volume growth where you get the best volume leverage. And that's most probably somewhere around perhaps 2%, 3% because if it's lower, it's more difficult to compensate for inflation.

If it's much higher, you put too much pressure on your supply chain, on your factory, you have to work with over time, you have to expedite deliveries and so on. So most probably that 2%, 3% organic volume growth is an ideal place to be. And if you are there in normal conditions, drop-through around that 30% should be realistic, yes.

And if -- okay, Bjorn, to squeeze in one just follow-up because you mentioned that comps will now become more difficult in Q1 and that market conditions are still very similar. Normally, you get the question how the current quarter has started. But does your comments around the tougher comps mean that you are now seeing slower organic growth in Q1 '26 compared to Q4 '25? What are you seeing?

Yes, perhaps on how that the quarter started, how January started, it's a bit difficult to compare. Of course, January had one working day less. If you compensate for that, January was a little bit lower than Q4. And that was mainly, we believe, linked to two things.

The weather conditions in general and the weather conditions in the U.S., in particular. We believe this is a temporary thing. And over the quarter, we don't think that is going to be a significant reason.

And the second reason was that we have a more important factory in Berlin. And you know that there was a sabotage -- electrical sabotage in Berlin that they were without current. Our factory was without current for 5 days. We could not produce an invoice for 5 days, had a negative effect in January.

But again, there, this will pick up, and we don't think that it's going to be a notable negative thing in the quarter. So that is on how the year started.

On -- the comment on the comparisons is as well top line as bottom line. Like we mentioned, we had a strong organic growth in Q1 last year than in Q4 the year before. Therefore, the comparison is more difficult. But also bottom line, the comment was always there because we have the normal seasonality, but we also want to highlight that now with SKIDATA coming in, we have a much higher seasonality.

SKIDATA will give an extra around 50 basis points seasonality in Q1, negative seasonality in Q1. And then like we mentioned on the currency side, which will have an important negative effect in Q1 top line but also bottom line. And that's perhaps the two deviations if you look at historical numbers.

So I think we have time for one more question.

The next question is from the line of Andre Kukhnin from UBS.

Well, just on SKIDATA, when you said 50 bps, is that at the group level? Is that EMEIA?

That's on group level.

Okay. And I just also wanted to ask about the Americas dilution to margin from M&A through the year looks like 90 basis points. And I think from discussions before, I understand this is mainly investments in the Level Lock acquisition where you're rolling out that technology across bigger brands.

Could you just comment on how that's going and what the outlook is for 2026? I noticed that dilution has kind of come down a bit or quite a bit in Q4 versus the prior quarter's run rate. Does that mean you're kind of now at the run rate of investment? And what kind of payback do you expect in 2026?

Yes. So if you take Q4, the acquisition -- the dilution of acquisitions in Q4 in the Americas has nothing to do with Level Lock because we own it now more than a year. And so therefore, Level Lock is in the organic part.

The dilution in Q4 is mainly transactional related costs for the two acquisitions that we also mentioned in the presentation. So you could say it's more one-off type of thing, whereas it's true that Level Lock has around 100 bps dilution for the Americas.

Level Lock -- it's fair to say that we are not entirely happy with the performance of Level Lock after the acquisition. We are struggling a little bit on getting the sales up in line with our expectations.

We have been taking measures to do that because we should see more sales as well on the residential side as on the light commercial side, and we have put now the right resources in place and the right focus in place to do that, but that was a bit later than anticipated.

And I think we have also been perhaps a bit too slow in adapting the cost to a lower top line because we, on one side, wanted to continue and finalize some of the R&D projects that they are working on because we have bought them in the first place as a, let's say, R&D machine coming with very exciting new products.

And on the other hand, we wanted to understand first a little bit better the commercial momentum. So we have now taken actions also on the cost side. So that dilution should gradually reduce now over the coming quarters. But it will remain dilutive for the quarters to come.

It's time for us to round up. Thank you, Andre, and thanks, everyone, for your participation. We -- if there are any follow-up questions, please feel welcome to reach out to us at Investor Relations. And we look also forward to meeting and seeing many of you in the coming weeks. Thank you again, and have a good day.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the presentation of ASSA ABLOY's Q3 report in 2025. My name is Björn Tibell, I'm heading Investor Relations. And joining me here in the studio are ASSA ABLOY's CEO, Nico Delvaux and our CFO, Erik Pieder. As usual, we will now kick off this conference with a summary of the report and then we will open up for your questions.

So Nico, that means it's over to you.

Thanks, Björn, also good morning from my side. Q3 results, we can show strong numbers for Q3 with good growth and strong margins. We had a good organic sales development with a strong 3% organic growth with good sales growth in EMEIA Entrance Systems, Global Tech in Americas, and the sales decline in Asia Pacific, mainly because of the continued challenging situation in Greater China.

Good operational execution with record operating margin, highest operating margin since Q3 2015, 16.8% EBIT with excellent operating leverage offsetting our M&A and currency dilution. Also very strong cash flow, 10% up and a cash conversion of 125% and then we completed 5 acquisitions in the quarter.

