Ncab Group Aktie

Welcome to the NCAB Q3 presentation for 2026.

[Operator Instructions] Now I will hand the conference over to the CEO, Peter Kruk; and CFO, Timothy Benjamin. Please go ahead.

Thank you very much, and welcome, everyone, on this call. With us also is Gunilla Öhman, our Head of Investor Relationships.

Starting with who we are at NCAB. NCAB, we are a supplier of printed circuit boards. And those are the products that you see on the left on this slide. And they form the basis of any electronic product. Our customers, whether it is contract manufacturers or OEMs, they will mount the semiconductors and microprocessors and other electronic components on the boards to create the intelligent modules in their products.

The key takeaway with our product is that products like PCBs, unlike the semiconductor industry, are bespoke products. So the products, the PCBs, are uniquely designed for the product they're going into. And that means that there is an engineered product with a lot of continuous changes during the lifetime of the final product. And here is where we, as NCAB, support our customers throughout that life cycle.

We are a company focusing on the high-mix, low-volume end of the market. We are not involved in the really high-volume applications like consumer products, mobile phones, PCs, et cetera, but rather typically industrial applications or medical applications where the product value in relation to the PCB itself is significantly high. The PCB is maybe sometimes only 1%, 2% of the total bill of materials. Yet the demands on these products are very high in terms of reliability and technology. And given that, say, the PCB is a small part of the total bill of material, even larger companies have a relatively small spend on printed circuit board. This makes it both hard and challenging for them to maintain the competence and resources to work with PCBs professionally. But even if they do, they are still challenging to have enough spend to really get access to the leading PCB manufacturers worldwide. And this is where we again make a difference, both by being able to support them with engineering, but also by combining the spend of our global portfolio of more than 3,500 customers, we can have access to the best factories worldwide.

We are -- in this high-mix, low-volume area, we are focusing with supplying the PCBs for demanding customers. We thrive in the areas where there are challenges, whether they are technical or quality-wise, and we aim to supply with 0 defects, produced sustainably at the lowest overall total cost for our customers. And it is a very complex product, highly engineered, a lot of challenges technically, quality-wise and as we see it today also from a supply perspective. And our vision is to absorb that complexity, whether it is technical or commercial, and make it easy for our customers.

Our model is based on -- very much on being local, close to our customers. We have, therefore, built up a network of companies in local markets, where we're covering some 19 markets today with local companies. And yet, even though we have fully outsourced manufacturing, we are still very much invested in the manufacturing part of the supply chain. So out of our close to -- or a little more than 680 specialists around the group, we have around 120 of our colleagues working solely with securing supply chain, both in current deliveries, but also in future development.

If we look at what's going on right now, the global PCB market has resumed very strong growth after a few years of slowdown after COVID. And this is driven both by a general recovery in the industry, but in the late last 2 years, we've seen a rapid expansion also of the data center market. Data centers, per se, is not really the market where NCAB has its main business. This is typically more high-volume applications. We can participate sometimes in the -- more of the infrastructure areas. But this rapid growth that we're seeing in the global market right now where the market has gone from around $85 billion in '25 to now being projected to be around USD 115 billion. This rapid growth is creating a lot of supply challenges in the whole industry.

This rapid injection of demand is, say, occupying or sucking up available capacity. And what started as being challenges in the PCB manufacturers capacity already in '25 and in early '26 has now spread to the raw material supply. What you use in the high-tech data boards require certain high- or low-loss materials, et cetera. And that is now skewing the supply chains of raw material where more and more production capacity is being directed over to these kind of materials, which is also creating then further bottlenecks in regular industrial applications. As you can see, NCAB is also now showing a really strong growth in this market, and that is being reflected in our third quarter.

So if we move to the third quarter, we see a rapid growth in our order intake. Our order intake is up 166% versus prior year. And this is very much, say, a combination of underlying, say, good double-digit growth for us. But then we also see significant forward orders from customers and also significant price increases in the market, all driven by the shortage in general supply. We have solid underlying growth in all of our markets, and we can see special strong growth in areas like industrial automation, defense areas, but also in the deliveries where we supply to infrastructure for data centers.

We also see a very good development in the net sales area, where we're now seeing growth of 54%. All of our regions also here are performing well, and we start to see some of the pricing effects from Q1 to start having an effect on our top line numbers also. And we are very much, through our strong network and our factory management organization, we are becoming somewhat of a safe haven for customers. We have sometimes what we call a double positive effect from both ourselves having, say, a strong position with leading factories. And we also have those leading factories also maybe have better-than-average access to raw materials. So we think we can give our customers an unfair share of available supply in the market, and that is partly driving our growth in this time. We also see in the quarter a positive contribution from Board Shark that was acquired here in late June.

With the growth in net sales, we also see a strong growth in EBITA versus 2025. We get a good leverage on the growth. But even if we have some minor FX headwind, predominantly from revaluation effects in the quarter. Gross margin declining marginally as we are not getting fully transferred the price increases to our customers, but still quite stable. M&A, we are continuing the work and expanding, and we have also made -- announced one further acquisition, also important from the fact that we're now making a step into our East segment and through the acquisition of the company, IMP Electronics Solutions in Australia.

This is a company based in Adelaide, and they are selling predominantly in Australia and New Zealand, a company also like NCAB, focusing on quality and high-tech applications, predominantly in industrial and defense sectors. Revenue in '25 was around AUD 9 million, and the EBITA margin is in line with NCAB overall. We will take over 12 employees, of which 6 are in Australia and 6 of our colleagues are based in China. The transaction was signed here in mid-September, and we expect to see the closing happen in -- later in quarter 4.

And if we then look more specifically at the numbers, we can see in the quarter, order intake, as I mentioned, up 166% to now reach SEK 2,620 million compared to SEK 985 million in the prior year. Organic growth is 155% in U.S. dollars, and that gives us also a very healthy book-to-bill of 1.79. Net sales up 54% to SEK 1,463 million compared to SEK 949 million, and this represents an organic growth of 45% in U.S. dollars. EBITA grew with the increased revenue and reached SEK 211 million compared to SEK 110 million in the prior year, and we had SEK 8 million of adverse FX effect. And gross margin, as I mentioned, declined slightly, 34.8% versus 35.2%, but our EBITA margin climbed up to 14.4% in the quarter compared to 11.6% in the prior year. And we're also happy to have a strong operating cash flow of SEK 177 million compared to SEK 118 million last year. Our working capital is up versus last year, but somewhat stable versus prior quarters. And our net profit reached SEK 129.8 million compared to SEK 61 million last year and an EPS of SEK 0.69 versus SEK 0.33.

