Mycronic Aktie

Hello, and welcome to the presentation of Mycronic's Q1 report. My name is Sven Chetkovich. I'm the Director, Investor Relations at Mycronic. And with me today, I have Mycronic's CEO, Anders Lindqvist; and CFO, Pierre Brorsson, who will be presenting today. And with that, I hand over to Anders. Please go ahead and present Mycronic's Q1 report.

Thank you, Sven, and hello, everyone. Welcome. So today, of course, we'll talk about the quarter 1 result and then go a little bit deeper in the different divisions and how the development is. Pierre Brorsson will explain more about the financials. We will have a few words on sustainability, and we will end with the question-and-answer session today. And as you -- as always, you will find in the material on the website also the market update in that part, which we will not present.

So talking about the first quarter 2026. So first of all you need to -- we need to keep in mind that also the quarter 1 of last year was a very strong quarter. So we compare this quarter to an already very good quarter. But despite that, we have a strong increase on almost every row. So order intake up 23% to a little bit more than SEK 2.5 billion so very strong and a very strong contribution from Global Technologies. We will see that when we go into the divisions.

Also net sales following that almost as much 17% up, almost up to an equal number of SEK 2.5 billion, where we had increases from all divisions. and also a record high EBIT of quite close to a billion, SEK 938 million. So of course, a very strong margin of 37%, strong backlog of SEK 4.7 billion. And we also, during the quarter, have completed 2 acquisitions, ETZ and Cowin DST, and I will talk more about those when we talk about the divisions.

So looking on the different divisions, starting with Pattern Generators. So here, we closed the acquisition of Cowin DST, which is a company in South Korea. The acquisition was announced quite some time ago, but we had a quite long process to receive regulatory approval from the Korean authorities, as this is a strategic investment and also strategic business in South Korea. Cowin will contribute to the Pattern Generators' product portfolio, both with the products that are adding to the portfolio, but also with knowledge and new capabilities that we didn't have before. So super exciting to be able to develop that business now.

On the business side, very strong sales because of -- we delivered the most expensive machine that we have ever built, P8000. Prexision 8000 Evo was delivered in the quarter so the sales increased 8%, up to SEK 1.3 billion, more or less. Order intake close to SEK 600 million, which is not really a bad number, but we had a very strong quarter for last year of close to SEK 1 billion so that was down 38%. On the order intake side, we got 1 Prexision 8 Evo, 1 SLX and 1 MMX. So very strong gross margin, 77%, extremely strong EBIT, SEK 831 million and backlog of SEK 1.9 billion. And in this backlog, we have 14 systems.

Also notable is that after the quarter, we received a very special order for a customized SLX mask writer that is quite customized, which you can see on the price tag. The normal price of an SLX is between $4 million and $10 million, and this one was sold in a range between $27 million and $30 million. And it's not a product that we will be able to sell more of really. So this is a one-off event, but still a very good order.

PCB Assembly Solutions. So here, we struggle. We have done that for a while. So the continued -- we have a continued weak market almost everywhere. We have a strong headwind in the European market in the first quarter. Also in the U.S. market was quite weak in the quarter. And we can see that there's a lot of hesitation around customers to hold orders until then they have received firm orders commitment from their customers. So this is creating quite a lot of delay in the -- on the investment side. So order intake, SEK 287 million, which is 3% down and sales, SEK 318 million, which is a little bit up, but still not very strong. Gross margin, stable at 37% and EBIT at 8 million so very minor EBIT and an order backlog of SEK 116 million, which is also quite a low backlog. So you can see that we struggle in this division.

On the high-volume side, we see very strong market demand, both in the Chinese domestic market and also from outside of China. And especially to be noted is the aerospace industry in North America, which is very strong at the moment. We also have reached a milestone with the new factory that we have built in Thailand, where we have the first machines, both assembled and delivered. So we are able to make made in Thailand, not Made in China, which is a positive thing in this geopolitical situation that we are in right now.

And very strong order intake, SEK 737 million, which is 33% up on already strong comparative number. Sales up 24% to SEK 400 million, stable gross margin at 42% and EBIT at close to SEK 40 million. On the EBIT, we have an impact of this employee share ownership program of minus SEK 24 million as well, included in the number. Order backlog, a little bit more than SEK 1 billion. So very strong development in the high-volume division.

And then we come to Global Technologies, where we had a super strong demand. I can talk first about the acquisition that we have made, which is a company called ETZ. This will not add much to the sales because this is a supplier that we have had for many years. So this is a strategic acquisition where we reinforce and safeguard our supply chain. You can see that we have a super strong order intake, 260% up for the division and up to SEK 915 million. And the 2 business lines that are contributing most to that is the PCB Test and the ETZ company, is a supplier to PCB Test. So we have a very large backlog, very good momentum on the orders and good situation on that one.

The other strong business line is Die Bonding. On this one, we also have a good increase. Both these demands are very much driven by AI-driven demand that we have applications that goes into AI products or products for AI and drives the investment in this area. You can see that if we had a sales of SEK 492 million, the contribution from the recently made acquisitions, it's SEK 77 million so a little bit effect from that side as well. Gross margin, strong, 49% and EBIT start to move now with the increased sales up to SEK 199 -- no, SEK 119 million, sorry. And we have a little bit noise from acquisitions, both positive and negative. So we had some acquisition effect on the recently acquired businesses of minus SEK 5 million.

And we had the revaluation of consideration related to the purchase price of Vanguard Automation, which was positive SEK 22 million, a little bit plus and minus in that one. And a super strong backlog of SEK 1.7 billion so a very good situation here and EBIT margin of 24% as well. I think, it's -- we are very happy with that. So the strong order intake and our view on the market has made us to revise our outlook for 2026. So the previous outlook was SEK 8.25 billion in sales at the end of the year and now we see that we will have a sales of -- in the neighborhood or in the area of SEK 8.75 billion. So quite a good change on that one as well.

So with that, I will hand over to Pierre Brorsson to talk a little bit more about the financials.

Good morning from my side as well, and happy to stand here and have a good quarter with us and presenting that. First of all, looking at this graph, you see the strong sales level that we have had. We have been above SEK 2 billion a couple of times, but not in the neighborhood of SEK 2.5 billion, which also happens to be 1/4 of our long-term financial target. And this quarter, we hit that in revenues, and we also hit it on the orders received side.

Aftermarket revenue contributing with SEK 525 million, which is a good level and in volume, actually higher than the number we had a year ago. But given that we also have a bit of headwind with the exchange rates, we were just below the level of last year. A record EBIT margin at 37%, reflecting that the sales also had a positive mix between the various businesses that we have with a strong sales, in particular, in Pattern Generators, as Anders explained.

If we look how this looks on a rolling 12-month basis, we hit SEK 8.3 billion in the quarter, which was just above the mark we had for -- in our previous outlook for the year. But we have now revised that one to SEK 8.75 billion, as Anders just mentioned. The EBIT margin is on a good level at 25%, and we are closing in on the SEK 2 billion in our aftermarket, which is a key focus area for us to continue to grow this one. And we are growing it in volume, but numbers take a little bit of time with the headwind we see on the FX side at the moment.

If we cut our total profit and loss statement by cost category, you can see that we moved the EBIT from SEK 775 million to SEK 938 million, and this was largely driven by a higher volume in the quarter than what we had last year, keeping more or less the same gross margin overall, which is a high level for us. On the R&D side, we continue to spend, in particular, on Pattern Generators. So about half of this increase is attributable to Pattern Generators. And for the rest, it's mainly related to the newly acquired companies in combination with some ESOP costs and some increased spend in the High Volume division.

On the marketing and sales and G&A side, it's also largely related to that we have added businesses to our baseline. On other, we had a very negative impact of revaluation of FX last year. So this year is slightly positive, and this supports then the delta as well as about SEK 25 million that we had to reverse for the earn-out liability in the Vanguard case. Ending on SEK 938 million, 37%, extremely good level. If we cut it the other way around, you can see that we had, despite a very strong Q1 last year in Pattern Generators, we had an increase, SEK 80 million almost. We also managed to improve the situation for PCB Assembly Solutions. This is a small profit generated in the quarter. So we are continuously working to get that up to a higher level, but we also know that we start the year relatively slow, typically in PCB Assembly Solutions.

High Volume, you see a minus SEK 20 million here. And I would say that this is not really displaying the performance of the division. We have, in these numbers, SEK 24 million of costs for the ESOP program. And we also had a fantastic order intake in the first quarter. So with a little bit delay on the revenue side, yes, but a really good performance there. On the Global Technologies side, a very solid profit improvement. And this is stemming from the business lines, which we have been owning for some time. So the business lines PCB Test and business line Die Bonding. This has been fueled by the demand in AI infrastructure investments and is really doing well at the moment. On the Group Functions side, this is a revaluation of cash and internal loans to a degree and the cost base is more or less similar as before. Ending the quarter on SEK 938 million, so 37%.

Cash flow-wise, of course, we -- the result contributed very well in the quarter. And similar to last year, we had a negative impact on the working capital. And here, we can sometimes contribute from large orders in Pattern Generators with advances, which we did not have to a very high degree. And at the same time, with strong invoicing, we also had a buildup of the trade receivables. On the investing side, the highlights for the quarter was the acquisitions of ETZ and Cowin DST, which accounted for 2/3 of that. Still, we remain in a strong cash situation. And on top of this, as many of you who follow us well know, we also have SEK 2 billion revolving credit facilities at hand, should we need to.

