AQ Group Stock

Okay. It's 9:00. Welcome to AQ Group's investor presentation for the third quarter 2026. And what you can see on the picture is our newly acquired site in Cleveland, Ohio. It is Norlake, and we will talk more about it in the presentation. It is our beautiful new transformer manufacturing site in the U.S.

So why to invest in AQ Group? As we see it, earnings per share CAGR of 14% over the past 10 years. We've made profit every quarter since the foundation in '94. We're exposed to industrial market segment with high underlying growth, such as electrification, where we include also data centers, defense, med tech. We have a long history of acquisitions. We buy 2 to 4 factories per year. This year, we have bought more than 2 factories. We have a strong balance sheet and a net cash position.

Some quick facts. We have about 8,000 employees. We -- on a rolling 12-month basis, we have almost SEK 10 billion in turnover. We have 7 business areas, 15-plus market segments and manufacturing in 17 countries with 4,000 customers globally. We made profit, as I said, every quarter for 30 years and the rest I've already mentioned. So now to the third quarter.

Net sales increased by 21% to SEK 2.5 billion. Operating profit increased by 36% to SEK 259 million compared to the same quarter last year. And the profit after financial items that we measure increased by 38%, and the profit margin before tax was 10.0%, which is in line with our target. Profit after tax amounted to SEK 205 million, and cash flow from operating activities was okay at SEK 269 million. Earnings per share before dilution was SEK 2.23 compared to SEK 2.06 last quarter -- or not last quarter, but the same quarter last year. And for the first 9 months, we have increased sales by 11% to SEK 7.5 billion. Operating profit increased by 18% to SEK 739 million, and after financial items, increased to SEK 736 million.

Profit margin before tax was 9.8%. And after tax, we had a profit of SEK 586 million. And the cash flow from operating activities was decent at SEK 631 million, and earnings per share was SEK 6.39 compared to SEK 5.54 a year earlier. And our equity ratio was 68%, way above our target.

Highlights in the quarter. So I'm very proud that we have doubled the earnings per share since 2021 from SEK 4 to SEK 8, above SEK 8, actually, if you look at the rolling 12-month basis and adjust for the split 1 to 5 that we did a couple of years ago. We see high growth in the U.S. and China in inductive components and electrical automation, especially for data center and power grid electrification.

Our growth in data centers and defense continue to accelerate. And all our data center factories are on full throttle, especially the inductive components ones, but also in sheet metal fabrication. We believe we take market share from others, but this -- that's nothing I can really prove. But together with our customer, I'm sure we are. But I'm not sure if we take market share at our customers.

Defense sales has also continued strong in Northern Europe, especially, which we include Sweden, Norway and U.K. And then we have made a couple of acquisitions in the quarter. We bought Gumboda in Robertsfors to increase production capacity towards power grids and defense in Sweden. It's basically an organic growth acquisition, you can say, because we buy a building, and we get some employees so that we can fit more machines to accommodate our continued growth in that factory that we bought in 2024, which was AQ JIT Mech. So this will be a bolt-on for JIT Mech. And I think the acquisition value for -- or the enterprise value for this acquisition was SEK 5 million. So it's not a huge acquisition, but it will help us to continue to grow.

We also made a bigger acquisition where we bought the assets of Norlake in Cleveland, Ohio to double our production capacity of Made in America inductive components. We can say we have a factory in Virginia. I think turnover this year will be close to $50 million in that factory. It is basically full. So we had an option that we considered to extend that factory. We have already extended it a bit. We will probably extend it even more, but then one of our customers came to us and said, we have this company that we buy inductive components from. They have a financial problem.

So basically, they've run out of cash. They stopped paying their employees. We came in. We restarted the factory with the former owners. So we gave them a loan to get the employees back. We did a quick due diligence over the summer, and then we now made the acquisition in this -- in the third quarter. And this adds a lot of capacity. So we get a lot of machines and other equipment that you need to make inductive components, and also you get skilled operators, which we need. And we can say basically every quote we send out for inductive components in the U.S., we win, meaning there is a big demand there.

So we believe that we can make this factory great again by just filling it up with AQ customer orders. And we can utilize our sales and design team in Roanoke in the U.S. as well to increase the growth in this company. So it will take basically a little bit more than a year, I guess, before we see the volumes that we have indicated in the press release which is like let's see how fast it goes, but we believe that we have at least equipment and buildings to accommodate $35 million in sales in the Norlake asset that we have bought.

Some lowlights in the quarter. We're not happy with everything. We feel we need to improve both quality and productivity in our inductive components factory in India. We have changed the leadership there now, and we believe it will get better in time. We have also some delays in certain defense projects due to delayed equipment. We are taking action there, and I think we will be back on track by the end of this quarter, quarter 4. We also have some backlog in data center deliveries that need to be recovered in Q4. So despite the organic growth was really impressive. I think in quarter 3, we still have some more orders that we would have liked to ship out. So this will need to be recovered in Q4. And yes, we have a challenge there, but I think we will be able to do it.

We have had some issues to get all the equipment in place in Finland. So it will be in place now in October, and I think we will be able to go at full speed in order to catch up this quite smaller delivery backlog, I would say.

We have also low capacity utilization in Mexico and New York in our wire harness factories. I think New York is on the verge of becoming better. We have won some new orders there. Mexico also increasing a little bit, but we need to do more. So we are not happy with the performance there.

Then Time 24 that we bought in Q2, we think the output is okay, but not as we want. We have a backlog there, and we want to get back on track there because we see that the semiconductor equipment companies that they have as customers are growing very rapidly, and we want to get back on track with the deliveries there. And we believe we can make more money in this company if we just improve. And we have put in some new people in that team, but we need to do more there as well.

On-time delivery needs to improve in several sites. We are down to 91% in the quarter. It's a little bit due to the high growth that we have, but also I think that we can do better, and we should do better. So we have work to do there. And as I said, we had some backlog issues in some sites that I already mentioned. And then we also want to do more acquisitions, of course. That was the lowlights.

So earnings per share growth, we see after a couple of years where it's been a little bit flat. We see it start to grow again, which is really nice. We have a target to double the earnings per share every 5 years. We have done it now from 2021 now to 2026, but we want to double it again now until 2031.

Net sales in the quarter was pretty much in line with what we saw in Q2, but it's much higher than Q3 2025. Normally, for AQ, since we have a big European footprint, there is what we call in Sweden, industrial holiday, where our customers and our factories closed down, reducing the net sales. In this quarter, we have seen that our Chinese and American factories are running on full speed, which compensate for this industrial vacation in the European companies. So it's really good to get -- hopefully, we can get a more balanced output over the full year now instead.

Acquired -- organic growth in the quarter was 17% roughly and acquired growth around 2%. The acquired growth is below the target. We'll get into that later.

We have some sales growth and the investment activities ongoing. So inductive components for electrification, including data centers grew 60% compared to the same quarter in 2025. It is a massive growth there. We are assisted by the acquisition of mdexx, which was a half full factory. Now we are also buying Norlake to increase the capacity further to continue this fantastic momentum that we have in this area.

We have also done very fun new prototypes for a new solid-state transformer for a data center application, for a leading electrification customer. This product, our customer believes a lot in. They will start to sell it, maybe '27, '28. We don't know when the full volumes come, but if the projections are like they believe it is, then we get into a new really nice product, which uses more power electronics to do the switch from medium voltage to 800-volt DC inside the data center, which is really I think the technology going forward.

We also see increased momentum in power grid projects in quarter 3, but I think it will be even better in quarter 4. To sum it up, I mean, all our business areas and market segments basically grew compared to the same quarter last year. But of course, the main growth is in data centers, power grid electrification and defense.

Another fun thing is that we have won a new wire harness contract and some sheet metal parts as well for a new EV truck customer in Europe, and it is not a substantial volume, but we are happy to see that we're also growing in these business segments.

So the organic growth for the year is way above our target. On the other hand, we have been a little bit below in the start of the year. So for the full 9 months, we are in line with the target. I think I have commented already on what is growing, so we can stop it there.

Regarding acquired growth, then we have acquired Time 24 in quarter 2. We -- the integration work is ongoing. We have recruited a new operations person from our sister company, AQ Rockford, we are recruiting a new finance person. We are doing -- we are adding management capabilities there to improve the performance. It is not too bad. We have done much worse turnarounds than Time 24. But we need to get up to speed with the deliveries. That is our key because then we will double the sales there, and we will also start to make good money as well.

Gumboda acquisition already mentioned and Norlake, I will get into on the next slide as well. So let's not mention it here. And the integration and turnaround of mdexx, I consider now complete that we are in line with AQ margins, and it is growing very rapidly.

We are filling it up with new business, and also increasing sales with the old customers. So we're very happy with the team there. We can do even better and even more, but they have done an amazing job. So it's fun to see that they are now into full swing.

Some things more about Norlake. So we acquired this company in -- on the 21st of September. I told you a little bit about the story. We didn't pay so much. I mean this is not a share deal. We bought certain assets and including real estate as well in Cleveland. You can see on the picture there. It's a normal dry type transformer factory, can do low voltage to medium voltage products. All the equipment is in place. So it's basically just to start to fill it up with the existing customers that have a big demand, but also to get enough people there to be able to produce that demand. It is a normal -- it's a typical AQ opportunity there. This, where we can go in with capital and knowledge and expertise, and really make this company beautiful again.

So it's a really fun opportunity for our Managing Director in the U.S., Dan Day, who is an excellent person and has done fantastically well with our Transformer Solutions site in Virginia. Now he gets some more capacities to sell. So he's super excited, I can say. Then we can also utilize our design and sales team in Roanoke and also the experience we have from our fantastic team in Virginia. I mean they are key in making Norlake successful. So it will be fun to see these 2 now sisters to grow up together and become even better. And it's very similar to the opportunity we had with mdexx, where they have very nice customers in Norlake. They were undercapitalized and maybe we saw a lot of improvements that could be done. So we will try to do the same. Let's see if we can be successful also this time.

And as a comment also, this acquisition had no real impact in Q3 results. I mean it's in the balance sheet, but there was basically no sales, no external sales from this company after the acquisition on the 21st of September.

So acquired growth is still a little bit low, even though we have bought some companies, of course, Norlake figures doesn't come in here. I hope that we can get maybe up to 5% in quarter 4, but let's see if we can make it happen. We have also lost some opportunities in the quarter. It's always hard to agree. They should like us. We should like them. Prices should match. So we maybe lost some opportunities in the quarter also, but we have a pipeline. We continue to work, and we will continue to do acquisition also next year. I'm not too worried about that. We can find good investment opportunities in the market. That is for sure.

Regarding margin development, we have now a margin -- EBITDA margin in quarter 3 of 10%, which is really nice. It is in line with our target. I think our cost control remains very good. We have good sales and capacity utilization in U.S. and China will compensate for the normal downs, as I said, in Europe in the third quarter, but we have also several factories which have a potential for improvement, which you saw on the lowlight slide that I presented earlier. Also, remember, we -- this journey that we are on to deliver more technology content to our customer. I mean, more difficult parts should bring more and better margins. And I think we are seeing it, and we will hopefully continue to see it going forward.

Regarding inventory value and turnover development, I mean this is calculated on a rolling 12 months backwards. And when we grow very rapidly, normally, this goes down. So not too disappointed with 2.9 actually. And the cash flow in the quarter is quite good despite we grow -- despite the fact that we are growing at a really rapid pace. So I think we have plenty of cash to follow our customers and to continue to grow with them and invest in equipment, machines, people and new companies as well.

And cash flow and net debt, I mean, we don't have a debt. So we have a net cash position, and we don't need to have that. We just need to find more opportunities to invest in. And I think we have a good organic growth momentum now where we will continue to invest in our current operations, which is costing a little bit money in capital expenditure. I think we've done most of it. But we will do a bit more, of course. But then in working capital, it really sucks cash from us. It cost basically the same as when we do acquisitions. So we will also try to see if we can make some more acquisitions, maybe end of this year or beginning of next year.