Tim, over to you.

Thank you, Peter. Let's dig into the numbers. So if you see here, over the last 12 months in quarter 3, we had a gross margin of 35.1%. So we've been quite happy to keep a relatively stable gross margin even with everything that's going on in the market that you heard about from Peter. So slightly below 35% within the quarter, but 35.1% on the average.

If we take a little bit more look into the order intake and the net sales, what you see in order intake is a total development of 166% up, backlog build of about SEK 1.2 billion and comparable units in USD up 155%. When we dig a little bit into that 155%, you can see approximately 50 percentage points impact coming from higher prices and around 80% impact coming from forward orders. When we then turn to net sales, we see that increasing around 54% or in comparable units in U.S. dollars around 45%. That, again, as you heard from Peter, is a book-to-bill of nearly 1.8. We saw a good impact within the quarter of positive pricing from the orders in H1. And we've also seen a continued positive trend in several different industries, some of which being EV charging, aerospace and defense as well as quite a few industrial customers.

When we then turn and take a look at the EBITA, we see around SEK 211 million as opposed to SEK 110 million in the prior year. So a very strong increase coming from high operational leverage, a good pass-through from pricing. We also, as you heard from Peter, had a positive impact coming through from some of the recent M&A that we've been doing, including Board Shark. And then to offset all of that positivity, we did have a little bit higher costs on the SG&A side from higher variable compensation. Overall, we ended the quarter at an EBITA margin of 14.4% versus 11.6% in the prior year. And as you heard, stable gross margins in the quarter.

And then maybe over to you, Peter.

Thank you. So if we look into the individual quarters a bit closer, we can see also here all quarters seeing the positive effects from pricing and forward orders. But if we look specifically at Nordics, we can see the order intake is up 188% to SEK 599 million compared to SEK 208 million last year. Organically, this is a growth of 159% in SEK and 158% in U.S. dollars. And we see pricing, forward orders, but we also see very good development in energy applications, defense as well as industrial sectors.

Net sales up 43% to SEK 290 million compared to SEK 203 million. This represents an organic growth of 29% in Swedish krona and 27% in U.S. dollars. And we see continued growth in the power and defense and also supported by general industry. With the growth, we see EBITA improved nicely to SEK 40.4 million compared to SEK 25.2 million and the EBITA margin climbing up to 14% versus 12.4%, which is maybe more in line with our historical performance in the Nordic segment. Leverage here, again, we get from the net sales growth, which helps to drive the margin development. And we also see a positive contribution from Multi-Teknik on the EBITA side.

Looking at the European segment, also, here, strong order intake growth, 143% to SEK 1,205 million compared to SEK 496 million. Strong pricing effects, forward ordering and solid demand development from both industrial, but also automotive customers. And for automotive, this is then predominantly the truck and bus industry or heavy equipment, not so much pass car. Net sales improved by 35% to SEK 628 million compared to SEK 464 million. And we see basically now a good strong development in most of our markets, but some that stick out are markets like Germany, Netherlands and the U.K., but all markets are showing growth. EBITA improved to almost SEK 81 million compared to SEK 46 million in the prior year, and the EBITA margin improved to 12.8% compared to 9.8% last year. And here, again, it's a strong leverage from the net sales growth in the segment.

And we move to North America, where we have a very strong order intake of -- which is up 194% to SEK 650 million compared to SEK 221 million last year. We see this in U.S. dollars, of course, it's the same number, almost little FX effect. And it's forward orders and a large part of the deliveries extending well into 2027. But there also here are positive development in defense and energy and notably, several larger orders for data centers, similar to what we had in quarter 1 also in this quarter. Net sales are up 89% to SEK 424 million versus SEK 225 million last year. It's also 90% in U.S. dollars.

A large part of the growth is boosted by deliveries of larger projects won in H1, where we had both some scientific projects and data center infrastructure projects that we are now delivering out. And we've also seen a continued strong development in our advanced prototyping business, which is also nice to see. EBITA increased to SEK 71 million compared to SEK 35 million last year, and it corresponds to a margin of 16.7% versus 15.4% in the prior year. And here, we see, of course, a very positive leverage from the added net sales growth despite that actually some of these larger projects have a slightly lower gross margin.

Looking then finally at the East segment. Order intake also here continued very strong as it did in quarter 2, with order intake increasing 180% to SEK 166 million compared to SEK 60 million in the prior year. We are capitalizing on the growth in high-tech areas. And I think also here, with the challenges in the supply base, NCAB's strong position with the factories as well as growth of sales that we have with global factories is helping us to show this extraordinary growth in the East segment. Net sales are up 109% to SEK 121 million compared to SEK 58 million in the prior year. And we can see EBITA increase to SEK 25.5 million compared to SEK 9.5 million last year, which corresponds to a margin of 21.1%, which should be compared to 16.4% in the year before. And here, of course, the strong top line growth helps to create leverage on the EBITA side.

Tim?

Thank you, Peter. So to talk you through a few additional financial KPIs here. Return on equity up to 21.7% from 14.1% in the prior year. So a significantly stronger earnings profile. Net debt down to 1.2 from 1.6. So a lot of dry powder for additional M&A in the future. Equity to assets ratio at 36.4% versus 41.5% in the prior year. Working capital, both in absolute terms and in relative terms, up a bit from prior year, especially as we support our customers through difficult times, which you heard from Peter. And available liquidity a bit over SEK 1.2 billion ready to go.

So maybe over to you, Peter, to talk a little bit about our pipeline.

Yes. So I mean, we consistently continue to develop our pipeline. And as we've said before, we have come from a historical situation with predominant focus in Europe and then into North America and extending further into looking at our East segment. And with that, actually, I'm very happy that we were able to close the deal here in Australia, even if it's not the biggest of our acquisitions. It is a very good fit for NCAB, and it's also an important first step to expand our position geographically in the East segment. So a very healthy continued pipeline and ongoing discussions for the future.

As we go ahead, we continue with our integration process with the companies we acquire where, of course, important starting point is to gain, say, the confidence in the customers from the company we acquire as well as the employees, which is really the 2 things that we are acquiring at the starting point. And then over time, we mature and look more into how we can together find the best sort of way of taking the company forward. We are continuously looking to buy good companies. So an important part in the early stage is always to understand how the companies operate and in which way they differ so that we may also learn from the companies we acquire and not only sort of move them into an NCAB model.