And with that quick overview, I hand the word back to Anders to speak a bit about sustainability.

Thank you, Pierre. So yes, sustainability. So we have applied and been approved by the science-based target initiative organization and have committed to reach certain targets related to that. And we're happy to see that we already have reached the target that we have on Scope 1 and 2, when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions, while we, on the other hand, are not yet reaching the Scope 3 target, which is related to emissions from the use of sold product.

You may remember that we launched a few years back a new laser model for our Pattern Generators equipment, where we can change from very energy-consuming gas lasers into solid-state lasers in the mask writer. And we're happy to see that we have -- and this will be the largest contributor to reaching the Scope 3 target for us. And we are happy to see that even though we have not yet reached the target, we have a trend, which is positive on that side, where we have seen the penetration increasing of solid-state lasers in the installed base, starting from 38% beginning January -- beginning in 2025 and January 2026, we were up to 47%. So still more to do, but the direction is very positive on this side. So Sven?

Thank you, Anders, and thank you, Pierre, for the presenting. And now we move over to our Q&A session. And first, we will head over to London and Oliver Wong at Bank of America. Please go ahead and ask your questions, Oliver.

My question is regarding Global Technologies. It was quite strong, very strong performance. And I noticed that in terms of the EBIT for Global Technologies, it was at 24% in Q1. And that was a -- that's a significant jump even over last quarter in Q4, where your gross profits in Q4 for Global Tech was actually higher than in this quarter, but you managed to achieve significantly better EBIT margin.

So I was wondering if you could give some color on that, give some context on that. Is this kind of -- are the EBIT margins for Global Tech expected to stay at this level and continue to increase as presumably you'll continue to grow your revenues there? And yes, what accounted for the big jump?

First of all, we had a couple of percent support in a way by reversing the earn-out provision for the Vanguard case. So this was about SEK 25 million. So this is a couple of percent. With that said, I think we are not specifically guiding a certain EBIT number, but we do see a very strong demand in our traditional business lines here. And I think we remain confident on the outlook for Global Technologies going forward.

Okay. Perhaps if I can ask another one. Just maybe an update on the trends that you're seeing for the Pattern Generators -- sorry, my camera just turned off. Yes, just maybe an update on the trends that you're seeing for the Pattern Generators. I'd be curious in terms of, let's say, demand from Chinese mask shops, demand from Western mask shops. I think I heard a little bit about perhaps -- because they may be inherently losing share to the Chinese, perhaps they are more hesitant on their investment plans there and whether it be new capacity or whether it be replacing old machines? And then also maybe an update on OLED. Any update on kind of when you see kind of an inflection in demand there in terms of the underlying OLED proliferation, what that means for your mask writers?

Yes, I can start to talk about that so starting with China and semicon. So there was a certain peak in '23 and '24. We are down from that level, but it's still quite solid. But I think we will not really see levels back to the '23 and '24 peak in China. So it's kind of more normalized now. Still China semicon manufacturers import the majority of mask and China still want to be more independent on this side. So I think the investments in China will continue, but maybe not as crazy high, as it was in '23 and '24, but still a solid demand on that side.

Globally, I think we see a similar. We have more -- much more places where people want to manufacture semicon equipment or semicon products and so on. So I think we see demand from all over. We still really -- we have not yet seen a big increase in this replacement cycle of the installed base. And the longer it take more urgently it will be likely because this is to start to get really old. So we really believe that we will see a market that is also being contributed by the replacement that should and will happen on that side. But overall, quite strong.

I think -- just recently, both Photronics and [indiscernible] released their quarter 1 reports, very, very strong ones, both of them, I think, where they also point to that they will continue to do CapEx investments and also more to the more advanced nodes. I think that is also a way to beating or to stay ahead of China, although both of them have operations in China. So it depends on where the factory is.

If you take on the flat panel display or market, I think that is quite stable. We really see this OLED penetration happens still. OLED is not really -- it's not still the largest portion of displays, but it starts to happen on a higher scale now in the IT-related equipment, tablets, laptops, desktop screens, displays and stuff like that. So we hope that we can see some increases in that. And the recently sold and shipped P8000 is, of course, a part of that transition. It will be able to produce masks for the most advanced OLED displays. So this is happening. Yes, I don't know if that was the answer of -- you had a number of questions built into that one.

Yes, yes, you answered all of them.

Okay. Thank you, Oliver. And now we go to ABG Sundal Collier and Henric Hintze.

Yes. So sort of continuing on PG there. You talked a bit about Prexision 8000 and OLED penetration. I was just wondering now that you've delivered the first Prexision 8000, what do you sort of see as triggers for other customers to invest in this? Like what kind of requirements does the model satisfy that previous models do not?

Yes. So it can write masks with higher precision, higher resolution or higher speed. You can choose a little bit what -- but normally, when we sell the first of a new equipment, that manufacturer of mask can sell their mask at a much, much higher market price. So the one who bought this one will enjoy this for some time. But this is also, of course, a trigger for others to do the same. We saw that pattern when we introduced the previous high-end mask writer P800 that the first one took some time to sell and then it followed after that. So we believe and hope that this will happen now as well. And logically, there should be more customers for the P8000.

Yes. Okay. Very good. And still on PG, given the strong deliveries and the good mix here in the quarter, are you sort of satisfied with the margin in the segment? Or were there any maybe elevated costs related to the fact that it was the first time you delivered the Prexision 8000 or maybe the R&D investments you're making?

I think -- no, the margin is where it should be. The margin on PG is very much related to the mix of products. The price and the costs are quite fixed on those. So depending on what we ship, the margin will vary and then the portion of the aftermarket, which is also quite stable. So the components will contribute -- there was no variation in the different components of contribution to the margin.

On the OpEx cost side, we are running at a very high investment or cost on R&D. And this is related to the new product, what we call IQS, which is metrology or inspection tool that will be released later this year. And this high spend will remain this year and into next year as well on this high level, and this is mainly related to that.

Okay. Great. And maybe if I could just ask one more question. If we turn back to Global Technologies, we talked about the margin already, but I think even more impressive were the orders in the quarter here. So I'm just wondering how are you going to be able to deliver on these orders? And how long are the lead times now? And do you think this is a sustainable order intake level with the capacity expansion plans you have in place?

Yes. So that's a very good question, which we also are struggling with, of course and how long will the AI demand really be there, I think maybe. But the -- no, we are -- we have longer than normal lead times, especially on the PCB Test equipment. Lead time is a year, 12 months, maybe a little bit more even -- which is longer than usual. We are expanding our facility. We built a new factory already -- what was it last year? 1 year ago?

Opened a year ago.

A year ago, yes. And we are already digging for the expansion of that one. So already the new factory that we built last year had a much larger capacity than the previous one, and now we're expanding that already to meet this demand. But we also work with efficiency and improvements and sub-suppliers and so on to increase the delivery capacity. So, so far, not a constraint on that one. But it's true that the lead times are getting long and the backlog are also large because of that. So we try to balance that. We can see that this demand goes into next year as well. But beyond '27, it's very difficult to say which -- how it will go on this.

Thank you, Henric. And now we move over to DNB Carnegie and Mikael Laséen.

Yes, I will start from the beginning maybe with the guidance that you raised for this year. If you could break it down maybe and explain the drivers why you have upgraded it. So is it timing effects or how much is underlying demand strength?

There is a little bit of timing effects on the PG side, but largely, it's demand, in particular, in High Volume and Global Technologies. I think that's where we have really seen strong demand, and we foresee this to remain at a somewhat higher level than what we saw going into the year.

Yes. I also have a question on Global Technologies. And coming back to the margins there. Just a question on -- if this current business mix, if the current margins of 20% adjusted for this temporary, I mean, effect in Q1, if this is representative of the current mix and how we should think about Hprobe, RoBAT, Surfx and ETZ, which are loss-making still?

Yes. I think we do see a strong situation for now. So I think the 20% underlying that we see is definitely a level where I think we can be. On the acquired entities, the idea is, of course, not to continue to make losses even if there are certain acquisition-related costs to bear for some time. So this we expect -- I think we have also stated that we expect that to -- typically, within a year or so, they should start to contribute to -- positively to Mycronic. So...

Can you maybe follow up on one there with Surfx, you acquired it in mid-'25, and it looked like it was really profitable, but then you had a temporary cost for -- in connection to the integration, I guess and not some things like that accounting issues. But -- so are you reinvesting in the business right now? And that's why it is -- is it sort of on the same profit level as you had before? Or are you taking action to, I mean, expand the capabilities?

The gross margin and so on is perfectly okay. The volume in the first quarter is not where we think it will be going forward. And we have, call it, supersized the organization because we do believe that this will grow quite fast. There is a little bit of timing difficulty when the investments fall in this industry, especially as it's new technology to be adopted and new process to be adopted by our customers' customer, in particular. So timing-wise, it can slip a little bit another quarter or 2 before we start to see the ramp, but we believe in this a lot. We are investing in the organization a lot, and this may result in a short-term negative result.

Okay. So how much of the sales -- just to understand the answer, how much of the sales in that part is to external packaging players that you deliver to them? And how much is sales of own systems directly to end customers?

