Ncab Group Aktie

Welcome to the NCAB Q1 presentation for 2026. [Operator Instructions] Now I will hand the conference over to the CEO, Peter Kruk; CFO, Timothy Benjamin; and Head of Investor Relations, Gunilla Wikman. Please go ahead.

Thank you very much and welcome, everyone, to our call. Today, presenting primarily will be myself and my colleague, Timothy Benjamin.

Just for those of you who might be new to us, NCAB is a supplier of printed circuit boards. So the products you see to the left on the screen, which form the foundation in any electronic product. So our customers will mount semiconductors or microprocessors on our product and that then creates the intelligent nodes in any electronic product. And what is important to recognize is that whilst semiconductor components are standard components, the printed circuit board is uniquely designed for each and every application. NCAB is present today through 19 companies across the world. We have about some 650 colleagues around the world supporting our customers and we are dealing with some 34 factories to supply the main portion of our customers.

We have no in-house manufacturing but we have a very strong focus on securing the supplier network. So roughly 120 of our 650 colleagues are working specifically with technology and the factory management. Our focus is for printed circuit boards for demanding customers, customers with high demands in terms of quality, on-time delivery, efficiency and we aim to supply them with 0 defects, produced sustainably and giving them the overall lowest total cost. And our aim is to be the #1 PCB producer wherever we are and we are the globally leading supplier of printed circuit boards worldwide.

Our focus is also on what we call the high mix, low-volume segment. So we are not focusing on the markets of consumer electronics or PCs or main data applications. But we're typically more applicable working with the industrial applications or medical or aerospace and defense. And typically, what we see in these applications is that the printed circuit board forms a very small part of the total bill of material for the end product. These customers that we are focusing on have very high demands on quality and performance. And given the fact that it is a small part of their bill of material and that their overall total spend on printed circuit boards is relatively limited, they struggle to get good support and access from the leading factories. And this is where we can support them. We can bring them knowledge to help them design their product efficiently and also match them up with the best factories.

And where we combine our global spend in printed circuit boards, we are one of the leading buyers of printed circuit boards worldwide. And that gives us also an opportunity to have a margin on the services we provide. What we've seen is that the global printed circuit board market is somewhere north of USD 80 billion worth. And it was a market that was growing rapidly during the early parts of the pandemic but then had a recoil in the market. We are now positive to see that now for the last 1.5 years, the market has resumed growth. And we can also see that NCAB's order intake is matching that and is accelerating its growth in 2026.

So moving to our first quarter. We had a strong positive growth on top line and also a positive development of our EBITDA. We can see that the market recovery and our growth in order intake that has started growing from Q2 of last year has continued to grow and has accelerated over the last 4 quarters. It is a very challenging market situation right now. The growth in the global market is accelerated by big data center investments. This is not our main market but it is creating supply chain bottlenecks for printed circuit board manufacturing worldwide. We have a strong supply chain and our factory management organization can actually help to make a difference in this tough environment and help our customers still get good delivery of product.

We're also seeing from the growth in the overall global market, increasing market prices. And in the quarter, we have also had on top of that, some project wins, notably in North America, which further enhanced our order intake in the quarter. But overall, we see an underlying good positive development across our segments and we can see things like defense, medtech and power doing quite well, whereas our sales towards the automotive industry remains somewhat muted. On the EBITDA side, we again have a good positive development versus 2025. We can see we're leveraging the growth and we're offsetting quite a significant FX headwind and our gross margins are stable versus prior year.

If we take a more detailed look on the numbers, we can see our order intake is up 27% in Swedish krona. Our organic growth in U.S. dollars, we basically trade 90% of our business in U.S. dollars effectively. Our organic growth in U.S. dollar is up 43%. Book-to-bill is also quite positive of 1.2. Net sales grew in -- by 12% to SEK 1.074 billion, which is a growth organically in U.S. dollars of 24%. And we can see our EBITA reached SEK 128 million, up from SEK 100 million last year and an EBITA margin equivalent of 11.9%. We can see our gross margin up slightly but largely stable. But we are overall on the EBITA side, offsetting a negative FX impact of SEK 27 million in the quarter. Cash flow was okay at SEK 65 million versus SEK 53 million of prior year. Our working capital is up slightly, mainly driven by the high growth that we see in the business but also the fact that lead times are longer than they were 1 year ago, which is creating more goods in transit. Net profit at SEK 75 million versus SEK 52 million last year and an EPS of SEK 0.40 versus -- or SEK 0.40 versus SEK 0.28.

Over to you, Tim.

Thanks, Peter. So I think you heard a little bit from Peter that our gross profit has remained fairly stable year-over-year, which we're happy to see a little bit over the medium term. When we look at the quarter, as you heard from Peter, up 27% in order intake, 43% in U.S. dollars, which is comparable units for us, excluding acquisitions. Positive development in all segments. We saw a good development, especially in North America and East. Net sales up 12% in SEK and 24% in U.S. dollars. These 2 effects contributed to a positive book-to-bill of 1.2, which you would expect with the longer lead times that we see right now as well as some of the larger project orders that we had within the quarter.

But we were happy to see a positive trend in EV charging as well as in our aerospace and defense business. When we look at the EBITA, yes, we did see a 28% year-over-year increase going from SEK 100 million last quarter to SEK 128 million this quarter. We did have to offset quite a negative headwind coming from FX, which mainly impacts gross profit, offset a little bit on the SG&A side. These 2 things were offset very much by the strong growth in revenue that we saw and they contributed to a very strong operational leverage within the quarter. And as you heard a little bit from Peter, gross margins, although a little bit down sequentially, were quite stable year-on-year.

If we're looking bit closer at our different industrial segments or regional segments, Nordic had a positive order intake growth of 17% in Swedish krona from SEK 261 million versus SEK 222 million last year. So a good organic growth in the business here of 7% in Swedish kroner and 25% in the U.S. dollars. Good positive development here, notably in Norway. We had some earlier order placements in Q4 in some of our Nordic countries but that was nicely offset by other growth in the segment in the quarter. Net sales grew by 21% to SEK 271 million versus SEK 224 million last year. So also here, good organic growth of 12% in Swedish kroner and 30% in USD. Here, we see our EV charging business in the Nordics resuming and we've also seen good deliveries of defense contracts that has boosted growth in the quarter.

EBITA amounted to close to SEK 38 million in the quarter, up from SEK 24 million last year and our margin EBITA increased to 13.9% versus 10.7% and we've seen good leverage on the net sales growth. And we've also seen good positive contribution from Multi-Teknik that we acquired here in Q4. And these things have offset the negative FX and mix impacts that we may have seen from larger project deliveries.

If we move to our European segments, also here, we start to see the order intake grow 8% in Swedish kroner to SEK 537 million, up from SEK 497 million. The organic growth is 2% in Swedish kroner but 20% in U.S. dollars. We see a positive trend in a number of our markets, notably Germany and Benelux but we see some of our countries here, U.K. and Italy notably impacted by their share of sales to the automotive industry.

Net sales are up 2% to SEK 508 million versus SEK 497 million. It's an organic decline in sales still in Swedish krona due to the FX impact, so --of 4%, but it's a growth in U.S. dollars of 13% year-on-year. And the general recovery that we see is offset by, again, here a little bit by the negative sales to automotive industry. EBITA increased to SEK 57.6 million, up from SEK 55.8 million and the margin is largely flat at 11.3% from -- compared to 11.2% last year. So we see some negative impact from FX impact on the EBITDA but we're at the same time, we're also getting a positive contribution from the B&B acquisition that came into the company in Q2 of last year.

In North America, we have seen a very strong growth in the quarter. We're up 71% to SEK 403 million versus SEK 236 million. So in U.S. dollars, it's actually a growth of 100%. And this is supported by large project orders, some of which will have deliveries extending into 2027. But also underlying this, there is a good positive development. We see notably our sales in defense and to power segments are doing quite well. Net sales are up 24% to SEK 233 million versus SEK 188 million and 45% in U.S. dollars. We had a little bit weaker Q1 of '25, so that number gets help from that as well in the comparison. We have positive development in defense, power and medtech sectors and we have seen a further decline in the share of sourced products from China in the quarter compared to prior year.

EBITA increased to close to SEK 28 million, up from SEK 18 million and corresponded to a margin -- EBITA margin of 12% versus 9.7% and the growth here is primarily driven by the increased revenue in the quarter. And finally, looking at our East segment, we also here see a very positive development on the order intake, order intake growing 52% in Swedish kroner to SEK 88 million, over SEK 58 million and it's growth in U.S. dollars by 77%. We are able to capitalize on the growth in high-tech and our supply base as well as growing with NCAB's global customers.

With the challenging supply markets, we are able go through our access to the relationship with the factories to be able to sort of support our customers better than customers, who may be, in some cases, have been buying direct from factories. Our net sales are up 21% to SEK 61 million, up from 50.5 million and our net sales in U.S. dollars increased by 41%. With that, our EBITA was able to grow from SEK 8.2 million to SEK 11.3 million and it's equivalent to an EBITA margin in the quarter of 18.5% compared to 16.3% last year. And this, of course, is supported by the strong leverage from the revenue growth. Over to you, Tim.

Thanks, Peter. So if we look on the financials that we have here, our return on equity up 50 basis points to 15.6% from 15.1%. We expect to see that continue to tick up. Net debt-to-EBITDA, 1.5 versus 1.6, which shows that we still have quite a bit of capacity here for M&A. Equity/asset ratio fairly stable year-over-year and net working capital up a fair amount, which you heard earlier was from the recent growth that we've had lately, along with some of the recent acquisitions, which have a higher working capital average than the standard NCIB business as well as the longer lead times that we're seeing in the current market conditions.

Available liquidity, north of SEK 1.2 billion, which again gives us good dry powder on the M&A scene. And then we have a proposal from the Board of Directors for SEK 1.1 per share. If we look at the pipeline side, we have a number of good conversations ongoing on the M&A side. You see recently, mid-last year, we did B&B in Germany and then in December, Multi-Teknik In Sweden. And with a number of good conversations ongoing, we're happy to see this continue. When we look at the recent acquisitions that we have had in the past 12 months, the 2 that I mentioned, we saw good and strong contributions within the quarter as we start the integration process.

So if we look ahead, I mean, our company, we are glad to see that the market is starting to turn back -- turning back up. And our strategy remains as before. We are focused on growing our business in the printed circuit board market with a 100% focus on printed circuit boards and continuing with an asset-light model, whereby we use outside partners for the manufacturing. We are, however, continuing to invest in technology and our processes to be able to support our customers more efficiently to grow our market shares and deepen the relationships with the customers we have in existing markets. We're also continuously looking to expand our business geographically, whether that is to enter completely new markets or to strengthen our footprint in existing regions. And we believe M&A is a good vehicle for us to accelerate that process.

And finally, we are acting in the market where there are a higher degree of fragmentation, a large number of smaller trading companies, local or regional, primarily in Nordic, say, in Europe or in North America. And we see great opportunities to consolidate this market by sort of giving these smaller companies access to the NCAB framework, our factory management organization and our purchasing power to be able to serve their existing customers better and to help them grow in the future.

With that, I think we open up for questions. And thank you for the presentation.

[Operator Instructions] the next question comes from Jacob Edler from Danske Bank.

Congrats on a strong report. A couple of questions from my side, starting a bit on price in the order intake. I remember in connection with the Q4 report in February, you talked about pricing for some raw materials being up around 10% at that point. We've now seen some reports on copper clad laminates, prepreg, et cetera, having increased in the magnitude of, let's say, 15% to 25% in February and March and even some higher prices here in April. Is it fair to assume that price will be a bigger factor in Q2 orders relative to what we saw here? And what was the number you saw for Q1?

Yes. Thank you for your question. I think as we said last time, we were seeing price increases expected in quarter 1 and sort of that led to some level of prebuying in Q4 where customers potentially come back to place orders earlier. As you said, we were estimating prices to be up in the order of 10%. I think it's fair that we have seen that. I think in some cases, we don't maybe see it fully come through on the order intake in Q1 because, I mean, there's a mixture here of pricing for completely new projects versus to what extent we can sort of work with our suppliers to maintain, say, a slower introduction or lessen price increase on existing parts.

But I think it's in that order of magnitude of price increase that we have seen in Q1. We are, of course, here working with our suppliers to protect our customers to the extent possible. But we are foreseeing and expecting further price increases here coming into Q2. So the price increases will probably continue here in the second quarter on the order intake side. On the revenue side, however, it's not really showing in our numbers yet. So that is part of why we have the positive book-to-bill. And we will gradually see the prices show up in the net sales, like starting maybe in Q2 but primarily in the second half.

Yes. Good. And then just a question on the North America order, USD 20 million. How much -- how should we think about it deliveries '26 relative to '27? If you're able to add any flavor there?

I mean you can say there are various -- it's not one specific order. It's actually a couple of different projects. And one of these projects goes over 2 years. And I think it's primarily where we were involved with some research activities for particular accelerators. And that has been business that we have had. It's a continuation of projects that we have been doing before. So we have had these kind of projects in the last, I think, last 2 years at least, where we've had project orders of around, say, $4 million in, say, either Q2 or Q1 or sometimes split between the 2. This time, we are getting this order but it's actually split over 2 years. So I think we are here maybe seeing a $4 million that's going to be into 2027 from this side here.