But overall, we integrate and we are looking to find important synergies over time. Of course, we want to see that the acquired companies that we can support them to grow long term by giving them access to our factory panel and our marketing activities, et cetera, as well as helping them drive quality and service through our factory management organization. We, of course, also give them access to our factory side and our purchasing power and our logistics solutions, which can help them also save cost. And then finally, it is very much a cross-fertilization of know-how between these companies. So not only can we help these companies, but these companies also help to make NCAB better over time.

And that brings us then to our concluding slide regarding our overall strategy. We are a company focused 100% of printed circuit boards, and we continue to stay focused in this area and believe very much in continuing with an asset-light model where we don't take ownership of factories, but rather build strong partnerships. It gives us the flexibility and agility to face both challenges and exploit opportunities in the market. We are, however, investing continuously in providing better and better technology and service for our customers so that we may grow our market shares in existing markets and deepen the relationships with our customers.

As we've taken the step now, as an example, with IMP, we are looking to expand the number of markets and our position in the markets, and we typically look to do this through M&A. As this is very much a relationship business and this -- through an M&A, it gives us a faster step into the market, and we can then help to grow on that position. And then finally, it is still a very fragmented market. NCAB is the undisputed global leader in the supply of printed circuit board, but yet we only have a few percentage points of the total addressable market. So we are looking to find opportunities to consolidate also in the markets where we already have a position since many years.

Thank you very much. And with that, I think we open up for questions.

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

Congrats on a really strong quarter. My first question is really on pricing. It was 50% in the order intake here in Q3, up from 20% in Q2. And what are you seeing in terms of kind of the pricing trend here as we're heading into October? Is it continuing up? And what is your kind of best guess on the price development here as we look ahead? Do you still think that we will see prices at a high level until the constraints kind of ease at the end of '27 or into mid-'28? That's the first one.

I mean it's a little bit similar to what we saw in quarter 1 and quarter 2 that you say that the 50% we see is an average. I think we saw quite a big movement very late in the second quarter and early in quarter 3. We don't see the market improving. It's hard to predict whether the prices will continue up further, but we don't really see the market easing up until maybe second half of '27. I think that is the general view just based on the continued ramp-up of AI investments as well as what we can see in terms of new capacity, in terms of raw material production coming online. So we do expect the supply markets to be quite challenging until at least second half of next year.

Very clear. And as prices remain high or continuing up at least from Q3 to Q2, do you still see here the last couple of months that the prebuying activity kind of is continuing. Obviously, we saw that in your numbers. But as of October here, is prebuying activity kind of continuing as well?

I mean, I think we saw extreme prebuy of forward orders being placed here in the third quarter. I would expect that at some point, say, when the supply situation is somewhat at least -- maybe it doesn't get better, but maybe at least it doesn't get further worse. At some point, you're going to have a situation where customers have already placed forward orders, and they will just continue to add months at the end. So it's not unforeseeable that the forward orders, it may continue for a few more months or maybe a few quarters. But at some point, I think we're going to see the forward ordering diminishing. And with that, we're probably going to see our order intake total number come down as customers are, say, not placing just forward orders anymore.

Yes. And tying those things together as we just discussed, I mean, now you had an order intake of SEK 2.6 billion. And if I would kind of strip out the prebuying element, I would be at, let's say, 1.7 or 6.9 annualized. That's kind of underlying level, is that a level that you think you can sustain for a couple of quarters here as we look ahead if I strip out the kind of prebuy element?

It is, of course, hard to judge. I mean, I think we have solid positive development underlying in our business. To what extent potentially pricing could have kind of a dampening effect on demand, it's also hard to say. Right now, we don't see that, but it's hard to make forward predictions what this will do.

Okay. Very, very clear. And then I just had a question on the gross margin. I think you're doing a great job here considering how fast prices are moving. It was at 34.8%, so just below the kind of 35% to 36% range. And would you say that the main driver behind the strength is that you've kind of revamped the strategy of kind of the 5-day quotation window instead of 30 days as previously? Is that helping you in this environment?

Yes. I think that has been an important part. Of course, we -- I mean, it's very hard to get fixed pricing. And to some extent, we are also subject to what you can kind of call dynamic pricing, where at some extent, because if our factories don't have material at home and they need to order material, they may need to pay a higher different price when they get orders, which are placed further out. And that may mean that prices may even need to be adjusted upon delivery. But I think this is -- it is a very, say, unique situation, but it's been building up over some time. And I think our customers -- we've had close dialogue with our customers and communicating around this. So I think we are working with our customers and they understand.

So this is something we will need to deal with. I think the biggest problem, prices are, of course, a big challenge, and we are working hard to kind of minimize the impact for our customers. But yet, the even more important right now is to secure supply. I think there, we are so far performing extremely well. We have very good -- still extremely good both delivery quality and delivery performance data, which actually is very comforting.

And very helpful for the customers.

Yes. Very good. And I just had a question on kind of margins and OpEx growth because last time, the last component kind of situation back in '21, '22, the margins on EBITA peaked at, let's say, around 14%. But this was kind of in an environment where the gross margin was 2 to 3 percentage points kind of structurally lower. And now you're already at 14%. Book-to-bill is quite notable. FX is turning positive. IT costs will be down heading into next year. So in my view, margins should scale quite okay if we look ahead. And is there something I'm missing here on the OpEx side of things? Because also there, I mean, the OpEx side is quite fixed, that is the majority of it, even though there are variable elements.

In principle, of course, leverage helps, but of course, we also need to ramp up to handle the extra activities. I think we can see a tremendous growth in the number of quotes and activities we're doing. So -- and you can see it a little bit in our headcount development. I think we have maybe added in the order of a little bit more than 10, 15 -- around 10, 15 people since Q2. And I think since Q1, we are up around 30 or maybe 25 if you take out Board Shark. So we are making some additions as well. But still, we should -- we do aim to, of course, to have a healthy growth and profitability with that growth.

Good. Just last question. Sorry for taking up so much time. But in Q1, you took USD 20 million of larger orders that was connected to data centers and also the research center, right? How -- was most of that delivered now in Q3? Or is there still some to be delivered in Q4?

I think the major parts, but maybe not fully all.

The next question comes from Jonny Jin from SEB.

I have a couple of questions as well. I want to start a little bit on the orders. I mean, obviously, very strong here in the quarter, which is good to see. But on the forward orders here, do you see any signs of doubling ordering, that is, that the same customer could place orders with you and other suppliers as well? Is that sort of -- is there some sort of that type of dynamic on the market right now?

No, we don't see any signs of that. Typically, these are engineered and validated products. So that is not something we are seeing at all.