Again, then why to invest in AQ Group. I went through it, I think most of you know us. So I will not go through it again. And then I leave for Q&A.

So please raise your hand and then we will try to. Okay, we start with Jonny then, and if you unmute yourself, maybe if you can.

James and Christina, I hope you can hear me.

Yes.

I just want to start a little bit with the very strong organic growth, which is obviously very good to see. I just want to break down a little bit further and starting with data center. I know you talked about this a lot, but could you say something how much data center was of the quarter roughly, would you say?

We don't go out with that number. I think I said, like if you look at what I said on the sales growth slide, I said we grew 60% in inductive components year-over-year. That is data center growth, I can say. But then, of course, we don't only do data center in that. But we are growing there and in power grids, but the majority of that is data center.

Okay. Okay. That's good. And then just to -- I know you also talked about this, but we talked about all the stuff that is growing. That sounds very promising. But I just want to clarify a little bit like are there any sort of any effect of positive timing effect that could sort of benefit this? Or is this an accurate picture of what you see, as that is underlying demand for you right now, would you say? And also, is there any sort of pricing -- material pricing effect in this quarter?

I wouldn't -- it's maybe a little small pricing effect. I wouldn't say it's in line with inflation, I would say. So I wouldn't say that it's a pricing effect. And it is a true picture, I would say. And I think we hope that we can deliver and continue to deliver like this. So we see this is the true demand that we see now.

That sounds promising. Do you expect more pricing effect going forward in coming quarters? Or is this sort of the...

No, I don't think so. I think we will be pretty much in line with inflation, I would assume.

Okay. Okay. Just one final one from my side, and that is on the component side. I feel like you're still -- you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I feel like you're still quite confident in your supply chain in the near term, is that correct? And also...

Yes.

What do you -- yes, okay, that's good. And what do you hear from sort of your customers? Do they see any sort of bottlenecks in their end markets that could impact deliveries? Or is it something that we should think about?

Not that I have heard so far this quarter. So we would have to get back on that. But we don't really see any of our customers slowing down because of lack of components at the moment anyway.

Maybe we'll take Albin from -- Albin Nordmark?

Very good reports, of course, but if we try to find some negatives here. Gross margin, looking at that 15% down 3 percentage points year-over-year and also sequentially. So can you try to help us break it down? And is this anything we should think about? Yes, any color there would be helpful.

I would say it's mostly product mix, in this case. When we sell more transformers, there is more material in the delivery. So I would say that is the main reason. It is copper, aluminum and electrical steel. They are heavy bulky products. So the material share is higher. So I would say it's product mix related mainly.

Yes. That makes sense. And also, if we talk about Norlake, you were talking about this, but you win every time you send out now in the U.S. for inductive components. So how come that Norlake had such a bad utilization and performance? What was the main reason behind that?

They had run out of money. I think they were -- it's maybe a long story, but I mean they delivered a lot of transformers and inductive to the oil and gas industry. And I don't remember which year it was, but several years ago, then the oil prices dipped, and they stopped delivery to that. I mean they had some customer that went bankrupt. And then the COVID came in the U.S. as well, impacted them negatively. And then they had -- when the oil and gas was really high, the deliveries that they had, they had invested quite a lot in buildings and new capacity. So I would say they have tried their best, but they have not been successful. And it is hard when you are a single company and you run out of cash, you take on maybe debt that you shouldn't and you sell your accounts receivables and so on and then you can get into a bad spiral. And that's really what happened here.

I mean, I have nothing but respect for the previous owners. I mean they do really nice products, I must say. But they had -- it's hard to say bad luck, but I mean they had some market activity against them, and then they fail to recuperate from that. And then we can come in, of course, with our strong balance sheet and support them with that, but also with new sales resources and customers that they maybe didn't have as well. So I think it is -- it will be a good combination, I think.

Okay. And congrats on a great quarter.

Okay. So we take maybe Marcus.

Can you hear me?

Yes.

Very good. Looking sharp, James. But just coming back to the organic growth question that we had, 18%, very strong. Can you maybe help us understand the split between data centers, defense, power grid?

We don't really do that. I mean we -- what we say in the report is that all our market segments are growing. And then the biggest growers are data centers, defense, and power grids. But maybe if I give a little bit more flavor, then it is data centers that is growing absolutely the fastest for us. And it is not one customer. It is several customers that we have in this area.

Very good. And maybe if you stick to that data center growth, could you share how much of the sequential UPS growth is driving this? What's the capacity now for the UPS?

I mean we have said before that we are aiming to build that we have a capacity of 100 per month. And I think in the quarter, we delivered 150.

Very good. And looking into 2027, do you expect that to ramp up in the same sort of speed that we've seen?

Yes, I believe so. But I cannot guarantee anything, but I believe that this will continue to increase. It's a fantastic product that our customer have developed, and we believe that they will be successful in selling it, and then we will get more orders.

Good questions. Maybe if we take Anton then.

Just some quick follow-ups here. You mentioned that you had some problems to get out all of the sort of orders in defense and data centers. Can you elaborate a bit more on this sort of try to quantify the magnitude? Because it seems like you were quite confident that this was pushed into Q4.

Yes, of course, I can. But I don't want to because it could -- it is -- it's some volume. It's not a huge amount. On the other hand, you can -- I mean, our -- you can see in the report also our delivery performance going down, meaning that we have more delays than we would like. And so there is some backlog that we would have like to deliver out this quarter, but now we will deliver out or did or it maybe backlog is already delivered out. But I mean, now it will be delivered out in quarter 4 instead. I think we -- as I said, I think the easiest is to say that we will continue to grow. I think that is the easiest way to say it, and we will try to get back on track with the deliveries.

Okay. Perfect. And on the sort of -- you commented on this before as well that you see sort of quite solid momentum outside of the defense, data center, power grid area. Any specific end market that stands out a bit here? It's been sort of weaker in recent quarters and now picking up.

No, no. I think except the 3 that we have mentioned, it is -- I mean, single-digit growth numbers across the board, and it is varying a little bit between different market segments. But I think it's solid growth from our customers. They show that they are doing well. So more than that, I don't like to get into really. But it is a good, nice growth. And it's different a little bit from the previous quarter this year where we have been a little bit more certain market segments that have been growing. Now it seems more or less everything is growing.

So do we have any more questions, then please raise your hand. I cannot see any.

No, then I think we can close the meeting there. I think it's a solid quarter from us. We will continue to grow in this momentum, and we will do everything we can to continue to increase our output. Thank you so much for listening, and I wish you all have a great day in the stock market.

Okay. It's 9:30. I welcome you all to the AQ Group Investor Presentation of the Q2. We start with a picture from a data center because I will talk a little bit about data centers today. What we deliver to data center, you can see on the left, I will try to show these cubicles here. They are part of our delivery to our customer, and then this is part of their delivery to the data center. And it's a transformer and an inductor inside. I think it's a really beautiful product. I hope you agree.

So normally, I start with this slide why to invest in AQ Group. As we see it, earnings per share CAGR, 14% over the past 10 years. We made profit every quarter since the foundation in '94. We're exposed to industrial market segment with underlying growth such as electrification, where we also include data centers, defense and med-tech. We have a long history of acquisitions. We acquired 2 to 4 factories per year. We have acquired 2 factories this year. We have a strong balance sheet and a net cash position.

Quick facts about AQ, we are 8,000 employees. We have roughly SEK 9 billion turnover. We have 7 different business areas and more than 15 market segments where we deliver to. We are manufacturing in 17 countries with 4,000 customers globally. We made profit every quarter for the last 30 years. And then we talk about earnings per share, not something else. And then we have a 14% earnings per share CAGR in the last 10 years, and we make acquisitions and then we are part of UN Global Compact since 2012, which is our sustainability initiative, which we think is really good.

Now to some numbers, second quarter. We increased net sales with 10%, which is shy of our target of increasing with 15% to SEK 2.5 billion. Last quarter, we had SEK 2.3 billion in sales. Operating profit increased with 17% to SEK 255 million and profit after financial items increased with 13% to SEK 256 million. Our profit margin before tax was 9.9% and profit after tax was SEK 202 million. Cash flow from operating activities amounted to SEK 23 million compared to SEK 232 million last year. I will get into it a little bit later why there is a difference and earnings per share before dilution amounted to SEK 2.20 per share compared to SEK 2.06 last year. It's a good increase.

In the first 6 months, January to June, we increased sales with 6% to SEK 4.9 billion and operating profit increased with 11% to SEK 480 million. Profit after financial items increased by 11% to SEK 480 million roughly, and profit margin before tax was 9.7%. And profit after tax was SEK 382 million, a little bit higher than last year's SEK 355 million.

Cash flow from operating activities in the first 6 months was SEK 362 million compared to SEK 477 million last year. And earnings per share before dilution was SEK 4.16 compared to SEK 3.87 a year ago. And our equity ratio is very high, 67%, very high compared to our target of being above 40%. So some highlights in the quarter. We have the highest net sales and result in a single quarter in AQ history. It's great. Growth in data centers and defense, and it's accelerating. We have doubled our output in the quarter of transformers for data centers, the ones you saw on the first page from our sites in Hungary, Finland, U.S. and Czech Republic compared to the previous quarter, meaning quarter 1.

Ramp-up will continue, and our capacity is now 70 systems per month, but we delivered 70 systems in the quarter. So -- and we believe that we need to continue to increase the capacity also in 2027. Defense sales is strong from our sites, especially in Northern Europe, U.K. and Scandinavia, and we will believe that, that will continue. We also see big productivity improvements in newly acquired sites in U.K. and Czech Republic, where we have made them more profitable by reducing overheads mostly. We have also in the quarter, high sales to construction equipment in Europe. And then we also acquired Time24 in the U.K. that deliver systems for customers in the semiconductor and railway industry in the U.K. And we delivered SEK 20 million of turnover from that acquisition in the second quarter, and we acquired them in mid-May, so it's like 1.5 months.

It's quite a good delivery there because they couldn't deliver out anything when we bought them because they had the cash problem -- liquidity problem. So we are very happy that we could start the deliveries to their demanding industrial customers again in a very quick way. Not so many low lights in the quarter. The quarter is quite good, I think, so not so many low lights, but we still need to improve quality and productivity in our transformer factory in India. We're doing some things there to improve. Then we have low capacity utilization in Mexico and New York still. It's getting better, but it's still too low. We need to sell more. And then we want to do more acquisitions as well.

Our earnings per share growth, if you look on rolling 12 months after the second quarter, we are at 14% CAGR in the last 10 years as we have been and dividend per share haven't changed anything. So it's still 14%. And the target is to double this every 5 years, and it's natural if we grow 15% and the profit follows, then we will double the business in 5 years. So the net sales development in the quarter, we had organic growth of 9.1%, which is just below our target of 10%. We had acquired growth Time24 of almost 1% and we had a currency effect, which was almost nothing, which gives the net sales growth of 9.9%. And that gives us the best quarter in the company's history. Happy about that.

Organic growth again. And as I've said, we see high demand in defense customers and data center, which is really electrification. But we also see a good growth in construction equipment sales from our side, especially in Europe. Some more on sales growth and investments. I've already talked about Time24, and they are working with very nice customers such as Applied Digital, Oxford Instruments and Alstom. We believe that the growth here will continue, and we can do a lot more to sell our Eastern European footprint into this factory and then sell it to their customers. I think it will be very beneficial for those customers because they will get a lower cost, but also we will sell more.