Okay. Very good. Just a last question on orders. I mean, in Q4, you quantified that roughly 10, 11 percentage points of the growth we saw in orders in Q4 was prebuying related. Was there an element of prebuying here as well? I presume that lead times are continuing to creep up as you're stating. So any prebuying effect, so to speak, continuing here?

I think what we see is, I mean, I think we do foresee the price -- we do see prices continuing up at the moment. And that is probably leading to some level of prebuying as well. But I think we don't see prebuying boosting our numbers in Q1 but maybe they are sort of netting out the positive prebuy we saw in Q4 to some extent. So the net effect of prebuying is probably pretty small because what we saw is prebuying in Q4 would actually have created a kind of a down blip downwards in Q1. Now that downturn blip is probably sort of offset largely by some further prebuy in Q1 here.

I think one of the effects that we saw in quarter 4 was that some of the largest customers sort of trying to get ahead of the current market conditions and the pricing increases and whatnot. So we saw that effect strongest with the large customers in quarter 4. We see it now with the medium customers that are also kind of waking up to the current market conditions and the difficulty in some cases to get orders in the future. So I think that's kind of the trend that we see. It's the large customers, medium customers and smaller customers.

Yes. Good. Just 2 last quick questions. On the gross margin, I mean, it's a bit lower sequentially, which I guess is -- makes a lot of sense given how fast prices are moving and you having to -- I mean, there's, I guess, a lag effect created from factories pushing on prices to you and then you have to kind of push them on to the customers. But is it fair to assume that we should see a similar theme here in Q2, so kind of the lower end of the interval of 35% to 36%. And then eventually, as prices may stabilize that, that could creep up a bit, I don't know.

Yes. I think it's fair to assume that we could be in this -- in the current range. It's a lot of work right now with our customers trying to manage the cost increases that are happening in the market. Of course, we try to protect our customers to the extent possible during this phase. But we expect probably to be in this range where we are right now.

Good. And last question from my side. I mean we had some decent invoicing in this quarter and you've had a relatively sizable backlog from the last, let's say, 1.5 years here. Can we expect kind of decent invoicing to continue during this year different from that backlog?

Yes, yes. I mean we've been booking orders here since basically during, say, '24, '25 on the defense side and we continue to win business in this segment. And some of these projects, it's a mixture here. Some projects are kind of short term but they also contain a fairly high degree of projects, which are longer term. So yes, we will have deliveries of defense during the remainder of this year as well as into '27.

The next question comes from Jonny Jin from SEB.

I have just a few quick questions. I think the first one is on data center project. I think that's very exciting. Could you maybe clarify how much direct data center you have today? And how is the pipeline of similar data center projects going forward?

Thank you, Jonny. I'd say -- let's say we are not specifically in the data center direct application. But I think where we are -- have been successful has been participating in projects where we are auxiliary -- supporting the auxiliary systems. So in some of the kind of power regulation systems for the kind of data center projects. And this is a business that we've started developing partly with some customers here in North America during the -- say, during 2025. And we've had very good business with them in Q1. And this is, of course, a business we hope to be able to continue to develop going forward. So we are very happy about the big project orders we have seen here in quarter 1 but they are by no means, hopefully, our final orders for this segment.

Okay. That's clear. And I mean, direct data center exposure, is that something that you're interested at all? Or is that more sort of high volume that you want to avoid? Or could that be a new growth pocket for you? Or how should we view that?

I think the main data boards themselves, that is very much high-volume applications. So that is not our sweet spot where we can add most value. But I think you have a lot of, say, infrastructure around the data centers either power distribution or it's cooling systems and all these other things that you need to make a data center work. And there is typically where you find more of our high mix of volume applications. So if we can be well positioned there, we have an opportunity to be a strong participator in this market as well. But it's, say the data center application itself is maybe not our area.

Okay. That's fair. Then one question on lead times. Can you maybe elaborate how we should think about the lead times even more and the order conversion we should expect going forward because there's some moving parts there at the moment.

Yes. And I think what we have seen is the lead times have gradually extended. I think they are still sort of in the -- historically, we've been in 1 quarter, maybe they are now more like 2 quarters. So we should not expect the current Q1 order intake to translate into Q2 revenue. I mean there will be some delay in this. And of course, partly due to the fact that there is -- part of the order intake growth is also related to price increasing, which would also translate into later deliveries. So I'm not sure if that sort of answers your question.

Yes. Okay. Just one final quick one here on Germany. That's an important market for you and you have some upbeat comments on Germany. Could you maybe elaborate a little bit more what you're seeing in Germany now? And how is the momentum developed during the quarter, so to speak?

I think what we have seen, I mean, for our business, we have gone through, say, from '23 to beginning of '25, quite an elongated, say repercussion from the growth in '21, '22 during the kind of COVID years. And I think what we've seen is that there's been a tremendous pile up of inventory or semi-built products, maybe not necessarily that there has been inventory of printed circuit boards but finished products in retail or in -- from contract manufacturers to OEMs, et cetera.

I think a large part of what we have seen happen during -- starting in '25 and continuing is that, that has not come out of the system. So we are now seeing not only a growing market, we're also seeing the growth that was already there during '24, '25, which we were seeing a discounted version of in our order intake. So I think from that, it's -- we can see our European business and our European customers coming back and we can also see that they are growing. So -- but I think they are -- and as you have seen from our numbers, they are a little bit behind some of the other segments in terms of growth rate but I think the trend is quite in the right direction.

[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from Gustav Berneblad from Nordea.

It's Gustav here from Nordea. So I thought maybe just to start off with the certificate you got here for the CMMC 2.0. Can you just elaborate a bit more on what you see in terms of potential from this certificate to start off with?

I mean the aerospace and defense business that we have in NCAB is historically has been primarily in North America and in the Nordics. And over the years, we're now starting to sort of gradually expand our know-how of this and selling into more markets. In the U.S., we have had a strong position also from the fact that we have [indiscernible] approval to use certain factories in Asia also for U.S. -- some of the U.S. defense applications, which has given us a strong position. The U.S. has moved forward with their way of securing data security. CMMC 2 is one important part of their new regulation that is now coming into effect. And for us, it's very positive that we are one of the first companies to have the CMMC 2 accreditation, which means that we are sort of accredited to support the U.S. defense projects, which is quite nice. And there is, of course, just like we see in Europe, significant investments in this industry going on.

Okay. But in terms of, I mean, volumes, I guess that's very hard to give an exact figure of. But is it -- I mean, are you seeing less competition now given that you are the first company to be approved and sort of can take market shares during this sort of raise that we're seeing? Or what's your view?

I think it's a bit too early to say. But I think if anything, it will sort of weed out some smaller or less competent competitors. It is a market where, say, if you're even allowed to be even to look at material to quote something, you need to be accredited to be able to prove that you can handle the data that you're looking at in a secure way. So it's an important part of us being a credible supplier into this market and continuing to grow in this market.

That's perfect. And then I thought maybe can you just elaborate a bit more on the situation here where you comment of customers that went previously directly through factories are now potentially coming to you. Is this something that brings up material volumes for you already now? Or...

I think we may see it. I think we know it's a very tough situation right now with our factories. We know our factories are more or less forced to turn away smaller customers. They need to prioritize how they handle the volume they have and even the factories themselves are competing to get access to the raw material. So you really need to be working with the leading factories. So I think it's too early to say that we have seen customers coming to us. I think we've already seen some signs of that during end of last year that customers were getting worried and looking for support from someone like us. I think it's part of the growth that we're seeing in the East segment right now, where typically you can say it's challenging for our organization in China to be successful when you have the customers and the factories close by. But I think part of the growth that we're seeing right now is that we actually have strong factory relationships. We can still get access to material. Even if prices are going up, we can secure delivery to a better degree than what many are that are trying to buy direct.

That's very clear. And on that note, the East market, I mean, given if we assume volumes are fairly stable from here on that level, I mean, how sustainable are the margins there currently?

I mean there's always a bit of variation here in the mix. I mean, in our business in Asia, we do a very high degree of advanced engineering, supporting our customers. And I think that also lends to, say, margins moving a bit up and down on some of these projects. So -- but I think to -- we have, I think, over a long period of time, been able to perform in that range of around 15% or sometimes above. I think that's fair to assume that we can continue that.

That's perfect. And just one last question here. Sorry. The new customers -- or sorry, the data center part of the business that you saw -- you received some customers during '25. Are those new customers that appeared in '25 and you're now seeing volumes ramp up more and more significantly in 2026?

I think this is one of those customers where we work both with their OEM as well as with their contract manufacturer. And I think that cooperation with both these parties have been going on for multiple years. And then together, we have worked on developing the concept for these applications here, which started taking off in significant volumes, I'd say, during '25 and is continuing in -- here in '26.

There are no more questions at this time. So I hand the conference back to the speakers for any written questions or closing comments.

Thank you very much. There is one question from Thomas Blikstad at Pareto Securities. And he says congratulations on a strong report today. Could you break down the 40% organic order growth here in Q1 in regards to prebuying and pricing effects? How are these 2 dynamics looking heading into Q2 onwards?

I'd say prebuying is virtually nothing because you have this kind of net effect. You had some prebuying in Q4. And yes, there is probably some prebuying in Q1 but they are largely offsetting. So it's a little bit hard to predict exactly. It's always a bit of a guesswork to understand exactly what is a preorder, what is just an order. But I think we don't really see that much of prebuying. I'd say on the pricing effect, maybe we have in the order of 10% on the order intake side. And then you have some of the larger orders, which maybe are somewhere in that 10%, 15% impact right now. And then you have an underlying growth of some other 15% on top of that to get to the kind of the numbers we talked about.

Okay. Thank you very much, Peter and Tim. And just to remind you, our AGM is coming up soon, the 7th of May, very welcome there and our Q2 report is on the 22nd of July. So very welcome back and thank you for today.

Thank you.

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Q4 presentation for 2025. [Operator Instructions] Now I will hand the conference over to the CEO, Peter Kruk; CFO, Timothy Benjamin; and Head of Investor Relations, Gunilla Ohman. Please go ahead.

Thank you very much, and welcome all to our Q4 release. First, a few bit of information about NCAB. So we at NCAB, we are a supplier of printed circuit boards, and those are the products that you see to the left on this slide, which basically creates the foundation in any electronic or intelligent product. So our customers are the ones placing components on the board that can be either OEM customers or it can be contract manufacturers. .

Our focus is on printed circuit board for demanding customers. We're focusing on customers with high demands in terms of quality, technology, and we aim to supply them with zero defect products produced also sustainably, giving them the most competitive offer by offering the overall lowest total cost. We are aiming to be the #1 PCB supplier wherever we are, and we are already the globally leading producer of printed circuit boards worldwide.

We are operating with a local presence in around 19 countries. We are some 660 specialists in the group, and we have no in-house manufacturing, but are working with a network of factories and our main factories, which are currently around 34, make up around 90% of our total deliveries.

Besides looking at the demanding customers, we're also focused on the high mix, low-volume segments of the market. So we are not involved in super high-volume applications like consumer electronics, mobile phones or computers, but more typically industrial products, so products where generally, the final product has a significantly higher value. The printed circuit board is a small part of the bill of material. Demands, however, can be very hard in terms of quality and environmental ability to withstand. And also, even if these -- our customers in these segments are very quite often large globally leading companies, their spend on printed circuit boards is relatively limited, and therefore, they struggle both to have the internal expertise to manage this commodity, but also to even get access to the leading factories.

And this is an area where we can help them and also by combining the spend of our portfolio of customers, we can also get very good terms and earn the margin on our business. We have been going through a quite significant volatile market over the last 5 years. As you can see, I mean, overall, this is a globally long-term growing PCB market, as you can see in the green bars. We saw a tremendous spike or growth in the market following the pandemic. And we have, for a few years, been living off the backlash of that where inventories in the supply chain were full of product produced or semi-produced products at our customers and our customers' customers.

We are happy to see that in 2025, this is starting to turn around, and we can see that growth in our order intake also for the full year coming through and even more so in the fourth quarter. We also have a good mix in our portfolio. We are not biased on any specific segment, but I think we've seen in this year, automotive has been one of the segments where there's still been some challenges, whereas, however, we've seen good continued progress in areas like defense, power and medical applications.

We're also handling the geopolitical risks by an increasingly diversified supply base. So we've been continuing to expand our sourcing in Asia outside China, and I think making good progress here, and I think we expect that to continue to grow also in 2026.

So coming more closely into Q4, and I think we're very pleased to see that we have good order intake and net sales growth in U.S. dollars. We trade predominantly in U.S. dollars. And it's also both a market recovery, but also it's sequentially growth order intake for us during the last 3 quarters, which is quite positive, not just year-over-year. We can see this as a general recovery across all of our regional segments, and we see accelerated growth in certain areas or industries like defense, medtech and power energy.