Okay. That's good. That's clear. And I know that you are very good at securing supply and such. But I mean, there's no sort of risk that customers buy too much and cancel orders? Or is there some type of dynamic that we need to be aware of?

I mean what we have -- I mean, since all of our products are bespoke designs, they are firm orders. I mean none of our products can be used for another application. So all the orders we have from our customers are firm and will be delivered. You could always argue, say, is there a risk that some customers are right now hedging themselves, building a little bit of inventory? That, of course, can be there, but that is hard for us to judge. I think we try to separate out what are forward orders where actually they're ordering ahead of time and placing them out. And that we can separate out as we have communicated of what we're delivering, if there is some part of that, which is also where they're building a bit more inventory than what they had before, that is a bit hard for us to judge, but it's not impossible. I think that is some possibility as well in these days.

And I mean, even if there was a situation where some particular customers had placed orders and needed to change the delivery pattern, for example, there's so much demand in the marketplace right now for material that we could often find a different customer for a certain type of material. It rarely happens from what we see.

Okay. That's good. That's clear. Then on the data center order in North America, I think it was quite big in the quarter as well. I mean, could you just shed some more comments about this, how concentrated are these individual customers? And is this sort of a, I mean, recurring business? Or is it sort of one-off projects? Or how is the pipeline looking for this type of business entering 2027?

You could argue that the products are not, you can say, specifically data center products, but more in the electrical infrastructure products. And of course, these are products that may reoccur going forward as well. So we -- these, of course, have been, say, larger projects, but we also foresee that these are business that could continue to also in 2027 for us.

They can just be a bit lumpy sometimes.

Yes. Okay. Sounds promising. Just one final from my side, and that is on the gross margin transfer. We talked about this a little bit, but do you expect to be fully compensated in Q4? Or are you still sort of chasing given the price dynamics on the market right now?

I think -- I mean, I think, our aim, as we said, has been to kind of maintain our gross margins in that band, 35% to 36%. It is with the rapid dynamics we have seen somewhat challenging to maybe maintain that in this phase, but it is our aim to sort of maintain stability in the gross margin. And I think we are working well with our customers and trying to be open and transparent on what's going on so that we are working jointly to secure supply, and we are able to transfer the cost increases, which are inevitable in this...

[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from Johan Lonnqvist Sunden from DNB Carnegie.

Just a little -- my first question is about lead times. And curious to hear a little bit your take on how fast the kind of orders that you have taken in the last, say, 2 quarters will be kind of converted. Are we still -- we're still talking about 2, 3 quarters. And obviously, you had some prebuying that comes further into '27. But just to have a little bit of your view on how much of a volume contribution we could expect in the coming, say, 2, 3 quarters as there's been some, obviously, a tough supply chain. And I guess there is -- you need to struggle a bit to deliver.

Yes. No, I mean, I think the way you can think about it is that lead times, as we've been saying over the past couple of quarters, have stretched out to be about 2 quarters on average. It doesn't always work that way. We do have some quick turn orders as well where we can deliver some things within the quarter -- the very next quarter after the order intake. It's not that much, but it's there. Typically, if you remember, quarter 4 is always one of those quarters where deliveries are a bit short in December and end up happening in January. So that moves a little bit more of it of that type of thing into quarter 1. And then you could imagine then that you'd see more of it in quarter 2. And I mean some of the orders that we get -- some of these forward orders can be almost full year orders in some cases. But I would say the bulk of it is over the next couple of quarters.

And maybe you highlighted that in the report, but was the data center orders that you received single out? How big they were and when you expect to kind of deliver upon them?

I think they are north of SEK 200 million, but we have not broken out exactly when they will be delivered. They will be staged...

Yes, largely over '27.

Okay. But just to get a sense of the estimate profile, is it like we start before Christmas? Or is it 2027?

No, no, no. These orders will be delivered in '27.

Yes. And in general, delivery abilities, you have showcased during this quarter that you can deliver quite a lot of volume, but any risk that you can't fulfill your kind of commitment, so to say?

No, I think we are actually in a quite good position. We are working very closely with our factory partners from both, of course, through our local factory management organization, but we're also from our group organization management traveling on a consistent basis, meeting with our factories. And we -- I mean, not only are we important customers of those factories from our spend profile, but these are also factories with whom we've been working in many cases, more than 20 years. So we have very long-standing relationships with our partners. And that also plays in our favor in these challenging times.

So I think we have very good positive support from our factories and are able to sort of get what we call our unfair share of supply so that we can really keep both existing and potential new customers happy.

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

So there are no written questions. So I just would like to remind you that we have a Capital Markets Day, which is due the 19th of November, and we're going to send the invitation out next week. So please look out for that.

And maybe we have one more question from the telephone conference now. No, we have a written question here from our shareholder from Anicom, Alexandre Weinberg. He is wondering to what extent is the unfair share leading to acquiring new or larger clients?

This is very hard to quantify, but it's a very good question. But we do see both with existing customers that we see that we get opportunities to take over certain projects, but we also see customers where we've been working with a long time where we're now getting opportunities to quote and start delivering other products. I think our business is extremely relationship-based. It takes a long time to make changes. And in some cases, customers may be reluctant to change if it's somewhat working okay. I think this situation right now, it's opening the door. And I think that means that maybe it doesn't have a huge impact on the numbers we're reporting today, but it bodes well for our long-term development.

That sounds like an excellent end to this telephone conference. And thank you very much, Peter and Tim, and also for all of you who listened in. And welcome, as I said, to our Capital Markets Day, 19th of November. Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Welcome to the NCAB Q2 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 Öhman. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and welcome, everyone, to today's quarterly report. Starting out with NCAB as a background. We are a supplier of printed circuit boards, which are the products that you see on the left here, which form the foundation in any electronic products. So our customers are typically OEM customers or EMS companies mounting the electronics and creating the intelligent modules in today's modern industrial equipment. And what is unique about our business is, of course, that the PCBs are uniquely designed for the product they go into. So there are no standard components, but we provide a lot of value, both in terms of engineering support as well as in the manufacturing.

NCAB, we are a company with outsourced production. We have no internal manufacturing, but work with a network of factories. And our mission is to supply PCBs for demanding customers and to do this on time with 0 defects and produce sustainably at the lowest total cost. And we believe very much in being local close to the customers, where we can provide the technical and quality engineering support and commercial support to our customers. We are operating in an increasingly complex world, especially in today's environment with AI putting pressure on supply chains. And our vision is to making PCBs easy, to absorb that complexity and make life easier for our customers.