And then inductive components, data centers is now 6% of AQ Group total net sales. The share is expected to increase going forward. It is a good growth segment, and we are trying to sell more to more customers. And we are now having, I would say, 5, 6 customers already that we are selling inductive components to data centers, and we can grow with all of them. We have several large RFQs for the different defense programs in Northern Europe in the pipeline. We expect nominations during or after summer. We think -- we hope that we will win something there. Nothing is certain, but we believe that we have a good chance. And then also power grids who has been a little bit weaker in the first half year will be growing again in the second half of the year. And then as I said, construction equipment sales have been increasing. And we have, as I write in the report, invested in some machines for defense and electrification customers in North Sweden. You can see some of the machines on the pictures.

On the left is a welding cell, then we have a laser cutting machine that can cut thick sheet metal, we have a machining center and machine parts. And then we have on the right, a big machining center that can machine really big parts for defense applications. And this is a shortage in Europe, I would say, to have really high big-size CNC machines that can do yes, very complex parts. So this is something that we continue to invest in. The acquired growth is nothing to brag about. It's like 1% in the second quarter. We acquired Time24, as we have said. We need to do some things there on the productivity side, but I'm quite confident that we will get there by the end of the year. We are doing improvements in purchasing and utilizing our own manufacturing footprint to improve their margins. Then mdexx that we acquired roughly a year ago or a little bit more than a year ago, is developing according to plan, and we have a big improvement compared to the second quarter last year, but also versus the first quarter in the results.

We are increasing workshop utilization, especially with these data center transformers, where we have a great demand. And we are evaluating several targets. We are, I think, working in a good way, and we have several interesting things that we are working with. Let's hope we can close something now because we want to reach our target of 5% also this year. Margin development. Here, normally, we don't say so much. And normally, I get a question about the margin target, but now I hope that this question is not there anymore because the Board now took the decision to increase our target to 10% now just before the quarter ended. It is natural since we are increasing our products with more engineering content and more complexity. And also we've had, I mean, EBT margins above our target now for 14 consecutive quarters if we count also quarter 2. Of course, now we're not above the target anymore because we increased it.

I believe that the cost control is very good. As I said, the margin has improved very well in quarter versus quarter in mdexx and Rockford, but also in the inductive components business area in general. We still have improvements to make in Bulgaria, Mexico, New York and India, but this is normal. I mean we always have companies where we need to improve. So we will continue to improve those companies to become even better. And it's good now. We have a new challenging target as well. Inventory turnover and inventory value. You can see that the inventory is going up a bit in quarter 2, and it is because we are preparing to deliver out a lot of things in quarter 3.

Despite doing a lot of improvements in many sites, the KPI goes down. And it's interesting that it goes down because really what -- how we are measuring this, you can see it in the small square below the chart. So it's rolling 12 months raw material goods for resale and change of inventory and products in process 12 months back. So meaning if we are growing the business going forward, maybe acquiring some companies, then this KPI will go down for a while because they are not in 12 months back yet.

So we believe that this KPI will improve, and I don't see a big change really in our inventory turnover. And again, it is good that we have a net cash position because that means that we can actually grow with our customers. And sometimes growth require us to increase our working capital. And the net cash flow in quarter 2 was quite poor, and we have a lot of deliveries at the end of the quarter. So we have a lot of increase in accounts receivables, but those will be converted into cash. So the net debt has decreased a little bit, but still, we have a very, very good position. So I'm not worried there. It's good to have cash when you're growing. It makes your life much easier.

And this I went through before, so I will not go through it again. And we head into Q&A.

We have a question from Jonny. Can you unmute yourself or do I need to do it for you?

Yes, I hope you can hear me. I have a couple of questions. I want to start with the strong organic growth here in the quarter, which is good to see. And I understand that a large part of these deliveries took place at the end of the quarter. But is it possible to say something how orders developed during this period? And what sort of book-to-bill are you entering second half of the year with? That's my first question.

And you will get a boring answer because we don't really comment on the order intake. But I mean, we are confident that we will continue to develop well in the quarter. I mean I don't see that the deliveries we have done to data center as we write in the quarter, I mean, we are investing to increase the capacity, and we don't do that if we don't believe that there will be more orders to deliver out.

Understood. Understood. Sounds like a positive book-to-bill at least. That's my feeling. Besides the data center and Defense then, was there anything else that drove this pickup in organic growth? Or what was sort of the background to this large deliveries at the end? What is the background to that?

No, I think that we managed to get out a lot of things and especially to the defense sector and to data centers, I believe. I think that is the main part of the explanation. I see as we comment also, I think construction equipment, meaning yellow machines had a good development also in the -- I mean, in the whole quarter as a whole, but in the end of the quarter as well. So I think also there was quite a few working days actually in June. If you compare it to last year, I think it was 2 days more. So it also has an impact, of course.

Okay. And then on data center, then I see that inductive components data center, 6% here of the sales in the quarter, you said I think that implies some -- a little bit more than SEK 150 million in revenues. My question is the capacity ramp-up, how should we think about that going forward? Because I think you said in the last quarter, 60 unit capacity in Q1 and now you aim to double it in Q2 here, which it seems like you did. So the outlook entering the second half of this year, what should we think then? Is it fair to assume you can maybe increase, let's say, 50% capacity to some 180 units in Q3? Or can you say something there?

I think I'm confident that we believe we will deliver out more products in quarter 2. Then how many it will be -- I mean, I know how much orders I have, but I think it will be more than what we delivered in quarter -- it will be more in quarter 3 than we delivered out in quarter 2. And as we have commented, we have increased the capacity. So we are able to do 70 pieces per month, but that will not be the pace in quarter 2. The pace will be lower than that, but it is -- we think it's good that we have a little bit extra capacity here because we see that the growth is coming going forward.

Okay. Sounds great. Just one final from my side, so a lot of questions. But when you talk to your customers in general, I mean, on the truck side, buses, yellow machines in general industry and such, what do you hear now? Do you see any changes in customer forecast on your end? Or can you say something there?

No, I don't see any difference really. I think it is quite solid in most cases. And then we have commented a little bit on the growth that we have had and that we see. I think it will continue the same. The business doesn't change so quickly, I think. So I think we will continue to increase the sales with inductive components to data centers. We will continue to increase the sales to defense. And I think -- yes, I think that will be the main story for us also next quarter, I believe.

Sounds good, sounds exciting.

We have Albin who wants to ask something. Can you unmute yourself?

Starting off with the data center sales or inductive components to data centers in terms of sales. I think you mentioned that you had some 5 to 6 customers in that space. So can you maybe talk about the size of those customers? Are they even or yes?

I wouldn't say it's even just yet. I think we have a few that are reasonable -- I would say it is one which is quite big and then there are some which are smaller.

And the big one is that like 50% of that or more?

No, I would say 50% is a good guess, I think.

Okay. Great. And then input prices and similar, have you -- yes, how have you been affected by that? And...

First, let me say one more thing. Even though it's 50% with one customer, it is not for the same type of segment within that customer, you can say. I mean they are doing a lot of different things for data centers, and we are delivering into several different areas within them that deliver to data centers. So I think I just wanted to clarify that. Regarding input costs, we see some are increasing like normally, it is like fluctuating copper prices and these kind of things. And I mean, in most cases, we have clauses about that in our contracts. And if there are big changes somewhere else, we need to negotiate with our customers. But we don't really see any huge differences. We see small increases, I think, mostly increases, but it's not anything huge, at least not in quarter 2.

All right. Perfect. And then I don't know if you mentioned that on the working capital tie-up, but the trade receivables increased quite heavily and in this quarter, but even more now. Can you comment on that?

Yes. I mean we comment a little bit in the report. I mean we deliver out a lot in June and in the end of June even, and that gives -- and then growth also will increase our accounts receivables as well. So I think it's a little bit cutoff that gives this effect, and I think it will sort itself out. I'm not worried about it at all.

And then Anton Ingves. You can unmute yourself.

Congrats on the strong figures here. Just on the strong organic growth here, is it possible to sort of divide that into volume and price?

I would say that price is a small thing here. I mean it is I would say that we are in par or maybe even a little bit lower than inflation. I mean most of the thing is coming from volume that we are utilizing our factories more. Also the improvements that we have made in mdexx and Rockford also have a big impact. So yes, but price is very small here.

Yes. Perfect. And on mdexx, you mentioned that you see continued improvement. But how -- if you compare sort of the margin level in Q1 to Q2 here, is it like a big step-up or kind of flat sequentially here?

No, it is better, but it's not so much better. But if you compare Q2 versus Q2, then it's a big improvement where we did a big loss last year, and we are doing profit this year. So it gives a good improvement there. We are still not ready. I mean we still have capacity to utilize in mdexx. We still have work to do there to improve the margin to become on the -- so that it comes to AQ Group level. But it is still -- it is generating profit and cash, it's good.

And sort of full year figures still on mdexx, the margin still a bit below the group level then, I assume? Or do you still expect this to sort of come up to group level on the full year?

We will see how far we can go. But I mean, the idea is that we will get to group level by the end of the year, but let's see how far we can come. If you look rolling 12 months back, we are not on group level yet. But I think going forward, we will see gradual improvement because we will continue to fill up that factory with more business.

Yes. Perfect. And then one final here from me. You mentioned also that the wiring systems factories in Mexico and U.S. is picking up a bit. But how much left there is to do here and sort of the potential on margins from this lift up?

I mean we still have work to do, especially in New York. I think there, it is underutilized. Of course, we have reduced the manpower and so on. But we need to sell more. We have won some contracts, but it takes some time before it becomes into serial production. I think it will be quite okay. But we need to do a lot of work that I can say, especially on the business development side.

Then we have [ Markus ] maybe you can yourself.

James, congrats on a good report and a lot of good questions asked already. But I will ask 2 questions. The first one on Power Grid. You mentioned that you start to see that it's picking up again after maybe a little bit slower first half. Is there anything that impacted the slowdown in the first half? And if you could add some color on what to expect from the pickup?

No, I think that our big customers there have been growing so fast for several years. So they basically couldn't increase more. So they are working hard to increase their capacity. And now we see that the orders are increasing again. So that means we will deliver more. And of course, we are working hard to win more business with these customers as well. So I think that -- I hope that the second half year will be better than the first.

Okay. And then on the good pipeline in the defense side, you expect some nominations after the summer. Could you quantify these? How material could they be and maybe time line also from nominations to revenue?

I mean if we knew how much it would be, then we would maybe write it in the report. But it is very hard to say how much we will get. There are also other -- I mean, other suppliers who are in the game. We will see how much we get. And when we know if it's material, then we will press release it.

So do we have any more questions? Then we have Jonny again.

Just one final. Just want to ask a little bit on the operating cost side. I mean margin in the quarter looks good here back on strong growth, but the cost OpEx seems a little bit up here, both year-over-year and compared to your Q1 level here. So what is sort of driving that, would you say? And do you see any more need to sort of expand the operating cost base as you ramp up? Or how should we view that going forward?

I mean it is natural for us that -- I mean, our costs follow the volume. I mean if we get more business, we need to hire more people, I mean, more operators. So I think that is the main reason why they are increasing. And I still think that we are doing quite a good job in getting out of volume and not increasing more. And that is why the margin is going up because the gross margin is not really improving that much. So it's really that we are getting out more bang for the buck, so to speak.

Any more questions? I cannot see any. Then that's great. I see there are a lot of 80 people also here on the call. So for those of you who are listening in, I want to thank all of you for a fantastic quarter. I'm very impressed about the delivery that we have done this year. So yes, thank you so much for that.

And then I think if there are no further questions, see any. Then of course, if you are late on the call, you can always listen into it on quarter, it always publishes there. And with that, I wish all of you a really nice summer. Thank you so much for listening, and have a good one.

Okay. Welcome to the AQ Group presentation for quarter 1. Nice to see you all. It's only 1 minute past 9:00. So let's start.

We will go to the first point here. Normally, I have this slide, it is why you should invest in AQ Group. We have an earnings per share CAGR of 14% over the past 10 years. We have made profit every quarter since the foundation in 1994. We are exposed to industrial market segments with underlying growth, Electrification, including Data Centers, Defense and Med-tech.