If you look at the numbers, sales of SEK 38 billion. Like I mentioned, 3% organic sales, a strong 2% price and 1% volume and 5% net acquired growth and then minus 6% from currency, mainly SEK dollar related. So top line, up 2%. Very strong EBITA, record margin of 17.9% and also a record margin of EBIT of 16.8% and then EBIT and EPS up 3%, EBIT in absolute value SEK 6.4 billion.

If you look a little bit on the world, I can perhaps summarize because the picture is very similar as in Q1 and in Q2, wherein our 3 main regions as well in North America, as in Europe, as in Oceania, we see -- we continue to see very good momentum on the nonresidential side, but also in all 3 regions, we continue to see more challenging market conditions on the residential side.

We have seen also a slight recovery, I would say, on the logistics vertical, which is important for Entrance Systems, not a V recovery, but a smaller but a positive recovery. We have seen a plus 5% organic growth in North America, a very mixed picture for our Americas division, where we have seen high single-digit organic growth for the nonresidential part and low single-digit negative growth for the residential part. And then strong performance also for the other divisions with good momentum in all the different verticals. Also our spec business up double digit in the quarter.

South America or Latin America, plus 1%, where for the Americas division, we have seen a small single-digit negative decline, but then good performance for the other divisions. In Europe, plus 2%, same picture, like I mentioned earlier, on residential, commercial, where we see in Sweden, at least some recovery on the residential side on the R&R side, but no real recovery yet on the new build. And then obviously, the rest of Europe, which is more ECB-related, is later in the cycle on the residential side. But continued good momentum on the commercial side, also in Europe, double-digit growth of our spec business.

Africa minus 8%, it's a small continent -- small part of our business is mainly related to higher project business for HID last year, so more difficult comparison. Oceania plus 3% with good performance as well in Australia as in New Zealand. And New Zealand is a bit in the same picture as Sweden. They also started to cut interest rates much earlier. And there, we see good recovery as well on the new build as on the R&R side.

And the last but not least, APAC, minus 4%, a very mixed picture between on one side, Greater China, where we continue to see double-digit negative growth where market conditions remain very challenging on the residential side where all indicators are down double digits. And then the rest of Asia where we have seen good momentum, good positive growth as well in Southeast Asia as in markets like India.

If we then look at some of the products we launched in the quarter, some digital products. We extended our Centrios product portfolio offering with a new mortise lock range. Centrios is our access solution for small and medium enterprises. We also launched in LatAm, a new range of digital door lock residential applications with facial recognition. And InVue launched a new high security retail display system for phones, tablets and wearables giving much more hands-free, smooth testing environment for new tablet, phones in those high-end stores.

Also interesting to see that our electromechanical products grew 13% in the quarter. So we continue to see that shift from mechanical to electromechanical and digital, and that obviously also gives us an opportunity to get more recurring revenue. Our recurring remains our strongest growth product or service offering and today is close to 6% of top line so continue also growing in relative weight.

So now 3 consecutive quarters with good organic growth and that organic growth continues to be complemented with very good growth through acquisitions. Our sales, 62% up versus 2020. And then our margins well within the 16% to 17% bandwidth we aim for, a run rate of EBIT margin of 16.1% and our EBITA margin even above the 16% to 17% bandwidth at 17.1%. So good margins, increased top line, they are also good -- therefore, also good bottom line, a record operating profit for Q3 and our run rate EBIT up 108% versus 2020.

Acquisitions, we continue to be very active on the acquisition side, 5 acquisitions completed in the quarter, 16 acquisitions completed year-to-date as of end of September and those acquisitions represent an annualized sales of close to SEK 5 billion. Just highlighting one of the acquisitions in the quarter, Calmell, a Spanish manufacturer of smart cards, smart paper tickets and magnetic tickets, acquisition in HID. They are based in Barcelona, they will reinforce our offering within smart cards, and we had a sales of around SEK 330 million in 2024.

If we then zoom into the different divisions, starting with EMEIA, very good quarter for EMEIA. We have a strong organic sales growth of 4%. It has been many quarters for EMEIA since we have seen such a high organic growth rate. So very happy with that. Strong sales growth in Central Europe and the Nordics, smaller sales growth in Middle East, India and Africa. And then sales decline in U.K., Ireland, that was mainly because some commercial projects are on hold because of some new government regulation, but we are confident that those projects will be released now in the coming quarters.

And then also sales decline in South Europe, that's mainly linked to a more challenging residential market in France. Strong operating margin of 15%. You really see now through that organic sales through that volume growth that we also get very good volume leverage and therefore also better margins for EMEIA. Operating leverage, 40 basis points, driven by volume growth, positive mix and operational efficiencies. FX also helped us with 40 basis points because of the stronger SEK. And then M&A was dilutive 30 basis points.

Americas, an organic sales of 3%. We have a strong high single-digit sales growth in the North America nonresidential segment, but small single-digit negative growth in the North America Residential segment and in Latin America, where the residential segment continues to be a little bit up and down, continues to be around that flat line and depending a little bit on quarter per quarter and the comparison with the quarter of the same year before we see a small growth or in this case, a small negative growth.