The majority is where we are a part of another solution.

Thank you, Mikael. And now we move over to Handelsbanken and Fredrik Lithell. Please go ahead and ask your questions, Fredrik.

Can we maybe talk a little bit about the SLX machine, the order you received in Q1 and what drives that price tag? You alluded to it in your presentation, but is it also on the technology side that you take new steps? Is that something that you will be able to use for your line of SLXs going forward in any way? Or can you talk a little bit more about that one?

Yes. So first of all, we are not allowed to talk a lot about that order from the customer actually. So -- but in general terms, this is also a very unique machine. It's based on the SLX platform. And the higher price tag is very much related to development work that is needed to be made on that platform to meet the specification. So this will not become a product that we will market to others, really. So this was really a unique event.

The development work we do could be reused in part. So I think it will contribute to the plans we already have to extend and expand the capabilities of the SLX range. It will not add anything that we didn't plan to do anyway. So it's -- but it will certainly make it happen maybe faster or cheaper or something. But anyway, it's -- so that is the contribution of that. But even so, we still believe it's a nice order and happy that we got it.

Another question, the raised guidance for '26. Is Cowin -- is that contributing into that changes? Or was that already part of your assumptions?

We -- it has a very marginal impact on that. So this is not the reason. We believe already when we issued the guidance that we would, at some point, get the acceptance.

Okay. And Anders, you talked in the Q4 report about that you're sort of stepping up your R&D spending a little bit this year in front of new machines you will sort of launch in the second half of this year. Are you on the right track there? Or are you peak in your R&D spend? Or where are you in that sense?

No, we are on the right track. It could possibly increase maybe a little bit more, but we are in that -- in the range, I would say, where we should be, maybe a little bit -- maybe we need to increase a little bit more on that one, but it's not too far away right now. And the project is going according to plan. We have -- the demand from customers is extremely strong. So there is no -- the market is not a problem. It's our own speed, which is kind of the critical line here. So what we said in quarter 4 still is valid on launching it and so on. And the intention is that when we have the Capital Markets Day later this year, we will talk more -- much more about this machine, of course.

And Pierre, is it -- I haven't been able to look at the very small details, but are you capitalizing more of your R&D just in front of sort of the launch? Is that how it works or...

No, we are following the same principles. And as you analysts know, we are very cautious in putting things in our balance sheet so we are not cheating that way either.

Thank you very much, Fredrik. And now over to Ina Djupsund at SEB.

So I have a question on High Volume. Does kind of this year follow the same pattern as we saw in last year with Q1 being seasonally very strong? And yes, could you give just some more flavor on high volume, what you expect going forward?

It's, of course, a little bit hard to predict the future. The past is much easier. And no -- but I think we do see strong demand for now. It's been strong in China for us. We also see more and more international demand. In the quarter, we also entered certain new customer segments where we deliver solutions for dispensing in the optic module assembly, et cetera. So this is developing very nicely for us for now.

Of course, I think the biggest threat is more on the geopolitical side than anything else. I think we have a very well-functioning organization, a strong product portfolio and we are now building international organization here.

And then a question on the acquired Cowin business in PG that you closed here in Q1. Can you talk a little bit about kind of order values you have here and what does the kind of order dynamics look like? And yes, will it be announced orders that you doing with the rest of the PG orders or what?

This has not been the plan to change the way -- we are today disclosing the PG orders because they have such a huge -- not only volume impact, but also profit impact. Should we have similar orders on the Cowin side, we may consider that. But for now, we have not considered that. Cowin has a bigger spread of -- there can be some orders in the same magnitude as a PG -- lower-end PG machine, but typically than in the lower end. So it's not display mask writer order size.

Okay. Okay. And a little bit, I guess, a boring question, but what kind of FX impact did you have on order intake in this quarter? Is it the same magnitude as sales or...

It's a similar magnitude as the sales is slightly lower, and that's because we had an upward revaluation at the end of March because you revalue the backlog at the period end rate, but it's double digit.

Thank you. I will actually now run through all participants again just to give another chance to ask an additional question, which might have popped up. So Oliver, Bank of America, do you have any additional questions that you would like to ask?

I'm all good for now. Thank you.

Thank you. So Henric, ABG Sundal Collier, anything else you would like to add?

Yes. I'd just like to add on high volume. It seems to me even if you adjust for the effect of the option program, the margin was down a bit here in the quarter despite quite solid sales. Anything special driving that? Or is it just natural variance there?

I think the gross margin is where it should be. We do invest in building up the organization -- organizational footprint also outside the traditional Shenzhen facility that we have, both operation-wise in Thailand and then building organization in -- both in Korea, U.S. and so on. But this is marginal deviations. And then, of course, on the R&D side, there is a slightly higher spend, but it's not fundamentally different.

Okay. Thank you. Mikael Laséen, DNB Carnegie, any additional questions from you?

No, thank you.

All right. Then over to Fredrik Lithell, Handelsbanken, do you have anything else you would like to ask?

Yes, I have a few questions, actually, if I may then. On -- start with PCB Assembly, you talked about that, Anders, you feel it's a bit on the soft side and all that stuff. When we visited Productronica in November, it was really a very high level of buzz and activity, customers walking all over the place in the PCB booth and all that stuff. Do you feel you have a very solid pipeline, but that the customers are sitting still, they don't really want to put the pen to the paper. Is that the problem?

That is exactly what it is. I think I don't really have historical data, but the pipeline is almost bigger than ever, I would say, but the closing rate is very, very low. And it's -- the hesitation is really there. I think we have a lot of quotations, a lot of discussions. We have new products, a lot of interest for them and so on. But orders are slower, and it seems like customers need very, very firm commitments on their own business before they want to move ahead.

So it's a little bit of difference before -- and we can see that other players in this struggle equally or even worse than we do. We can see that ASMPT announced a strategic review on their SMT business. We have seen that Kulicke & Soffa didn't even try to sell their business. They just closed it and took a big hit on that one at end of last year. So it is a very difficult market at the moment.

All right. That's interesting. High Volume, the order intake -- strong order intake, you've opened up your facility in Thailand. Are there any customers that haven't really been able to purchase products from High Volume as long as they were only Chinese based. Is that a trigger for the order intake? Or is that not part of it at all?

Not yet, but it -- we see this as a positive thing. We have had customers that didn't want to buy or couldn't buy depending on which sector they are in and which country they are from. And so they didn't want to buy from China. It's both related to tariffs, but also to political regulations and desires. So made in Thailand will open up for more -- for new customers that we couldn't sell to before. But so far, there's very little effect on that.

Okay. Final question, ATG, and it's a probe machine. It's really flying. They're pretty much alone on the flying probe as it is. But as demand is increasing this quickly, do you see or hear any competitors making moves to participate in this specific part of the space?

We do see, local China companies starting up trying to get into this market. We think that for the high end, in particular, server boards -- advanced server boards market, we think that we still have a very good position, both technology-wise, patent-wise and et cetera. So we've been able to maintain and enjoy that market position for now.

Thank you, Fredrik. And now finally, over to Ina Djupsund, SEB, do you have any additional questions you would like to ask?

I could ask one question on Global Technologies. So super strong in the quarter, but obviously, it's been going strong for some time now. Can you -- what kind of signals or kind of indicators should we be looking at to better understand the drivers of Global Tech? Is kind of semi CapEx spend a good proxy? Or is there something more specific we could look at?

I think for now -- I mean, for us, it's been really good. We have now 4 quarters in a row where this is the division with the strongest order intake. So really, really strong. And this has so far mainly been powered by the Die Bonding and PCB Test business lines, and they are both AI infrastructure driven. So this is the best leading indicator for now. And then we have the other smaller still business lines. They have other driving forces as well.

Thank you, Ina. And with that, we have reached the end of today's presentation of Mycronic's Q1 report. Thank you very much for attending.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Hello, and welcome to the presentation of Mycronic's Q4 report. My name is Sven Chetkovich. I'm the Director, Investor Relations at Mycronic. And with me today, I have Mycronic's CEO, Anders Lindqvist; and CFO, Pierre Brorsson, who will be presenting today.

And with that, I hand over to Anders. Please go ahead and present Mycronic's Q4 report.

Thank you very much, Sven. And this is what we'll talk about today. No change from before. So about the quarter, of course, go deeper within the different divisions. Pierre will talk more about the financials, a few words on sustainability, and then we have a question-and-answer session at the end of the presentation. And as usual, there is a market update in the material that will be posted on our website, which we will not present, but it could be interesting reading.

So starting with a short summary of the last quarter of last year. So we had a decline of order intake with 19% to a level just below SEK 2 billion, which is a good level. It's on our annual average, but compared to a very strong quarter in 2024, it was nevertheless a decline of 19%, very much explained by the less -- lower order intake in Pattern Generators. Also worth to note is that currency makes a lot of impact on all the numbers here, and Pierre will talk a little bit more about that in the financial part. Also, sales were more or less flat compared to last year, around SEK 2 billion. And we had a decline in 3 divisions, so Pattern Generators, PCB Assembly Solutions, and also in the High Volume division. And then we had a quite good growth in the Global Technologies division that almost fully compensated for that difference, so being flat in total compared to the year before.