Some quick facts about AQ. We're 8,000 employees, SEK 9 billion in turnover for the last year. We have 7 business areas, 15-plus market segments with manufacturing in 17 countries with 4,000 customers globally. And then we've made profit, as I said, every quarter for 31 years. And we have, over the past 10 years, had a 14% earnings per share CAGR. We make acquisitions every year, we try, and we are part of UN Global Compact since 2012, which is our sustainability initiative.

So for the first quarter, net sales increased by 3% to SEK 2.3 billion. It is a little bit better than last year. Operating profit increased with 5% compared to last year, and also profit after financial items increased with 9% to SEK 223 million.

Profit margin before tax was 9.4%, which is better than last year, and profit after tax was also better than last year at SEK 179 million. Cash flow from operating activities was SEK 339 million, which is much better than the year before. And also earnings per share was up to SEK 1.95 per share.

Some highlights from the quarter. We are growing in Data centers and Defense. It is a strong growth in both of those segments, a little bit different depending on geographic market. In Data centers, the main growth is coming from our inductive components business area.

And on the right, you can see some different products that we deliver into different data center applications. So the top one is for electrification of data centers. So we -- I think we will deliver -- of those components you see there, we will deliver more than 3,000 pieces over the course of 2026, and it is made in one of our factories in China.

And the bottom part there is for heat or ventilation of data center, cooling, you can say. So it is to one of our American customers. It is a water-cooled inductor, and we will deliver -- we will increase -- the demand is increasing, and we will increase our output with 100% in '26 versus 2025. We believe also that '27 will be even better.

So in the quarter, we have doubled the output of these big transformers that I've talked to previously, not the ones on the picture, from our sites in Hungary and Czech Republic in quarter 1 compared with the previous quarter, which was quarter 4 last year. We continue to ramp up and we'll increase output in quarter 2 and quarter 3 as well. Then we will also do finished products of those ones also from our factory in Finland.

We have doubled the net sales for Defense from our 3 sites in the U.K. compared with the same quarter last year. It is a dramatic increase, and we are growing with customers in U.K. predominantly, but also in Norway. And our factory there does wire harnesses and electromechanical components for different aircraft, a lot in the air.

We also see a strong growth from our Defense sites in Northern Europe, and that is predominantly in Sweden. We also see strong growth from the marine sector, naval sector in the U.S.

As I said, we have 30% growth in inductive components for HVAC from our factory in Shanghai. We also have increased demand for parts for gas turbines that we do. We do very small cooling holes in gas turbine blades for the major gas turbine manufacturers in Europe and the U.S. from our site in Hungary. We see a strong increase in demand also from this, and it is driven by data center demand.

We have -- in our U.S. transformer factory in Virginia, we have an extremely strong order intake in quarter 1 with $20 million in new orders, which is a record for us. And as a comparison, this factory had a turnover last year of like $35 million. And this is not driven by data center because they are not so much into the data center.

It is, however, driven by data center as well because data centers are sucking out all the capacity in U.S. So we are delivering to other segments, but the capacity is not there. So we are basically winning everything we quote.

Operating cash flow is very good in the quarter. It is driven by high profit and also increase in accounts payables. We are ordering quite a lot of material. And we normally don't order a lot of material unless we see something to deliver going forward.

We are also very proud in the quarter that we have promoted several internal leaders for its different factories. We will have a new Managing Director in Italy, Lucia. We have a new Managing Director in AQ Magnit, our transformer factory in Bulgaria, which is internally recruited. We have a new MD in our transformer factory in Enkoping, Valdemar is promoted there.

And we have 2 new MDs also in Bulgaria, Anna Hristova and Ivan Koussarov. So a lot of new leaders we are promoting internally that know our core values, know how to grow the business, and we also have some people retiring then, of course.

So it is fun with new leaders, and this is super important for you as an investor, more important than you think. When we have good leaders in our factories, we make profit, we grow and we have fun.

Some lowlights in the quarter. We see some weaker demand in the systems business for Med-tech and food packaging. For Med-tech, it's not plummeting at all, but it's not growing as it used to. It's quite kind of flat, even though we have won some new orders in Germany for Med-tech customers, which we are very happy about. Maybe come to it later.

For food packaging, our volumes are going -- our customers' volume are going down a lot, but also we have lost some business there, and it was not super profitable for us anyway. So we're not -- we are, of course, disappointed in that, but we need to be in fields where there is actually money to be made. So I'm thinking that this is okay.

Then we have low capacity utilization in Mexico and Plattsburgh. This is, in fact, an opportunity because it gives us an opportunity to attract new customers and sell more. And we are very happy that we have won a new order, and I will come to it later when I talk about our newly won customers and so on.

Then we have a little bit lower sales for marine transformer compared to all-time high level in 2024 and 2025 from our factory in Finland. Of course, that factory is now very busy in ramping up in data center transformers also, but it is anyway a lower demand at the moment, even though it's not super low, but it is not as high as last year.

And then another lowlight is we didn't make any acquisitions in the quarter, and despite the [Audio Gap] team is putting in and we find really nice companies, but on the other hand, we cannot buy anything. It needs to be an attractive return also for us. So if there is nothing left on the table, then after we acquire them, then we will not do it.

So sometimes it's better not to do deals than to do deals if the deal is too expensive. That's how we see it. But we are working hard to do deals also in the future, and we believe that we will be able to do deals. And we have a nice pipeline, I think, of interesting things that we are looking at, as always.

So earnings per share is -- has increased 14% over the past 10 years, same as the dividend per share. And our target is to double it, earnings per share every 5 years. Net sales development, as communicated in the report, organic growth is 6.3%. We have acquired growth for January, mdexx and Michael Riedel is part of that, so it's 1.4%. And then we have a negative currency effect of minus 4.8%, which gives the net sales growth of 2.9%, which is kind of okay, I would say. It feels like we are taking market share, but I have no data on that.

Organic growth, as I said, is 6.3%. It's below our target of 10%. We see high demand in Defense and Data centers. It will continue to grow, we believe. Of course, we have no idea. We have no chance of knowing, but we believe that this will continue to grow for us. And then we have some low demand for vehicles in Mexico, food equipment, as I've said, Med-tech, I've said already, and transformers for ships in Europe, I've also mentioned.

Some recent new customer wins then. So AQ Rockford in the U.K. has won several actually new projects, but one new project in the quarter from a Norwegian defense customer for about GBP 2 million. We have been awarded several new parts for Epiroc from our factory in India to their factory in India for wiring systems and sheet metal parts.

We received the first order for Med-tech systems in Germany. So it is a legacy AQ customer that has ordered parts from our newly acquired company, Michael Riedel in Ilshofen in Germany. And we are working together, our factory in Bulgaria, our factory in Uppsala in Sweden and AQ Riedel team in order to make a couple of good prototypes now.

You can see sort of 3D rendering of the product in the bottom right. And we believe that this will be a good -- it can be some good growth for us there delivering into this Med-tech customer in Germany.

And then we are quite happy that we have won our first order from Solaris Bus in the U.S. for New York City buses from our factory in Plattsburgh, New York. And as many of you know, who has been with us for a long time, Nova Bus closed down a factory in New York State a couple of years ago. So -- and we were delivering all the wire harnesses to that factory.

And now Solaris will be a new customer for us doing city buses for New York. And Solaris is a big bus manufacturer. And in -- we also have an opportunity now to get into that in Europe, which is good.

And then we have received the first serial order from a U.S. customer for data center transformers in the quarter, and it is ordered from our U.S. transformer factory. And I said that the U.S. factory had a good order intake, and it's not data center. A part of it is actually data center now as well. So it is a new customer, not a completely new customer for AQ, but it feels like a new customer for our American -- my American friends.

So acquired growth, as I said before, we have several bids under evaluation. We have been bidding for a lot of companies, and we have declined to increase our bid, and we have lost several cases. And -- yes, it is normal as well. I mean we are -- we look at many, many cases every week, and we decline a lot.

And then we do due diligence on some, and we -- but currently, we haven't been able to close anything. And it's a little bit of failure, I would say, but we continuously search for new potential acquisitions, and we are trying to buy companies continuously. So we think it's fun, and it is a good way for us to grow.

But on the other hand, we cannot accept too high valuations either. If too much of the profit is already given to the sellers, then, of course, how will it improve profit per share for AQ in the short and long term? Because in the long term, you don't know how the company will develop if you have given away the profits 10 years in the future. So sometimes it's better to decline to buy than to buy.

Then mdexx, I think it now develops according to plan. We have a very ambitious growth plan there, because we need to get out a lot of both railway transformers and data center transformers out of this factory in the quarters to come. We have bought new equipment. Some is already in place, but we need to buy more. So we have placed orders for that.

And we have recruited, I think, 50 people, additional blue collars in the quarter to cope with the increased demand coming forward. So it is a collaboration between several sites to deliver these data center transformers that we have, but also to relieve a little bit our Hungarian factory from other customers because they are the main data center supplier from our side. So it's hard work, but it's fun work.

If we look at the earnings before tax margin development, it is very, very stable, above our target of 8%. And the margin in Q1 was 9.4%. So now we have 13 consecutive quarters above our target, which is great.

I believe that our cost control is still very good. It is always good, and it will continue to be good. We still have a dilution from mdexx, but now 1 year has passed, so we can't complain on that anymore. But mdexx is making profit, and the more volume we are getting in there, and we are, the better the margin will be.

So we believe that the margin for 2026, as I communicated earlier, will be in the range that AQ Group target in 2026, which is a massive improvement coming from minus 7% to 8%. So the team is doing a fantastic job with this turnaround, and it will be -- I mean, it is -- I believe that we will get the money back on this acquisition faster than 3 years. So that is great.

Then we have some underutilized factories. I write about Mexico and New York in the report, but we have also more and more capacity in our Bulgarian factories. We have more capacity in our Indian factories, we have more capacity in many of our factories. And of course, we can increase capacity as well. And this is a potential for future growth, but it is affecting the margin a little bit at the moment.

The Mexico and New York sites are quite small, also the Indian one. The Bulgarian one is a little bit bigger. It is doing -- it is -- we are making profit, but we think we should be making more profit there. We have some work to do. That is fun. That's why we are here.

Regarding inventory value and inventory turnover, it was 3.2 in last quarter, now it's 3.1. We have done a lot of improvements in a lot of sites. However, we are increasing now -- we are increasing our capabilities to deliver out more, meaning we need a bit more goods. And the way we calculate it is rolling 12 months backwards. So it is maybe an indication that more volumes is to come.

We continue our improvement projects, and we continue to have a focus on this because we don't want to have bad inventory in our stocks. It's natural. But I believe we have a good organization for this now. We have a very, very strong person in Grzegorz to run this project, and it is a foundation for us to generate very good operating cash flow, which is seen here.

So net cash from operating activities is on a very high level in the quarter. It's not a record, but almost. And of course, then it gives us even more cash in our balance sheet.

So our net cash position, including leasing, is almost SEK 700 million. And if you exclude the leasing debt, then we have SEK 1.1 billion in cash, excluding leasing. This gives us a very strong foundation to continue to grow in this highly -- high-growth segment, but also possibilities within M&A, of course. So it is a good thing.

We will continue to work on using this cash in a responsible manner to generate great returns for our shareholders also in the future, but also to help our customers. When they need a ramp-up, we can support them with that, which is great.

So that was my last slide. Why invest in AQ Group? We grow earnings per share 14%, and we will continue to do so. That's the plan. We made profit every quarter since the foundation. We have exposure to industrial market segments with a high underlying growth, and we have a long history of acquisitions. And as I said, lastly, a very strong balance sheet.

Should we move into questions? Let's see.

We have [ Albin ] maybe first.

All right. Can you hear me now?

