ABB Ltd (ABB) Q1 2025 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Greetings, and welcome to this presentation of ABB's first quarter results. Next to me here, I have our CEO, Moten Virud, and our CFO, Timo Jamutila. And I'm Ann-Sofie Nord, Head of Investor Relations. As per usual, Moten and Timo will talk through the results, and after that, we focus on today's announcement of portfolio change. So today the presentation will be a little bit longer than we normally have before we open up for the Q&A. And with that said, I ask you, Martin, to kick off the presentation. Thanks, Anssi. And a warm welcome also from my side. I would say that we had a strong start to the year. The team did a good job at staying focused in what has been a quarter with intense news flow. I would guess that we all have had tariffs on our radar screens. But if I was to pick up a few highlights from the quarter, those would be. First of all, market activity was high and it was good to see that demand was strong throughout the quarter with a good finish in March. In total, we increased comparable orders by 5% from last year. Secondly, we beat our own expectation for operational EBITDA margin in all business areas. On top of this, our margin got an extra boost from a one-timer which contributed 170 basis points to the margin of 20.2%. The third point I want to mention is the free cash flow of 652 million. This is good for a first quarter, which usually is a softer period for our cash generation. And it puts us now in a good position to improve our annual free cash flow from the 3.9 billion we generated last year. We also made good progress towards our sustainability targets. My final point is that we continue to be active with the business portfolio. In early March, the team in Smart Building closed the acquisition of the Siemens wiring accessory business in Chi...