Securitas AB (publ) (SCTBF) Q4 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

2025-02-06 09:50:38 ET

Securitas AB (publ) (SCTBF)

Q4 2024 Earnings Conference Call

February 6, 2025, 3:30 AM ET

Company Participants

Magnus Ahlqvist - President and CEO

Andreas Lindback - Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Remi Grenu - Morgan Stanley

Johan Eliason - Kepler Cheuvreux

Sylvia Barker - JPMorgan

Andy Grobler - BNPP Exane

Suhasini Varanasi - Goldman Sachs

Raymond Ke - Nordea

Karl-Johan Bonnevier - DNB Markets

Presentation

Magnus Ahlqvist

Good morning, everyone. And warm welcome to our Q4 Results Presentation. We’ve had good progress in 2024 in terms of executing on our strategy and similar to the last couple of quarters we are about to finish the year with significant performance improvement versus last year.

So let’s go straight into some of the highlights of the quarter. We delivered 4% organic growth for the Group and 6% sales growth in Technology and Solutions, and the operating margin improved to 7.3%.

Similar to the third quarter Europe with Security Services contributed with good results but we also had good contribution from Security Services North America and our global Technology and Solutions businesses.

The operating cash flow was very good at 153% in the quarter and 84% for the full year, and improved profitability in combination with strong cash flow are contributing to continued deleveraging and we closed the year with a net debt-to-EBITDA ratio of 2.5 times.

So the performance across the Group is good and the Board of Directors propose a dividend increase to SEK4.50 to the annual general meeting in May. But as we build in the new Securitas we have identified further opportunities to optimize how we run the business and primarily in Europe, and to this end we have initiated an optimization program that we will execute in 2025 and that will generate savings of approximately SEK200 million on an annual basis.

And the business optimization program is really the result of a stronger more digital scalable Securitas after having finalized now the STANLEY integration successfully and making good progress in our transformation.

So thanks to increasing usage of AI that we have been investing in since 2018 we can now leverage that to also then optimize how we run the business and we’re increasing automation thanks to more modern platforms and we’re able to run the business at the structurally lower cost base....

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