Yes, I can hear you now.

James and Christina, just to start off with mdexx. You're telling us it's profitable now, getting to 8% this year. Can you quantify where we are currently?

I haven't really written it in the report, but what I can say is that on an EBIT level, they are doing fine. I would say they are -- if 0 would be the bottom and 8%, it's roughly 4%, I would say, the EBIT at the moment.

Okay. And that's for the quarter or for the rolling 12?

That is for quarter 1.

All right. And then on the ABB reported yesterday 44% up on electrification orders. How do you think that we should read this into AQ? And what does ABB tell you, et cetera? If you have any comments on that, it would be great.

No. But I mean, we -- I think I have communicated already the orders that we have on -- in the data center part. We believe that we will get more orders, and that, that will continue to grow.

I think we are trying now to double our capacity, and we delivered out roughly 60 units for these ABB parts in first quarter. We are trying to double that capacity now, and we are investing to do so. And we wouldn't do that if we didn't believe that demand would come.

Yes. And then, of course, ABB is not only data centers, but a lot of it is now driven by it. So we see a very strong order intake also in our -- like in our drives manufacturing facilities in Estonia and China. So that is growing. That will grow very fast also in Q2.

But then again, ABB is only 10% of AQ. It will maybe be more this year because they are growing so fast, doing a fantastic job, but I think we have other market segments as well, of course.

Yes, of course. And just to check the 60 pieces in Q1, that was 30 in Q4, right, and then doubling it again in Q2?

Yes, exactly. I think we doubled in Q1, and we will double again in Q2. That is the capacity, I would say, and output, that is the wish, yes.

Let's see if we have anyone else raising the hand.

We have [ Thomas ] here.

Can you hear me?

Yes.

Just a couple of questions from me. First, on the Defense supply chain. I remember you spoke about capacity constraints or supply chain issues in 2025. But then again, also that the U.K. site doubled their output for Defense now here in Q1, I was wondering if you could give some like overall view on supply chain challenges, the potential here in 2026 or if we should expect sort of accelerating growth in 2027 rather than near term?

I mean, we -- I can say like this, when things are growing fast, there will always be supply chain challenges. Anyway, the market has a tendency to overcome those challenges. And of course, we are part of that, and it's also part of our opportunity, of course, to grow more when there is -- when our customers have challenges to find suppliers that can deliver.

So I would expect that this continues to grow in 2026. I'm, however, uncertain of the pace of the growth because it is -- our customers need to be able also to deliver out their goods. So even though we can deliver, maybe they cannot. So it is a mix.

But I believe our customers in these segments, they will continue to grow and the weapon systems that we are delivering to, they will continue to grow. So I mean, yes, it will continue. But I'm reluctant to give any numbers on this because it's hard to predict for me.

Do you think it's likely to grow more than in 2025, where you mentioned that you have a lot of capacity constraints?

Yes, I think so.

Okay. Lastly, just on the M&A side. I was wondering sort of do you have any specific strategy or targets here going forward, threshold multiples or something considering that these multiples may stay elevated for some time?

I think the multiples are very elevated, I would say, especially in the defense market. It is crazy multiples, I would say. And it might be correct, or it might be wrong. We are, however, very careful with our shareholders' money. So I would say to go now.

I mean, normally, we try to run in the opposite direction of everybody else. So we are currently trying to find some cases within Med-tech, for instance, and some other business areas where we are strong. So it is -- to pay like 10x EBT for companies, it's not healthy in our line of business. We don't have IP. Of course, you can have a strong position within Defense, but you can't pay those multiples. That's at least not how AQ operates.

Let's see if we have any other questions. Please raise your hand if you have a question. [ Jakob ] here.

Perfect. I just have one question. You seldom talk a bit about the railway and rolling stock projects that you have. I mean we saw Alstom were out there adjusting their targets and talking about project delays and execution issues. What do you see on the railway if we look at the railway markets in general and how you view your competitive position and so on?

No. But I think there is a lot of railway projects being developed. What you can say with certainty, though, is that the railway project is always delayed. So it's nothing new for Alstom or for us. So we are involved in several projects, I would say, in -- mainly in Europe, India, China and the U.S. And I think there are, for sure, delays.

And -- but on the other hand, we have, I think, a quite strong project pipeline at the moment. So I'm thinking it's going okay for us. I mean it's -- we are making profit. And here, it's -- like with Defense, it's very hard to predict when the projects will be delivered because it's -- we are very much dependent on our customers. And they're always postponing and then suddenly, they catch up with their production, and then they want things faster.

So it is something that we have in our pricing models and with them, and we need to be very flexible in ramping up and down quickly with these type of customers. That's good that we have also other customers, so we can be flexible with our staff and move them because this is a lot we're doing for railway is assembly, sheet metal. So -- and we have dedicated factories for that.

We can mention, for instance, our factory in Estonia doing complex aluminum enclosures for railway with friction stir welding and so on. I mean there, we see a very good order intake and a very good project pipeline. And most probably, we will need to expand that factory going forward in order to satisfy the demand because they're delivering also a lot to Hitachi in this factory.

So it is -- I think railway is fun. It's very complex projects, it's always customized, and it's always -- every time it's different. So we like that kind of projects.

And I mean, just to get a sense of the magnitude, is it fair to assume that railway or these type of projects at least could be somewhere around roughly 8%, 10%, would you say of your business as of right now or...

I would say that it is below 10% because other segments are growing fast, so -- and growing faster than railway. So I would say that it is -- maybe it could be 10% altogether.

Do we have any other questions? Not on this one, not here. Okay, last chance. Any more questions? Thank you so much, and see you hopefully next quarter. Bye-bye.

Welcome to AQ Group's fourth quarter and year-end report for 2025. The picture that I start with, it's from our new paint line in Radomir, Bulgaria. It is a very advanced production line, which enables us to paint high-volume and low-volume large parts and small parts with, I would say, world-class powder coating in a very cost-efficient way. It is enabling us to increase our volumes in Bulgaria, but also improve the quality to our customers and reduce also energy consumption and paint consumption. So it's an investment that is now up and running. It will be in full swing in February, and we believe that this will be attracting even more customers to this factory for doing sheet metal.

Now let's get into the business. Normally, we start with this slide [indiscernible] group. We have had an earnings per share CAGR of 14% over the past 10 years. We made profit every quarter since the foundation in '94. We are exposed to industrial market segments with high underlying growth. Electrification, which is power grid electrification and data centers. We are exposed to defense markets. We are exposed to Med-Tech. We believe they will grow for many years going forward. Then we also have a long history of acquisitions. And this year, we bought 2 factories and a design office in Germany and Czech Republic, also a small one in Sweden. And we have a very strong balance sheet with a net cash position.

Some facts about AQ. 8,000 employees. For the first time ever, we are above SEK 9 billion in turnover for a year. We have 7 business areas, more than 15 markets that we serve with manufacturing in 17 countries. We have more than 4,000 customers globally, and we made profit, as I said, every quarter for more than 30 years now. And yes, the other things there I have said before. And then we are part of UN Global Compact since 2012, which is our sustainability initiative.

So for some numbers then. For the fourth quarter, we managed to increase sales with 9% to SEK 2.3 billion. It is a little bit below our goal of growing 15% per year, but still it is a decent number. Operating profit increased with 5% to SEK 216 million and profit after financial items increased with 2% to SEK 212 million and the profit margin before tax was 9.1%. And the profit after tax was SEK 168 million, a little bit higher than last year, and cash flow from operating activities came in at SEK 123 million. We get into the details a little bit later in the presentation. And then earnings per share before dilution was SEK 1.84, which is higher than SEK 1.69 a year ago.

For the full year then, our net increased with 6% to SEK 9 billion. First time ever, we are above that number. And the operating profit was unchanged, SEK 840 million, and EBIT was increased by 1% to SEK 831 million. And the profit margin, EBT was 9.2% compared to 9.6% the year before. And profit after tax was SEK 677 million, a small increase from the year -- from 2024. And cash flow from operating activities came in at SEK 900 million approximately. And earnings per share increased to SEK 7.38 and the equity ratio is well above our target, and the Board of Directors will propose a dividend of SEK 1.80 per share compared to SEK 1.60 last year.

Some highlights in the quarter, organic growth improving, and we almost reached our target. So we get to 8.6%, which is much better than the previous quarters. This is mainly impacted by growth in data centers, electrification, also in defense. We have strong growth in the quarter in net sales and order intake for electric data centers. And we have during quarter 4 signed a new letter of intent between AQ Trafotek in Finland with one of our legacy customers to deliver medium voltage transformers and inductors to data centers in the U.S. We have also got an order for the design and manufacturing of low voltage large transformers to hyperscale data centers in the U.S. through an electrification customer, an American one. And we have also received in the quarter additional orders for medium voltage transformer for our factory in Hungary, but they are also taking subcomponents from our factory in Czech Republic and in Shanghai.

Then I'm happy to say that we have also finally recently gotten a EUR 4 million order for supercapacitor cabinets from one of our biggest customers in Europe. Supercapacitor is like a big battery, but it is -- you can charge it in microseconds and discharge the energy in microseconds. So it's not really used for storage. It's used for balancing of the power grid. And this product we have developed together with our customers for 9 years, I believe. And the development started in Sweden many years ago in one of our plants, and we have made like 30 prototypes. And now finally, our customer gets their big first order. So we will deliver like almost 300 cabinets now. We believe that this is a field that will expand going forward as well.

We see strong growth from inductive components and electrical cabinets to customers for ventilation or you can say, cooling for data centers. And those activities are in Bulgaria and in China, and it's a little bit different. Electrical cabinets are delivered to a company that is focusing exclusively on data centers and they are delivering cooling solutions for that. And from China, we deliver inductive components to an American company that are doing cooling for hospitals and data centers and so on, but the growth is coming from data centers as well. Then we're happy to see that on-time delivery has improved to 96% in December, and it has steadily improved during last year. So it's much better than the year before. So it's good that we start to deliver more on time.

Some lowlights in the quarter, we've had quality defects that has impacted profitability negatively in the quarter. We always have these kind of things, unfortunately, but it is a little bit bigger in quarter 4 than normally, and it's not products that we have produced in quarter 4, it is products that we have produced maybe a year earlier. And it is also related to data center. So it is -- we have done a design and it didn't work perfectly and now we have redesigned it, and we believe it will work perfectly now. We've also added a lot of new testing equipment and so on so that we can detect these faults before they happen. Then we -- I think I indicated here a slower growth in defense market than expected. It's -- orders are there. We are getting orders, but we are not delivering out as much as we would like because it is not -- the ramp-up in the -- especially in Europe, is not going so fast for our customers.

We try to help them as much as we can. We're providing them with more engineering services and making more parts as well so that they can ramp up faster. But it's not going -- the growth is not in invoicing as fast as the order intake. And then we have low capacity utilization in Mexico and New York since bus volumes are quite slow there. We have new customer there, and it is ramping up, but it's going slower than we want, both us and our customer, but I believe it will get better during the year. And then we did some inventory write-off in Bulgaria, I would say, due to poor material planning, we have put in place a development program for them, and this should not happen going forward. And then inventory turnover, it improved to 3.2 turns per year, which is sort of a record level for us, but we're still not happy because we don't reach our target of 3.5. We think it's possible to do it in 2026.

Go to some more numbers, then the earnings per share increased a little bit this year, not as much as I wanted, but still it's a small improvement. And the dividend is proposed by the Board to increase also to 1.8. The historical performance is decent though. Regarding the sales development in the full year, our organic growth is 2%, which is way below our target, and we're facing some headwinds from some of our market segments like in trucks and in buses. But on the other hand, we're able to offset that with the growth we have in electrification, defense and data centers. So at least it's a growth in the year.