There is to the order intake an impact also here from some early ordering by customers. We have seen as the market is growing and expanding, especially driven globally by data center applications, the lead times are extending. And we also see prices going up now at the beginning of 2026. And therefore, we also see customers who have the ability to forecast to place early order, and that is influencing our order intake growth in the fourth quarter.

We estimate that roughly 1/3 of that order intake growth is related to these earlier order placements -- very good recovery in our EBITA versus 2024, where we had a weak ending of the year. And I think we see here a good recovery despite a strong FX headwind. And it's a combination of our gross margin improving sequentially. We are now basically on a level where we were in Q4 2024, but really leveraging the growth now to our overhead structures and with that driving better performance in financial EBITA.

Also, M&A activities have continued. We were able to sign and close with Multi-Teknik here in the fourth quarter. Multi-Teknik Monsterkort is a Swedish company based in Gothenburg with the main customer base also in Sweden. It's a company that has a long history from 1975, which also included manufacturing, which was ended in 2008. They are mainly focused on industrial applications, automotive, telecom and medical.

Revenue in their financial year '24, '25 was approximately SEK 110 million with an EBITA just below SEK 20 million. And with that comes 15 new employees, of which 8 are in Sweden, 5 in China and 2 in Lithuania, and the deal was closed on December 19.

Looking then at Q4 in the numbers, we can see that our order intake is up a strong 20% to SEK 1.092 billion versus SEK 907 million prior year. That equates to 33% organic growth in U.S. dollars and a book-to-bill of 1.21. Net sales also grew by 9% in Swedish kroner to SEK 902 million versus SEK 830 million prior year. And also here, we can see the growth now in organic -- in U.S. dollars of more than 20%.

And with EBITA, our EBITA increased to SEK 98.6 million versus SEK 71.6 million prior year. And now we have an EBITA margin of 10.9% versus 8% of last year. The gross margin, as can be seen, is equal to prior year, but having improved sequentially during the year. And you can also see our negative impact from FX in the quarter, which was a full SEK 23 million, and we'll elaborate on that a little bit later.

Cash flow was at SEK 22 million versus SEK 45 million prior year. Our working capital increased a little bit up versus last year, tied partly to the acquisitions, but also due to some temporary changes that we're doing with the implementation of our ERP system. Net profit of SEK 53 million versus SEK 41.5 million and EPS of SEK 0.28 versus SEK 0.22 last year.

And with that, I give the word to you, Tim.

Thanks, Peter. So if we take a look at the full year, we saw order intake increasing 10% to just above SEK 4 billion. We saw a positive book-to-bill, especially driven by the second half of the year of 1.09. While sales increased 3.6% to SEK 3.7 billion versus SEK 3.6 billion the year before, when we look at the organic growth, it was actually 5% in U.S. dollars.

The EBITA margin came out for the year at 10.8% versus 12.4% prior year, mostly impacted by an adverse FX effect that you heard from Peter. For the full year, SEK 53 million over SEK 20 million in Q4, and that's just a result of FX rates being significantly different in quarter 1 of 2025. Operating cash flow at SEK 287 million, impacted a little bit by the temporary increase in working capital in quarter 4. And then that all contributed to an earnings per share of SEK 1.1 versus SEK 1.36 in the prior year. And the NCAB Board of Directors has proposed a dividend of SEK 1.1 per share.

When we take a look a little bit over time at the gross margin, it's nice to see that we're stabilizing at a high level at 35.1% for 2025. It was a little bit weaker than that in the first part of the year and then developed well in the second half. And it's also nice to see the top line starting to grow as well.

So when we take a look at it, we see that order intake increased by 20% in the fourth quarter, but actually for comparable units in U.S. dollars, up 33%. And that wasn't just driven by one particular segment. We saw a positive development in all segments, especially so when you look at it in comparable units in U.S. dollars, which is a typical trading currency in our industry.

Net sales followed, but still significantly below where the order intake level is. So up 21% in USD, a positive book-to-bill of 1.2. And there's a couple of particular industries to highlight here with a good positive trend in EV charging as well as continued positive development in aerospace and defense. And when we look at EBITA, that developed well to SEK 99 million in the fourth quarter versus SEK 72 million in the prior year.

The FX was impacted negatively in the quarter by SEK 23 million, which influenced the margin from where it would have otherwise been. Gross margin came in at 35.7%, which is just a hair below where it was in the prior year, but slightly higher than quarter 3. Acquired companies did have a slightly dilutive effect on gross margins versus prior year. I should note that.

When we take a look and unpack the FX a little bit, I think it's interesting to look at where the U.S. dollar versus the SEK was this year versus prior. So this year in quarter 4 on average, just a hair below 9.4 versus prior year at 10.8. So what that does for us is that impacts our revenue with basically negative SEK 100 million on the top line side, which travels directly down to the gross profit side of minus at minus 40. There's a small revaluation effect of minus 3, but most of it is just a pure translation effect at minus 37.

Within our SG&A, though, we have a little bit of a negative hedge against that. So that actually boosted the result a little bit with 17, but the overall effect, you can see is quite strong at minus 23.

Thank you, Tim. Moving over a little bit more in detail in the segments, starting with Nordics. We see again a continued strong order intake development here with a growth of 24% in Swedish krona. Here, though, there is some early order placement, which kind of further accelerates this growth. The countries with the most significant increases were Denmark, Finland and Norway. .

Net sales also grew nicely even though we had significant FX impact in the markets here. And large drivers here are the defense side, but also the EV charging business, which is resuming after having had a low period during large part of -- early part of '25 and latter part of '24. EBITA amounted to SEK 36.3 million versus SEK 31 million in the prior year, and the margin came back up north of 15% to 15.9% versus 15.7% and really the result of good leverage on the net growth offsetting the impact of FX in the quarter.

Moving over to our largest segment, Europe. The order intake also here increased. It grew by 13% to SEK 483 million versus SEK 428 million. That's an organic growth in the order intake of 5% in Swedish kroner, but 21% in U.S. dollars. And it's a little bit of a mixed development here in the European segment, but clear positive trends in markets like Spain, Benelux and Germany, which are recovering from a weak end of '24. We can also see net sales growing 10% to SEK 400 million versus SEK 365 million.

Organically, the increase is 3% in Swedish krona and 19% in U.S. dollars. And the industries tied connected to automotive is still weak, and that is impacting primarily for us, regions like U.K. and Italy, but we see a recovery in most other areas. The EBITA increased to SEK 34 million versus almost close to 0 in end of Q4 2024. And the margin was now 8.5% versus only 1% in 2024. And still, there is also here a negative impact from FX and some product mix on margins.

North America, a very strong order intake in the North American business. We grew 31% over what was also a little bit of a weaker fourth quarter 2024 order intake-wise, but nevertheless, very strong development. We're making good progress with our new product introduction model that we sort of acquired through Phase 3 and are expanding across our U.S. organization. Strong growth also here in defense, but also related to power applications, auxiliary solutions around data centers.

Even if NCAB is not in the high-volume data center market, we can still be participating in parts of the auxiliary systems. Net sales are up 4% to SEK 214 million and 19% in U.S. dollars. And a note here again, as before, tariffs are included in the revenue, but are not registered as part of our order intake as the tariffs are only known when we bring the goods into the U.S. market. Our share of China-sourced products supplying for the U.S. is continuing to decrease and is now in the low 40s percent. EBITA decreased to SEK 26 million versus SEK 33 million, a margin of 12.1% versus 16%. It's a bit of timing of costs and also adjusting a little bit to the higher pace that we're seeing in the order intake that is impacting the margin in the fourth quarter.

East, also here a continued positive development. Order intake growing by 32% to SEK 72 million versus SEK 55 million last year. Order intake in U.S. dollars, up a whole 49%. And we are capitalizing on the growth in high-tech. We're leveraging our supply base where customers who may have been buying direct are now struggling to get access, but they can have better access to the market through us. But we're also growing with NCAB global customers growing in China. And there's also here some preordering effect that is also helping the numbers.

Net sales grew 7% to SEK 59 million -- sorry, decreased 7% versus SEK 63 million, also here in U.S. dollars down, but it's more a timing of business and deliveries in the different quarters. So our EBITA is down to SEK 7.5 million versus SEK 11 million and equivalent to still a healthy margin of 12.7% versus a very strong margin of 17.3% in the end quarter of the prior year. And there is some adverse mix here as well in product mix and pricing impacting the margin.

Tim?

So when we look at the return on equity, we see about 14.3% this year versus around 18.3% last year. equity fairly stable. You heard a little bit about the FX impact on the earnings earlier in the call. We just completed an acquisition of Multi-Teknik Monsterkort. That drove our net debt to EBITDA up just a little bit to 1.8 versus 1.5 in the prior quarter -- prior year. Equity to asset ratio at about 40.9% versus 42.7% prior year. Working capital around 9.6% or SEK 376 million, a bit higher than this time last year, but you heard a little bit earlier from Peter, that we have a bit higher temporary working capital as a result of some of our ERP go-lives. Still quite a bit of available liquidity with a little bit over SEK 1.2 billion available and a proposed dividend of SEK 1.1 per share.

Very good. So as Tim mentioned, we have a good balance sheet and a lot of dry powder to continue our M&A activity, which is part of our strategy. So we are happy with the 2 acquisitions we did in 2025 and are continuing to work through our pipeline of both long list and shortlist and have a number of good discussions pending or ongoing at this moment. Our model is that we are -- the integration process is an important part for us, and B&B and Multi-Teknik are now entering our process where the initial phase is very much about sort of getting to know our new friends in greater detail to understand in the areas where they are working differently to ensure that we welcome the new colleagues to our company in a good way as well as reassuring our customers of how we will continue to support them in a good way.

Following that, we will then start looking more into synergies of cooperation, how can we work closer in terms of our factory base as well as longer-term integration of systems and finance roles. So here we are now in the beginning of the phase, and we are continuing, of course, to ideally add further acquisitions to our portfolio. And historically and continuously, we're looking to see roughly half of our growth come through acquisitions over the cycle.

And our strategy overall remains firm. We are -- remain 100% focused on printed circuit boards, and we're also believing strongly in our asset-light model where we don't invest and own any factories, but look to sort of provide superior service and flexibility for our customers. So we continue to invest though in technology as well as other services to be able to provide our customers better products and better service and by that, grow our market shares in the market where we have a presence.

We're also looking continuously to expand geographically. And we believe that M&A is a good way for us to open up new markets. It is very much a relationship business and getting a first foothold in a new market speeds up that process and then we can add the full value of the NCAB Group to these new markets as we go forward. And we also have in predominantly Europe and North America, still a very fragmented market with a large number of smaller trading companies that date back to the '90s or early 2000s when a lot of the manufacturing moved to Asia.

Many of these companies have remained regional or local. And as they were started in the '90s, some 20, 30 years ago, many of these companies, there's also now a time where they are approaching a succession dilemma, and that is also a good opportunity where we can help these companies into the family of NCAB and give them also the strength of access to our full factory portfolio and our factory management organization.

And with that, we conclude our presentation and open up for questions.

[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from Jonny Jin from SEB.

Hope you can hear me. I have a couple of questions. Starting with organic order momentum seems strong here, which is good. And you mentioned both preorders, longer lead times and increased PCB prices. So starting with the price here, are there any price effect showing in Q4 orders at all? And secondly, what sort of magnitude of the price increase can we expect here at the beginning of 2026.

Thank you for your question. And I mean, I think we don't really -- we do see very minor impact of pricing on Q4. I think prices are really coming into effect here in the beginning of 2026. So this is predominantly earlier ordering, if anything, in the Q4 impact. And the magnitude, I mean, here is a little bit volatile, and it varies quite differently between different technologies because you have some which are very gold heavy and then you see significant price increases. But -- and in some areas, you see more reduced. But it's a combination right now of both capacity utilization, which is driving price increases as well as commodities. And it's commodity on gold, metals, but also even the laminate materials.

So I think we are estimating that the average price increase is in the order of 10%. And therefore, we expect probably say, in Q4, we're going to see some positive impact of pricing, but then you're going to see the detraction from the preordering. And on revenue, we don't expect really to see impact on revenue more -- maybe more pronounced in the second half of '25 if this continues -- '26, sorry.

Yes. So 10% on average, did I catch that correctly?

Yes, it's in that order of magnitude.

Okay. Yes, that's clear. And then a question here on the price. I mean, are there any margin impact for you at all from the higher PCB prices? Because as capacity utilization gets up and long -- lead times longer and then your prioritized deliveries get more important. So I suppose your value to customers also becomes more important as well. So do you think you can increase your prices more than the increase of the input prices? Or how should we view that on the margin?

I think we believe and if we look back in our history when we have seen significant price increase in the market, if you go back, say, '21 or at that time when we start to see price increases. I think we've been quite good at keeping our gross margins. But I think we're also taking care of our customers in a good way that for us, I think it's more an opportunity where actually maybe we can see growth because I think a number of customers right now with poor lead times or lead times extending, that could actually be an opportunity where we at NCAB sometimes can have better opportunities to have stronger priority with the factories and maybe more see that as an opportunity of gaining market share as opposed to sort of driving margins further up. I think we've been good at managing, keeping margins with that growth.