An operating margin of 18.5%, excellent operating leverage, 70 basis points. FX dilutive 20 basis points and then M&A continue to be strongly dilutive 120 basis points. That's still linked to the Level Lock acquisition. We then go to Opening Solutions Asia Pacific, an organic sales decline of 4%. We have good sales growth in Pacific North Asia -- Northeast Asia subdivision and a significant sales decline in the Greater China, Southeast Asia subdivision, where we have, like I mentioned before, that's a very mixed picture where Greater China is down double digit -- strong double digit and where we have seen good double-digit growth in Southeast Asia. So in the whole picture, it's really Greater China that brings that division down.

Nevertheless, a strong operating margin of 10.2%, a long time ago that we had a double-digit margin in this division, excellent operating leverage of 260 basis points, FX dilutive 30 basis points and no M&A activity in this division. Global Technologies, also a strong quarter with an organic sales of 3% with good growth in both HID and Global Solutions and a very strong operating margin, I would say, where all the stars are really aligned of 19.8%. Good operating leverage, 20 basis points, dilutive FX, 70 basis points, strongly dilutive, I would say, because of the weaker U.S. dollar. But then strong accretive on the M&A side, 140 basis points, a little bit because of the divestment of Citizen ID, but mainly also because of the acquisition of InVue, which has been a very successful acquisition with very good accretion also bottom line-wise.

And then last but not least, Entrance Systems, also a very strong quarter again for Entrance Systems with an organic sales of 4%. Strong sales growth in Perimeter Security and Pedestrian, good sales growth in Doors & Automation and Industrial. So in all 4 segments, good growth. And also good to see that our growth in service has come back to a strong higher single-digit level. Also strong operating margin of 17.4% with excellent operating leverage, 130 basis points. Dilutive FX, 20 basis points and then still an important dilution from SKIDATA on the M&A side with 80 basis points. As you know, SKIDATA is still very seasonal with very low sales in Q1 and Q2, a bit better sales in Q3 and then much better sales in Q4.

And with that, I give the word to Erik for some more details on the financial numbers.

Thank you, Nico, and good morning also from my side. I will just repeat a couple of numbers when it comes to the sales. We were up 2%. Organic growth was up with 3%. Acquisition acquired growth was plus 5%. And then you see a strong dilutive effect of the currency or the FX of minus 6%. If we look on what it looks like today on the period end versus last year, then if you look for Q4, we expect an even higher negative impact of minus 9%. And since it's mainly related to the SEK versus dollar, we will also have a clear dilutive impact on our margin.

Operating income as well as income before tax, net income and EPS, they were all up with 3% versus the same period last year. As mentioned by Nico before, we had a strong cash flow. We were up in the quarter, 10% versus the same period last year. And if you look on year-to-date, we're almost at the same level as we were a year ago. Return on capital employed remained on the same level at 14.2%. If we look into the bridge and dissect it a bit, the organic sales, it was a strong 2% when it comes to price, which leaves, I would say, plus/minus a bit, 1% in organic volume growth.

The flow-through, as seen was at 41%. So it continued to be strong. Of course, it's related to the price versus cost, but we also have strong operational efficiencies. We have -- like this quarter, we have savings from the MFP projects of roughly SEK 240 million, but we also have done other operational efficiencies in order then to be able to perform such a good flow-through that we have. Currency was negative with 20 basis points. And then you see the dilutive impact on the M&A. That comes predominantly then from SKIDATA and Level Lock. However, remember that we bought those 2 companies last year in September. So they are in for 2 months in the acquisition column and then they're in for 1 month in the organic column.

And then as mentioned before by Nico, we had a strong performance of InVue in the quarter. If we look on the cost breakdown, direct material was 80 basis points better than the same period last year. Of that, roughly 1/3 comes from positive interdivisional mix, which leaves, let's say, if I call it the true price versus cost is about 2/3 so let's say, almost at 60 basis points. It is starting to go down, and we expect it to continue to be slightly lower in the quarters to come. Conversion cost was also positive versus the same period last year. You have the higher volumes and then the operational efficiencies, as I talked about on the last slide.

And then SG&A, slightly worse than a year ago, minus 40 basis points. There, we have sort of -- you have the inflation is impacting as well as we continue to invest in R&D as well as in sales. So that's the reason why it's slightly negative. Operating cash flow, as mentioned before, it's up 10% versus the same period last year. As mentioned before by Nico, the cash conversion was a strong 125% for the quarter. It's driven by the strong earnings as well as reduction in our working capital, predominantly within receivables as well as within inventory.

That sort of leaves, if you flip the slide that you can see that the net debt to EBITDA went from 2.3 in the same period last year down to 2.2. If you look sequentially on the gearing, we went from 70% in Q2 down to 65% in this quarter. So we have actually reduced the actual debt with about SEK 4 billion in the quarter. That comes from, I would say, the strong cash flow, as mentioned before. So all in all, we have a very strong financial position, and we can continue with our acquisition strategy.