Then our organic growth in Q4 is much better and coming up to 9%, and we are working very hard to deliver out all these products now that we have orders for, so to try to make the organic growth continue in this way. So all in all, quarter 4 for the growth, we're quite happy for the full year, not satisfied, but it's maybe okay.

Here is now showing the historical organic growth by quarter and almost reaching our target of 10% in quarter 4, but we wanted to be higher. We have done it before, as you can see. So we are working hard to come above the green line for the quarters to come. Some new recent customer and project wins. So as I said before, the supercapacitor cabinets, you can see a glimpse of them on the right side, that is 2 cabinets, and we are going to deliver almost 300 cabinets in 2026 and 2027. And we are making the complete scope there. So it's full sheet metal production and then we integrate the supercapacitor banks inside. We do the electrical testing and we deliver to a customer in Germany actually.

And then we have also won additional EUR 2 million for electrical cabinets for HVAC to -- that is a supplier for data centers. That's also from Bulgaria. Both of these projects are made in Bulgaria. We see also increased volumes for inductors to a large, as I said before, HVAC OEM in North America, and that is deliveries from our factory sold by our U.S. transformer unit, but produced in our Shanghai factory and delivered to the customer in Mexico. And then we have received the first prototype for the design and manufacturing of large transformers from a new U.S. electrification customer for data centers. That's exciting. It is, however, quite a small order at the moment. We believe it will be a big order coming, but first, we need to deliver the prototypes for them.

And then we have received orders for about 40 pieces for a couple of small of these medium voltage UPS transformers. You can see on the middle picture during the quarter to increase to our already big order that we received or the 2 big orders we received last year. More orders are expected to come there. But we are quite fully utilized. Our capacity is increasing, but for quarter 1, we will be quite full and deliver out as much as we can, then we get increased capacity in Q2 to deliver out more because of the investments that we have made and qualification of the finished site and so on. And then we received also in the quarter an award from a European electric truck supplier for power cables for electrical vehicles. We're happy with that. If they sell as many as they want, then it will be a huge order, but we are very pessimistic that their sales will be as high as they claim. So -- but still, it's good to be in new products and new projects. We learn as well a lot about this type of products. So it's -- we are very happy that we have won this order.

Regarding growth from acquisitions, it is mainly in Q4, this mdexx acquisition that we did. We have several targets under evaluation and negotiation, but we are very picky with the prices we pay. We don't want to overpay because then you will have a hell of a problem later. So we're negotiating hard, and we are staying true to our nature. We will not buy anything that is too expensive. We made a small bolt-on acquisition in November. It's a small prototype machining workshop that is working with, we could say defense mainly. And this will be integrated in our AQ Engineering workshop that is basically the TechROi acquisition that we bought in 2024.

mdexx is gradually developing according to plan and the margins are improving. And we can see the photo on there is a newly -- new machine for winding of this medium voltage transformers. This is helping us also to utilize the people and the workshop that we have bought. So it is -- they will grow a lot this year and in combination with the other transformer workshop that will also continue to grow in 2026. And we talked in the report a lot about transformers. You can see on the left -- on the bottom left, the net sales development of this business area. We have made now 3 big acquisitions in the area. We are getting into these data centers that we have talked about a lot already in this presentation. And we have a growth CAGR of 30% in this business area. It has gone in 2018, it was 5.6% of our sales. And in 2025, it's now, I think, 24.99% of our sales, something like this.

So it is a little bit special for us because we do a lot of design here. So we have design engineers and then we produce the parts as well in the locations that you can see on the map, the green dots there on the map. And it is a very demanding field. It is not so easy to do it. We deliver really special customized transformers for specific applications that's supposed to be very cost efficient, smallest weight and footprint in the customers' product as possible. You can also see the customers that we have there are well and renowned customers within electrification and data center and railway. So we're very happy about this, and we want to continue to grow this business, and we want to be a world leader for this niche type dry type transformers. And we are on the way to do that, which is fun.

Regarding margins, we are now on the 12th consecutive quarter above our EBT target of 8%. It was 9.1% in the quarter. I think cost control is very good. However, in quarter 4, we have made several provisions for quality issues that we have had. It's not products that we have delivered out in quarter 4. It's products that we've delivered out previously that has not been up to -- has not fulfilled the customers' specifications completely. And it is sometimes really hard to design these products for new applications. We believe that we have now taken corrective actions, and we have better testing in place and have a more robust design in these instances, and we have taken the costs that we believe we will incur for these known effects in quarter 4.

Also mdexx still dilutes the margin a little bit, mainly now because of personnel reduction costs that we have had in the quarter. Still, we see the development is going in the right direction and December was quite good, in fact. Then we have a couple of underutilized factories, one in Bulgaria, one in Mexico, one in New York and one in India, where we need to sell more and be more active on the sales side. But my sales teams are energized and they are working really hard to bring in more volume, and I think we can see it also on the organic growth development that we have had in quarter 4. We believe that there is more to come. And it is not that volumes will fall down from the sky. We really need to work hard to reach the organic growth targets that we have. And I believe that we do. I'm really impressed by our team's performance in this area.

Regarding inventory value and turnover, we are a little bit disappointed because we don't reach our target, which is 3.5. Currently, we're at 3.2. However, it is the highest level that we have ever been to. So it is not too bad, but not great. When we add new businesses, normally, we see that the inventory turnover is lower than the AQ legacy plants. So then we put in a team of people to support them. We also changed the ERP system and so on and improve the planning. And normally, this results also in better delivery performance and better quality. And it's also easier with bookkeeping and everything when you have less inventory to count and so on at year-end. So we have done a lot of improvements during the year. I'm really happy with the team that is working with this specific project to improve this, but still, we have several plans that can be much better.

We have now a focus on electric in Bulgaria, our wiring plant in Canada, our wiring plant in U.K., our injection molding factory in Hungary and our wiring plant in Mexico. And as a group, we want to reach 4, but the target first to reach 3.5 and then we can go even further.

Regarding the cash flow, it is a little bit lower in quarter 4, and it is heavily impacted by increase in accounts receivables. It's natural when you increase sales, then accounts receivable go up, but also we have, during the quarter, terminated a lot of all, I would say, factoring agreements that was in mdexx and Michael Riedel, and this impacts the cash flow quite a lot in the first quarter when you do it. And then when you finally get to the end of the payment term that we have with the customers, then this will improve again. But on the other hand, we have a super good balance sheet with a net debt of -- a net cash position of SEK 427 million. So we have a lot of money to buy companies for and to invest in this ramp-up for the transformers for data center and so on. So we are very careful with the shareholders' money. I can assure you of that, and you can see it also in the performance.

So final slide for today. Earnings per share CAGR of 14%. It's actually 14.5% in after 2025. So you can -- if you're inclined to positivity, you can say it's 15% profit every quarter since foundation. We like to work with these industrial market segments that are growing, and we have a long history of acquisitions, and we are going to make acquisitions going forward as well. And we have a super strong balance sheet with a net cash position.

So then we move to Q&A. Maybe we have Jonny first, SEB.

I have a couple of questions. Starting with data center, which is obviously very exciting right now. And you mentioned some letter of intents of 200 transformers here in the quarter and some prototype orders as well. And I think in the last quarter, you said order book was at EUR 15 million, if I remember correctly. So how much data center would you say you have now in the order book? And also what sort of lead time can we expect on those orders? Are they set to be delivered here in 2026? Or what can we expect there?

No, the expectation is to deliver those 15 that we received last year that we communicated already in quarter 3 that we are supposed to deliver those out before June this year. So we're working super hard in the factories. Of course, this is not software that we're delivering. So -- and it's a lot of people, machines, testing equipment, shipments and so on. But the target is to deliver out all of that before June. And then we -- as I also presented here, we have received some more orders for some smaller data centers as well. So we received another 40 units for that. So it will continue, and I think we will get more orders for 2026. But of course, that's what I think doesn't matter at all. I mean we need to get those orders in.

The LOI for Finland is really related to production capacity that our customer wants. So they have agreed to buy 200 units over the course of '26, '27, '28. And that is to enable us to buy the necessary equipment and to qualify the units also in this factory. So it's the same units that we today deliver from Hungary, we'll be able to deliver also from Finland. And we are also working on to deliver those from the U.S. and then we deliver components. So the transformer and inductor that goes inside this cabinet now can also be produced in some of our other sites in Shanghai and in Hungary as well. So it is a system of products then for all these big components that we're talking about now, there is also, I think, 18 smaller components in each cabinet as well, which we deliver today from our factory in Shanghai, but we'll also qualify now our factory in Bulgaria for this volume.

So there's a lot of activity ongoing, and we're happy that we have such a good collaboration with our customer and that we continue to develop the business and qualifying more sites to be able to deliver the volumes that they believe will come and that we hope will come.

Yes. Understood. Sounds exciting. Yes. Then a quick one on the quality complaints here a little bit. Is it possible to say something about the magnitude of those extra costs and provisions here in the quarter?

I think I would like to pass on that one because it is like this, that we always have quality issues of some sort. On the other hand, we like to highlight that in this transformative field, there is a risk. I mean it is, I would say, very beautiful growth, hopefully, and profit margins, but it's also possible to go wrong. So I think it's our duty to talk about those risks. But on the other hand, it's not so small in the quarter because then we wouldn't mention it. So it impacts the EBT. Yes, but to go into the detail because it's several different projects and so on as well. So I'd like not to go into details there.

I understand. I understand. But I mean, I assume as you mentioned it, as you said, I expect it to be at least, as you said, impacting you. So can we expect it to be closer to 0.5 percentage point maybe on EBIT level? Is that a fair assumption, closer to 0.5 percentage point than not?

Very good question, Jonny, but maybe we take next one.

Okay. Fair enough. I need to try at least. Okay. I have one on the defense orders. I mean you mentioned some slower deliveries to defense than expected. And I think other suppliers to defense companies have also said similar. But do you expect this pattern to continue here in the near term? Or can we expect some sort of catch-up in deliveries here in the near term?

I mean it's not slow. It's still on a very high pace for us compared to what it has been historically, but it's not growing as fast as we thought going into 2025. I believe that it should catch up because our customers have a lot of orders that they need to deliver out. So when that catch-up effect is coming, it's hard for me to tell. But for sure, there will be more deliveries, I think, in '26 than it was in '25.

I understand. I understand. Yes, we'll see. Just a final one. I mean it's always interesting to hear what is your general gut feeling here on demand and the general economy right now entering the new year?

Yes. I'm not so good at doing forward-looking statements, and we don't really do them. So I mean, as we have written in the report, I think there is a great demand in power grid electrification, in data centers, in defense. There is also -- most of our markets are moving normally. And then it's a little bit slower in trucks, and it's a little bit slower in buses, it's a little bit slower in food equipment. But I think we are working really hard to win new business. And I think we are so small still, so we should be able to counter those market segments that are declining by winning more business at these customers and take market shares.

Alvin?

Just the first one on -- if we can get some comments on the type of companies you currently have in the M&A pipeline. I mean, is there a typical AQ sort of turnaround acquisition we can expect? Or are there companies with good profitability you're aiming for? And also if you can comment something on the size of the company you're looking for?

Very good question. I think it is -- I mean, I could sit here and talk all day about all the companies that we are looking at. And I mean -- so I think we are currently -- I believe that we will not buy so much in the defense sector because those multiples have become too expensive for us for turnarounds and for companies that show a little bit profit. We believe it's hard for us to buy with the prudent way that we see on contract manufacturing acquisitions. Maybe there is, in the other hand, an opportunity to buy something in Med-Tech with healthy margins. But to answer your questions, I would say it like this.

We look at both we look at some companies that are actually doing really well, and we look at some companies that are doing a little bit poorly where we have to put some work into it in order to make it, I mean, a classic, as you said, the AQ acquisition where it's a little bit cheaper with nice machines and customers, but there we need to do a little bit more work. So both of them we are looking at. And I mean, our target is to grow with acquisitions 5% per year. And if you take 5% on SEK 9 billion, it should be something like turnover of SEK 500 million if we are successful with what we want this year. But on the other hand, I don't want to promise anything.