Yes. Understood. Then moving to lead times there. Could you try to please help us understand how much longer lead time we could expect. I mean if you look at historical patterns on order conversion patterns, for instance, historically here in Q1, it's sort of an average above 100% conversion on orders. Could that move below 100% now in Q1? Or what is a reasonable assumption there?

Yes. I think -- I mean, historically, I think you could -- I mean, we have a large variety of orders. And I think in history, we've had kind of on average, you had almost like a quarter delay from order to revenue. And I think now we're looking more like 5, 6 months maybe in some of these areas. So I think it's crept up at least 1 to 2 months in terms of lead time from what you would normally see on the average.

And I guess it's a little bit of a combination of, say, lead times and maybe some larger -- longer orders as well, which also impact this. So I think it's a large portion of the excess orders that we've seen in Q4 will spread over several quarters in '26.

Okay. Understood. And then just one final one from my side, if I may. And that is on the order growth intake. I mean you mentioned that 1/3 is pre-buys. And my question there is, was that driven by a few number of customers only. And then the rest here, 2/3 of the growth, how much would you say is existing customers and inventory normalization versus you taking on new customers. And what sort of is the pipeline visibility here of the new customer entering the new year?

I'd say on the preordering side, I mean, you have a few things maybe which is more impacting. I think we also have some cases where we have one larger customer, for instance, where we're making some factory shifts and that causes them to place bigger orders. But actually, you see that pattern across where customers have good visibility, they can -- we've been working with them to sort of help them understand and understand what kind of level of price increase are we seeing and we've been negotiating with the factories to sort of give our customers room to react as well.

So there is a little bit across many of our markets that we have seen this impact. I'd say, I mean, on the basic order intake, I mean, if you look back in U.S. dollars, our order intake was -- we were up 8% in Q2 order intake while we were 14% up organically in Q3. And now we are, say, 33%. So maybe you take out around 10% maybe. So we -- maybe we're now north of 20% organically. So it's a clear progression of the order intake growth.

And I think it's a combination of both growth in a couple of segments, but I think it's also the impact of inventory having come out of the system. I think that is actually something that we can see in some of the segments like EV charging, where they were very much -- they already actually started to have outbound sales growth during, say, early part of '25, but we only start to see the orders started to grow after the summer really.

The next question comes from Jacob Edler from Danske Bank.

Tim, Peter, I have just one on Nordics to start with. I mean you've had a pretty significant buildup of order intake in the Nordic segment since the start of '24. And I think if you kind of look at it accumulated orders relative to revenue, there's a kind of a USD 20 million backlog here. How much of that mainly, I guess, the Defence, Aerospace backlog can you -- can we expect you to deliver in '26 relative to further out, so to speak?

I'm not sure if we have a number that we can give. But I mean, there is a significant portion of some of those, specifically, say, defense orders, which also run into '27. So I think there is a significant part that actually also belongs in '27. It's not all going to be in '26.

As lead times tend to be 12 to over 24-month time line for these.

Sorry, I heard you a bit poor there.

No, I was just saying that the lead times tend to be in the 12- to 24-month time frame for these.

Yes. Yes. Perfect. Okay. Just a question on the Europe segment then. I mean you mentioned that industrial demand is improving in some of the core countries here, including Germany. Even though, I guess, PMIs haven't skyrocketed during the quarter, would you say that the development is mainly driven by inventory replenishment and that inventory levels have reached kind of bottom levels and are now bouncing a bit? Or how should we read it.

Yes. I think that, as you say, I mean, I think German economy is not, by any means, say, booming, but I think it's recovering. I think we're starting to see the signs of it recovering and the effect of, say, inventory reductions diminishing is helping to see our numbers normalize as well. So yes. .

Perfect. And then just a question, I guess, on automotive and U.K., Italy, auto has been a drag for quite a while here. Would you say the trend is kind of somewhat stabilizing sequentially? And when do we kind of reach the point where we're kind of washing out the comps here, if you get my question?

Yes. I think to some extent, it has been stabilizing over, say, in the second -- partly during the second half of 2025 on the automotive side. And if you start -- if you follow the reporting on the -- from the truck manufacturers, I think they start to show some positive order intake numbers now in the U.S. market, which I think was the initial really big drag on the truck industry.

So I think we've -- I don't -- right now, we don't see signs of things getting worse, but maybe actually there are some indicators that would indicate that this market will start to recover.

Very good. And then I just have maybe a last question. Just on North America, how much of the -- how much was related to tariff offsets -- the price increases on tariffs here in Q4. The increase was 19% in U.S. dollars year-over-year. Are you able to add any more flavor there?

We don't give out exact on tariffs in North America, but it was a fair portion.

Next question comes from Thomas Blikstad from Pareto Securities.

Just a question on the dividends from my side here. SEK 1.1 is quite a large payout ratio. And just wondering if you could give some flavor on the rationale behind it in terms of market outlook, visibility, cash flow, M&A possibilities and so forth.

Okay. I'm happy to do so. I mean, as you know, our dividend policy is to basically give out available cash. During last year, we decided to pull back on our dividend. Basically, we were at the time of approaching our decision or our Q4 release, we -- or Q1, we had the Liberation Day in the U.S., which caused a lot of anxiety. And at that time, also we had B&B in the pipeline, and we actually also expected that maybe that we could close Multi-Teknik already before the summer.

And with that, we saw a payout of dividend that we had originally proposed plus these 2 acquisitions that would put pressure if the market would have declined more than it actually did. So in that time frame, we decided to pull back on the dividend. Since then, you could say the market has not done as badly as we could potentially fear. We have also generated quite a bit of cash flow over the period of time. And we have also refinanced the company during -- before the summer of last year, which also gives us more headroom on our covenants.

So with that, we exit the year with a very strong balance situation, and we find it's fine that we can actually then maybe give back some of the things that we did not do last year.

That's great. And just a quick follow-up on the prebuying trends. Are you seeing the same development here in January, February? Or was this more of a 2025 trend?

I think we could see that the lead times really grew in Q4. So the lead time aspect already started to be sort of impacting then. I think it's not really changed that much in the beginning after the year. And the price prebuy effect was more related to before the year. We don't see further pre-buy impacts right now. If anything, we probably might see a bit of a backlash on order intake than in Q1 from the fact that we had preordering in Q4.

The next question comes from Gustav Berneblad from Nordea.

It's Gustav here from Nordea. Just maybe just to come back here to the early part of the Q&A regarding your gross margin guidance that you have sort of given with stating 35%, 36% should still be something we should expect longer term. Do you see any -- are you any hesitancy in regards to this margin guidance? I mean, you comment on maybe looking a bit more at growth here, but...

No, not really. I mean, I think like Peter said, I mean, if you look at us historically, we've been able to handle both price increases in the market and price decreases in the market in a fairly good way and in good cooperation with our customers. We try to make these type of partnerships sort of over the long term. There will always be a quarter or 2 here or there, a little bit like you saw in early '25 where we're adapting the new circumstances. But I mean, if you look at it over the medium or long term, no, I think that's still where we expect to be.

That's perfect. And then just one clarification. I mean when you take these preordering, are there any risk to these orders in terms of cost inflation or that may cause lower profitability looking a few quarters out?

When we take these type of preorders, what we're doing is we're lining them up back to back with factory pricing. So it would be unusual. Not impossible, but unusual for there to be a margin impact.

I mean the only area where we sometimes can be exposed more is in kind of freight costs, which are more volatile and can change. And that is where we could have -- can sometimes get some volatility. But on product pricing, as you said, Tim, it's back-to-back with the factory. So there's a tie between those orders and deliveries.

Okay. That's very clear. And just in terms of the preordering, just also a bit of a clarification. Just wondering if there is a risk that you are undermining the market or if you're underestimating the magnitude of these preordering, is there a risk to that? Or do you have very good visibility of exact what are preordering and what are normal.

No. Actually, in this case, I think we have a pretty high degree of confidence on the preordering. I think one of the nice things with a lot of the investments that we've been making in our ERP over the past couple of years is that we have quite good visibility into which customers and which regions this comes from. So no, I think we have a fairly good handle on it.

That's great. And then on your topic there, ERP. I mean, you should have gone live in Sweden and Norway, right, this quarter. Is there a negative impact from the IT rollout in the Nordic segment in this quarter?

No, not particularly a negative impact in the Nordic side. Actually, there, even if going live with these ERPs is a little bit of a struggle in the first couple of weeks and months, I think both Norway and Swedish teams handled it in a really good, really professional way. So I think there was actually less business impact than we feared there might be. And at this point now, we're 75% of the way of the company loaded into the new ERP. So all of the large go-lives are actually behind us.

So now we have 3 smaller entities in 2026 to go with, which are significantly less risky than the ERPs countries that we went live with in 2025. So actually, it's a comforting feeling going into '26 with the road map that we have. The one disturbance that we did see in the quarter, which Peter commented on a little bit earlier in the call, was on the working capital side. So we just have a few issues to work through with how we use the system to make sure that we're doing invoicing in the most optimal way so we can collect accounts receivables from our customers at the normal pattern. We expect to recover that in the next 1 to 2 quarters.

That's very clear. And then just -- sorry, one last question here from my side. You also commented on the lower inventory levels supporting particularly Europe here. What you're hearing in the market? Is that, that the inventory levels are still on low levels in general? Or are you seeing that normalization occurring right now, would you say?

I think from our perspective, it's not been that they've been super low. It's more that they were historically always high. And I think now the fact that we are seeing orders pick up is maybe not that they're building up orders, but I think that they need to start ordering again. So I don't think we see customers gearing up and building inventory right now. I think it's more the fact that actually they are running out of old inventory, and therefore, it kind of restarts the cycle of production in a greater deal.

[Operator Instructions] There are no more phone questions at this time. So I hand the conference back to the speakers for any written questions and closing comments.

So we have 2 questions written here. The first one is from Johan and he asks, how do you view the current high demand and price trend within the more advanced PCBs, say, for high-density interconnect HDIs and other advanced AI application. How is your exposure to these more high-tech segments. And are there spillover effects in terms of factory utilization, price levels and so forth.

Yes. This is a good question, and it's very much the case. I think what we see is even if we are not directly supplying to the high-volume data center applications, it is creating sort of ripple effects through the industry. And a number of the applications where we are also working with these high-tech technologies is seeing that increased workload because there is a kind of spillover where those factories who are directly focused on data centers, they are forced to sort of move other production out to the other manufacturers.

So this is creating in part of what is driving lead times. It also, of course, is driving price increases from these factories who are now very fully utilized. But it also creates opportunities because, I mean, NCAB, we have very strong relationships with our partner factories. We are generally between 10% to 20% of their turnover, and that means that we still have good priority, and it actually becomes an opportunity for customers who are struggling to get access, to find access through NCAB.

Great. And the second question comes from Carlos Moreno. And he is asking, it's amazing that diversification of suppliers means moving from China to Taiwan. Can you find price quality suppliers anywhere else in the world? And what do the defense companies do. Must be a great time to set up a factory in India, et cetera.

Yes. Our activities, of course, growing here is not only in Taiwan. Taiwan happens to be our largest non-Chinese region in the market. We are also developing business in Korea, Malaysia, Thailand as well. And I think there is where we see a lot of growth happening as well.

India, maybe not so much for the kind of technologies and qualities that our customers are demanding. But a lot of activity in the whole of Southeast Asia and beyond what we currently see in terms of orders or revenue through these factories in '25, if you look upon the activity of sampling validation activities, there's a lot of activity outside of these markets.

So that was the last question we had. So I just would like to thank you and remind you that our first quarter report for '26 is on 23rd of April. So very welcome back, and thank you, Peter and Tim.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Welcome to the NCAB Q3 presentation for 2025. [Operator Instructions]

Now I will hand the conference over to the CEO, Peter Kruk; CFO, Timothy Benjamin; and Head of Investor Relations, Gunilla Ohman. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to today's Q3 report. So, presenting will be primarily myself and my colleague, Timothy Benjamin, and also Gunilla will be supporting us.

NCAB, for those who are new, we are focused on printed circuit boards, the bare boards that you see to the left in this picture, and that basically is the foundation in any electronic intelligent product. And what is a little bit particular about our industry is that while semiconductor components are standard components, the printed circuit boards are a unique design for every single product. So, it's a highly engineered product where we work closely with our customers in defining the designs.

We are a company, we're believing in strong local presence. We are present through 19 companies across the world, serving some 50 markets, and we are around 650 colleagues within the Group. We don't have any in-house production. We are only working with outside manufacturing partners, but we're heavily invested in the production process and securing quality and sustainability in our supplies. So, out of our 650 colleagues, we have around 120 people working worldwide with our factory management and technology areas. We strive to be #1 wherever we are, and we are the globally leading supplier of printed circuit boards today.