Last but not least, from my side, the earnings per share, as mentioned before, they were up with 3% versus the same period last year. And with that, I hand it back to Nico for some concluding remarks.

Thanks, Erik. So concluding, it was a good Q3 for ASSA ABLOY. Good organic sales growth of strong 3%, a strong record operating margin of 16.8% with excellent operating leverage of 41%, the best operating margins over the last 10 years. A very strong cash flow, 10% up and a cash conversion of 125%. And then it's clear that we continue to live in uncertain market conditions where things change very fast day after day, night after night, tweet after tweet. But it's clear that our decentralized organization really helps us to make local decisions in a fast and agile way.

And we will continue to invest there where we see opportunities to grow fast, and we will continue to adapt our cost in those markets or in those verticals where we see that the market is challenging. And then Björn asked me to remind you that we have our Capital Markets Day on November 19 in the U.S., and you see also the link where you can register yourself, if you didn't do so yet. And with that, I give back the word to Björn for Q&A.

Thank you, Nico. Well, excellent. That means it's time to open up for the Q&A session. And as usual, can I ask that you limit yourself to one question and then a follow-up. And if we get around the whole queue of questions, then you can obviously line up again. The operator will tell you how to do that. So that means, operator, we are ready to kick off the Q&A session. Please go ahead.

[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from the line of Andre Kukhnin from UBS.

I wanted to ask really about the Global Tech margins now that we had a couple of quarters of strong delivery. Do you think it's time that they challenge your view, Nico, that this is a 17% to 18% margin business? And as we kind of look forward and see continuation of gradual recovery and operational gearing that this business can generate with this kind of cleaner form with a couple of disposals. Do you think we should be thinking about maybe at least the high end of that or maybe even going through it?

You continue to challenge me, Andre, like a lot of other people continue to challenge me on the margin for Global Tech. And my answer remains the same. We still believe this is a business that should perform somewhere between 17% and 18%. Then you can debate if it has to be on the higher end of that bandwidth or not. I can only say that in the quarter, all stars were aligned in the sense that we had good growth, good cost savings, good price realization, and we also had a strong PACS and a strong hospitality, and that's the 2 best margin contributors in the mix of Global Tech.

You should not forget that all the other verticals in Global Solutions next to hospitality and all the other business units next to PACS in HID still have lower margins are also smaller, and we continue to invest heavily in those verticals to get them on a higher volume level and therefore, ultimately, over time also will give better margins, but we are not there yet. Therefore, we remain with that ambition between 17% and 18%.

Very clear. And if I may just ask a quick follow-up to Erik on the price cost, just to make sure I got that right. Did you say the pure price cost was 60 bps in Q3 and you expect that to get smaller from here? Could you just confirm that? And then also kind of what would drive that becoming smaller in coming quarters?

No. What I said was that -- and you're right about the number because I said 1/3 was related -- out of the 80 bps, 1/3 is related to mix and 2/3 is related to the true price versus cost. And then you come to around the 60 bps when you look at that. I think that, of course, what you see is that for us, the comps there is getting tougher and tougher. So -- and I think that is sort of why it's more from a comps perspective that I'm saying it. And then -- yes, so I would say that will be the main reason.

The next question comes from the line of George Featherstone from Barclays.

I just wanted to touch a little bit on Entrance Systems because it seems as though in the Industrial segment, you've been pretty constructive on the momentum in that business throughout the year. And you talked a little bit about orders before. I don't know whether you could give us a little bit more color on how orders have evolved so far in the second half of the year to sort of paint a picture for how things might evolve into the first half of next year.

Yes. So we -- what we said is that we had seen a good recovery on the loading dock side on logistics vertical end of last year -- November, December last year, where we got good order intake. And we have also said that typical delivery times are 6 to 9 months. So the Q3 and the good organic growth for Industrial segment that you see in Entrance Systems in Q3 is thanks to those orders that we got later last year. I would say it has been a little bit up and down. We were then very excited November, December, then we saw things a little bit calmer again at the beginning of the year, then we got another uptick and then we saw it's calmer again.

So we definitely don't see that V-shape recovery on the logistics vertical side. It's more a steady, slower recovery. But nevertheless, it's a good recovery from a lower level. And therefore, we should continue to see improvement on our Industrial segment for the coming quarters.

We now have a question from the line of James Moore from Rothschild & Co.

I've got a couple of questions, if I could. One on the U.S. residential environment where it's obviously stayed soft. But when you look forward in terms of pipeline or specification, do you see any signs of improvement? I noticed that some mortgage application data is starting to tick up. I don't know if you're seeing that yourselves. That's the first question.

And then the second question, great to see electromechanical growing 13%. I noticed it's been a similar share of group sales for the last 4, 5 years. Do you have a sense or could you give us a sense for the shape of organic sales growth in the last 2 or 3 years? Has that maintained itself or slowed down? Is there something behind that other than acquisition effects? Any color on that would be great, Nico, and how you see it really going forward?