EBIT also declined SEK 342 million, which is a margin of 17%. Backlog more or less flat at SEK 4.7 billion, which is a good and healthy backlog, I would say. And also the Board of Directors will propose to make a dividend of SEK 3.25 per share, which is a little bit of an increase from before, and no extra dividend as we did in last year.

We made a small acquisition after the end of the period, a company called ETZ. That's a supplier of critical components for our PCB test business line. So it will not have a large impact on the numbers, but it will really reinforce our quality of the supply chain. So quite an important acquisition for us.

So going into the different divisions, starting with Pattern Generators. We could see that the markets were stable, I mean, and even positive. The semiconductor photomask market has shown positive development. I think you can read it by also in the reports from peers that it's mainly driven from applications related to AI. On the display photomask side market, we see that stable as usual, a little bit irregular, but stable nevertheless. And we saw a decrease then of order intake down to SEK 545 million, and this has to be compared to a super strong quarter in 2024.

We had 5 machines on order, or we got orders for 5 machines, 1 display mask writer, Prexision 8 Evo, FPS 6100 Evo, and also 3 SLX mask writers for the semicon industry. Sales down to SEK 577 million. We delivered 6 equipment, and this is 18% down. One display mask writer, Prexision 8 Evo, 1 FPS 6100, and 4 SLX. So quite similar to the order intake, actually, but it's not the same equipment. Gross margin, 58%, which is good, stable around that level, and EBIT SEK 173 million. Backlog is a bit down to SEK 2.6 billion. So as we said, the total company backlog was flat, and you can understand that the backlog has increased in the other divisions. So we have 18 systems in the backlog as per end of the year. And after the period this year, we also received orders for Prexision 8 Evo and MMX.

You can also see that in the headline, we talk about continued R&D investments, and we do increase R&D investments. We develop new products to offer more equipment to our current customer base, and that kind of equipment is in the inspection technology area. So we will launch at the end of this year, a range of inspection machines for the semiconductor photomask market, which are ramping up right now, both in R&D investments, but also we are preparing space for the production for that. So quite a big -- quite a large project for us.

On PCB Assembly Solutions, we have talked before about the difficult market, and this continues to be difficult, especially the European market. We have seen positive trend in Asia. and also U.S., but Asia is not so large for us for the PCB assembly solutions. So -- and the U.S. market has been stable, but European market has continued to be very, very weak. Every second year, there's a large show in Munich called Productronica, where we and our peers in the business normally introduce new products, and we had 2 large introductions there, GenAI, which is an AI-enabled inspection machine, and MYPro A41, which is a continuation of our pick and place series.

Order intake down SEK 362 million, which is 7%, also sales down 10% to SEK 438 million, gross margin at 40%, okay, and EBIT down to SEK 60 million. Backlog, SEK 147 million, which is quite okay, but still a difficult market in this division. On the high-volume side, also participated on the Productronica Show, the large part of our strategy in the high volume is to expand sales outside of China. So very important to be present at those shows outside of China. We have also decided to put the listing. Some years ago, we announced that we are contemplating investigating the possibility to list Axon on the China Stock Exchange, and this is put on hold right now. That listing would have contained also an investment program for employees. So as that is not happening, we have launched what is called an ESOP program, which is employee share ownership participation program. So that is just launched.

We also opened a new facility for production in Thailand to be able to supply machines not made in China, which is to be more flexible in this restricted world that we live in today from place of origin of manufacturing. Order intake was down 30% to SEK 271 million. Sales was very strong at SEK 448 million, still a little bit less than the year before. Gross margin, 41%, a good margin, and EBIT SEK 55 million. And in this SEK 55 million, there is a bit of plus and minuses. We have a cost of this share ownership program of minus SEK 23 million, and then we had a positive impact of provisions for personnel that was made, that contributed to SEK 30 million. Backlog, SEK 683 million, which is quite good or normal, I would say. So all good there.

Global Technologies. Here, we see a very strong development as many companies now in these days report that it's driven by AI-related applications, and we have the same. This is in particular notable for our PCB test and also the die bonding business line. And also, we have some acquisitions, of course, supporting all that. So order intake up almost 70% to SEK 773 million and sales up 41% to SEK 570 million. And you can see the sales contribution from acquired businesses, which is Hprobe, RoBAT, and Surfx, SEK 131 million, but still a very strong development there. Very solid gross margin at 45%, EBIT, SEK 118 million, and some negative impact from the recently acquired businesses of minus SEK 6 million, and a very strong backlog of almost SEK 1.3 billion. So very good development in this division and an EBIT margin of 21% in the quarter.

And as I said before, we also had acquired this very small company, ETZ, which will not really be -- have a lot of impact on the numbers, but really will solidify our supply chain for the PCB test business line. So all that, we believe that we will continue to grow the business. And this year, we see that an outlook now, which still almost 12 months to go of -- or at least 11 to reach SEK 8.25 billion in sales.

All right. Now I hand over to Pierre to talk more about finances.

Yes. Good morning from my side as well, and we will do a little bit deeper review of the numbers. Starting with this graph displaying the quarterly numbers, and we reached just above SEK 2 billion in sales. And this is compared to last year, a small decline of 2%, but it's really a volume increase. It's both organic and inorganic growth, and 11% negative currency impact. And this currency impact is even bigger on the order side because there you also revalue the orders on hand. So very significant impact of the currencies in the quarter and also throughout the year.

The aftermarket revenue, we exceeded SEK 500 million. So we are approaching SEK 2 billion on an annual basis. This is a good number. However, for the first time since 2021, we were not sequentially growing on the -- towards the same quarter last year. So we were slightly below the good quarter of 2024, mainly related to that we, at that time, had some upgrades in the Pattern Generators division, which we could not fully compensate for this year. EBIT margin, 17%, a solid number, a bit high on the OpEx side, but really, according to the plans that we have made and how we want to develop the company going forward.

If we look at it on an annual basis, we ended the year just below the SEK 8 billion with an EBIT margin on 24%, good level. Aftermarket revenue, as I mentioned, we are approaching the SEK 2 billion, which is then constituting 25% of the net sales, and continuously growing this part. So we will see fluctuations on the equipment side, but the aftermarket revenue is important to continuously gradually build and grow, which we are doing at this point in time. We go a little bit deeper into the costing details and the different parts of the income statement, comparing quarter-on-quarter. And this may look as a less positive staircase, but it's really largely according to plan. We had a little bit lower sales in the Pattern Generators division as a share of the total in the quarter. And thereby, we have a small negative gross margin effect.

On the R&D side, Anders alluded to that we are continuing to spend at high pace and in very relevant projects, particularly in the Pattern Generators, but we also have an organic increase of the R&D spend in the high-volume division. In that division, in the High Volume division, we are also expanding the footprint in particularly outside China, and this drives a bit the marketing and sales cost. Here, we also have -- when we compare the numbers versus the prior year, we also have the newly acquired entities adding to all the cost categories here and also the acquisition-related costs and in particular, the retention mechanism for the Surfx acquisition that is running over 6 months, which will end now in the fourth quarter, which is affecting the numbers a bit. About SEK 10 million net impact of the China ESOP versus the provision release as well.

If we look at the 2025 full-year bridge, we can see that we have been growing throughout the year despite the currency headwind that we have had. And in several of the divisions, we have also improved the gross margin, in particular, in the Global Technologies division, which we are very happy about. We have decided to do investments on the R&D side and on the marketing and sales side in order to set the company for the future and to create the organic growth that we want to have sustainably going forward. We have also a bit higher acquisition-related costs and transaction costs this year compared to the prior year. And in this other column that you see there, we have the net -- mainly the net effect of the FX realized and unrealized exchange differences.

Ending the year at a solid SEK 1,940 million, which is 24% in relation to sales. Division by division, if we cut it that way, we have said that we had a little bit lower sales and also lower margin and higher R&D in Pattern Generators, and this is really the main explanation for the relatively lower EBIT in the fourth quarter. We had last year record quarter in PCB Assembly Solutions and in High Volume. We could not fully match that this year, but particularly for PCB Assembly Solutions, we had the best quarter of the year in the fourth quarter. It's normally that way, but I think it's also fair to say that it's not a bad level, it's a good level.

In High Volume, we had a little bit slower ending of a solid year, and it looks quite good going into 2026 as well there. Global Technologies, really good despite not getting contribution yet from the acquired entities, delivering 20% or about 20% EBIT margin in the quarter, taking us to a total of 17% or SEK 342 million in the quarter.

Looking at the full year, we were slightly lower than last year in Pattern Generators, mainly related to the R&D investments. The number for PCB Assembly Solutions is, of course, a bit bigger in relation to the baseline. So we did not reach what we wanted to reach in a tough market where we had our largest markets, Europe, having a negative economy, and U.S. having a bit of a difficult investment climate with tariffs, as well as the headwind from currencies. High Volume and Global Technologies on track and for Global Technologies, even exceeding the plans we've made. And here, you see on the group functions that we have, and this is largely transaction-related costs that has increased over this period of time.

Ending the year on, as we said, 24% or SEK 1940. Cash flow-wise, it's all natural in relation to the activities we have conducted and the situation on the P&L, plus the acquisitions and the dividends that has been paid out. Maybe noteworthy is that we have about SEK 200 million less good change in working capital, and this is largely that we have a lower order stock in the Pattern Generators, where we have a significant portion of advanced payments from customers. We have almost spent SEK 1 billion in the acquisitions we have done during the year. Still at a position where we can be active in the M&A market and with SEK 2.3 billion net -- sorry, with SEK 2.3 billion cash and additionally facilities in place of SEK 2 billion.