The company; beyond focusing on demanding customers, where we can help them solve potential problems. We are also directing our focus on high mix, low volume segments of the market. So we are not in the high-volume consumer electronic products, but typically more in industrial applications. And these might still be very large global companies. But again, for them, the printed circuit board is a small part of the overall bill of material. They have very high quality demands typically. But given the fact that it's a high mix, low-volume business and for them, even though they may be large companies, their total spend in printed circuit boards is still quite minor. And that creates a lot of problems. They will struggle to have enough internal competence to work with printed circuit boards as well as getting the right attention from the leading factories. And that is where we can help them both by providing competence and guidance in the design phase. But also matching their needs in factories where we buy combining all the spend of our customers are in a very attractive position with the leading factories.

We have had a couple of years been -- we as a company operating 30 years long with a strong growth history. It was an extreme growth period from the year 2000 up until 2022. And then we've seen a global decline in the market, and we are happy to see that, that market is now starting to resume growth again as we can see in our rolling 12-month revenue chart here as well.

As a company, we have quite a diversified portfolio of customer segments we are serving. So the biggest part is in industrial, which, of course, is covering a lot of different applications. But we also have strong positions in medical, automotive, power and green tech as well as defense and telecom. And over the years, we've seen sort of these segments countercyclical to some extent, which has helped us be resilient in challenging times.

Manufacturing of printed circuit boards globally is dominated by Asia and China. And we have been sort of, as a company, also working to broaden our supply portfolio to be able to offer our customers good alternatives in terms of not only technology, but also in terms of geopolitical exposure. At the time of our listing in 2018, we at that time had 95% of our sourcing coming from China. And end of last year, we are around 75%. So, there's been a migration and the portfolio we have in predominantly other parts of Asia could offer a significant portion to cover the Chinese current spend. Here, it's always a dialogue with our customers whether or not they want to make a change or not. And still, China is a very strong supplier of printed circuit boards. And therefore, for many of our customers, they are happy to stay with China.

So moving in then to our third quarter. So we are positive to see a gradual improvement in our order intake and revenue. And if we look year-on-year, we can see that our order intake continues to strengthen with very strong numbers versus what was a very quite weak second half of last year. So our overall growth in order intake is 21% in U.S. dollars, which is our main trading currency. And excluding M&A effects, we are at 14% organic growth in order intake. And as before, it's North America and East that is leading the charge. Europe is following. And Nordics is actually quite okay. It looks -- this year, it will have a comparable where Q3, we booked some larger defense orders, which distort the trend a little bit. But also in Nordics, the development is favorable underneath.

We can see positive development across several sectors, and we see it continuing in areas like aerospace and defense, but also medical and energy are areas where we see growth. Net sales are kind of following on the coattails of the order intake. We see in our numbers in the reported Swedish number, of course, the strong FX headwind from the softer dollar. But we're seeing growth in all of our regions in U.S. dollars now, and we also see overall organic growth in U.S. dollars. So this is a quite nice trend that we've seen.

Strongest growth here as well is in North America. Here, we get some support additionally from the tariffs. We don't book tariffs into order intake as we don't know what the tariff level will be as we book the order, but we only see that when we do the deliveries. But even beyond that, we see good growth in the other regions. And the impact of the U.S. dollar decline versus last year has an impact on our net sales of SEK 75 million.

EBITDA improves sequentially from quarter 2, and our cash flow is strong. We are up slightly in gross margin versus quarter 2. And with a better margin volume, we also see the EBITDA rise versus last quarter. Again, here, the FX effect on the EBITDA is around SEK 15 million that we would have seen as a higher number in comparison with prior year. And again, good cash conversion on the EBITDA, but also there has been improvements in working capital during the quarter, which has helped generate a strong cash flow.

So if we look upon the numbers in more specifics, you can see that the order intake in Swedish krona is up 11% to SEK 985 million versus SEK 887 million last year. So, 21% in dollars and 14% organic growth in dollars and the book-to-bill still positive with 1.04. Net sales are up 6% to SEK 949 million versus SEK 898 million last year. Overall 15% growth in dollars and here also organically 8% growth. EBITDA is down from SEK 118 million last year to SEK 110 million, providing us with a margin of 11.6%. So the gross margin is down versus last year, but it's improving sequentially with previous quarters. And again, the net impact of FX here is SEK 15 million.

And operating cash flow, as I mentioned, quite strong at SEK 180 million on par with last year and working capital has come down from SEK 9.2 million in quarter 2 to SEK 7.9 million, slightly above last year, but that's predominantly associated with the acquisitions that have been done during the year. And net profit at SEK 60.9 million versus SEK 50 million last year and EPS of SEK 0.33 versus SEK 0.27.

Tim, over to you.

Thanks, Peter.

So, I think you heard a little bit from Peter that we have a good top line this quarter with net sales at SEK 949 million, an increase of 6% versus this time last year. When we look at it in U.S. dollars, USD 99 million, up 15% versus this time last year. And then we also have EBITDA coming in at SEK 110 million, while down 7%, I would say, important to remember that there's a large FX impact there of minus SEK 15 million. So that's one of the contributors that you see there with the EBITDA margin at 11.6%, which is 1.6 percentage points down versus last year.

When we look at the gross margin, this is the second quarter in a row where we are increasing the gross profit margin, now up to 35.2% on a last 12-month basis and starting to come back in line with where we've been. When we look at the total top line, though, order intake up 11%. But as you heard from Peter, up 14% in U.S. dollars, when we start to exclude the currency impact. I think the thing that was nice to see is that we had positive developments in pretty much all segments. North America was up double digits as was Eastern Europe. Nordics was stable in U.S. dollars, but you'll hear a little bit more from us, that has to do more with timing of large orders in the prior year than anything else.

Net sales up to SEK 949 million, which is 8% up in U.S. dollars in comparable units. And we still have a positive book-to-bill of 1.04, and we see a lot of good progress with customers in the energy and medical sectors globally.

You heard a little bit from Peter that the EBITDA decreased versus prior year. But again, all of that was due to FX impacting us with SEK 15 million. Gross margins, as said, quite stable versus prior quarters. And when we really start to look into last year versus this quarter, a lot of that has to do with product mix in the different countries where we operate anyways. I think also interesting to note that the acquired companies dilute the gross margin a little bit compared to this time last year, and that's something that we work on in the medium term with them to improve.

I think when we dive into the details of the FX impact, I think it's interesting to remember where the U.S. dollar was this time last year. It was all the way up at SEK 10.42, and they continue to climb actually when you start to look at quarter 4 and quarter 1. But right now, we're down to SEK 9.52 on average for this quarter. I think as of right now, closer to SEK 9.4. And what that leads to then, as you can see on the right, is that we have a revenue impact of around minus SEK 75 million coming from the U.S. dollar translating to less krone. That leads, of course, to a gross profit impact as well, which is generally margin neutral. The only thing that does impact margin, a small amount, is that revaluation line that you see there when we revalue our balance sheet, specifically accounts payables and accounts receivables, otherwise, generally margin neutral.

We also have SG&A or operating costs in currencies such as the U.S. dollar, but we also have it very much in SEK, euro, GBP, among others. And there, we get a little bit of an offset against the FX impact. So the total net impact from currency is about SEK 15 million.

Over to you, Peter.

Okay. So looking a bit closer at the different segments. So, we can see that Nordics order intake coming down by 9% versus last year, but this is in relation to a very large orders being booked during quarter 3 of last year of longer digestion. So overall, underlying, I think there's still continuing a positive development, and we can see notably Denmark and Finland developing well in areas of the energy sector. Net sales remaining flat in Swedish krona. However, that, of course, strong or good solid growth given that our sales is predominantly in dollars. So in dollars, we are growing nicely also in Nordics on the revenue side.

EBITDA amounted to SEK 25.2 million versus SEK 26.3 million and the margin came down slightly to 12.4%. We still see some of the FX impacts as well as the customer product mix having some impact on the EBITDA in the Nordics.

Moving to Europe. It's possible to see that also Europe now, we start to see Europe who has been the laggard in terms of sales development. We've seen the order intake increasing by 18% here, of course, supported also by the acquisitions. So the organic growth in U.S. dollar is still a good 13% up, and we can see positive trends in Spain, Benelux, Italy and Germany when it comes to order intake. Net sales are up 7% to SEK 464 million versus SEK 435 million last year. And organically, we can see in U.S. dollars, the revenue remains stable and SEK slightly down or down by 8%.

Automotive is for us showing a negative trend, but we're seeing recovery in other areas. And the automotive business is predominantly related to the truck and bus industry. EBITDA decreased versus prior year to SEK 45.6 million versus SEK 57.6 million and corresponds to an EBITA margin of 9.8%, which is down from 13.2% last year, but sequentially improving from quarter 2. And we still also here see negative impact from the mix and FX.

North America is where we've seen very strong development on the order intake in the quarter. We're up 20% in Swedish krona, and it's good progress with the new product introduction model we have, which came in partly through the company Phase 3 acquisition, which we're extending. We see good growth in defense, power as well as medtech sectors. Net sales are up around 9% versus -- to SEK 225 million and 19% up in U.S. dollar. And here, there is an impact also positively contributing from the revenue -- from the tariff side. And we can also see that the trend of lowering the share of products sourced from China is decreasing. Last year, we were just below 50% in sourcing from China for the U.S. market, and that number is continuing to trend down. EBITDA increased versus last year and increased to SEK 34.6 million versus SEK 31.7 million and the margin was stable at 15.4%.

Looking at our East segment, we can see that our order intake is up 14% to SEK 59 million versus SEK 52 million. The order intake in U.S. dollars was up 25%. And I think we've been able to capitalize on growth in high tech, and we are leveraging our supply base in this area. I think a number of, say, local companies in Asia have been struggling to get attention from high-tech factories as some of them are getting full with orders from AI applications. Then again, our relationship with the factories is giving the opportunities to win with new business.

Net sales increased 4% to SEK 58 million versus SEK 56 million and our revenue in U.S. dollars increased by 13%. So our EBITDA is up to SEK 9.5 million versus SEK 8.2 million and the margin at 16.4% versus 14.6% last year. And I think we're also here focusing as before, very much on high-tech niches, and we can leverage some of our global relationships as well to win more business in the region.

Back to you, Tim.

Thank you.

So, return on equity for the quarter at around 14% versus 21% this time last year. That very much has to do with a very stable equity and then earnings that's down a bit when you look at the last 12 months earnings.

Net debt still at a very good level of 1.6, and that is very supportive of what we'd like to do on the M&A agenda. Equity asset ratio quite stable at 41%. And net working capital in absolute terms more than prior year, much as you heard from Peter, we have acquisitions in that time frame, and we've acquired working capital there. And then the working capital percentage itself is down relative to where we were in quarter 2, but slightly up versus this time last year, again due to those acquisitions. And available liquidity quite good at SEK 1.4 billion.

Back to you, Peter.

Yes. So, I mean, we continue focused on the M&A side of our business activities. We have no new M&A announced here during this quarter. The one we did earlier this year was B&B Leiterplattenservice in Germany. But I think we are -- we have a good strong balance sheet. We have made some reinforcements to our team during the year, and we continue diligently with building our pipeline as well as entertaining a number of interesting discussions. So we hope to continue to add good companies to our portfolio and hope to do so in the not-too-distant future. We'll see how things progress.

Looking overall at our strategy, it remains stable focused. We are focusing on printed circuit boards 100% and also retaining an asset-light model where we do not invest in having in-house manufacturing. It gives us the flexibility to always provide the best solutions for our customers and also to be flexible to match geographical sourcing needs as well as different technology needs. So instead, we are investing still in the cooperation with our factories and in our own technology development and our services so that we can continuously improve the support for our customers and grow our market shares in the existing markets.

Geographical expansion remains high on our agenda. There are areas where we are expanding. So the acquisition of B&B, even though you could argue that we are present in Germany since quite some time, this gives us a very strong local presence in the eastern part of Germany. And there are further geographical expansion, which we were looking to do across the world. And here, we believe M&A is a good way of doing this to enter and start to get a good foothold in a new market.

And then also, as we mentioned before, the printed circuit board market and the trading market is still a highly fragmented market as manufacturing moved predominantly from Europe and North America to Asia the last, say, 20, 30 years, in its wake arose a large number of smaller trading companies and many of these are struggling to be able to support their customers in a good way in terms of both technology requirements, quality requirements as well as sustainability. And many of these companies are also now starting to come close to a succession situation. So, there's an opportunity which we are exploring to consolidate the market predominantly in Europe and North America, but there are also things starting to arise in Asia in this area.

With that, I think we leave it open for questions.

[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from Jacob Edler from Danske Bank.

Congrats on a strong quarter. Just starting a bit on Europe and specifically the coloring on Germany and Italy, it's gone from signs of being a positive development in Q2 to now clear signs of growth. Do you feel that there is a clear delta here in the demand from customers sequentially in these 2 countries specifically?

I would still say that part of the European market are not yet in a strong growth mode. So, I think we have seen, as you mentioned, Germany and Italy being markets that have been trending weak and have been quite weak, say, during the first half of this year. But I think maybe we are starting to see some positive signs. I would not yet say that the German market is growing strongly. I think we're all expecting that potentially going forward, we could see positive effects of the, say, the new government and the higher degrees of investments. But I think that is something we're not yet seeing, I think. But I think there is still a small rebound from a low level.