I think first on the residential side in the U.S., yes, I agree with you that there is some positive indicators -- market indicators on the residential side, but there is also -- if you want to see the glass half empty, there's also negative indicators on the residential side. I think that's a little bit what we see also in our results on the residential side over the last quarters. It has been a little bit up and down around that 0 level. And depending also where we were same quarter a year ago, you have this small single digit up or small single digit down in -- which is the case now in Q3. We don't see really a strong pickup on the residential side yet.

And internally, as a matter of fact, we don't have too much long-term indicators because when you refer to spec business, we don't spec on the residential side. So our spec activities on the nonresidential side. So that is not an indicator for residential business. So we look at similar indicators as you do, James. I can only say that we don't see that strong uptick yet. We know that there is a significant deficit in housing in the U.S. So sooner or later, that has to come and hopefully, confidently, it will come sooner than later.

When it comes to the electromechanical part of our total sales, it's around 31%. True that percent-wise, it's not so much up, but it has all to do like, you also alluded, to the acquisitions we do as we do a lot of acquisitions recently also on the non-electromechanical side that brings that percentage down. I think it's more important to look at the pure organic growth and the growth of the electromechanical side. And there, we have definitely seen an acceleration, I would say, after COVID, and you see that acceleration to continue.

After COVID, there's much more people that are looking for electromechanical solution for a simple reason, you can do so much more operational efficiency-wise, management-wise, you can do it also touch-free as compared to a mechanical solution where prior to COVID, we still often had specifications written pure in a mechanical way. Today, there's much more electromechanical. And if you already asked for a mechanical spec, then often there also as an option, an electromechanical alternative. I don't know the exact number for the last 3 years, but it's around double-digit organic growth that we had on the electromechanical side, if you take the last 3 years.

The next question comes from the line of Gael de-Bray from Deutsche Bank.

Yes. I have 2 questions, please. The first one is on the pricing side. I mean, looking at the U.S. PPI for locks and door hardware products, I mean, it's been up double digit in the past couple of months roughly. So I was wondering, I mean, the pricing contribution to the group's top line is still more or less unchanged at about 2% plus this quarter, which looks a bit surprising in light of the PPI dynamics. So specifically, I mean, could you talk a bit about your pricing development there in the U.S.? That's question number one.

Yes. So I think price is up as you compare to Q2 because we have said that price was a strong 2% whereas compared to Q2, it was a low 2% and in Q1, it was 1%. So it's incredibly definitely up. We had said earlier that also in order to compensate for the tariffs in the U.S., we needed a price increase somewhere between 4% and 5%. That has come down. It's today more between 3% and 4%. And that has to do with -- 3% to 4% on the U.S. business. That has all to do with the fact that we also found other ways to compensate for the tariffs. Obviously, we have been negotiating with our suppliers and got very good results there.

We have also been able to relocate some components, some subassemblies and assemblies to countries that are less tariff impacted. And therefore, the price component that we need came a little bit down. So if you take between 3% and 4%, if you say whatever, 3.5% that means -- 3.5% on the U.S. means between 1.5% and 2% on a group level. If you take on top of that the normal 1% inflationary price, you look somewhere at 3%. And at least we are going in that direction with a high 2% in Q3.

Another reason why it's still lower in Q3 is the fact that we still, at the beginning of the quarter, had some inventory at lower cost prior to the tariffs, which we were able then to continue to invoice at the beginning of Q3. Obviously, that is now done in the end of Q3 and going into Q4. So you should see a further higher price component now going into Q4.

Super helpful. And the second question is I mean a few days ago, you announced the acquisition of Kentix, which is obviously a very small transaction, but in a key market, data centers, which have obviously become an increasingly important vertical for many other industrial companies. So maybe could you elaborate a bit on the addressable market size on the growth potential in the field of monitoring and access control products for data centers?

I would say very excited about that Kentix acquisition because it was really the missing link for us to really offer a complete access solution for data centers. They have particularly a very good solution for those shared data centers where you have to control indirects different customers on the same rec, and they combine that access control with a lot of other information on the performance of the service. They measure temperature, they measure current consumption and so on. So you get also a very good diagnostic data on how that part of the data center is working. So very excited about that.

I can only say that data centers, if you look a year, 1.5 years back, it didn't even make it to our dashboard when we are looking at specification. Today, it's by far the fastest-growing vertical when we do specifications. And we don't specify all data centers. There's still a lot of data centers that are not specified and go straight into the sales funnel. But today, it's not in the top 3 of our verticals yet, but it's growing very fast and making its way up. So it's definitely something that will move the needle for us even on group level going forward.

I think we have a really complete solution from our fencing around the data center with Perimeter Security to the entrance in the data center with our security doors in the geographical divisions and our Industrial and Pedestrian doors in Entrance Systems and then a full suite of access solution with our mechanical -- electromechanical offering in the geographical divisions and now nicely complemented also with that additional acquisition we did last week. So very excited about that, yes.

We now have a question from the line of Max Yates from Morgan Stanley.