And with that, I hand the word back to Anders.

Thank you, Pierre. And let's continue. So as usual, a few words on sustainability. And first, I want to talk about diversity, where we make some nice progress. We -- and especially on the share of women in the workforce as both in the workforce as also in the different managerial roles. And we could see that very notable, the Pattern Generators division had a good rise in the female representation from 19% to 22%. And also that in our annual employee engagement survey, we could see that diversity and inclusion is having now the highest rate topic of them all. So positive development on that.

On other parts of sustainability, we had training for sales representatives in this and also purchasing managers that participated in different seminars to strengthening the due diligence that we do in our supply chain.

So with that, Sven, over to question and answers.

Thank you, Anders, and thank you, Pierre. And today, we will start with Handelsbanken and Fredrik Lithell.

I'm going to keep it to 2 questions now. Maybe we could get a little bit elaboration on the outlook, the SEK 8.25 billion Pariff, what U.S. dollars are based on? And if this includes or do not include Cowin in Korea. And at the same time, maybe an update on the Cowin acquisition. The second question is you talk about the investments that you expand organization, increasing your TAM. You now also elaborate on that you will launch machines towards the end of this year. It would be very interesting to hear you talk more about that to the extent you can, of course, Anders. Always interested to hear about machines.

Okay. If I start then with the bit the outlook. The outlook is based on all we know now, which means the current exchange rates as they stand today. We also believe that we will have a small contribution from Cowin, which we believe will be closed towards the end of the first quarter. This will not have a dramatic impact on the sales for this year, but we do believe a limited contribution from Cowin.

And yes, regarding the new products, so this is super exciting. And as you understand, this is something we have been working on for a while. So you have seen that we have increased R&D spend over the time. We have also increased manufacturing availability by moving out the division in our main production facility to make space for this new equipment. So this is inspection equipment for photomask for semiconductor, and it can inspect the quality of a full mask, not only the pattern, but also the defects from particles and contamination and so on. We will come into an environment with competitions from very capable partners here. It will be mainly companies like Laser Tech and KLA.

The size of the market we see is quite -- everything is quite equal to SLX actually. So the size of the market is the same, we believe, the available market for us, like SEK 1 billion. We believe also that the price of the machine will be in a similar range, something between from $4 million up to $10 per equipment. We have, of course, an ambition to take a part of that share, but we do have very capable competitors here, as we have in the laser-based mas writers as well. So this is super exciting. Launch will be to the end of this year. And we believe that the first revenues will be visible first 2027, really, where you can start to count on that. But we will have this year a further increase of R&D spend a little bit more than what we currently do, and most likely peak out during this year. So it's a lot of cost and no revenue so far, but we believe very much in this.

I mean I'm intrigued by that you sort of explained it so explicitly already, now 11 months before you will launch it, giving your competitors some time to think about it. Do you bring any new type of technology angle into this? Is it something you could talk about?

All of the players here have a little bit of differentiation between how they do and how they compare patents, either you compare it to other masks, or you compare it to the drawings and so on. So we believe that we will have a unique position. We will also have the benefit of also being able to sell the mask writers. And the combination of this is given an additional value actually, which the others don't have where we can use data from both equipments to kind of optimize the whole solution there. So no, of course, we believe that we have something better, but exactly how and what I think we will need to come back a little bit later in the year, really on the features and benefits and all the nice stuff.

Thank you, Fredrik. And now we move over to SEB and Ina Djupsund.

I have a question on pricing and kind of assuming FX is where it is now, how important of a growth driver will price be? And is it any particular division where price hikes play a bigger role?

Price is, of course, very important in all divisions. And I think everywhere where we can offer quite a large degree of differentiation, we are able to keep the prices quite high. But we don't really see any change in price pressure or so. We see, of course, a little bit an effect in the PCB Assembly Solutions divisions where we have the tariffs adding cost for customers, which we not always can transfer fully to the customer for different reasons. And so there can be a small decline. But otherwise, we keep pricing on everywhere and even increase where we can. And we have seen that the demand for some products in Global Technologies are extremely high, and that's, of course, an opportunity to be a little bit more stiff on the pricing.

And how is capacity utilization, if we look at next year, I think there's a little bit fewer deliveries for PG in H2. How do you kind of approach that?

Yes. And we can still fill a bit of that, I think. So -- and we have been maybe producing more than we could in the past time. So I think that it's good for the production facility. But we're also expanding production for the PG division also to be able to -- not only actually for this inspection machine, but also for the other product lines to make that more efficient. So I think we have sufficient capacity there.

We face a little bit on the PCB test in the Global Technologies, where we have an extremely high demand. And last year, we built a new factory inaugurated that in January last year, and we are already making the first extension of that to meet this increased demand. So to be able to supply. We deliver double as much as equipment as we did 2 years ago. So high pressure on production there. And also then in high volume, we expand by adding additional production site, as mentioned in Thailand now. So yes.

And within PG, do you think you can still take orders that can be delivered in 2026 as well?

It depends on configuration and model, but theoretically or practically as well.

On the semicon side, we could definitely get something towards the back end of the year, yes.

Thank you, Ina. And now we move over to ABG [ Sundal Collier and Henrik ].

So about the employee stock option program in Axon, I was just wondering if you could give us a bit more detail on the reasoning behind that and if it's a one-off thing here or if you will keep offering programs like this over time after this one is done.

I can start and then you can add. Yes. So this is the first. And the IPO that we were investigating should have had an investment program built into it. So now the IPO is on hold. We still want to offer an investment program. And the reason for that is that China is extremely competitive when it comes to talent, both to retain and to attract, but also to engage and to drive performance. So we believe that this is a very good way to fulfill that to really keep the engagement, the performance of people, attract the best talent, and retain our good people. So that is the motivation behind that, this program is the first one, and it's larger. We will, like a normal company, launch this every 2, every 3 years, something like that in a sequence with a duration of a similar time between 3 and 5 years.

And -- but the first one now is larger than the coming because of that we didn't have a program during this investigation period of the IPO. But it will have a bit of cost last year, this year, and next year as well. Pierre can explain a little bit more on that side, but it will -- but first of all, it should have a large benefit also, of course, of driving value and driving engagement and performance in the business. And it is a co-ownership program. So the -- and it's quite broad. We have invited 120 people. So it's a broad program, and we have 100% almost participation. So there's a big willingness to do this. And most China companies either have this kind of program or ownership through real shares on the stock market. So we believe that it's very good to stay competitive in the talent market.

Okay. Secondly, on Global Technologies, the margin here in the quarter was quite a bit stronger than at least I had expected. So I was just wondering if you could give us any more details regarding how we should think about that and the margin going into 2026.

I think we have 2 larger portions that we've been owning for some time within Global Technologies. Both are benefiting from AI-driven demand in the background, and this trickles down to us who do equipment for various parts of this chain. With this demand, we have seen good increases in sales, and we have also been able to improve the margins in this existing business. And then we have added acquired businesses, which are profitably sound as a stand-alone entities. We have been suffering a little bit this year because we have had extraordinary acquisition-related costs. But we see good growth prospects and solid profitability in line with the group targets of the 20% that we see for Global Technologies specifically. I think it's perfectly realistic to believe.

Thank you, Henrik. And now over to Nordea and Anders Akerblom.

So firstly, I was wondering a bit on display. We saw recently in Samsung's Q4 report that they were discussing the recent memory price surge is impacting display shipments. What's your view on this?

Our view is -- I mean, we -- the link between photomask and price and so on display is quite far, I would say. So we don't -- we haven't seen any change in the willingness to invest in photomask. We still have the growth drivers on the display side, being the area driven by new applications, mainly. We have also the layer and the complexity of the displays driven by new applications as well as new technology such as OLED and so on.

So I think those -- the price changes and the supply and demand of memory and other components is more short -- has a more short-term impact on the end customer business, I would say. So from our side, we don't see any change, and we haven't seen any change in demand either.

I guess I was hinting a bit towards in your customer discussions, do you think that, that might drive a mix accretion towards a higher proportion of OLED compared to LCD so that OEMs can maybe absorb that cost inflation to a greater extent?

I think it's typical in the display industry that when demand is lower, they need to invest in technology to create demand and create and launch new features and so on. And I think that is still valid. But we also see quite a lot of new -- this mix of technologies where you have OLED, you have microLED, you have other types, you have the transparent displays curve, foldable phones, all that requiring more advanced production methods of displays and in most cases, more layers that are -- that need photomasks to be produced.

And just a final question. I sense your wording in terms of the semi market outlook in PG is incrementally more positive compared to Q3. I mean we've seen some developments during the quarter with TSMC and others raising targets, but kind of what underpins this more specifically?

I think you can see in different reports also that the semicon industry is forecast to start growing on a quite high level and very much driven to various types of AI. But also what we have seen in the past was China kind of standing out being driving a lot of demand, and now we see a lot of demand created in other places, more kind of a more balanced approach. We can see that all those projects in the U.S. are moving forward. We also see the European projects moving forward, but also in Singapore, other places, India is gearing up and want to have their own capability domestic for semiconductor and so on. So I think, yes, all that together, I think, shows that the semicon market will be good. And at some point in time, that should be good for us as well.