Yes, that's a good question -- good answer. And just another one for me. You have flat year-over-year personnel in number of personnel, but we can see you're up 11% in cost -- personnel cost. And also, you can see that personnel cost has been around 26% to 28% of sales. Now we're 29%. So it is given more complex products that we should expect these levels? And -- or is this a function of underutilized factories or yes, any comment on that would be great.

Yes. No, but it is, of course, varying a little bit. You can see that our biggest business area in terms of personnel is in the Wiring Systems business, and they're exposed to truck and bus and construction equipment volumes. So there, we have seen a decline in volume from those customers during the year, and that, of course, reduced the number of people. But as you said, the people is flat. We are reporting the headcount that is employed by us. We are also -- we also have, I would say, like 15% of the employees that are also rented. So that also has an impact.

And then we have, of course, increased around 400 people when we bought mdexx and Michael Riedel as well. So -- and the Germans actually pull up a little bit, even though there are not so many, they actually pull up the cost picture for the personnel costs. But -- and we have done some reductions in Germany during quarter 3 and quarter 4, which also is showing in the personnel cost for the fourth quarter and the full year. So yes, I hope that answers your...

But do you think 29% is a fair level as well given you go...

It is very much -- yes, I think it's a fair level, but I would say like this that it is so much dependent on what type of products we deliver. Some products we have more working content and some products we have less content in. If we deliver more electrical cabinets, then the amount of work in those are much lower than, I mean, work cost is much lower because the components inside are much more expensive. So it's also a mix thing. But I would say it will be in this ballpark sort of...

Linus?

Just a quick couple of questions here from me. Firstly, on the margin here, the margin declined year-on-year to -- despite 8.6% organic growth here. I'm just wondering if you could maybe not quantify, but perhaps rank the impact here from the quality reclamations, the inventory write-offs in Bulgaria, index dilution and capacity utilization here below.

We don't really want to go and then we would maybe have written it in the report if you want to go into the details. I mean, all of those things that you mentioned have an impact on the margin. On the other hand, in a normal, every year, we have inventory write-offs and every year, we have quality issues. I would say it is a little bit bigger in quarter 4 than we -- than normal, but it is nothing really that unusual. Then, of course, we -- the mdexx and Riedel acquisition still dilutes the margin as well, and that is the decline that we have seen, I would say, in general for the full year.

Okay. And just a question here on Mexico and your capacity here. What is the current utilization rate here approximately? And when do you expect them to normalize?

I would say like this, that in Mexico, the volumes for buses for us has decreased substantially in 2025. And we have now started to grow again compared to '25 because we are getting in some new volume there, which is good. But when you get such a big decrease, then normally, you also decrease your capacity. So we have reduced the workshop space and we have reduced people. So it's -- capacity is, of course, a moving target. But I would say that we could double that turnover. Then again, this Mexican plant is quite small. So -- but I believe we can double the turnover in 2026. And we are working very hard to achieve that with the customers that we have.

Right. Super interesting. Moving on over to the transformers here. Just a question on the margin profile here. I mean they are 25% approximately of sales now. How do the margins compare to the group average approximately?

Yes, we don't report like that. So -- but I would say like this that since we are doing all the design work here and also the risk is higher, then margin should be higher than AQ Group's target and AQ Group average.

All right. Super. Just one last question here for me. On the New Flyer ramp-up, as you said, it's not yet at expected levels. What are the specific bottlenecks here that prevent the faster scale up? Is it customer demand or supply constraints or something else?

No. But I mean, we -- I think in Canada, we have ramped up very quickly, and we are at a higher pace. In the U.S., we are getting in some new volume, but it is also about switching the customer need to switch from a Russian supplier to a new one. They need to get orders for the parts that -- for the products where we deliver parts to. Same with Mexico, we are newly qualified and then we get parts for part for part, and we're quoting parts and we get parts and so on. So it normally takes some time. But I believe that Mexico is on a good position at the moment. And New York is working hard as well. So...

Would you have any time line on that?

Maybe 6 months until we are on the volumes that we have that have been agreed, I would say.

Do we have any more questions? Please raise your hand. Seems to be very quiet. So then I thank everybody for listening, and I wish you a really good day, and I hope to see you again next quarter. Thank you so much. There's a question in the chat maybe.

Could your LOI of 200 transformers also mean that customers have signed LOE for the same type of transformers with other deliveries just to make sure that they will not be short of transformers or are the data sent to market not so hard?

I don't know if you heard the question, but the LOI for Finland is for 200 transformers over a number of years. If the LOI is just an LOI, as everybody knows. So it doesn't mean that they have placed order with us. On the other hand, we are buying equipment to be able to produce these 200 pieces. And if the customer don't buy these 200 units, they will have to pay for the equipment. So then you can say then we get equipment for free. Of course, we and our customers wouldn't do this if we didn't think that we will produce this volume.

Then of course, our customers, they will always try and want to have second sources. So of course, they are working with that. But I would say data center market, we are scraping on the surface. And if our customer is as successful as they believe that they will be in this area, then there will be a demand that they would need more than they would need 10 AQs in order to be able to deliver all the products that they want to ship. So I don't see it as a -- it's always a risk and so on, but I see that there is demand for everybody if we are successful.

I think that was maybe the last question. Very good one. Thank you. And then I wish everybody a nice day again. Bye-bye.

Okay. So it's 9 o'clock in Sweden, and we'd like to wish you welcome to AQ Group's report for the third quarter. I will try to speak quickly, and then we have questions in the end, so let's go.

So we think you should -- we like to invest in AQ Group because we have an earnings per share CAGR of 14% over the past 10 years. We made profit every quarter since the foundation in 1994. We have an exposure to industrial market segment with underlying growth such as electrification, defense and Med-Tech. We have a long history of acquisitions. And this year, we have made -- bought 2 factories and the [indiscernible] in Germany and Czech Republic. We have an extremely strong balance sheet with a net cash position.

Some quick facts. So we have 8,000 employees in AQ. We have had a turnover in 2024, about SEK 8.5 billion. We have 7 business areas. We cater 15-plus market segments, and we are manufacturing in 17 countries to 4,000 customers globally. And we made profit every quarter for the last 30 years. And then I mean profit in the earnings line, the bottom line, not anything else. And we have a 14% earnings per share CAGR for the last 10 years. We make acquisitions, as I said, and our sustainability initiative is UN Global compact that we have been part of since 2012.

Okay. Let's move to the third quarter. We increased net sales with 8% to SEK 2.1 billion. It is shy of our goal of growing net sales with 15%. Our operating profit increased with 2% to SEK 191 million, and our profit after financial items increased to 5% to SEK 187 million. Our profit margin before tax was 8.8%. And after tax, we had a profit of SEK 154 million. And the cash flow from operating activities was as usual in quarter 3, quite high, SEK 322 million, but a little bit lower than last year. And earnings per share before dilution amounted to SEK 1.67, which is about 4.5% increase compared to the same period last year.

We talk about the first 9 months, our net sales increased with 5% to SEK 6.7 billion and our operating profit decreased with 2% to SEK 624 million. Our profit after financial items increased with 1% to SEK 619 million, and our profit margin before tax was 9.2% and profit after tax was SEK 509 million, a little bit lower than last year. Cash flow from operating activities was SEK 799 million and earnings per share before dilution was SEK 5.54, which is a slight decrease versus last year. And our equity ratio is super high with 67% versus our target of 40%.

If we go to the earnings per share growth, we are still on 14% and it is a little bit decreased versus last year. If we look on the rolling 12 months, let's see if we can do something about that in the last quarter. And our target is to double the earnings per share every year, but of course, on an average of [indiscernible].

Regarding the net sales development quarter-over-quarter, we had an organic growth of 5%, which is positive, but not good enough. I think we should be able to do more and deliver out more. Our acquired growth was 7%, and then we had a negative currency effect of 4%, which means with a net sales growth of 8%. If we go a little bit more into the detail, so the organic growth was 4.6%, which is below our target of 10%. We have low demand from buses in North America where one of our customers closed down the plant last year. We have low demand for food equipment machines or food packaging equipment machines and also a little bit lower demand for big transformers for big ships from our factory in Finland.

On the other hand, we have a very high demand for grid electrification, in the defense sector, which is sad but true and in data centers, which is a very exciting, you can say, new opportunity because we started to receive orders last year, but now we see big orders coming and big deliveries coming, which is fun. But we have developed this for quite some time. I will get into a little bit more detail later on in the presentation.

Some recent customer and project wins. So we have won what is called the electrical control cabinets for one of our customers for a high-voltage DC power line, which is called Korridor B in Germany. This is control cabinets for about EUR 7 million that we will do in our factory in Pernik in Bulgaria.

Then we have extended our contract with a big inverter company from Germany for cabinets, which will amount to about EUR 15 million per year, and we will have that volume now for another 2.5 years, which is fun. We are also working with some other projects with this customer, but it is fun to see that they are happy with our performance and that they want to continue. And then we have this on the right, transformers and inductors in an enclosure for data centers where we have received from one of our legacy big customers orders for EUR 15 million for 1 data center, 1 hyperscale data center, we should say. So it's quite a big one, but not the biggest one. And I think there is a possibility to do more. I'll get into it now.

So what is this product then? It is -- what we are doing? We are doing medium voltage transformers and inductors. We've started to design this in Germany in what was then Schaffner Power Magnetics, but now is AQ Inductives Germany in 2018, together with this customer and it is a legacy AQ customer with 100 -- more than 100 years of electrification experience. And the end product is a medium-voltage solid-state uninterrupted power supply for data centers. What it does is that if the power is cut to the data center, then several of these modules will make the data center run for an additional 7 minutes, I think. And then they have -- the data center have the opportunity then to switch to alternative power sources, such as diesel engines or gas turbines or similar.

So this will be a key thing here. And the key thing that you should take with you also is that this is medium voltage and why do you go to medium voltage is that you can reduce the energy consumption and the installation costs for the data center tremendously as the data centers require more energy. So yes, we think this is exciting new technology. Our customer claimed that they are the only one that have a solution for this problem at the moment. So we believe that if we are successful together with our customer that this can be sort of a standard for these bigger hyperscale data centers. And what do we do then? The cabinet that you see here on the right, which is a little bit behind my bald head, is the inside there is a medium voltage transformer and the medium voltage inductor. This enclosure weighs about 7 tons. Then there is another cabinet where we have 18 pieces of low-voltage inductive components as well. So in total, in every unit, we deliver 20 inductive components and then also the enclosure for this part.

And then our customer put this together and it becomes a unit and then in this data center that we have orders for, it's about 180 units. So it's quite a lot of volume in one data center. And currently, we are as I said, have decided in Germany, we are producing the full unit in our factory in Hungary, but we have also produced units in our factory in the U.S. and in October, now we start to produce the inductor in Czech Republic, but the target is to produce the complete unit also in Czech Republic in 2026. And then we produce the internal inductive components for these units also in Hungary, Czech Republic, China, Finland and the U.S. This is except India and Brazil, where we have our transformer factories.

The volumes are big, and it will take a lot of manpower to do this, but also a lot of equipment. So we have decided already now in 2025 to do investments of EUR 2 million in winding equipment, testing equipment and [indiscernible] equipment in order to increase our capacity. And as we have stated in the press release, we have orders on hands for EUR 15 million for one data center and the deliveries are ongoing now in October. And the whole delivery should be finished before this -- before June. And we expect -- and our customers expect that we will receive many more orders for these products. And our application, as I said, is a hyperscale medium-voltage data center.