I just wanted to ask on the government shutdown that we currently have in the U.S. And I mean, in your Institutional business, obviously, some of these verticals, sort of government buildings, some of the education are probably quite important. Do you think this will have any effects on demand in your business? And are you seeing anything already in terms of some of those projects kind of being delayed or pushed out?

So the pure central government business of the U.S. is a smaller part of our business. Then some of the businesses are also continue to run. I think everything depends on how long that shutdown would last. If it's, let's call it, a normal shutdown, it should not have any negative effect on our business. It's just a small stop and go on a very small part of our business. And as there is a big pipeline, I think, there is no effect on our business. Of course, if it would hang on and be much, much, much longer, then ultimately, it could have some consequences. But let's take that challenge if that would be the case.

The next question comes from the line of Rizk Maidi from Jefferies.

So the first one is really whether you've seen any changes when it comes to the demand environment between the months of the summer and then September? And whether you could just give us an indication of how Q4 started for you so far?

Yes. Of course, Q3 is very, very difficult to answer that question because July and August, as you know, are holiday months and it can fluctuate very much on smaller months. Obviously, September was much better than July and August because we had also one working day more and it was not a holiday month. But if you try to compare and compare like-for-like, so correcting for the working days, September was slightly better than July and August. And then we have seen the same momentum now in October as -- or the beginning of October as we have seen in September.

Perfect. And then finally, just on the M&A impact on margins guidance for Q4. I think you're guiding for it to be accretive. Can you just walk us through sort of the divisional impact here and what we should be aware of?

The main reason is that SKIDATA and Level Lock will not be longer in the acquisition column because we are now partly owner of both companies for more than 12 months. So they will move into the organic column. And as you could see in Q3 and also in previous quarters, they have been the main reason for the dilution. Then I think one bigger acquisition on the acquisition column, which is still there in Q4 is the InVue acquisition, which has been accretive, and we will probably -- confidently will continue to be accretive also in Q4.

We now have a question from the line of Mattias Holmberg from DNB.

Nico, I think in the past, you've talked a little bit about your window hardware business in the U.S. as sort of potentially a leading indicator for the U.S. residential side as I guess it's one of the few exposures you have to directly towards the homebuilders. Could you say anything about what you've seen and heard from this vertical, given that it seems like the sort of overall residential market is hovering around this no growth environment and has been doing so for quite some time?

I think we -- our business might not be directly representative for the market because I think we have done 2 good things in our window hardware business in the U.S. One, we were able to compensate in a good way also through pricing for the tariffs, which then helps obviously on the organic growth side. But I think we have also been able to improve our relative position in the market through to some new wins. I think if you look at the underlying market, it's very similar as what I said before. I think on the R&R side, it's a little bit more positive than on the new build side. On the new build side, we don't see any real recovery yet, and we also don't see any signs of a real recovery yet.

The next question comes from the line of Vivek Midha from Citi.

My question is also on the Global Tech M&A performance. It looks relative to Q2 that both in InVue on the absolute revenues and on the margin contribution, that looks to have improved. I was just wondering if you could give us color on what growth -- organic growth InVue delivered in the quarter within that M&A line? And more broadly, what's been doing to drive performance within that business?

So InVue does asset management protection of assets in retail stores. So if you have a high-end store of iPhones or tablets, they protect those -- that equipment that people cannot steal it. In the past, you remember there was always with a cable, and it was not very user-friendly. They came with different new innovative solutions. One of the latest solutions is that you don't have this wire anymore. You just have something on the phone that permits you to really feel how the new phone feels in your hand.

And if you walk too far away from the station, then the alarm will go after making it much more user-friendly. And we have had several bigger global companies in the phone and tablet space that have adapted that technology from us. So therefore, we have seen very good higher double-digit growth of that InVue business as compared to a year ago, and that with also good margins, and that's the reason why you see the good acquisition column for Global Tech. Next to that, of course, we have the divestment of the Citizen ID business.

Understood. And a very quick follow-up. Just to understand on the price cost, even if we're looking at the true price cost, that looks to have been broadly stable. In the past, you were guiding for this to gradually fade from the 60 basis points you saw in Q2. So just to understand what, if anything, has surprised you to the upside in the third quarter on that price cost?

I think we should run our business that we don't have surprises. So I would say that we had not a surprise on the price cost. So if you look at the direct material percentage, what Erik explained in the presentation, you can clearly see that we were able to fully compensate for tariffs and other inflationary pressure, yes, partly through price and partly through other actions that I mentioned before, and we're able to maintain the margin, and that has been our ambition from the beginning. That is what we said that we would do from the beginning.

So in that aspect, that should not be a surprise, and we will continue to do so also in the coming quarters. But I think you can also see it in a positive way, despite all the inflationary pressure, despite all the tariffs and so on, we still had, let's say, 60 basis points pure price cost accretion in the quarter, 60 basis points of the 80 basis points in total that you see on the direct material line.

We now have a question from the line of Magnus Kruber from Nordea.

It's Magnus, a couple of questions from me. Good to see acceleration in growth in EMEIA in the quarter. Could you help us a little bit to what degree that helped us on the mix, on the margins, how many bps that helps us?

On which division?

On EMEIA.

