ABB Ltd (ABB) Q4 2025 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Greetings and welcome to this presentation of ABB's full year and fourth quarter results. As usual, we have our CEO, Morten Wirod, here. And now also for the last time in this forum, our CFO, Timo Hyamotla. I'm Ansa Fynod, Head of Investor Relations. And as per tradition, Morten and Timo will talk through the results, after which we open up for Q&A. So now I'll leave it up to you, Morten, to kick off the presentation with some comments on 25 as a whole. Thanks, Ansi. Yeah, 2025 was our best year yet. We delivered an all-time high financial performance and we also continue to be recognized with good sustainability ratings. I want to thank and give credit to the team who worked hard to achieve this. Through the year, we saw demand for electrification and automation solutions continue its overall strong trend. From a top-line perspective, I would say that we have performed well in a strong market. Add to that our internal focus on continuous improvements. And putting it all together, we reached new record levels in orders and across most P&L metrics, including an operational EBITDA margin of 19%. The margin of 18.2% on income from operations or EBIT was only 80 basis points lower, in line with our ambition to keep the gap at about 100 basis points. The strong order intake resulted in a book-to-bill of 1.11. This leaves us with a record backlog of 25.3 billion to support future revenues. Another highlight is the strong free cash flow of 4.6 billion, as well as the outstanding return on capital employed of 25.3%. We ended the year with a strong balance sheet with net debt to EBITDA of 0.3. The teams are active on their M&A pipelines, but admittedly, valuations have been demanding in some cases and we have chosen to step away. I want to make good deals that create long-ter...