Beyond the factor that we are focusing on demanding customers, we are also targeting specifically the high-mix, low-volume segment of the market. So we are not active in high-volume consumer good products like mobile phones or PC makers as an example, but typically much more in industrial applications or medical or aerospace defense applications. And typically, what we see in these applications is that the PCB is a very small portion of the total bill of material, maybe only as low as 1%, 2%, yet the demands on quality are still very, very high.

And for these customers, even though our customers, in many cases, are globally leading companies, their spend on PCBs is somewhat small, and they maybe are struggling to have enough competency to manage this commodity. But also even if they have that, they are still not having a spend significant enough to allow them to get access to the best factories and have priority there. And this is where we can add a lot of value by aggregating the spend of a large number of customers. And of course, having also that spend, we also have the competency to be able to provide support. And this gives us an opportunity to provide good service with competitive pricing and yet have a decent margin for the business we provide.

If we look upon the global market, we can see the global market here being represented by the green bars and 2026 is the forecasted end number for 2026. We can see how the market has, after the pandemic years, or post-pandemic years in '23, '24, when the market was down, has resumed growth, and this is really being driven globally by AI applications. But we can also see NCAB's order intake curve accelerating as well in the recent times. And this is also something we can see is influencing now our second quarter.

So if we move to the key takeaways in quarter 2, we have a very strong growth on top line as well as on EBITA. We can see our order intake accelerating in this market with quite significant supply chain challenges. The investments that are currently happening in data centers for AI predominantly is creating a lot of supply chain strains for PCB manufacturing globally, both in terms of manufacturing capacity, but now more and more in the ingoing constituent materials that you need like glass fiber yarn or laminate materials. And this is both resulting in pre-buy effects as well as price increases, which is enhancing our order intake in this quarter. But beyond those 2 effects, there is still a good solid underlying double-digit growth for us.

And we see good progress specifically in the focused industries like what we do for AI as well, but predominantly also in areas like medtech or aerospace and defense.

But in the quarter, we overall come up with an organic order intake growth of 58% in U.S. dollars. If we move to net sales, also here we see strong growth on the back of previous quarters of growing order intake. So our net sales growth is 25% in the quarter, and we can see all regions performing well. And beyond volume demand going up, we can also see some effects from pricing that we saw in quarter 1. And I think NCAB has a strong position in this turbulent market. We have a very resilient supply chain, a strong portfolio of factories where we are a priority customer, and it makes us a resilient source of supply in this challenging market.

We should also remember that we still have some negative impact from FX compared to prior year. And in this quarter, we had SEK 35 million of negative impact on net sales. Also, EBITA, with the growing growth in net sales, we see a strong improvement in EBITA versus 2025. So we're leveraging well this volume growth and offsetting also the negative FX headwind that we still have and gross margins remained stable versus prior year.

Also just at the end of the quarter, we were happy to announce another acquisition. We acquired the company Board Shark PCB in the U.S. This is a company based in Florida, started in 2006, and the focus is very much on prototyping and quick turn deliveries. And their main customer base are in areas like aerospace, but also industrial and medical sectors. In 2025, their revenue was around $17 million, and they have a very good EBITA margin, which also contributes to NCAB's performance.

It's a fairly small team. It's only 5 employees in the company. But like also some other U.S. companies, they are operating with an external network of regional sales reps, and they are predominantly strong for this company in the western part of the U.S., which is a very good complement to NCAB's already strong position where our strength historically comes more from the East Coast. So this further strengthens our position on the West in the same way that our acquisition of Phase 3 did in 2023. And this transaction was signed and closed on June 24.

If we then take a little bit deeper look at the figures for the quarter, we can see that the order intake overall in Swedish krona grew by 59% to SEK 1,570 million versus SEK 985 million in prior year. That is a 58% organic growth in U.S. dollars, which is the main trading currency we have. And we also have a very strong book-to-bill of 1.34.

Net sales grew 25% to SEK 1,168 million versus SEK 934 million, and that represents a 24% organic growth in U.S. dollars. EBITA grew to SEK 138 million versus SEK 93 million and represents an EBITA margin of 11.9%. And as mentioned, the gross margin here stayed stable versus last year and also largely versus prior quarter. And in the EBITA, we are still offsetting a negative FX impact of SEK 10 million in this quarter. So the FX impact is reducing compared to quarter 1, but still represents a negative impact.

Good cash flow of SEK 116 million versus SEK 93 million in prior year. Our working capital is up, and we see this partly as the lead times are somewhat longer on the supply chains, but it's actually slightly lower than what we were in quarter 1. Net profit is at SEK 84 million in the quarter versus SEK 40 million last year, and EPS is SEK 0.45 versus SEK 0.22.

With that, I give the word to you, Tim.

Thanks, Peter. And here, you can see our gross margins over a longer period of time. You can see we were in the low 30s back some years ago. We invested quite a bit in having a strong supply chain and a strong engineering base. We've been able to add additional value for our customers, especially in market situations like this. And that's given us a good margin at a stable level over the past few quarters, closer to 35% in a nice stable situation.

If we take a look through the order intake, you heard from Peter, around 59% up, and in comparable units, U.S. dollars, 58%. That growth is comprised of approximately 20% on the pricing side and then around 20% pre-orders for delivery in 2027. And we see that, as you heard from Peter, that with this market situation, the lead times are moving out. So around 20% of the orders that we took this quarter are scheduled to be delivered in '27.

Net sales up 25% to SEK 1,168 million, and in comparable units, around 24%. That gave us a book-to-bill of 1.34. We also saw a positive pricing impact starting to be translated through from the backlog from the quarter 1 orders. And we also saw positive trends coming through in EV charging, aerospace and defense as well as industrial sectors, which we were happy to see positivity there.

When we look at the EBITA result, around SEK 139 million compared with SEK 94 million last year, and that's despite an additional FX -- a negative impact from FX of around SEK 10 million. And we also had SEK 7.3 million of transactional costs for Board Shark, which you saw represented in the North America segment of around SEK 7.3 million. So despite those 2 things, we had a little bit of additional help from M&A as well. So we had B&B that we acquired last year, Multi-Teknik, and now Board Shark. But the biggest driver here has been strong operational leverage on the higher volumes that have come through. So that pushed us up to an EBITA margin of 11.9% versus 10% last year. And you heard that gross margin has been stable over the past 2 quarters.

But with that, I hand it to you, Peter.