Yes. So I think on EMEIA, the main reasons for the improved margin is the volume. I mean, you have seen the 4% growth, the other price in line with group. So they had good pure organic volume growth. And we have always said that EMEIA today was on a cost structure that once you would start to see volume growth, you would also see very good margin improvement. And that is what we have seen in the quarter. So if we are able to continue to see that volume growth in the coming quarters, we should continue to see also margin improvement for EMEIA. And that is thanks to a lot of operation efficiency measures they have done. They also contributed to MFP. They did a lot of VA/VE actions. And then, of course, you have the price effect.

That is true that there is also a positive mix effect in the sense that we are growing better in the Nordics than in the South of Europe. And you know that in EMEIA, if you look, the higher you go geographically, the better the margin; the lower you go, the lower the margins. So that was a positive mix effect.

Then on the other side, we have also a negative mix effect in the sense that we were growing nicely also in Africa, Middle East, India and that has also lower margin. So yes, there is a small positive mix effect, but the main reason is the organic volume growth that we experienced in the quarter.

Got it. And my second question, could you elaborate a little bit on what we see in terms of margins across China and the other parts of APAC have helped us a bit with the margin levels there in the past?

There I would say also nothing has changed. We have always said that Southeast Asia, Pacific is in normal conditions, margins more or less in line with EMEIA. Whereas Greater China, we still have an ambition that one day over time, we want to have that high single-digit EBIT. Today, we are far from that. Today, in Greater China, we are very slightly negative. So you could say close to 0 EBIT. So I think Greater China has done an excellent job in further cutting the cost to keep at least the margin close to 0 in a much lower top line today than, let's say, a year or 2 years ago.

[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from the line of Daniela Costa from Goldman Sachs.

I just have 2 follow-ups. On the pricing point, I think as of the 2Q call and what we had of tariffs at that point, you had said that you needed to put prices up in the U.S., 4% to 5%. Since then, we had the extra or the up on the Section 232 of steel and derivatives in August. Can you comment to sort of what would be the equivalent figure now? And I guess sort of what's inside your going forward pricing commentary? That's question number one. I'll ask the second one afterwards.

Yes. So like I mentioned earlier, the 4%, 5% we mentioned earlier is more today between 3% and 4% because we were able to negotiate with suppliers better price, and we were able to move some of our components, some of our subassemblies and some of our final products to countries with less tariff impact. When it comes then to the new tariffs on the direct material percentages in the different products, you will appreciate it's a very difficult calculation to be made because you really have to look product by product and then you have to see how much steel content there is in every individual product. So we are still fully -- you could say, very much into the calculation, but we believe it has no significant effect on the tariffs because you win and gain a little bit.

So -- and if there would be an increase of the tariff cost, again, we will just compensate that through price increases and other operational measures like we have done for all the other tariffs. So we remain very confident that we -- also going forward, we will be able to compensate tariff costs and keep margins.

Okay. So 3% to 4% regardless of the post development? Okay. And then just in terms of the strength you've mentioned and been talking through in Europe, driven by Central Europe. Can you give us a little bit more granular by vertical view? Is it resi? Is it non-resi? Is there any restocking at distributors? Sort of what are the main contributors there?

Well, definitely not restocking. That's not a significant argument. I think we should also here make distinction between residential and nonresidential. So residential is around 45% of EMEIA. And I would say on the residential side, it remains challenging. It's most probably bottomed out on a lower level if you take the bigger picture for EMEIA. But for EMEIA, bigger picture, definitely not a recovery yet. The only recovery we really see is in Sweden, where Sweden continued -- started to cut interest rates already almost 2 years ago. There have been 5 or 6 interest rate cuts in the meantime.

And there, we have seen R&R coming back from a lower level. But in a way, we are even a little bit disappointed to see that it takes longer for the new build to come back. We haven't seen that recovery on the new build yet. We are confident it will come, and hopefully, it will come sooner than later. I think the rest of Europe, where it is more ECB related, is still later in the cycle. And there the more challenging country is definitely France, where we have seen more pressure on our residential business. If you take the nonresidential, it's still on a very good strong level, very similar to what I mentioned earlier for the U.S. Our spec business is up double digit, and we see a good higher single-digit growth overall for that business in EMEIA. And then, of course, we have good emerging market part also in EMEIA with Africa, Middle East and definitely also India. That's still a smaller part of our business, but a fast-growing part.

The next question comes from the line of Andreas Koski from BNP Paribas Exane.

I want to ask about Global Technologies and the organic growth of 3%, which you would say is a good organic growth in the quarter. But I think in the past, you've been talking about an organic growth rate of around 5% as a level that we should expect going forward. I just want to get your thoughts on how to think about the organic growth in Global Tech going forward?

I think when we look at those numbers, obviously, we should not just look at one quarter because for the quarter, also the comparison with a year ago is important and also the way we came out of, you could say, more turbulent cycle on -- especially on the HID side with all the electronic component shortages we had 2 years ago, and therefore, disturbs a little bit the curve.