Thank you, Anders. And now we go from Stockholm to London and Oliver Wong at Bank of America.

First question is on the semi mask writers. Just curious about what you guys are seeing in terms of demand from China, in terms of demand from the non-Chinese companies that may or may not be replacing -- either replacing their old machines or not doing anything or kind of upgrading with their existing machines from the incumbent supplier. Yes, just kind of curious what you're seeing there relative to maybe this time last year.

Yes. So China is a difference. So we saw at this time last year, we had a very strong and also had before that quite big demand from China from domestic mask manufacturers, which is less. We still have demand from China. So I think it has more maybe normalized. It was maybe more than normal in the past time. But we do see, at the same time, a pickup from the other people where everyone wants to position themselves very good. China -- and China still should be -- have a huge potential for mask writers because the domestic mask production in China compared to what is used, it's still quite low. So there's -- if China would go for 100% in China for China production on mask that would require a lot more machines than what you already have. And that's maybe a theoretical thinking.

But anyway, you can see that the potential is still there. Otherwise, we see potential everyone wants to make more capable masks and so on also in more places. So we have we could see all the new factories building up, and the mass production facilities is most likely to happen in the neighborhood of those. So that compensates for the peak in China that we had, hopefully.

So it sounds like it's kind of more new fabs where they're kind of buying new equipment and they're going with you, versus kind of existing fabs where they're replacing old machines.

Yes, I think that will be a mix because I think existing fabs will also be upgraded, both capacity and capability. So that's going on, and we've seen that. So that's absolutely.

And then in terms of margins for next year, I was wondering if you could just talk through kind of the big moving parts, just to give us a sense of how to expect margins to trend next year?

We typically don't really guide on margins. We have -- what we have issued is that we expect everything we own to be double-digit EBIT margin. This is a base expectation on all divisions we have and all the business lines that we have. And then as a group, we should be consistently above 20%, which we have been now for some time. And then on the Pattern Generators, I think is -- you can make the estimates by looking at the backlog and the aftermarket. And then here, we will continue to invest in R&D slightly above the level we have done this year. So I think that gives you a little bit of guidance on where we will end.

Thank you, Oliver. And now we go back to Fredrik Lithell at Handelsbanken to see if you have any further questions.

Thank you very much. Pierre, in your prepared remarks, you talked about the aftermarket revenue and elaborated a little bit on that. You said you had a few more upgrades in 2024, for example, than you did have towards the end of this year. Can you put some more color on this? Can you sort of give us a range of what value we talk about and how much it came down? Is it software? Or is it -- what's in that would be interesting.

It's software upgrades and it can be laser upgrades as well in that. And as you see, we were a notch below the same quarter last year. So I still had to explain why we, for the first time in 5 years, could not continue to grow really. It's not a game-changing amount that differs on this.

Okay. That's perfect. Another question is the -- I mean, you have quite distinct FX headwinds right now and your position on the Prexision side being the only vendor, do you update your price plans every year? Or do you intend to update your prices and compensate for FX?

Basically, the pricing for the Prexision, it's a dollar market. It's a dollar baseline. Of course, when we deliver a new machine, new features that comes in at a different level. It's very hard to say, okay, now the dollar went down 20%, we need to increase the price in dollars with 20% that would distort the competitive landscape among our customers, given our strong position.

Thank you, Fredrik. And now we go to SEB and Ina Djupsund to see if you have any further questions.

I have one kind of high-level question. So which division do you expect to contribute most to growth in 2026? And where do you see kind of tough comparison going into next year?

I think in general, I think we are -- you have seen the development in Global Technologies, and I think you can see also the backlog and the order intake in relation to the sales. So it's quite natural to believe that this will continue to contribute. And as Pierre said, the margins are also good in this division now. So that will be a good contribution. I think we'll still have a headwind on the market for PCB assembly systems for a while that even though the show in Munich last year had generated a lot of leads, but there's also a lot of hope in the market. So I think this will still be a struggle a little bit for us. Do you want to comment more on that?

I think we see -- we do expect also High Volume to perform very well going into -- we see very high interest from various markets in the products, and we start to get some maturity also outside China in what we do. So I think those 2 divisions are probably the main growth engines for this year.

And on the Pattern Generators, you can see they have the backlog described, and that's going normally according to plan. We have had changes in deliveries, but they have all been driven by customer demand, a little bit, but no significant difference, and nothing that is moving out of the year. And as Pierre said, this will be a year of investing really in the final part of this new product program that we are launching. And there, you see we will start the year strong. You see the deliveries in the first half of the year. So it will be a strong start. And should there be some semicon equipment coming in towards the back end, that will also be supportive to pattern generators.

Thank you, Ina. And now we move over to ABG Sundal Collier. And Henrik, do you have any further questions, Henrik? I think all my questions have been answered. Thank you. Great. So then we move over to Anders Akerblom at Nordea to see if you have any further questions.

I always do. Just a final one on Global Technologies. I mean we've adjusted for acquisition-related costs, you've performed in the 2 most recent quarters at 30% margin level. And I know you don't like to guide on margins. I don't mean to put you on the spot, but you're saying that all divisions you want to have above 20% margin. I don't think one should interpret that as you expecting margins to trend down in GT from the current level into next year, particularly with the accretive contribution from Surfx. Is that a correct assessment?

Yes. I think you can look at the past quarters and take out the acquisition-related costs, and look into the future.

There was nothing in the last 2 quarters that contributed more positively than expected. So it kind of was normal, I would say.

Thank you, Anders. And now back to London again, and Oliver Wong, Bank of America. Do you have any further questions?

Yes. Maybe just a question on the new inspection tools. You shared a TAM projection. That's helpful. Maybe like roughly, if you could give a sense of what kind of market share do you think would be a good sort of achievable target for next year and kind of the years to come?

I think it's maybe a little bit early to talk. We will come with a much more detailed information closer to the launch. So I think we have that planned to the second half of this year. But we believe that this market looks very much similar to the SLX market for us, size, price, and so on market share. We do have very capable competitors here. So -- and we do have some benefits. So it's -- we don't really have a point of view that we can share right now on how much. But of course, we spend a lot of money in doing this, so we expect a good return, of course.

Thank you, Oliver. Well, with that, we have reached the end of today's presentation of Mycronic's Q4 report. Thank you very much for watching.

Hello, and welcome to the presentation of Mycronic's Q2 report. My name is Sven Chetkovich. I'm the Director of Investor Relations at Mycronic. And with me, I have Mycronic's CEO, Anders Lindqvist; and CFO, Pierre Brorsson, who will be presenting today.

And with that, I hand over to Anders. Please go ahead and present Mycronic's Q2 report.

Thank you. Thank you very much, and a warm welcome to everyone from me as well. So today, we will, of course, present the quarter 2 results in short, also go a little bit deeper in the different divisions. Pierre will talk about financials. And also today, Pierre will talk about sustainability. And then we will end with the question-and-answer session.

And as usual, in the material that is on the website, there's also a market update that we will not present, but it's there for everyone who wants to read that as well.

So with that, I'll start with the presentation about the second quarter. So we saw a strong sales, an increase of 35% compared to the same quarter last year to a little bit more than SEK 2 billion, also a strong increase of EBIT, up to SEK 568 million million compared to SEK 348 million and the corresponding margin of 27%. So very strong sales side.

A decline on the order intake down to SEK 1.3 billion, compared to a little bit more than SEK 2 billion. And this is explained by the patterning generators where we had no system orders coming back to that soon. The backlog is still very strong, even though reduced a little bit because of the less order intake and bigger sales. So now the backlog is a little bit more than SEK 4 billion.

And in the division in Global Technologies, we have completed two acquisitions within the quarter. One is RoBAT and another one is Surfx. We talk about this a bit more.

Also very excitingly, we had a share split where the existing share was split by two. And at the end of the period or after the end of the period, actually, we also signed an agreement to acquire a Korean company, Cowin.

So a lot of activity in the second quarter. So if we start with the patent almost half of the business in terms of revenue on this quarter, you could see that the market is still stable for both displays and the semiconductors, and we have no orders for new systems.

So the order intake that we recorded is only related to the aftermarket, which is, on the other hand, very strong. The order intake had a decline of 84% and was SEK 191 million.

We delivered 8 systems, which is quite a lot, and that resulted in a net sales increase in 50%, up to almost SEK 1 billion and a strong gross margin of 69%. And EBIT follows the sales up to SEK 537 million, so good.

Of course, the decline in the order backlog because of the less orders, strong sales to SEK 2.3 billion, and we have 19 systems in the backlog. So still a very strong backlog. And as I said, we signed the agreement with the Korean company, Cowin to acquire that at the -- after the end of the period, still not closed, however.

Moving over to PCB Assembly Solutions, which is a new name, by the way. It was formally named [indiscernible] and the name change is to better reflect what we actually do. And it was a little bit confusing for our customers.

Markets have been quite weak here, especially European market has been weak, but we saw some sign of improvement from a very low level, U.S. market is very uncertain, mainly caused by tariffs that creates some uncertainty on the willingness to invest. And quite flat order intake compared to last year, a small decline of 2% down to 356 and a decrease of net sales to 328.

