2024-07-17 15:09:13 ET
Thule Group AB (publ) (THLPF)
Q2 2024 Earnings Conference Call
July 17, 2024 04:00 AM ET
Company Participants
Mattias Ankarberg - CEO and President
Toby Lawton - CFO
Conference Call Participants
Fredrik Ivarsson - ABG
Daniel Schmidt - Danske Bank
Gustav Hageus - SEB
Mats Liss - Kepler Cheuvreux
Adela Dashian - Jefferies
Presentation
Operator
Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Thule Group Interim Report Q2. [Operator Instructions] I am now going to hand over to your host, Mattias Ankarberg, CEO to begin. Mattias, please go ahead.
Mattias Ankarberg
Thank you very much, and welcome everybody to this Q2 call. I'm as previously joined by our CFO, Toby Lawton and we'll get going straight away. Overall second quarter was a quarter with a good financial result, despite us making big investments for future growth. We saw some sales growth in the quarter, strong profitability and importantly have now launched lot of products, but also two new product categories this first half year. So covering some of the highlights and speaking to the presentation material available.
Financials first. Sales is up 2%, FX adjusted versus previous year and fairly the same across the geographies. We’ll talk about the product categories in more detail in a minute. We continue to see a tough market out there in general and in particular, in some specific areas. And we also continue to see good growth from new Thule products and from bike related products.
We have a gross margin, which increased to an all-time high in the quarter 44.2%, which we are of course pleased to see, and that helps us to deliver an EBIT margin, which is in-line with last year despite us making investments and therefore higher costs in SG&A to drive product launches and new product categories. Strong cash flow, again also in Q2 and helped by EBIT, of course but also continued inventory reduction and on-track to meet our target of reducing it by SEK200 million by year-end.
Quite a few highlights in this quarter. Car seats has been initiative long in the making, now launched in the first European markets. We've got another recognition for our design team, which we're really proud about. We have a minor acquisition that happened actually at the -- in early July so after Q2. And we've also put a new refinancing package in place during Q2 and we will come back to all of these points.
But before we do that on the next page, we'll take a bit of a bigger picture view. Of course this is a quarterly update. But as you know, we at Thule take a long-term view of driving the business and it is therefore nice to reflect on the long-term development at least once in a while. Long term, we have driven profitable growth for many years, and it is nice to see now that after sort of the COVID ups and downs that this year, we are back to profitable organic growth again....
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Thule Group AB (publ) (THLPF) Q2 2024 Earnings Call Transcript