So this is fun, we think. It is a lot of design work for us to get the UL approval for the products and so on. And I think we have a bit of a head-start since we have been working with this in seven years. So we know what we are doing, but it is still a very, very challenging project because in data center world, everything goes extremely quickly. So we have to run, run, run very fast which is, of course, interesting, but it's also a risk. If we make a mistake with these products, there will be a bang and it will burn and it is not good. So there is also a risk in this that I think investors should know about. But we believe we have done transformers for a very long time. We believe we are very good at it. We believe we have a great design, which is very cost competitive.

So yes, we hope to support our customer with this. In the quarter, we have also moved our factory in Estonia, in Tallinn and the new building, you can see on the photo. It is AQ Trafotek where we produce inductors for inverters and drives for ABB, Danfoss, Siemens and others. We believe that this business will continue to grow. It has grown rapidly for us since we bought Trafotek in 2019. And that is why we have made this move. But it's also a cost saving move for us because we get 30% more space but the cost is the same. The previous building we had was rented. Now we are renting from another landlord, but a new building.

As you can see, there's also solar panels on the roof, which reduce our CO2 footprint but also makes this more cost efficient because it is costly with energy in Estonia where they use a lot of shale oil in their energy mix. So we're happy to be able to contribute to reducing the CO2 in this country as well. The move has been done and with no major disturbances. We had a little bit lower volumes, I would say, in June, July, maybe a little bit in August as well, but we are in full speed from September and also there is a big optimization work done in the production flow, which is really good which will improve our productivity in this factory.

And I would like to say thank you to the team have done this move without disturbing our customer because it's been a big, big project for us. So fun to be ready with that one to deliver full speed now because we see that the forecast from our customers is increasing for the coming quarters.

Regarding the acquired growth, we are above our target of 5% per year. We have bought this Riedel and Trutnov. We are also looking continuously at several different targets, but we believe it's very hard to find good companies and factories that we want to buy for a reasonable price. So we are fighting regarding the valuation and making the deals happen, but we are working very hard on this. And yes, I think we will see something going forward as well, hopefully. We have always done acquisitions, but I cannot say when. So it will be a present when that time comes.

Little bit update on mdexx and Riedel. The total net sales is much lower than we anticipated when we did the acquisition for different reasons. I think their main customer, as you have heard before, is Siemens, and they have maybe not been super successful in the market. But on the other hand, it is our job to fill this factory up. We have done a lot of work to reduce the personnel costs, and we have reduced -- managed to reduce them from when we took over to until September with about 10%. And a lot of the redundancies was made during August because we couldn't do them earlier because they had short-term work and legal things in Germany.

But some of them are done now. We're continuously working to improve the productivity, especially in the offices. Then we reduced purchasing costs with about 2%. We are reducing the financing costs with 2%, but the full impact will not be until December because it has taken us some time together with our customers to get out of these factoring agreement that was in place when we bought the company, so taking a little bit longer to get out of those than we had imagined.

But as a positive, the mdexx margin in September was on breakeven, which is good. We have managed to change the name. So now -- from now on, we will call mdexx AQ Magnetronics. So we have AQ Magnetronics in Czech Republic, and we are AQ Magnetronics also in Germany now, the design offices in Bremen. We believe that we can do further product improvements in both Czech Republic and in Bremen, and we want them to be completed by the end of quarter 4. We are now working, as I said before, very hard to start to produce also the transformers, the inductors have already started for the data center as mentioned in the previous slide.

And we have done the first deliveries in October of inductors, but this will continue. And it -- we have a lot of capacity in this factory, and we believe that it will be good. We still have a target to reach AQ average margin at the end of Q4, the target is still valid, but it will be challenging, but we are working hard to achieve that.

We come to the margin. And in Q3, our EBITDA margin was 8.8%. It is the 11th consecutive quarter above our target of 8%. I believe the cost control is good. We still have opportunities to improve operationally at several of our production sites and this despite the improvements we have made, dilutes the margin with about 0.7% in the quarter. We believe that still it will improve sequentially. And as I said, in September, it was breakeven. We will continue to improve it so that it will be a contributor rather than a diluter going forward. We are not happy with the margin despite it being above our target in the quarter.

Regarding inventory value and turnover, we have a target of 3.5 of inventory turnover. This is super important for us because a big part of the risk for you as an investor and for us is our inventory that becomes old. And the faster we can turn the inventory, the less the risk is for you and -- for AQ and for investors.

So I see that I have missed that, but the red bars are the inventory level in SEK and the black bar line is the inventory turnover, Series 1 and Series 2. I made the slide myself. So that's why it's not great. We see also that we -- like this product with the data centers, there's more internal deliveries in AQ meaning that the goods are in our inventory and work in progress a little bit longer time, which have an impact on our inventory turnover. However, we believe that this is a good way for us to have better margins and utilize all the good factories that we have.

So it's still the right thing to do. We have an ongoing project with a project manager, Gregos. He's doing a great job with our teams, and we are improving in many of our sites. What we see, however, is that many of the companies that we purchased, they have a lot of improvements to be done regarding inventory turnover. And we continue with this project because it has been, as I see it, quite successful. So we continue with focus of [electric] in Bulgaria, with Canada, U.K., India and Mexico to improve the inventory turnover further, even though it's improved already in the quarter a little bit. We will continue.

Cash flow is super important. I think it is a good measure to see if the things that I say is true or not. And our net cash flow from operating activities is high level, which it usually is in the third quarter because we have a little bit less deliveries and then we get paid for what we delivered in quarter 2. I think you understand that, which is normally a high delivery quarter, which means the net debt also decreased or it's not the net debt, it's a net cash position. And we have now a net cash of SEK 429 million. However, we will see a slight working capital increase at the end of the year since we terminate now all this factoring for mdexx and Riedel. But I mean, of course, it will -- it should not have a huge impact.

We have plenty of cash to invest in equipment for data center production, this transformer production or other customers that want to invest with us and also to buy companies, of course. As you know, I will always show this on-time delivery, and we are decreasing a little bit in the delivery performance. It's not as good as we want. We can see that several of our factories are under quite a lot of pressure since our electrification customers are growing rapidly, but also in the defense sector, it's growing very fast and also for these data centers. So it's a challenge for us to increase the capacity, and we have some constraints in Rockford, which are mostly in defense, in JIT Mech which is Defense and electrification, in Transformer Solutions, which is electrification and Inductives Hungary is data centers.

The quality level still remains on a very good level, but of course, we always want to improve. So we get back to this one. I will not go through it again. I think you understand why to invest in AQ, and I go to questions.

So please raise your hand if you have a question. Albin was first, I think. Please unmute if you can, otherwise, we will mute for you. Maybe we will unmute.

Can you hear me now, James?

Yes.

Yes. Perfect. So firstly, with the data center order, you mentioned order book of some EUR 15 million and you also mentioned better margin, but lower inventory turnover. So firstly, can you give us some sense of the margin of those products? And then also, are you the only source here for your customer? Or are you dual sourced?

We are the only source at the moment, but of course, our customer will try to have a second source. But as I mentioned, I think we have a bit of a head-start since we've been working with this since 2018. However, we don't have any patent or such things that will protect us. I would like also to add that if this will be the standard for data center, which, of course, I have no clue about, but I can only listen what my customer tells me, then there will be so much work for the dry-type transformer manufacturers in the world that it will be enough work for everybody.

I would say, currently, our customer is not concerned about pricing, he only wants speed in delivery. So I hope that tells you something about margins as well. But of course, during the ramp-up, it can be so that we have a bit of extra cost because we are not optimized in our flows and so on. But I believe that this is profitable and that it will continue to grow, but we have to be successful. We have to prove that the concept is successful. There are a few smaller data centers already live with this technology, which seems to be working well. But who knows, the development is very fast in this area. But I believe that we will, at least for a couple of years, have a good volume for this new product for us.

Yes, understood. Let's hope it doesn't burn or explode what you mentioned.

Absolutely.

Also, you mentioned you reduced the personnel in mdexx in the quarter 10%, but still managed to increase personnel overall Q-on-Q outside of Sweden. So is there anything that sticks out there?

I mean the personnel increases anyway because we add the acquisition. So I mean, there are a couple of hundred people there. So I mean that -- and then we grow organically as well. So then the personnel will increase. So I think that is the answer because we didn't have Trutnov this quarter last year.

Yes, but it's Q-on-Q, still grows. But yes, I guess it's not too much, it's organic.

Yes, that's what I mean. I mean, we didn't have Trutnov last year, so the Q-on-Q growth will be the net between -- I mean, the amount of people we have in Trutnov now, we didn't have at all. There were 0 last year because we didn't have Trutnov. And then of course, we grow organically as well, so, yes.

Yes, maybe I think you misunderstood. I mean from Q2 to Q3, so that's a little bit of growth, but I guess that's organically then.

That's organic. Yes, okay. Sorry, yes.

All right. And just lastly, given the net cash position here, active M&A agenda, but still the ramp-up of mdexx. How would you say that your capacity is to take on further large acquisitions here?

I mean, capital-wise, it is no issue, I would say. Then again, I would maybe choose which business area I would buy in, but depending on the load in those. But when we find the right company, we try to buy it. So yes, we have the capacity to do it.

Any other questions? Thomas?

Can you hear me now?

Yes.

Perfect, perfect. First question, I was just wondering if you could give some color on the sequential development in construction equipment and trucks in Europe. I understand that Q3 is like seasonally lower, but some comments on the order intake, for example, would be very interesting.

Order intake is very hard to say because it -- I mean, we have very short lead times in construction equipment, but especially in trucks, I mean, we receive the order two days in advance before we should deliver it. So -- but despite that, I would say that the construction equipment, we see it is growing in Europe in all our sites and trucks are decreasing a bit in our sites. So then it's a little bit mix between the biggest the customers that we have. I mean, Scania and Volvo. I think, Volvo is doing a little bit, I wouldn't say better, but I mean the decrease is lower at least than for Scania. That's my feeling, but yes.

Perfect. My last question here. And so on the other customer segments and the market in terms of new product launches and customer wins, are you seeing any significant delays in new product launches from customers? And if so, in which segments?

No. No, I don't really see any delays like that, I wouldn't say. But I don't know what you really mean with product launches.

Either new customer wins or customers that are launching new product lines, sort of any deterioration in the -- from Q2, for example?

No, I don't think so. I think it is rather stable and our customers. I mean, they are huge international companies. And I mean, their product and -- project management is not changing I would say. I think they are trying to -- yes, they are pushing on with the new projects. We have Scania with the Traton new modular system. We have Volvo with all the electrification projects they're doing. They launched this new battery as well, where we are doing the enclosure and all the wire harnesses, for instance, and so on. So no, I think what I believe that our customers are very profitable and have a lot of capital and that they are continuing as usual, so to speak.

I mean we are not in cars and these kind of things, so that I cannot really comment, but for the segments that we are in, I believe that there's a lot of new products and then in the defense, it's like crazy, a lot of new products that are coming.

Do we have any more questions? Linus?

Just one quick question here from me. You cited weak demand in buses in North America here. I was just wondering if you could comment a bit on the New Flyer ramp-up and how that is progressing.

New Flyer ramp-up is progressing. On the other hand, I don't remember which quarter we announced it, but I mean Nova Bus closed the factory in New York State, which we delivered until November 2024 and that volume is 0. So we are replacing it with New Flyer, but the volumes are not as big as the Nova was yet. So I think the ramp-up is going okay. We have had some delivery issues in U.S., but overall, I think customer is happy, and we are -- they are especially happy with our Canadian site. We have started to deliver small volumes from Mexico, and we have started with, you can say, serial deliveries from U.S. as well, but it is not on the level that we expect in the long term. So yes, I hope that answers a bit of your question at least.

Yes. That's super clear.

Do we have more questions? Very good questions today, I must say, as usual.

Okay, it seems that we don't have any further questions. So then I thank you for showing interest in AQ, and I hope you have good reporting season. Thank you so much, and bye-bye.