Okay. Great. And then another question on Europe. U.K. is the market where you highlight the demand situation hasn't improved. Is that related mainly to your truck exposure there? Or any more flavor to add there?

I would say it's a combination. I think the U.K. economy itself is challenged overall. But I think as you know, as you mentioned as well, we have our main automotive exposure through our U.K. business. And therefore, also the fact that, say, the truck industry is slowing down predominantly also for the North American side of business also impacts our business in the U.K.

Yes. And then just hopping over a bit to the U.S. I mean, when you look at the EBITDA margins, but also the orders, it's been very strong in North America this quarter. Is there any effect that you can see that there's some kind of pull forward demand effect here ahead of potential tariffs? I don't know what's happening. He's changing his mind in the U.S. every day, but anything you can see there in terms of pull-forward demand ahead of potential tariff hikes, I don't know?

I don't think we're not seeing any clear signs like this. I think overall, I mean maybe we had a little bit -- I mean, also internally, we -- I mean, we are rolling out a new business platform across the Group. I think for the North America, that had maybe a slight impact on our Q2 at the end because we went live in June and maybe we had a little bit of carryover to July. But overall, otherwise, I'd say it's a continuous improvement. I think the strong growth numbers versus last year is also partly reflective of actually that our order intake in Q3 last year was a little bit weak on the weak side in the U.S. But also, if you look progressively versus Q2, it is a strong quarter for us. So...

Yes. Great. And then my second last question is just when I try to count backwards and on the M&A contribution, it feels that DVS and the B&B are at a slightly lower revenue number compared to what they entered the Group at. Is that a fair conclusion? And is that in that case, partially explained by, for example, DVS automotive truck exposure? Or do you agree with that conclusion, so to speak?

Yes. I think it's a fair conclusion. I think the numbers we presented on that [indiscernible] was also sort of historical data from '23. So, I think the general market decline in '24 has, of course, also impacted these companies. So that's a fair interpretation, yes.

It does not change our view on these companies in the longer-term perspective. And as we start to see now in Italy also starting to move a little bit in the right direction, it will also impact our DVS business.

Perfect. Just a last question then coming back to the U.S. But on margins, it's been hopping around a bit all over the place here in the last couple of quarters. And this quarter, we have a bit stronger margins. Is that partially also a bit more favorable mix than we saw, for example, in, let's say, Q1? And when we look ahead, should we expect it to still be a bit lumpy between the quarters?

I think if we look back, I mean, we had a weak Q1, but that was also related to actually quite significantly lower sales. So, I think we were at SEK 187 million in sales in Q1, and now we are at SEK 225 million. So, a lot of that was volume driven. But there can, of course, also be some mixes in terms of gross margin depending on bigger projects, which can have different margins. But otherwise, if you look back, we have been quite stable around 15% in the North American business with the exception of Q1 this year.

The next question comes from Gustav Bernebled from Nordea.

It's Gustav here from Nordea. Maybe to start off here on the IT platform. Maybe if you can just help us here where you sort of rolled it out this quarter and where you expect costs to be ahead there?

No, I would say for this quarter, we were fairly stable. We were finishing the U.S., as you heard from Peter, at the end of last quarter, and we've been doing a lot of prework even if there's a bit of a summer period here, there's still a lot of intense prework for doing Norway and Sweden later this year. Later next year, we'll do France and Spain and then China in the second half of the year. So our expectations here is that we keep a fairly stable cost for this program through at least the back half of next year. And then we could see some trailing off of cost in the back half of next year, but China is a complicated country with all the legal requirements to do. So that's roughly what we're expecting.

And is it possible to say if the majority of this quarter was negatively impacting in North America specifically? Or how should we look at it?

For the IT cost itself?

Yes.

No, I wouldn't say that. I wouldn't say that.

We never mix [ the activities ] . You may have, say, kind of hyper care after just after going live, which, of course, is -- that was predominantly versus North America. But at the same time, you're preparing for the next rollout and the development work or adaptations to meet the legal requirements in those countries. So, it is kind of spread between different regions there.

That's quite true. There was quite a bit of local work and adaptation to make the system work in the quarter in the Americas, but yes.

Can you just elaborate a bit on what you are actually doing with the IT platform and why it is sort of taking so long and driving so high costs? It would be very helpful.

I mean we are having a quite integrated business model where we are both buying and selling as well as we are configuring products. So it is an advanced model where we want to be able to provide good service for our customers as well as handling the technical configuration design options. What we're doing is that we are now implementing the program country by country. So we're setting it up. And so it follows a rollout program where we during last year, okay, we started with the first pilot company being the U.K. end of '23. And then we went live with 5 entities during 2024. And for each country that you enter, you need to sort of review -- we are checking, say what -- are there any specific customer requirements that we need to adapt to and fulfill if we have, say, certain consignment stock solutions or specific business needs that we need to cater for in the new system. But predominantly, it's also adapting to legal and financial reporting requirements in the different countries.

And that requires both the adaptation. And then, of course, you have a training activity, transfer of all the data because we're migrating all the running business from our old system into the new system. So you have a lot of that data migration of live orders, which is kind of activity consuming.

Okay. That's very clear. And I mean, now when you have sort of implemented it in several regions almost a year back, I mean, can you say anything about sort of the payback time you've seen? Or can you say anything about what we should expect going forward?

I think for us right now, I think the main driver is to get on to the common platform. We've chosen to go with say, vanilla functionality, a starting point to secure a smooth transition. Then we have to remember that our old systems have been systems that we have had for some 15, 20 years where you have done a lot of local adaptations and tweaks. So those kind of tweaks will not be there from the start, but are being added in.

And of course, we have a lot better opportunities in our platform, both for automation -- we're starting to see areas where this is already starting to flow through. But also the biggest benefit is the ability and availability of the data we have. I mean no one does more business transactions than we do in this industry. And we have a unique opportunity of leveraging that data. That was historically quite tricky for us because we have different systems and data in different pools, which made it hard for our people to really access the full group know-how when quoting new projects.

Now with this platform and potentially also with the use of AI on top of it, we can leverage that strength even more. So, these are things that's going to gradually come into play. I mean we are shifting from -- during -- when we're going live with the U.S. this summer, we've now passed the 50% border of implementations. I think we're right now around 60%, and we aim to be around 3/4 at year-end. So, the importance now of ramping up the functionality and leveraging the investment is growing. So we'll see that grow during '26 and during '27 onwards.

That's very clear. Should we expect these type of costs also throughout -- you said China was going to go live in late next year. So should we expect then sort of evenly at around SEK 8 million for every quarter during 2026.

I would expect pretty stable costs from what you've seen over the past couple of quarters continuing into at least the first half of next year. And then it just really depends on how complicated China is. It could trail off a little bit in the second half or it could remain a little bit stable. We'll know more once we really get into the pre-study of China.

Okay. Perfect. And then just, sorry, the last one here, if we then move to orders and the dynamics in the order backlog. Can you just comment a bit on how much you expect to deliver during 2026 and '27, what we can consider sort of a backlog today?

I mean we don't give long-term forecast. But I mean, during the last few quarters, we have had a positive book-to-bill. And so there is a, building up of an order backlog for us, which is positive. But I cannot quantify what those numbers will be in '26 and '27 by then.

The next question comes from Thomas Blikstad from Pareto Securities.

Strong numbers in North America here. I understand that the order intake was not affected by tariff increases. But does this mean minimal impact from tariffs on top line in the segment in Q4?

We don't give guidance for Q4 per se. If you look at Q3 and Q2, however, we were pretty stable.

Okay. But is it possible to sort of...

And maybe just right now, there's no change to the tariff per se. So, I mean right now, we have seen impact from the added tariff versus last year in both Q2 and Q3. And if nothing changes, we will still continue to see contribution from tariffs in Q4 as well. But the fact that we're not booking it into our orders is that we cannot -- we don't know if tariffs would change we will only know what the tariff is actually when we bring the products into the U.S. And therefore, we are not reporting it as part of our order intake right now. You will see deviation or gap between order intake and revenue.

Perfect. And is it possible to sort of try to quantify the underlying growth in North America without these impacts from tariffs this quarter?

It's a bit lower, but we don't publish those numbers on the tariffs exactly.

[Operator Instructions] There are no more questions at this time. So, I hand the conference back to the speakers for any closing comments.

The next question comes from Gustav Berneblad from Nordea.

Yes. Sorry, just one last question here. When you sort of look at your operations today, would you say that sort of all risk -- I mean, obviously, we can't guide, but all risks you see now currently are in full effect with sort of tariffs, FX, IT platform, et cetera? Or do you see other risks ahead such as price pressure from factories or customers or higher freight rates? Or what's your view there?

I mean, right now, it is still a very uncertain economic environment we're operating in. And as we know, a few weeks back, the U.S. government announced potential new higher tariffs on China. So, it is still sort of volatile from that perspective. But I think we are in a situation where we are managing tariffs. We are running our IT program. And we've been -- it's also quite successful. I mean if we look upon the rollout we have had, every single rollout has gone to plan. So we don't foresee big risks in our continued business platform rollout. So in that perspective, I think it's fair that we think we have the current risk under good control. What may happen in geopolitics that we cannot speculate in. But I think for us, I think, our model overall has flexibility built into it. So we will be trying to sort of adapt to those new circumstances.

There are no more questions at this time. So, I hand the conference back to the speakers for any closing comments.

So there are no questions -- written questions either. So, I would like to thank you very much, Peter and Tim, and remind you that our Q4 and full year report will be published on 13 February '26. So welcome back. Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Welcome to the NCAB Q2 Presentation for 2025. [Operator Instructions] Now I will hand the conference over to the CEO, Peter Kruk; CFO, Timothy Benjamin; and Head of Investor Relations, Gunilla Ohman. Please go ahead.

Thank you very much, and welcome, everyone. My name is Peter Kruk, and together with Timothy Benjamin, we will be presenting the second quarter results for NCAB Group.

Starting point, NCAB, we are a company focused on supplying printed circuit boards. Printed circuit boards are the foundation that you see to the left in all electronics, which forms the brain in any intelligent product. And what is unique with our product is that every PCB is unique to the product in which it is used. So there are no standard components, but everything is our engineered product where we provide a value to our customers, both in the design phase as well as through the supply of products.

As a company, we are operating globally with a strong local presence in 19 entities. We are serving some 45 markets, and we are around 645 employees. And we use some 36 main factories to supply our customers with different technologies and from different geographies.

We don't own any in-house manufacturing. In fact, we're using only external partners, and which makes us flexible in order to support our customers in varying needs, both in terms of technology, but also always being able to give our customers the best supply chain possible for their specific needs.

If we then move over to the -- specifically the second quarter. So, I'm glad to see that we have another quarter of positive order intake. We have had in the second quarter a very significant headwind from the weakening dollar, as the dollar has dropped roughly 10% since Q1. But if we look upon the order intake, we continue to have a second quarter of growth in order intake for the group. The continued positive development in Nordic and East has continued, and we also sort of see actually Europe to show order intake growth in U.S. dollar.

U.S., well our order intake in the U.S.A. was weak compared to last year. But beside the FX, this is partly due to the tough comparables that we've had in the quarter. Q1 for us was very strong. So I'll come back later to show that full year status.

Net sales also devalued by the U.S. dollar movement, but we see growth in the dollar terms in all regions, excluding Europe, which is still down. So it's lagging a little bit from the order intake. The impact of U.S. dollar on net sales is around SEK 90 million in the quarter.

Gross margin remains stable, improving slightly versus Q1, but the EBITA is impacted by the weak dollar. The EBITA would have been some SEK 17 million higher, excluding the U.S. dollar impact.

M&A activities, as we have reported earlier, have continued. We were able to close the acquisition of B&B Leiterplattenservice in Germany here earlier in the spring, and that integration has now commenced. And we have also during the quarter renewed and increased our financing for -- at better terms and with the validity until 2030.

If we look more specifically on the numbers for the quarter, we can see that our order intake in Swedish krona is up by 5% to SEK 985 million. If we look upon U.S. dollar, the order intake is up some 16% versus last year. And it's also positive that we have a book-to-bill of 1.05 in the quarter.

Net sales are stable in Swedish krona versus last year. But if we look upon organic growth, excluding acquisitions in U.S. dollars, we're actually seeing organic growth of 8% in the quarter.

EBITA, as we said, is impacted by the FX. So we are down to SEK 94 million or an EBITA margin of 10%. Gross margin has gone down versus last year, where we had extraordinary margins in the first 2 quarters of the year, but we are moving up slightly from our Q1, we were at 34.7%. And as we mentioned, the negative FX is SEK 17 million in the quarter.

Cash flow, good at SEK 93.6 million in comparison to last year's SEK 101 million. Our working capital is up slightly. We are up partly due to the acquisition of B&B, and we also see some effects from the tariffs in the U.S. impacting working capital there.

A little bit more information briefly about like B&B Leiterplattenservice, is a company based in Eastern Germany with its main customer base also in Germany. It's a company that was started in the 90s and was running production up until 2022. That means the company has a very deep knowledge around technology for manufacturing, which is also valuable in the dialogue with customers.