Margin 37, a little bit less than same quarter last year and EBIT 14%, which is 4% of sales. Backlog at the end of the quarter was SEK 133 million, which is a little bit on the low side, you can say.

High volume. Here, we could see very strong demand, very healthy demand from the market, especially from the Chinese domestic market, but also good performance from outside China. We had an order intake up 7% to 383, which is a very good number also and sales also 40% up to 443, so even a better number.

The recently acquired business Modus, contributed SEK 5 million to that sales, so not so much. Gross margin, 38%; EBIT, 74%; and from Modus, we had a loss or a negative impact of minus SEK 7 million. Very strong backlog of SEK 915 million. So very good on that side as well. So strong performance in this division.

Also very strong performance in Global Technologies. And here, we had a lot of activity. We made two acquisitions. So one is RoBAT, U.K.-based company that is doing -- having a technology for test for signal quality on PCB. So this will be part of the PCB test business.

And then, another company called Surfx Technologies that are doing atmospheric plasma solutions for surface treatment, both cleaning and removal of oxide, et cetera, and that will form a separate business line. If we look on the existing business, the PCB test business was very strong during the quarter. And was a little bit less strong, very much affected by the uncertainties between the U.S. and China tariff discussions.

Very strong order increase of 95%, mainly attributed to the PCB test business up to SEK 402 million, also strong increase of sales, almost 60%, up to 323 and a small contribution from the recently acquired companies of SEK 23 million.

So EBIT up to SEK 11 million compared to minus SEK 15 million. And here, we had quite a big negative impact of the recently acquired businesses of minus 23. So the underlying business performed about 10% in the quarter.

Very strong backlog, more than SEK 700 million. So good performance and a lot of activities, of course, here in this division. Then we're coming to the outlook and where we have changed that slightly or rephrase that a little bit, and that is because of -- we had a very strong quarter in the quarter 2.

We also have made some acquisitions. And also, as we only have 6 months to go for the year, we have also less uncertainty for the remaining period. So -- we're coming back to the original outlook of having a sales of SEK 7.5 billion by the end of the year.

So with that, I will hand over to Pierre to talk a little bit more about the financials. Thank you.

Thank you so much, Anders, and welcome from my side as well and taking a look at this graphically as well then. Quarter-by-quarter, we had a very strong revenue quarter with net sales above SEK 2 billion for the third quarter in a row.

We also had a good aftermarket quarter of SEK 465 million. Although this is below what we had in the first and fourth quarter of last year, but it's sequentially stronger than the same quarter of prior year.

EBIT margin continued on a high level at 27% in the quarter. And if we look at how that plays out on a 12-month basis, we can see that we passed for now the SEK 8 billion mark on a rolling 12-month basis and that we are also hitting a 30% EBIT margin.

And as Anders explained, the outlook for the year is 7.5, so we are not fully matching the quarters -- quarter 3 and 4 of last year. Aftermarket continue to grow, we are approaching the SEK 2 billion mark. However, as a percent of sales, this is slightly declining and is now at 24%.

And if we look at quarter-on-quarter versus the same quarter last year, we had a good growth primarily in the patent generators division. And this has a good volume impact for us, looking at the result development. At the same time, you can see that we continue to expand our efforts in the R&D, growing the cost base in R&D with SEK 60 million, limited effect of the acquired companies here.

On the marketing and sales side, we are basically on par -- you might remember from the Q1 that we were referring to, especially high cost on certain trade fairs, which fell in quarter 1 this year rather than quarter 2 last year. So this is one of the explanations for this.

On the G&A side, we have a little bit higher cost on the acquired entities, and we continue to grow our global footprint. So this is also an explanation. On Other, we have a negative exchange rate effects, mainly playing a role, but ending on a strong SEK 568 million for the quarter.

If we look at it, if we slice it in the other dimension, we see that very high improvement in the patent generators, which stands for the majority of the profit generation in Mycronic at the moment.

On the PCB Assembly Solutions, we were close to par with last year, despite a tricky market situation and some negative influence on exchange rate that hits particularly hard on this division. High volume, continued improvement, building on the continuous improvement that we also started in the first quarter.

And Global Technologies, despite negative impact from the newly acquired companies delivered a strong improvement on last year.

On the group function side, this is a reflection of largely the FX impact, but also some costs of the recently made acquisitions that has had an impact in the quarter, ending as well then on the 568 or 27%.

Cash flow. With a strong result, it's clearly a strong contribution from the operations. Part of that, however, is already prepaid, mainly in the patent generators side. So looking at it this way, it comes as a plus in the operations and the negative in the working capital.

We also have a somewhat higher inventory than we had a year ago, and this has an impact, so that the cash flow from operations as a whole is SEK 668 million versus above SEK 1 billion a year ago.

On the investing activity side, we have been much more active than before and acquired 3 companies. This accounts for a little bit more than SEK 900 million. And on the financing side, we had now, in the second quarter, also the dividends, which were including an extra dividend and added up to SEK 734 million in total.

Cash position is still solid. We have a net cash position of SEK 1.6 billion and cash at the end of the period of SEK 1.8 billion. And in addition to that, we still have the 2 facilities of revolving credit facilities of SEK 2 billion in total.

One of them was renewed during the second quarter. And we also added a link to sustainability and to our science-based targets, which will give us a small extra discount on the interest if we are able to fulfill the targets we have committed to.

And with that, I hand the word back to Sven.

Thank you, Pierre; and thank you, Anders. So now we are moving over to our Q&A session, and we will start with DNB Carnegie and Mikael Laseen.

All right. I hope you can hear me. I have a question on the photomask side. You mentioned that photomask markets were stable for both displays and semiconductors in Q2, but the PG segment received no new orders in the quarter. Can you elaborate on the dynamics behind these disconnects, and what you see you had?

Yes. I think quarter is -- on the PG business is a very short time. So it has to be seen in a much longer period even at maybe the 12 months or something like that, really -- to really see a connection or not.

We can see in the pipeline, it is very similar to as usual and also discussion with customers are very similar as usual. I think it's also possible to look on the photomask manufacturers reports and -- which are reporting kind of a flat or a stable market from their side as well. So we haven't seen any radical dip or any steep increase on that side. And also the technology trends are still there as well. So from that side, no change really.

Okay. But you don't hear any changes or hesitation due to tariffs and allocation of production facilities over time and so on? But the customers are thinking about that and maybe hesitating a bit?

No, not really. I think the customers are more strategic in where they invest and so on, but almost all customers have global operations and can manage this without any larger problems.

Okay. Good to hear. And another question here on the Surfx acquisition. It was high price tag on that one, $88 million upfront. Can you elaborate on the strategic rationale and business case for Surfx? And also what gives you confidence in value creation given the price tag?

Yes. Surfx is a company where we have had a minority investment since a number of years. We have seen that they have a very interesting and relevant technology for the electronics industry, where you have an atmospheric plasma that can treat surfaces and remove oxides.

It's been a bit a technology that has been searching its sweet spots for some time. There are many several possibilities in that space. But now we think that the time has come where this can actually take off and be a meaningful player in the industry for thermal compression bonding where the finer pitches may make it or looks to make it difficult to use the traditional methods of flux and formic acid to clean the surfaces prior to bonding.

So this is one area where this takes up. But there are also many other opportunities in the semiconductor industry, and plasma solutions is a very commonly used application in the semiconductor industry, often in vacuum, which is much more complicated and expensive, but proven since a long time, and we think that this is a really, really good technology for the future.

Okay. So what are your expectations for this company's top line growth and margin over a few quarters ahead? And can you remind us of what the starting point, where they are right now?

The starting point is that we are projecting a turnover of at least $25 million this year. And given the price targets you say, we foresee a rather rapid growth without disclosing the exact business case here. This is implied in the valuation, yes.

Thank you, Mikael. And with that, we move over to Handelsbanken and Fredrik Lithell.

I can sort of continue on Mikael's question on Surfx. You had the minority investments since before. Did you have an option, so it was really up to you to decide when you wanted to take a bigger step into this company? Or was this something that the owners came to you and asked now if you want to participate in a bigger way? So how was this triggered?

We are, of course, having a bit of an advantage having a relation to Surfx historically. We have also delivered certain solutions for automization from our high-volume division in certain ways. And when this came up as an opportunity in the dialogue, we made a business case out of it and could realize this as a one-to-one process.

Okay. All right. Another question on Global Technologies from my side is you had -- on an organic level, you had a very good order intake. Can you specify a little bit where that comes from? What are the pieces of that puzzle coming up to the order intake?

I think it's, in particular, in our PCB test business line, where we have been very successful with certain solutions on the high-end PCB which is used and the end demand is driven by AI and data centers.

Okay. And a final question from my side. I just wondered on PCB assembly. Has that unit moved now to the new facilities or is that still to come in Q3?

That's actually in Q4, the move.

Q4?

Yes, that will happen to I think, November or October. But a little bit later this year, according to plan. So...

According to plan. And will there be any sort of costs associated to that, we should take into consideration?

It will not be meaningful on a group level, but there is a few single-digit million already in the year-to-date results for that move. But on the group level, it will not be meaningful.

Thank you, Fredrik. And now we will move over to SEB and Ina Djupsund.

Also a question on M&A. You announced that you did some M&A within the pattern generators here last week. Could you talk a little bit about the kind of opportunity you see here and the business rationality?

