Bufab AB (publ) (BUFAB) Q1 2025 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good morning and good afternoon everyone and warm welcome to this presentation of Bufab Q1 report. My name is Erik Lundén, President and CEO of Bufab Group and together with me here I have Per Iskog, my CFO. This presentation will be recorded and by attending to the meeting you agree to the recording. I will start this presentation to go through the first quarter highlights, and then I will leave the word over to Per Iskog for some financial highlights. After that, I will take you through the different regions' performance in the quarter, and at the end, we will have a slide about the situation in the U.S. and tariffs before we ramp up, sum up the quarter and outlook. So, let's start with the first quarter highlights. I think it was a good start of the year. If we start with the top line and sales growth, we had a sales growth of 1.6% in a quarter after several quarters of negative growth. Our organic growth was minus 0.1%. This is an improvement versus Q4 when we have minus 1.5%. Region Asia-Pacific showed strong organic growth of 17.2%, led by China. If you look at the market demand, we see continued cautious market out there. It's still a large variation across industries. We continue to see very strong development in energy, defense, and also in medical, while agriculture, automotive, furniture had weaker demand. General industry, construction, mobile home and our trailer segment in US then were stable. If we continue down and look at the gross margin, we had a strong gross margin in the quarter reaching 30.3% compared to 29.1% last year's Q1. And this is driven mainly by our trading business. We have now for the last seven quarters have gradually strengthened our gross margin compared to comparative quarters. And this is something I'm very pleased to see. For us...