Revenue in '24 was around SEK 150 million, and they had an EBITA north of SEK 20 million in that year. And with the company comes some 25 employees predominantly in Germany, but also in China. And the transaction was announced and signed on April 23rd, and it was now closed on June 3rd, so it has contributed somewhat in the quarter.

Then I give it over to you, Tim, to continue.

Thank you, Peter. So I think you heard a little bit from Peter that we had sales of around SEK 934 million in the quarter, and fairly flat with quarter 2 last year. However, when you look at it in U.S. dollars, which is more of a fixed currency comparison for us since we do so much trading in U.S. dollars, we were up to 10% year-over-year growth with M&A contributing nicely as well.

We did have an EBITA at SEK 93.9 million, down 22%. And you heard a little bit from Peter that some of the impacts there were both FX and then also a little bit of price product mix. So we ended the quarter at around 10% or about down 2.9 percentage points.

If you look at our gross margins over time, we're running at around 36% last 12 months, and that's compared to around 36%, 37% for the past 2 years. But in the longer term, we've been able to drive up gross margins quite nicely.

When we turn our heads then to order intake and sales, it was really nice to see the order intake increasing 5% year-over-year to SEK 985 million. But again, in a more fixed currency comparison with U.S. dollars, it's actually up 8%. We did see some very nice positive indications on the Nordic side as well as Europe and also on the East and then a little hesitation on the North American side with all the tariff movements back and forth in that country.

As mentioned, net sales were flat for the quarter and that presented the third quarter in a row of positive book-to-bill, which we are happy to see as well as a good trend in new part numbers in customers won.

When we then look at the results, as said, we were down to around SEK 94 million. That's partially an impact of the lower U.S. dollar in total SEK 17 million, but then also around SEK 22 million coming from a negative translation effect as the U.S. dollar weakened, offset by a little bit of positivity on the balance sheet revaluation of SEK 5 million. And the balance sheet revaluation is something that isn't expected to repeat. It really just has to do with how much AP and AR we have on the books in U.S. dollars at the end of every quarter, whereas the translation effect is something that we expect to continue wherever the U.S. dollar is. So that one continues forward.

EBITA margin, as said, 10% with a gross margin slightly improving over quarter 1. But we did see gross margins decreasing year-over-year, which was mainly attributable besides FX to the pricing and product mix, which was quite elevated in H1 2024.

And then we thought we'd give you a little extra detail here since we do have big FX movements within the quarter. So if you take a look at the U.S. dollar compared to prior year, down around 10%, so down to 9.66 on average during the quarter versus 10.68 last year. So that gives us a full SEK 90 million impact on revenue.

And as we've said for a while now, we tend to have our revenue coming from the prior quarter's order intake, and when you have a prior quarter order intake, that translates into a different exchange rate, you tend to get impacts like this. So we saw a SEK 90 million impact on revenue versus prior year from FX. And that then resulted in around SEK 27 million total impact to gross profit, of which minus SEK 32 million translation and plus SEK 5 million on the revaluation side, which again, the revaluation side is the one that's not expected to repeat, whereas translation we do expect to see repeating as long as the U.S. dollar stays this low.

And then SG&A also repeats and that was at a positive SEK 10 million as some of our SG&A converts into less SEK. That gave us a total EBITA impact in the quarter compared with the prior year quarter, quarter 2, at the higher exchange rates of around minus SEK 17 million.

With that, over to you, Peter.

So if we look a little bit closer to the segments, I mean, we can see Nordic has had a fantastic order intake in the quarter being up 15% in SEK and around 26% in U.S. dollars. I think positive development in a number of the countries and I think like Denmark, but we've also seen good orders from aerospace and defense, but this also means that some of the order intake that we've seen now will have a longer digestion time. So will primarily -- or part of it will primarily impact 2026 rather than the second half of 2025.

Net sales up 4% in Swedish krona to SEK 250 million versus SEK 207 million last year. EBITA around SEK 23 million versus SEK 29.6 million, and margin down to 10.7% versus 14.3% margin last year.

We have significant FX in the quarter. As Tim highlighted, both the translation part, but the revaluation part has hit different segments differently. So whilst we have for the group a positive of [ SEK 5 million ], we actually have a negative in the Nordic segment, but positive more in the European segment. So FX or EBITA would have been on par or better than last year's EBITA had we not had the FX in the segment. So Nordics doing quite well operationally.

Looking at Europe, we can see here -- positive here actually that the order intake started to grow, and that we also see positive order intake in development in U.S. dollar. Europe has been the segment lagging in the turnaround, and we're positive to see that this is changing in U.S. dollars, even though we have to say that there is uncertainty in a number of our markets, also in Europe, not just in the U.S. from the tariff situation and what this may impact the general demand sentiment. So some hesitation in the market, but still positive that we are showing growth on the order intake. And some countries like Spain and Benelux have been more clear in their turnaround.

If we look upon net sales, we are here still lagging behind. We are down 7% in Swedish krona. And organically, if you then take away the impact of the acquisitions, we're actually in Swedish krona down still 18% versus last year or 9% in U.S. dollar. And there -- here, of course, there's one part, which is the time lag between order intake development, which is positive and when it translates into revenue. And we can see that, say, the markets where we are still sort of trailing behind primarily are some of the bigger ones like Germany, Italy and the U.K. But hopefully, that order intake trend will start to move the needle here as well.

So EBITA is down quite significantly to SEK 33.6 million versus SEK 56.7 million, and it corresponds to a margin of 7.6% versus 12.0%. And so the decrease is -- say, a big portion of this is coming from the revenue, further enhanced by the FX, but then also some product mix and pricing.

If we then look on North America, here, I think we're doing quite okay. Order intake is showing a big decrease versus last year. Besides FX, there's also here quite a bit of kind of timing activity of larger orders. We have -- we were up 18% versus prior year. So if you actually look upon the full year, we are 9% up in U.S. dollars. So it's more -- some part of this is timing, but there is also a little bit of that anticipation or hesitation in the market from the -- depending on the tariff situation.

And also to remember is that the tariffs are not booked in the order intake as they are only visible or only become known when they are actually imported into the country products. So we will have tariff showing up as part of net sales, but not in our order intake.

If we look upon net sales, here, based on the order backlog we've had, we've had a good sales increase. We are up 12% to SEK 225 million versus last year of SEK 200 million. And here, we've been successful in transferring tariffs to customers, but we're also very well positioned to benefit from our global supply base. I mean, NCAB has over the years invested in building a factory network also outside China in various parts of Asia and other parts of the world. And this is a big strength for us right now being able to help customers who may want to ship their supply.

Right now, there's still a lot of discussions ongoing and many customers still waiting a little bit because there are still, say, a lot of the tariffs that are up for discussion and are not confirmed. And since moving production is a big step for many of our customers, it means that, say, many are in the kind of holding position to make those switches.

If you look at EBITA, we are up to SEK 32 million, up versus SEK 28.1 million last year and our EBITA margin stable at 14.2%, up then from quarter 1 and on par with last year's 14.1%.

If we then look finally on our East segment, also here, positive to see that we see growth in order intake despite the FX movement. So the order intake in U.S. dollar is up a full 12%. And I think we are -- the market is starting to grow in high tech. And I think it's -- we are able to capitalize on our supply base. We have a strong network of factories in this area and are able to sort of provide good service to customers.

Net sales decreased 2% to SEK 54 million, but in U.S. dollars, we're up 7% in revenue. And our EBITA is down a little bit to SEK 9.5 million versus SEK 11 million, but there still a very healthy EBITA margin of 17.4%, and this is a little bit of a mix situation. And I think we continue to be able to drive high margins since our East segment is the area where maybe we are doing more engineering support than other regions for high tech applications.

Over to you, Tim.

Thanks, Peter. So return on equity, 13.5% versus 26% prior year. As you can imagine, that's just linked to the EBITA development between the 2 last 12-month periods. Net debt sitting now at SEK 1.8 million versus SEK 1.1 million last year and up a couple tens of basis points from prior quarter, I believe, SEK 1.6 million in quarter 1, and that has to do with the acquisition of B&B that we completed during the quarter.

Equity-asset ratio stable, slightly higher versus prior year at 40.7%. And then working capital also sitting at about SEK 353 million or 9.2%, which is a little bit higher than last year and a little bit higher than prior quarter. But again, as mentioned, we had the B&B acquisition during the quarter, which increased both those 2 numbers as well as the impact of the U.S. tariffs impacting both as well.

Available liquidity at SEK 1.26 billion as well as options to increase that as well ready to go. And then, as mentioned before, no dividend expected for the year.

[indiscernible] Tim?

So on the M&A side, I mean, we continue with our strategy to explore opportunities for M&A, and we have a good pipeline of potential companies which we have kind of filtering down and we remain with a kind of a short list of some 50 companies that we feel are a good -- be a good fit for NCAB. And we are in dialogue with some 5 to 10 companies on a continuous basis. And as we said before, we closed B&B Leiterplattenservice here in -- early in the year, and we are hopeful that we can find some other opportunities that can close in the coming quarters.

If we look upon our overall strategy, we remain 100% focused on printed circuit boards. We also believe in the model of having an asset-light model where we do not have in-house manufacturing. It gives us flexibility to really have the best service for our customers and be flexible and move with varying market needs. So we are instead focusing more on continuing how we can improve the support for our customers in this market with engineering services and other ways of making our customers more efficient and by that, growing our market shares in existing markets.

We're also looking how we can expand geographically. We believe very much in being local to our customers. There's a big value of that local interaction with our customers and looking to expand into new markets. M&A is an important part of taking those steps into new markets.

And finally, it is also a market with a high degree of fragmentation, and we see benefits in consolidating here and looking for economies of scale, both in terms of developing stronger capabilities, but also in terms of find efficiency and cost advantages. So this is something we'll continue with and our M&A strategy serves both the consolidation aspect as well as the geographical expansion.

And with that, we close today's presentation and open up for questions.

[Operator Instructions] Next question comes from Jonny Jin from SEB.

I want to start a little bit in North America and understand the demand and impact from tariffs a little bit better. I suppose that you increased the prices and push that on in the U.S., which is reflected in the sales. But if we break it down a little bit, how would you say -- if you could elaborate the underlying demand, how that is developing? And I mean, it's a lot of moving parts, but book-to-bill is quite a lot below 1. And again, I know that the tariff is not reflected in the orders, I suppose, but how is the underlying demand and the sentiment in the U.S.? And how is the momentum going into Q3 here, if you could say some words there?

I'd say it is a challenging situation to understand exactly what the sentiment is. I think there is, say, some concern in the market given the uncertainty of what happens with tariffs. As you know, there are a number of tariffs being discussed also with Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, that are still up in the air. And I think that creates a level of uncertainty. We have still seen pretty good order intake, but I think there is always a little bit of that anticipation which makes it hard. And maybe not specifically on our products, but it's more on end consumer products where, for instance, you could see truck industries and others where, say, people are holding off on making, say, bigger capital investments.

So I'd still say that our order intake has been pretty good. The drop in quarter 2 versus last year, it's largely timing of larger orders. If you look back, we see we had a very strong Q2 last year. And I think this year, we also had bigger orders coming in, but they happen to be more in Q1 this year. So I think it's a little bit of timing of those bigger orders than to say that it's related to, or say, a general drop in the market.

But there is a level of uncertainty. And I think there's also this still [ sort of ] partly impacting European sentiment as well. I think we can see that we are coming to a turnaround where maybe the European markets have bottomed up and the inventory buildup after the pandemic is starting to come out of the system, which is improving things. But I think the whole trade war with tariffs has made everyone a little bit more hesitant and maybe means that the recovery is coming a little bit slower in some of these markets. But we don't see, say, big shifts. I think it's maybe more of a little bit of anticipation at this time.

Okay. Yes. And just a clarifying question. The timing of those -- some larger orders that you see, did you mean that they came in Q1 already or that the timing is that they can be pushed to Q3?

No, I think what we had, we had -- if you look, say, both last year and this year, we've been running certain projects with research customers, which comes more in kind of projects. And we've had -- last year we had a number of those being booked predominantly in Q2 of those orders, whereas this year we had similar orders coming in, but we had them predominantly in Q1.

So if you look back, our Q1 was way above '24 Q1, and Q2 now we're a little bit below. But if you look at first half, we are still up in U.S. dollars by some 9% in order intake in the U.S. So I think that -- sort of those bigger orders plus the FX makes a big part of that sort of shift in -- or the drop in the order intake.

Okay. Yes, that's clear.

And of course, we hope to see more orders like those research orders coming, but they are a little bit harder to predict when they come. They're kind of intermittent in their nature.

Yes, yes. I understand. I understand. But then the underlying book-to-bill in North America, maybe we can look at over a little bit longer period? Or what is the best estimation for the underlying book-to-bill, would you say?

Yes. I think that the trend that we have seen in the U.S. with, say -- I think U.S. was one of the markets combined together with East to start the recovery on order intake during '24. And I think that situation is still healthy. I think the turmoil with the tariff et cetera maybe has made the U.S. market slow down a little bit, but we're not seeing it break in at this time.

Yes. Okay. Yes, we'll see. It's a lot of --

Yes.