Thank you. And as mentioned, I think we have seen positive development in all of our segments. So if we start by Nordics, we can see the order intake up strong by 55%, reaching SEK 403 million of order intake versus SEK 260 million. Here, we also have some contribution from Multi-Teknik that was added in. So organic growth is around 41%. And we can see, of course, the effects of pricing, pre-ordering, but also a solid development in sectors like energy, defense and also general industry that helps to drive the order intake growth.

Net sales also growing nicely by 28% to SEK 277 million over SEK 215 million, representing an organic growth of 17% in Swedish krona or 21% in U.S. dollars. And we continue to see the resurgence of the EV charger business that was low for some time during '24, '25, but that is coming back and growing nicely. We also see the continued growth in defense plus general industry developing positively.

EBITA amounted to SEK 42 million over SEK 23 million last year and the EBITA margin up to 15.2% versus 10.7%, which is maybe more in line of our historical performance in the Nordic segment. Contribution from Multi-Teknik, of course, helped to drive the EBITA improvement, but there's also, as mentioned by Tim in general, a strong leverage on the net sales growth that helps drive the margin development.

If we start looking at Europe segment, also here, strong order intake growth by 58%, up to SEK 750 million over SEK 475 million. Organic growth of 51% in SEK and 57% in U.S. dollar. Only a small contribution from B&B makes a difference as they came in during quarter 2 in last year. So we see the order intake, again, driven by pricing, pre-ordering, but also the continued demand -- growing demand from industrial customers. All markets here are strong. We only have a few exceptions, I think Italy, where we have quite a bit of exposure to automotive passenger car, where there is a more muted performance still.

Net sales grew by some 22% to SEK 536 million over SEK 440 million, organically here, 17% in SEK and 21% in U.S. dollars. And we continue to see the strong development in most of the European markets. And notably, Germany for us is doing quite well. EBITA increased to around SEK 60 million over SEK 33.6 million and EBITA margin grew from 7.6% to 11.1%. And we have some negative FX in the quarter, but it's being offset by the leverage of growth and also the contribution from B&B.

Moving to North America. Also here, we continue to see strong order intake growth of 56% to SEK 294 million over SEK 189 million last year. Growth 59% in U.S. dollars, supported by some orders with extending into 2027. And we continue to see strong development in defense. Here, we have the approval of CMMC 2.0 recently for the cybersecurity, which is a mandatory requirement, specifically for defense in the U.S., and that is helping us now to win more business in the U.S. We also see continued business within Power Solutions, where we also in earlier quarter had significant projects for some data center applications.

Net sales are up 24% to SEK 278 million over SEK 225 million, and it's a growth of 30% in U.S. dollars. And here, we have had deliveries of a number of larger projects, helping to drive the growth in the revenue side. And we also see strong development in the advanced prototyping business that we have in North America.

EBITA came down to SEK 26.3 million over SEK 32 million, but this, of course, is mainly driven by the fact that we have the transaction cost of SEK 7.3 million for Board Shark. Without that, the EBITA margin would have been 12.2%, which is still slightly down from last year, but in par or slightly better than Q1.

And then finally, over to East, where we have seen maybe the strongest development on top line with order intake increasing 102% to SEK 124 million over SEK 61 million. Order intake growth in U.S. dollars, 111%. And we are capitalizing very much on the market growth in high tech. Our team here is very much focused on niche applications where we are providing a lot of engineering support. And you can also see that a major part of customer base that have been trying to buy direct historically in China, given that, that is the main source also of supply, they are struggling to get access and they're valuing the access through manufacturing capacity from NCAB, and this is helping us to grow our business in China, notably.

Net sales are up 40% to SEK 76 million over SEK 54 million, and it represents a net sales increase by 46% in U.S. dollars. EBITA grew to SEK 15.1 million over SEK 9.5 million and represents a margin of 19.8% versus 17.5%. And here, it's really the rapid growth in net sales that creates the strong EBITA leverage for the business in our East segment.

Over to you, Tim.

Thanks, Peter. So I think you can see here that our return on equity is developing favorably with 18.9% during the quarter compared with 13.5% in the prior year, driven very much by a healthy EBITA development. The net debt-to-EBITDA is at 1.9 versus 1.8 last year, which is below our financial targets. And that is also considering the fact that we did pay out a dividend during the quarter as well as acquiring Board Shark.

Equity-to-asset ratio at 35.8%, considering around 40.7% last year. And then working capital up to SEK 443 million or 10.3% compared with SEK 353 million or 9.2% prior year. And part of that does come from us buffering the situation for our customers a little bit and making a bit easier for them and adjusting to the market climate. Available liquidity, a little bit over SEK 1 billion versus SEK 1.2 billion last year, but very much in a good situation with additional dry powder for additional M&A.

If we look at the pipeline, a bit over 300 identified companies. I think if you've been following us for a while now, you're a bit familiar with our criteria. If you look at the past few acquisitions that we've done over the past years, including B&B, Multi-Teknik, Board Shark, all without own production, all profitable companies, and that's the type of company we continue to look for. Short list of around 50 target companies and good conversations ongoing. And we're happy now to have our first of the year out with Board Shark. All 3 of these acquisitions, we think, at a very good timing in the market.

And then if we look at the integration process, there's a lot of advantages for a company to come into the NCAB family. There's opportunities to improve and learn and grow in marketing, sales, people and culture, IT operations. And it's also an opportunity for us to learn from them. Each one of the companies that we acquire, we try to learn from. They tend to make us a little bit better globally. And they get to choose a little bit together with us which one of these synergies makes them more successful, and they get to choose those ones first, and that's how we move along.

Over to you, Peter.

Yes. So summing up, again, we are a specialist company, and we remain 100% focused on printed circuit boards. And overall, the global market this year is predicted to be around $100 billion. And what we are focusing on in high-mix, low-volume represents maybe around 30% of that. So a worldwide market of around $30 billion. So even though we are a clear leader, we still have a lot of market to target. So we do not have plans to extend into other product areas, but remain 100% focused on the PCBs. And we also want to continue with this asset-light model of not having in-house production, but instead leveraging a strong portfolio of partner factories to always have the -- be flexible and adaptable to have the right offering for our customers.

We are still, however, investing a lot in the whole manufacturing process. We have a strong factory management team. We're also investing in technology and system support to help us provide even better service for our customers and build stronger relationships to further increase market shares in the market where we operate. We are continuously also looking to expand geographically to cover new markets or areas of new markets. And we believe that M&A is a very good method of doing this.