And also on the Global Solutions side, the very high comparison we had with last year because you remember that we said at several occasions that Global Solutions for more than 2 years, for more than 8 quarters was growing double digits. So it's difficult to continue to do that. But I think overall, we remain with our statement that Global Tech is a division that should grow higher than our 5% ambition that we have as a group. Global Tech over business cycle should grow closer to that high single digit rather than the 5% we have as an ambition for the group. And we are confident that if you look over a longer period that you will see that acceleration again now after, you could say, the turbulences around electronic component shortages.

And looking into the quarters ahead, how do the comparables look like? Will the comparables still be tough and we should expect a more muted picture in the very near term?

I think Q4 will be still a bit more challenging. But then as of next year, we should see that acceleration.

That's great. And then on the -- on the EBIT side, if I look at the other line or overhead cost line, which was negative SEK 272 million, it's a very high cost number compared to previous quarters. Is that step-up because of the acquisitions you have made or -- and that higher level will now be sustainable? Or did you have some, call it, extraordinary or something in there and that we should expect that to come down to the low 200s that we have seen in recent quarters?

I think there, Andreas, it sort of fluctuates between the quarters so you shouldn't read too much into now -- I mean now it's up above SEK 270 million. Last year, we had SEK 192 million, but it's more sort of fluctuates. It has nothing to do with acquisitions at all. It's just sort of -- yes, that it fluctuates. .

We have a follow-up question from the line of Rizk Maidi from Jefferies.

Just a very quick one. You talked about the U.K. being weak, and I think that was also the case in Q2 where you had some missing projects that we thought would come back in Q3, but they didn't. Can you maybe just elaborate on that and just quantify the impact? I think in Q2, you said it cost the division 1 percentage point of the organic growth?

So I think what we said at previous occasions is that if you look at the residential market, which is challenging, there's perhaps 2 places where we are a bit more optimistic that is Sweden. I commented on that. And the other one, U.K. also because U.K. has been on the lower side, residential since quite some time. And we continue to see that slight optimism on the residential side for the U.K.

The reason why it's lower in Q3 is more on the commercial side, where some of the commercial projects through new government legislation has been on hold. Those projects have not been released, and the government is working on adapting those standards and regulations. And we are confident that now Q4 and definitely in the coming quarters, those projects will be released and then we will see that growth coming in also on the commercial side, and that will help then the U.K. picture.

[Operator Instructions] We have a follow-up question from the line of James Moore from Rothschild & Co.

Just a quick one, Nico. I see that the PPI in the U.S., the purchase price index is up 10%. It's quite a big number. I just wondered if that is a good guide for what you're seeing in the market with the current tariff environment. I understand about the inventory cycling, but maybe in the more recent months where we're now seeing a full flat tariff impact. Do you think that's a good guide for the U.S.?

We would like to have 10% price increase. I can tell you that is not the case for us. think the Americas price component has been a little bit higher than the group average. And I want to come back to what I said before, we need that 3% to 4% for the tariffs. And if you then take another, let's say, 1% or whatever normal inflation, that is more the number that I think is realistic for our business. Then, of course, if we can further increase prices, we'll always try to do so and perhaps the PPI is a good argument to see if we can further increase prices, but it looks a little bit too high for us at least.

Sorry, so my mistake. So the 3% to 5% comment is specifically for the U.S.A. It's not the global impact. That's just the U.S. business.

Exactly. Yes. So 3% to 4%, the U.S. business, which means 1.5% to low 2% for the group, you could say.

We have a follow-up question from the line of Andre Kukhnin from UBS.

I just wanted to come back to the specified activity at growing double digits in U.S. and Europe. I think in U.S., we've been there, I think, for a quarter or 2 already. And in EMEIA, I think, too. I'm just trying to understand when do we get the kind of growth acceleration in revenues from this step-up in specified activity. Could you just talk us through the cadence there?

Well, it's very difficult to say because we make specifications today and some of the projects are realized 6 to 9 months later. Some of the projects are realized 2 years later. So when you look at spec, you should look more on a trend over a longer period, but I would argue that you see that acceleration already in EMEIA. I mean if you see the 4% organic growth in the quarter, that is clearly also linked to, like I mentioned earlier, the commercial side because it's not so much coming from the residential side. And it's on the commercial side where we spec all these projects, and it's linked also to the shift from mechanical to electromechanical. It's also linked to more green specifications, something perhaps more specific for EMEIA. And we are -- we continue to see that trend on the specification side.

But is it right that the actual revenues of your commercial businesses in U.S. and Europe are not growing double digit at this stage, they're in high single digit?

Yes. I've said during the presentation that our North America commercial business was growing high single digits in the quarter. And it's a similar -- it's a little bit more difficult to calculate in EMEIA because, as you know, whether you put multifamily and some of the semi commercial projects, but it's a similar number in EMEIA.

Thank you. That means it's time for us to round up this conference. If there are any follow-up questions, feel welcome to reach out to Isabelle or myself at Investor Relations. And that means we look forward to seeing you in the next coming weeks and many of you also at our CMD in Milwaukee. Have a good day now, and stay safe.