Demant A/S (WILLF) Q4 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

2025-02-05 13:40:42 ET

Demant A/S (WILLF)

Q4 2024 Earnings Call

February 5, 2025 08:00 ET

Company Participants

Peter Pudselykke - Head, Investor Relations

Søren Nielsen - President and Chief Executive Officer

René Schneider - Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Richard Felton - Goldman Sachs

Julian Ouaddour - Bank of America

David Adlington - JPMorgan

Martin Brenoe - Nordea

Maja Pataki - Kepler

Martin Parkhøi - SEB

Andjela Bozinovic - BNP

Niels Granholm-Leth - Carnegie

Robert Davies - Morgan Stanley

Carsten Lønborg Madsen - Danske Bank

Presentation

Peter Pudselykke

Good afternoon and welcome to our conference call following the release of our first integrated annual report for 2024 earlier today. For the call here, it’s business as usual and we have a plan to run through the presentation and then we will do Q&A. [Operator Instructions] In the room here today, it’s the usual team and representatives. We have Søren Nielsen, our President and CEO; René Schneider, our CFO; and then Gustav Høegh and myself, Peter Pudselykke from the IR team. That is it for the practical elements and over to you Søren for the presentation.

Søren Nielsen

Thank you very much, Peter, and welcome, everybody. The agenda today, also very usual key events, financial takeaways and the addition of a little more sustainability advancements business area review. René will do a group financial review. I’ll comment on the outlook and then we will get into Q&A. Financial highlights for 2024, 4% reported growth, 2% from organic growth and 2% from acquisitions, and then all in all, revenue up to DKK22.4 billion, an improvement of gross profit 5%, EBIT down DKK100 million, round numbers, 2%, but very strong cash flow from the group.

Key events, very good momentum in HearingCare, which has continued towards the end of the year, strong organic growth rate in a high number of markets and above market growth rates, so super solid. Hearing aids growth was below our original expectation, impacted by in general, a strong competitive environment, but more importantly, the choice of brand strategy in U.S. that led to loss of significant market share back in the second quarter. Diagnostic growth was impacted by soft markets, but even in deadlight or in deadlight we estimate that our organic growth rate was above the market growth rate. We have closed the divestment of the CI business in summer.

And we, during the year, also took the decision to divest the communication business, two very important steps to become a more focused hearing healthcare company and then we implemented restructuring in communication EPOS in the fall, which means that in Q4, we, as expected, saw a positive profit from both the communication business and the bone-anchored hearing system business. So, the two together posted a positive result, which was also in line with expectations....

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