We are very much -- you can say we are supplying products, but we're very much a service organization and building those customer relationships takes time and even more so if you're entering a completely new market. So M&A is a very good vehicle of establishing a foothold and then from there, growing our shares in that market. And we also see still, in Europe and North America, especially, there are a lot of smaller, medium-sized regional players, trading companies where we see an opportunity to consolidate this market. Many of these companies lack the kind of the muscle that NCAB has in terms of its factory management supply base organization and its work on sustainability, et cetera. We can help these companies take the next step for the future. And as many of the companies were formed and started some 20, 30 years ago, there are many of these companies that are also coming up with a success and change. And here, it's a good opportunity for those companies to transition their ownership into NCAB and give both the company, their customers and the employees a nice future development for the future.

And with that, I think we wrap up our presentation, and we'll open up for questions.

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

Congrats on another strong quarter. I have a couple of questions. Starting a bit on the order intake side and starting with pricing. Pricing was 20% up year-over-year in the orders here in Q2. However, if I look at external data, it seems that spot prices are running even higher heading into Q3 here. Do you agree with that statement? And how do you view the price development here ahead?

I mean, that's a fair assumption, Jacob, because, I mean, what we've seen is, of course, this has been, say, a gradual process starting maybe some of the discussions already end of last year and during quarter 1. So in quarter 1, we had price increases in, say, north of 10%, and now maybe we are north of 20%. And I think that has been, say, a gradual implementation. So it's a fair assumption to say that the prices are higher now at the end of quarter 2 than what they were at the beginning of quarter 2.

And looking ahead, I mean, I think what we -- it's always hard to predict where this -- how the market is going to develop. But I mean, we do not see any relief in the supply chains in the near term. If anything, they may become more challenging going forward before they turn to the better.

Very clear. And kind of touching a bit on that. I mean, as you explained now, but also in the report, the capacity constraints are tougher than ever. And I believe the last component crisis we had back in '21, that cycle kind of lasted for 1.5 years in terms of sustained order intake growth. Based on what you can see right now, do you think that this cycle will be more prolonged, so to speak?

It is, of course, challenging to predict. But I mean, right now, what has been the main driver of this cycle has been the investments in AI. And then that, of course, has created shortages, which in turn has created more of pre-buy, which actually amplifies the strained supply chains. But if we look at the current rate and the projected near or, say, midterm investments in AI, there is no real relief from the AI side in the investments. And there, investments as predicted, at least, look to outpace the pace by which the industry can ramp up its capacity. So right now, it's hard to predict, and we don't right now see when things would kind of turn around.

Clear. Good. And then I just have 2 questions on North America. I mean, in Q1, you were talking about these bigger orders that you quantified of $20 million, which was partially towards these research centers, which may become once a year, but then you also have these ancillary energy systems towards data centers. You mentioned energy here in North America segment, but the magnitude of the data center order is a bit smaller here in Q2, and can we expect larger orders in H2? Or how should we view that commentary here in Q2?

Yes. I think it's fair to say that, I mean, as you said, in quarter 1, we had a little bit of an extraordinary assembly of those orders coming in kind of all at once. So yes, we have had continued orders for these kind of power auxiliary supplies also here in quarter 2. And I think we expect to have more opportunities going forward. If we will have that they will kind of converge in a single quarter like they did in quarter 1, that's a little bit hard to judge. I think actually if you look upon our order intake numbers for quarter 2, then actually in the year-over-year comparison, then we actually were lacking one part of those kind of science orders that we then last year had in quarter 2, but this year came out in quarter 1. So yes.

Good. And then also quite exciting to see that you started to receive defense orders on the back of the CMMC 2.0 certification that you got approved for. And I guess can we expect these orders to kind of continue for the remainder of the year? And are you able to kind of quantify the magnitude within the North America segment, which is connected to defense, or give any color there?

I don't think we're breaking out exactly defense for North America. I think defense for the group in '25 was around 6%, but that was predominantly then North America and Nordics. And I think this is also a general development that on the one hand, we are cementing our position in North America and hopefully extending through our commitment with the CMMC 2.0 investment. But also, we can see that the work that we initiated a few years ago to extend our sales to aerospace and defense in Europe is starting to bear fruit, but we're also winning more new orders and projects in Continental Europe, which is also positive for the future.

Very clear. Last question from my side before I hop to the line. But I think the gross margin guidance you've had for a couple of quarters has been 35% to 36%, and you delivered right above the low end in this quarter, which I thought was quite strong given how fast prices are moving in the market. So do you think you'll be able to kind of sustain this low end of the guidance here ahead given the market dynamics? Or how should we view it?

I mean, it is our aim that we will be able to sort of manage the cost increases to our customers in the way that we are also preserving our gross margin. So that, I guess, is our ambition to still stay with that kind of guidance we've given before to be in that range, 35%, 36%.

The next question comes from Gustav Berneblad from Nordea.

I thought maybe just to start off with something you write here in the report regarding you say that deliveries for current orders are now materially into 2027. So just a clarifying question that if I were to place an order today, will I get delivery first mid-2027? Or is it still possible to sort of place orders today and get delivery within 2026?

I think you can still get orders into 2026. But it is increasingly -- it depends a little bit on which technology, et cetera, but you can still get orders in '26. So it's not that it's completely closed, but we also see that, especially on the pre-ordering side, we have seen orders extending where they have visibility that stretches beyond customers are placing those orders as well. So a lot of the pre-ordering is materially pushing into next year.

And shorter delivery times also require slightly higher prices in some places, because capacity utilization is so high in many of the factories that can do that.

That's very clear. And just given -- I mean, given the order book you have today, you have quite good visibility here into H2. I mean, how confident are you in seeing sales volumes increase year-over-year here in H2, given the supply chain constraints?

I mean, right now, you can say that you have to, of course, take out, say, the pre-buy side of things from our order intake. But I think generally, we are keeping up quite well with our customers' demand increases. So we don't see, at least for the near term, major risks to our supply opportunity. So I think we are pretty confident about how we can develop. But I think what we can see is, of course -- and this is something for, maybe for those who were with us in '21, '22, to see that, yes, when we have this significant order intake and with levels of pre-buy, the revenue will climb slower than what the order intake. You will not see the kind of 1,500 plus order intake materialize in near-term revenue. It kind of gets more prolonged in its growth.

And maybe to add on to that, I mean, if you look at where the orders were originating for these different quarters, the orders for quarter 3 were originating largely in quarter 1 when the supply chain issues were not as severe as they are now. So the bigger risk in the 2 quarters is really more in quarter 4, where we typically have a seasonality pattern in December as well, which bleeds into quarter 1. So I would say it's more of a thing in quarter 4 than it is in quarter 2.

