SAABY - Saab AB (publ) (SAABF) Q4 2024 Earnings Call Transcript
2025-02-07 06:47:04 ET
Saab AB (publ) (SAABF)
Q4 2024 Earnings Conference Call
February 7, 2025 4:00 a.m. ET
Company Participants
Merton Kaplan - Head of Investor Relations
Micael Johansson - President, and Chief Executive Officer
Anna Wijkander - Chief Financial Officer
Conference Call Participants
Henric Hintze - ABG Sundal Collier
Ian Douglas-Pennant - UBS
Sam Burgess - Citi
Erik Golrang - SEB
Guinchard Tom - Pareto Securities
Sash Tusa - Agency Partners London
Presentation
Merton Kaplan
Good morning, and welcome to Saab's Q4 Presentation. I'm Merton Kaplan, Head of Investor Relations. As you saw this morning, we released another strong quarterly report. And for those of you who follow us closely, you also see that we are strengthening our growth journey further. So, we have a lot to talk about. And in the studio, I have our CEO Micael; and CFO Anna.
So, we'll start with handing over to you, Micael.
Micael Johansson
Thank you, Merton, and thank you for joining us this morning to take part in the presentation of the full-year report and also the quarter four report, of course. And I will jump right into the numbers. Looking at sort of the outlook that we had for '24, we stated that we will grow between 15% and 20%, and that our operating income must grow more than that, and that we would generate positive cash flow over the year.
And I think we had a very strong year. We increased our order intake with 24%, almost SEK 100 billion in order intake SEK 96.8 million, and also had another strong year for growth 23.4% organically, 23% of course. And last year was -- '23 was also 21.7% . So, we have had two consecutive really strong growth years. And we continuously improve our profitability which means that the EBIT now did grow 33%. And without compromising anything, which is related to investments for capacity or focus on research and development to embrace new technologies to generate new capabilities in the medium to long-term. And we had a very strong quarter four when it comes to cash flow. So, we delivered a solid SEK2.5 billion operational cash flow for the full-year. So, this was absolutely according to our plans and a very strong year and also a strong quarter.
Highlights for the quarter I think is, of course, it's a really difficult sort of security landscape to predict what's going to happen going forward. There are your political uncertainties. There are many statements about extending defense spending both from NATO and from the U.S. And many countries in Europe are extending their defense spending, of course. And there are tensions and stuff like that, which makes it I think unusually difficult time to predict what's going to happen going forward. But we see a strong continued need for defense capabilities definitely and a strong market. So, we will see it going forward. But there are many things that are moving around, of course. And we have seen a quarter now where the order intake mainly on small- and medium-sized orders which shows that we have a strong portfolio.
And you can't look at Saab from a quarterly perspective looking at order intake. You need to take a sort of a broader perspective over a year or two to see how we are growing our backlog and also that we are generating a book-to-bill that is higher than 1. We are continuing our investments to expand capacity. And they are moving ahead according to plan. And more will come into play, of course, during this year and next year....
Saab AB (publ) (SAABF) Q4 2024 Earnings Call Transcript