I can start. Okay. Then, yes, Cowin is a company which is active in the repair of photomasks and the repair of panels as well. It's been a company also developing some new solutions in this inspection and repair space that could potentially also reach a little bit further than that into at least the back-end semicon side, which we find better relevant.

So we think it's a really good fit with our Patent Generators division. It will also give us a good footprint in Korea, which is one of the most important market for patent generators. So we think it's a really good fit. It's not been a massively successful company in the last few years. So -- but we see really good opportunities in linking this with our existing business.

And we've seen quite good growth in R&D on a quarterly basis as well, can we expect this to continue for the rest of 2025? And is this kind of R&D growth related to kind of this M&A that you did within the pattern generators?

Maybe slightly connected. And I think we have reached now a level where we -- which you will see for the coming quarters, so not maybe escalating further, but still on ramping on a high -- on this high level. So this is one area where we see opportunities, but there are also more areas.

Thank you, Ina. And now we move over to Nordea and Anders Akerblom.

Yes. I guess all the good questions have been taken. But on it would be interesting to hear just -- I mean, firstly, could you explain the weakness that you mentioned in the past 2 years, what that is due to and kind of your expectations for that going forward?

It's a company which has been supplying to the display panel industry and this -- the investment in this part of the industry is fluctuating even more than in the photomask side, and with limited number of customers, this has been a bit volatile. .

So will it increase the inherent volatility in PG?

It will -- if this will in relation to the total patent generators division as we have projected or we have disclosed that this year will be around USD 10 million, this will not have a material impact on the size of the Pattern Generators division.

But also, as Per said, had a very limited customer base, and that is one of the larger synergies with the PG division that we have access to, to more or less every company or every customer that is a target for this kind of technologies.

Okay. Interesting. And on high flex or assembly solutions now. I mean you reported quite healthy order growth after seeming they have very weak Q1. You mentioned that was due more to kind of Europe. If we kind of draw best, I mean, do you expect this to persist in the coming quarters or was it sort of one-off effect in Q2 in terms of some type of recovery in the EMS market?

This division is probably the one which is most difficult to predict that in this present landscape. We had a strong, in particular, actually ending of the quarter. Will this continue? It's really hard to say.

Thank you, Anders. So then we move back to DNB Carnegie and Mikael Laséen, again.

Okay. I have a couple of clarifications maybe. You mentioned that you had a negative EBIT impact of SEK 23 million. I think it was in the Global Tech.

In Global Tech, yes.

Yes. Can you break down this and explain why you had these costs? Was it acquisition-related transactional cost or operational?

It's actually both. So we had in 2 of the 3 acquisitions, low net sales in the quarter, which then gave an operationally a negative result. And then we had on top of that, certain acquisition-related costs that will, of course, affect us also going forward partly and partly for the transactions as such.

So it is a mix, and we don't publish a breakdown in full of that. What we have said is that as part of the structure of the Surfx acquisition, there is a founder and employee stay on related incentive that will mean that we will actually be slightly below 0 for this year in terms of EBIT impact, but we expect it to be supportive to EBIT as from next year onwards.

Okay. That was actually my second question. And maybe in connection to that, what type of margin should we expect for Surfx? I guess, given the price tag earn out that it must be a very profitable business and given also that they have -- seems to have a niche position on the unique technology?

It is a healthy profitable business as such, yes. So it will, of course, depend a bit on how quickly we are able to generate revenue in this business. But it is a highly profitable business, yes.

It must be well above the Global Technology segment margin level that you have right now?

Yes. That's correct.

Okay. But not this year, will it come in the next year?

Not this year.

Okay. Just to be clear. And maybe a follow-up on the PG segment. You didn't report any orders this quarter. It's not that unusual. It happens from time to time. But how should we think about the demand trends and order possibilities in the second half. Just to be a bit clear here. I saw also that you have posted new market data in the Q2 report anything there, but that we can focus on?

Yes. I think -- we don't expect -- we don't see -- I think, as you said, we had many times before, also a quarter and even more without orders, and I think we are in the similar situation now. So there's nothing, what we can see, a change in the market that has generated this.

And we do believe that we will get orders in the coming quarters, if it's next quarter or next next quarter, of course, that's as usually a little bit difficult to predict the timing of that. But the pipeline is normal, I would say, and also the amount of discussions are normal. And then, of course, things move back and forth all the time when it comes to negotiations and timing and all of that. But no change in that climate, I would say, then difficult to translate that into when will what happens. So...

Thank you, Mikael. And back now to Handelsbanken and Fredrik Lithell.

Yes. I just wanted to touch a little bit on high volume that has sort of come back a little bit in momentum. Can you describe a little bit more the dynamics and developments and maybe on sort of customer segment, if you -- I mean one of the bigger ones are the handset vendors and how they are acting and what you expect from them. So a little bit to give a better color on the trends there.

Yes. So China has been, as you have seen in the past, very, very low and especially on the consumer electronics, and that has been very much because of new really news on the product side on that side. So very much of the sales from high volume into the Consumer Electronics segment is product development from our customers, new innovation, new models.

And so now we are in a time where a lot of both Chinese local manufacturers launch new models, so -- but also globally, a lot of that. I think that market is so competitive, so the ability to win in the consumer electronics is really by innovation and now we are in such a trend.

Again, and it's visible in China and as China being the largest market for consumer electronics, we see this swing coming very good, and we have a very good position. We have the #1 -- we are the largest manufacturer and the largest -- we have the #1 market share position.

So of course, we get quite a lot of debt when the market changes. But we also have seen good development outside of China. I would say that in the past, we referred a little bit more to electrical vehicle than usual. I think now we see more contribution from consumer electronics.

Thank you, Fredrik. And back to SEB and Ina Djupsund.

Yes. So a question on aftermarket, started down sequentially here. Is this related to kind of any specific division? And can you talk a little bit about the growth drivers for aftermarket going forward?

If we compare this quarter with Q4 and Q1 of the closest preceding quarters, there was less of upgrades and these kind of things in the pattern generators division. And thereby, the absolute number is lower.

However, the underlying contractual business is continuing to increase, and we are also having some headwind on currencies here as we are consolidating Swedish krona, which is stronger now than before. So -- but continued good development on the contract side and then this upgrade that comes a little bit certain quarters and certain quarters less.

And how big of a share of the kind of SLX installed base would you still say is kind of missing this service contract?

I mean all the ones that have run out of the warranty period, they have gone into service contracts. So there is no change in business model.

But they have everything delivered within the last year should not be in the service contract not because of that.

And then I guess kind of a follow-up on the capacity expansion you're doing later this year. What can we kind of expect in terms of cost and orders for PG and PCB assembly? Will there be kind of -- should we expect to kind of impact?

I say also here that on a group level, it's not a material cost increase that we will have on group level for this. However, it will enable us to take -- to continue to grow in both the PCB assembly as well as in the patent generators to a level where we couldn't have grown much more than before today. So this opens up good opportunities for us for the future.

Thank you, Ina. And now over to Nordea and Anders Akerblom.

Yes, I just wanted to follow up also on PG and sort of the demand dynamics. I mean perhaps we've gotten a bit spoiled with seeing orders in the most recent years, but I mean all of equal the last time you didn't receive an order was, I think, Q1 2022 in the quarter.

In any case, I mean, sometimes since that was the case. I mean you're not seeing some type of pent-up demand based on your phrasing, I presume. And kind of the second part of that question is, I mean, if we look at what some of the display manufacturers are doing currently, I mean, LG, for example, announced their largest sort of investment in South Korea in several years for OLED production some USD 500 million. When kind of does that come through for you guys generally speaking? And would be interesting to hear on your expectations for such investments.

I think it's -- that link and timing is very difficult to make. But I think in the long term, I think you need to see it as those investments support the long-term trend and also the projection that we have. And also you can see that in the material that there is a growth forecasted in the -- in this industry, and that growth will be beneficial for us.

And it's both in technology and in panel size, of course, in total or mask size. In total, and I think still we have a lot to do on the AMOLED side. Also, we could see that panels are also getting more advanced. And not only that they are having different shapes. So every foldable and so on requires AMOLED, of course, but also that you see much more devices in the panels like cameras and sensors and stuff like that.

So there's still happening a lot on that one. And I think the the announcements from LG and their peers is just supporting that trend, but we are not able to translate that into equipment sales, except for that we believe it's a good market going forward.

Thank you, Anders. So now I would like just to leave the floor open if anybody has an additional question, please go ahead and ask it. Okay, seems everybody is happy -- it's Mikael. Mikael has a question.

Yes, quick 1 here. Did you have any FX-related revaluation effects in the P&L in the quarter due to working capital revaluation maybe?

We have continuously revaluation, in particular, outstanding receivables that we have. And this has an impact on group level and it has an impact on divisional level, maybe mostly so you see a little bit lower gross margin in the High Flex division, where we have a cost base or the division, I should say, now we have a cost base in Swedish krona and we have revenues coming in, in different currencies. .

Okay. Nothing on group level, revaluation of inventories and the receivables, maybe?

We had a bit on certain intercompany transactions -- intercompany loans, which are on -- reported on the corporate level as well as mentioned there. So that's low double-digit million in the quarter.

So with that, we have reached the end of today's presentation of Mycronic's Q2 report. Thank you very much for attending.

Thank you.

Thank you.