[ It's kind of closed off ]. If we shift focus here to the gross margin a little bit, it's a lot of moving components here as well with the price and mix and tariffs and FX and so on. So what is the underlying gross margin here in the quarter, would you say? And what can we expect forward? I mean you mentioned the mix, but would you say that mix is representable for Q2 or for Q3 as well here in Q2? Or how should we think going forward?

I think overall, I can start -- I think overall, I think what we have said before is that we believe probably a reasonable gross margin that we can maintain is somewhere in that range, 35% to 36%. And I think we believe that is to be true. I think in Q1, we were -- we had more of a revaluation impact, which actually hits gross margin percentage as well, whereas say, translation doesn't really impact the percentage of the gross margin so much.

So I think -- we think we are pretty stable. I think we also knew that, say, during latter part of '23 and early part of '24, we had sort of extraordinary gross margins, partly due to just kind of timing of purchase price movements and customer pricing, which gave us a few quarters with, say, a boost to the gross margin. But I think that 35%, 36% is probably more stable to be sustainable at, at least for the midterm.

Yes. Yes. Okay.

I would agree. I think 35%, 36% is quite reasonable. You'll always have timing effects when it comes to revaluations or, for example, M&A, but other than that, yes.

Yes. Yes. That's clear. And then shifting focus to Europe. Order seems developing well there with orders coming in above 8% of our sales in the quarter. So could you maybe elaborate a little bit more what is driving this? And I think that you mentioned also some early positive signs of recovery in Europe already in Q1. So has this developed as you expected, would you say? Or has there been any shifts? And how is the gut feeling? Or what do you hear from the dialogues of your customer and the best guess of the outlook in H2?

No, I agree. I think there is a -- I think we saw the trough of Europe in the second half of last year. In Q1, we started maybe to see some signs on order intake moving in the right direction. And I think those signs have kind of continued into Q2, maybe coming a little bit stronger, maybe some more markets starting to show progress, but it's still quite sort of weak growth in Europe.

And you have some markets where we see sort of -- where we're still somewhat challenged. I think U.K. is a market where the economy is maybe more challenged. And we also through our U.K. business are sort of partly involved with the truck industry, where you see, for instance, a truck industry order intake slowing down. So I think there are some things there in Europe where we still see some challenges. But overall, I think we are slowly starting to climb out of that trough in Europe. And I think that's happening kind of stably across the board right now.

And I think we can see, if you look upon German trading or German manufacturing PMI indexes, you can actually see that they're now starting to climb up. They are still showing actually negative in June. But they have now climbed down from kind of low 40s up to 49. So it's a clear trend where they are approaching a general growth in German manufacturing industry.

So I think this is what we're seeing as well. It's not yet booming in any means, but we start to see pockets and -- of growth, and I think we are benefiting from that.

I think we also saw some very good performance [indiscernible] as well.

Yes. So cautiously optimistic, if I interpret you correctly.

Yes. I mean you can say we have momentum in a couple of other segments. I think Europe is starting to sort of turn around, but maybe we don't really see a strong momentum yet, but positive at least that we're making steps forward.

Yes, yes. And then one final one, sorry lot of questions here. But on the cost and OpEx side of things, do you see more cost -- underlying cost reductions ahead to help the EBITA margin going forward? Or do you think that you will need some help from the market and higher volumes to drive the margins going forward?

You can say we are, say, continuously look to find steps of making sort of things more efficient. At the same time, we are also in the process right now where our order intake is growing. So we are at this time not looking to kind of downsize for lower volumes, which is a different story.

Next question comes from Jacob Edler from Danske Bank.

I'm just getting back a bit to tariffs to start with. If I read the report correctly, order intake grew 8% in comparable units in U.S. dollar. But as you stated, it does not include tariffs as we spoke about a bit. If I was to shout out the number and guess that, if I was to include that, that could have been like 3 percentage points on growth year-over-year. Does that look -- sound like a half reasonable number? Just trying to understand the-ish magnitude.

I'm not sure, Tim, if you have the number or --

Yes. We're not looking to give out exact numbers on tariffs. But yes, there was a small effect somewhere in that range of tariff that we had. Yes.

Perfect. Perfect. And a second question also on order intake. But I remember last year, you had, what was it, 6% of sales coupled to defense and aerospace. And -- but you have stated that order intake was a bit stronger, a bit above that number last year. And I believe most of those deliveries were set to be seen in sales during the course of '25. So I'm just wondering, did we see any defense sales bookings here in Q2? Was there any big increases year-over-year there? Or is that something to expect more for H2, those delayed bookings, so to speak?

I think we do have some of it in the Nordics, but I think we're predominantly -- some of the bigger orders that we booked during, say, Q2, Q3 of last year, I think was predominantly -- will predominantly start building during the second half of this year.

Okay. Cool. And -- yes, okay. Great. Just getting to, I guess, during the last week here or yesterday, actually, we had some, I guess, positive news from Germany with the stimulus programs being increased and almost doubled, if I read it correctly. Do you think that can kind of help the recovery here ahead? Or how do you think those programs could impact you guys?

I have not had the time to analyze specifically [ what ] the programs entails. But I think generally, to say the fact that the German manufacturing industry would benefit and see a pickup, I think that would clearly have a benefit for us. So I think it's something we would anticipate and look forward to.

Yes. Great. Great. And then just for East, you stated that you saw some price increases finally coming through. Are you able to add any flavor of the magnitude? Is it a low single-digit number we're seeing now coupled to those, or connected to those high-end tech products?

I think the price increase that we're seeing now is not specifically for East. But I think what we're seeing is -- I mean, you have -- in some tech areas, the factory loading is growing.

So I think the tendency for price aggressiveness from the factories is coming down and prices maybe will start moving up. But we have seen -- where we have seen specifically price increases, which we are also now starting to push on new orders here in the second quarter is more specifically related to certain areas where you have, for instance, we have gold. So you have certain technologies with ENIG of gold surfacing, et cetera. And given the gold price movement there, there are price increases which may be in the high-single digits or even above or somewhere 5% to 15% on some product areas. But it is in select product areas. So the impact on the total number is still quite small.

Great. And the last question from my side. Just looking at the margins in North America here sequentially, we obviously had quite poor margins in Q1. How much -- is that delta sequentially mainly related to mix from Phase 3 sequentially? Or are there any elements of you guys being more prudent with costs given the tariff situation during the quarter?

I think it's more of a question we have good -- we have also good revenue in the quarter, which helps a lot.

I mean we -- We had SEK 225 million now versus SEK 190 million or SEK 187 million in last quarter. So I think the volume translation with that gross margin creates a great leverage, so -- which is also the key for us as a group that the volume development is important because I mean, we are still in many parts like Europe operationally running sort of significantly below volumes where we historically have been. So if we can see a pickup in some of the key European markets, we should see a good leverage on that volume increase.

Next question comes from Gustav Berneblad.

It's Gustav Berneblad from Nordea. I thought maybe if we can start on the margin in Europe. And just -- it would be interesting to hear your view on that development here? I mean you comment slightly on product mix and also price. So if you can just elaborate a bit on the margin there in the quarter and possibly also quantify the impact from that specifically?

And then also, I mean, are you saying that you're seeing also price pressure in the market? And is that something more structural that we should extrapolate? Or -- yes.

I think you can say that we -- for sure, there is a general price pressure in the market has been for some time here given that the market has been quite sort of low in '23, '24. So, I think the price pressure is there. And I think specifically, as we've highlighted that we had very -- we had good margins in the beginning of 2024 overall as there were some timing effects partly on purchase prices from factories as they were coming into effect versus for customers, which kind of gave some boost. And I think Europe benefited from that as well. So I think that is one big part of it, that -- I mean the whole group is still down around 3% versus last year. So that is a big part.

And then you have, of course, a significantly lower volume in the European segment compared to last year. Even if in SEK, it looks pretty stable, but then you have to factor in the fact that you have some acquisitions adding to the existing volume. So the organic drop is, of course, much lower than in the European -- in the local sales numbers or in Swedish krona.

Yes. And I would say just to add a little flavor to that, a lot of the pricing and product mix development that we had compared to our margins this time last year, that was happening late last year more than it's happened sort of within the quarter. So that's something that's been happening a little bit over time, not so much lately.

And then, of course, to remember is, which contributes as well is, I mean, when we talk about that we have impact on FX, we have some SG&A savings, but of course, they are all in -- more or less in the U.S. and our East segments where we have costs in dollar, whereas Europe, the FX drop of sales related to dollar hits directly versus in SG&A, which is largely fixed. So you see that impact very clearly on the European and Nordic segments.

That's very clear. And then, I mean, if we look sort of at the average 4-year margin in Europe, I mean, it's been 12%. Obviously, it's been quite healthy margins. But I mean, I understand you probably don't want to guide on anything, but how do you look upon that number sort of going forward, I mean, once sort of we see a normalization in the market, et cetera?

I think you're right, we don't guide here. But maybe one thing to remember around Europe is they are a little bit lower than the historical average, as you point out. But we do expect to see them grow with some pretty decent leverage as well. So just remember, they're at a bit of a low point. I don't know if you want to add any color there, Peter?

Yes. I mean if you look sort of over longer terms and if you factor out, say, pandemic boost, et cetera, I mean, typically, what we should expect is, let's say, Nordics and East are probably the segments that based on, say, mix and technology mix, where we expect maybe to be able to be sort of stable, sort of to be able to perform north of 15% over time, whereas say Europe and North America maybe to be somewhere between 10% to 15% in the longer term.

And I think Europe right now, as you said, Tim, is the one that is hit by the lower revenue. So the under absorption of cost structures there means that we are now sort of struggling. We are kind of back to below 10%, but we expect to come back north of 10% over time, depending on how the market develops is how quickly that can happen.

Yes. Perfect. That's very clear. And then I thought maybe you -- if we could focus a bit on your comments regarding taking market shares in the report, you say both organically and through M&A. I mean if we take the organic part, I mean, you have commented quite recent, or recent quarters that you're taking or won a lot of articles, et cetera. And I guess maybe if you can just give us a bit more conviction in the organic part as the market is a bit volatile? I mean what are your basis on this? Is it that you actually see competitors go bankrupt? Or are you seeing customers or new customers that come to you or -- yes, anything there would be helpful.

Well, I think the different parts that we see of course is the trend we see in new customers starting to buy from us, the amount of new part numbers that we are winning, even though in some cases, we are still -- we know that we are running at maybe, say, lower volumes per part number than what we did a few years back. So we can see the positive trend that we are eating into new customer positions.

But it's also positive to see that we now start to see an order intake, which is kind of up 8% in U.S. dollars even organically or even -- or 16%, including acquisitions. So I think -- that I think we don't have market data right now regarding the market development here in '25. But I think we believe we feel comfortable that we are in a very good progress here overall in our growth on the order intake side.

Yes. Perfect. That's very helpful.

It is tricky. It is somewhat tricky to find exact data on the different markets, but I think we feel quite -- we feel that we're in a good position here to continue to develop well.

No, that's perfect. And then, sorry, just one last one here. Also, if it's possible to give any sort of ballpark numbers of the impact of the higher freight rates here in the quarter? And also, I mean, assuming sort of stable rates from here, should we also expect a negative impact in Q3? Or what's your view there?

We actually saw a slight positive development on the freight rates versus quarter 1 year-on-year still a negative effect. And I would say, without giving any specific guidance, we do still see some lagging effect on the earlier part of quarter 2 from the higher costs that were coming through on items from quarter 1, but no large material changes expected.

There are no more questions at this time. So I hand the conference back to the speakers for any written questions and closing remarks.

So we have one written question from Philbert Veissieres, LFDE. And he asked what is happening between the -- given what is happening between the U.S. and China, do you foresee at some point reshoring of PCB production in the U.S. in the near future? Peter?

Yes. No. Thank you for the question. At this time, we don't see any such movements or indications at all. I think what we are seeing is potentially that manufacturing is moving potentially from China out to other parts of Asia. So I think we are seeing investments in manufacturing capabilities in Southeast Asia, countries like Thailand, Malaysia, et cetera, which potentially is a next term sourcing ground.

What we see -- however, where we can see impact from the U.S.-China implication and trade wars in general is that you may see more nearshoring of final assembly. And that, of course, could be something which could be beneficial for our relationships in North America that you see more customer activity, but we don't see manufacturing of the printed circuit boards themselves move to the U.S.

Same thing with Europe. We don't see a shift in more investments in PCBs, but more pickup of assembly work, I think nearshoring of assembly work. That I think there's a trend of, but not of the manufacturing of the printed circuit boards.

Okay. Thank you, Peter. And that was all for today. I just want to remind you that our --

I think there's one more question actually. I think there's one more question from Anders Rudolfsson.

Sorry. Yes, that's right, came in now. Anders Rudolfsson of DNB Carnegie asked, do you see any indications of new fabs in the U.S.? That's the same question.

I guess it's probably the same question actually, yes.

Yes.

So we don't see any investments in manufacturing capability right now in the U.S.

Well then, thank you, all, for listening in, and our Q3 report is on the 24th of October. Thank you, Peter and Tim.

Thank you.

Thank you, everyone.