That's very clear. And just on the price increases filtering through, just to help us with our estimates as well. I mean, should we expect a gradual increase in the price increases reaching roughly 20% by mid-'27, or is that a good reference point to sort of see the 20% coming through?

Yes. I mean, it's probably pretty fair. I mean, we talked about it in quarter 1 where we said, I mean, the price increase we see in quarter 1 would predominantly be visible in the second half of the year. We've seen some positive contribution from the pricing on the net sales also in Q2. But I think we'll see the full effect of Q1 price increases will really materialize, say, in quarter 3. And likewise now, the price increase we're seeing now will be towards the end of this year and into '27, on the net sales effect.

Perfect. Yes. That's clear. And just 2 small questions here on costs before I get back in line as well. Just in terms of the transaction costs that we are seeing here, just if you can elaborate a bit on why they were so large in relation to the acquisition. I mean, if we compare to the previous acquisition, it's a quite large difference. And then also on if there were any costs related to the business development conference that you usually have every second year in Q2?

Yes, I can say that the transactional costs for Board Shark were primarily related to doing business and setting up the acquisition in the right way in the U.S., which is a bit more of a complicated jurisdiction, especially on the legal side. What we could see is that it was a bit more comparable to the last large acquisition that we did in the U.S. rather than smaller, more simple acquisitions in Europe. So that's a little bit where that came from. And yes, we did have some costs from the conference that we had in quarter 2, but not a material effect on the quarter, although.

Is it fair to assume that it's sort of low single digits in terms of million SEK or...

Not something that we disclose.

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

I have a couple of questions as well. I want to follow up a little bit on the pre-buy and especially tying that to your higher prices now, as it sounds like, yes, prices are still climbing. So how do you reflect that sort of in the pre-buys? Do you charge a premium on those longer pre-buys orders to reflect the pricing risk? Or how does that work?

I think it's a mixture. And I think this is where the market is probably moving. Given the fact that the market is not easing up, I think the willingness to make committed long out pre-buys with fixed pricing is challenging. So in some cases, you can say that the pricing is built in there, but we are also facing a situation where we may be subject -- and we've informed our customers well that we may be subject to what's called kind of dynamic pricing, meaning that the PCB manufacturer, if there is a pre-buy order with deliveries 6 months out, they, of course, do not have 6 months of raw material in stock. And they only right now have a pricing indication, but the raw material prices are more set on a kind of spot market currently. So there may be even, say, price adjustments to longer orders going forward.

Understood. Then just one quick follow-up on previous questions here. I mean, you flagged longer lead times very clearly. But I mean, order conversion is still very good. It seems like very healthy if you look at both this quarter and on year-to-date. So I assume it sounds like the price effect was minor on the sales side in this quarter. So as you convert these higher prices, yes, starting in the second half of this year, and I mean, you also mentioned the supply chains are very, very tight now, so your value is also getting higher to customers. So yes, just to clarify, is it fair to assume that the gross margin could start to climb towards the upper end of 35% to 36% range ahead? Or can you maybe clarify?

We don't give forward guidance on that sort of thing. But suffice to say, we're not expecting immediate margin accretion. We're just trying to keep up with the market itself and what's going on in the supply chain dynamics.

Yes. And I think we're also very much focusing on the customer relationships we have in terms of doing our best to protect our customers and, of course, getting compensated for the cost increase that we see, but at the same time, not profiteering, but really building the long-term business with our customers.

Okay. Understood. And then just a quick one on cash flow. I mean, you grow very fast now. But I mean, going forward, as you say, supply chain is very, very tight. And yes, do you see sort of a behavior that suppliers might ask for more upfront payment or such that could impact your working capital in the short term? Or how do you mitigate that? Or what do you see there?

I mean, it's a good question, Jonny. And I think we are seeing that happening, or at least we can see that as a potential issue that, say, especially for factories to be able to get raw material that they may need to pay upfront, or just from the fact that, say, that prices are going up on raw materials means that, say, our manufacturers, they will hit the credit limits of their raw material suppliers and then may need to pay upfront to get anything beyond their credit limit.

So in some cases, we may need to go in and support that to secure material. I think it's an opportunity and the strength we have. But it's also something where we are also in dialogue with our customers to get our customers to support that in order for us to secure material for them. So there may be some impact on our working capital going forward, but I think we can also largely offset that also from customers.

And it may not be something that some of our smaller competitors have the ability to do in the same way that we can.

Understood. That's clear. Then I have just one final one, one quick question. I mean, some companies are seeing some tariff refunds now in the U.S. Is that something that you expect as well going forward, or...

I mean, this is a process that has been -- is progressing. So I think, yes, we may see some procedural tariffs coming back. Then again, in some cases, we will also be there based on, say, post our deducted cost that we've had in association with this, there will be part of that flowing back to our customers as well. So we don't see that as a major impact on our numbers going forward.

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 thank you very much. There is some questions here. And we have one from [ Phil Berenberg ] here, and he says, congrats for the results. And he has 2 questions. First, could you disclose the share of your revenue or order intake that is directly or indirectly related to AI infrastructure investment?

I think it's not something we have reported. But I mean, what we do, we report those activities, they are predominantly related to Power solutions. And I think in 2025, we reported Power being around 9%, which then includes also our EV charging business. So it was in '25, maybe a business that is, say, potentially sub-5% of our turnover. I think we have seen continuous growth. We already had some of those projects in the second half of '25 notably. But it's not a major part of our overall revenue.

Thanks, Peter. And the second question was, where do you see PCB prices going for H2 and 2027? Any capacity addition ongoing that may ease this crunch?

And I think as we say here, I think it's very hard to predict where the PCB prices will move in the second half. I think based, though, on the fact that there has been a gradual growth of the prices, we are ending quarter 2 with higher price than where we were entering. So that, of course, will be reflected in the H2 numbers. We know that there are capacity extensions happening in terms of, say, increasing the availability of raw materials for the PCB industry. But that still, sort of, takes quite a while for that to grow and it's still lagging behind the pace at which AI investments are growing. So right now, we cannot say when those additions may have an impact on easing the crunch.

Okay. Thank you, Peter. So just want to remind you, our Q3 report is on October 23rd, and we sent out earlier this morning, save the date for our Capital Markets Day, which we will hold on 19th of November. It's both in our offices and hybrid. So very welcome back. And thank you, Peter and Tim, for today, and all of you for listening in. Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

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.

[Audio Gap]

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.