Loomis AB

Loomis AB

543.00
SEK
-16.00
(-2.86%)
32.28BMarket Cap
Oct 30Next Earn

Q4 FY2025 · Earnings Call TranscriptFebruary 4, 2026

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the fourth quarter and full year 2025 conference call. I'm the Chorus Call operator.

I would like to remind you that all participants will be in listen-only mode, and the conference is being recorded. The presentation will be followed by a Q&A session.

You can register for questions at any time by pressing star and 1 on your telephone. For operator assistance, please press star and 0.

The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Aritz Larrea, President and CEO.

Please go ahead, sir.

Aritz Larrea

Thank you very much. Good morning everyone, and welcome to the fourth quarter and full year 2025 presentation for Loomis.

My name is Aritz Larrea, and I'm the CEO of Loomis, and with me here today I have our CFO Johan Wilsby and Jenny Boström, our head of sustainability and investor relations. I'll start by providing a quick summary of our fourth quarter as well as our full year performance, and we'll also talk about our accomplishments for the first year of this strategic period before taking questions.

Let's start the presentation by turning to slide 2. We delivered a solid and positive performance in the fourth quarter with revenues reaching 7.7 billion Swedish kronor despite a 10% negative impact from changes in exchange rates.

Currency-adjusted growth reached 7.5% driven by 4% organic growth, solid despite the headwinds in our ATM business, and a solid contribution from acquisitions. In the quarter, we saw very strong growth within the international and FXGS business lines due to an increased demand for the movement of precious metals driven in part by geopolitical uncertainties.

Our performance was driven not only by market conditions, but also by our expansion of the addressable market through the opening of new geographic lanes and our ability to capture global demand. We also continued to deliver strong growth within the Automated Solutions line of business during the quarter.

The business mix along with higher efficiency resulted in an increased operating margin of 13.2% versus 12.9 in prior year, with an operating income of above 1 billion Swedish kronor. This is the highest EBITA we have achieved for a fourth quarter, and I'm pleased to see that the restructuring and efficiency initiatives we have taken, successfully growing the business without increasing headcount, are supporting the margin expansion.

We delivered another quarter of strong operating cash flow with a cash conversion of 99% for the year, and the free cash flow in the quarter was close to 1.2 billion. This robust cash generation enables us to continue investing in the business while also delivering attractive returns to our shareholders.

In the fourth quarter, we completed the acquisition of the precious metal storage facility in Toronto that was announced in the third quarter. This acquisition strengthens our local presence in Canada and expands our depository services and storage capacity within the international business line.

During the year, we remained active in M&A while maintaining a disciplined approach to capital allocation. Despite continued investments in the business and the execution of our share repurchase program, our net debt to EBITDA ratio improved year-over-year.

This discipline is also reflected in a return on capital employed of above 16% in the quarter. During the quarter, we repurchased about 540,000 shares for a value of 200 million Swedish kronor.

In total, during 2025, we have repurchased close to 1.5 million shares for a value of 600 million Swedish kronor. The board of directors has proposed a record high ordinary dividend of 15 SEK per share to the annual general meeting, and in addition, the board of directors has proposed an extraordinary dividend of 5 SEK per share in an extraordinary dividend.

This brings a total distribution to shareholders above 1.3 billion. Let's now turn to our reporting segments, starting with Europe and Latin America.

Our European and Latin American segment delivered a solid performance in the quarter with revenues reaching close to 3.7 billion Swedish kronor. We achieved an organic growth of 1.9%, which was strong considering the communicated decline in the ATM business line.

The uncertain geopolitical climate has increased global demand for secure logistics and the management of physical assets such as precious metals, and our teams have successfully grown the business in this environment. It's impressive to see that the international business line grew by 30% in the quarter compared to prior year.

The operating margin increased by 40 basis points to 12.5%, and for the full year, we increased our operating margin by 0.7 percentage points to 11.8%, demonstrating that our focus on operational efficiency yield positive results. Let's move on to the next slide to talk about the US.

The US segment delivered another strong quarter. If we adjust for the currency impacts, which was negative 13%, the US achieved record high revenues and operating profit.

Organic growth was 5.5%, and the acquisition of Borros contributed positively to the overall growth. International and Automated Solutions lines of business had notably strong performance in the quarter.

It's worth highlighting that it was the 16th consecutive quarter that the Automated Solutions business line has achieved double-digit organic growth. Our implemented operational efficiency measures continue to show results, allowing us to grow the business without adding employees.

At the same time, we have secured a high service quality and maintained customer satisfaction. The integration of Borros into our US operations and our Loomis culture is progressing as expected, and we are still early in the integration process.

Borros is a strong strategic fit, and it allow us to provide a fully integrated ATM and Automated Solutions service offering to our customers. We are actually working on stabilizing the revenue and on improving our service quality.

Once this is achieved, we will shift our efforts to improving operational efficiency and over time focus on gaining market share. The volume growth combined with improved efficiency contributed to the improvement of operating margin.

The operating margin surpassed 17%, which is a new record for us. Let's turn to the next page and talk about SME Pay.

Revenues in the SME Pay segment increased to 71 million Swedish kronor in the quarter. Nearly 40% of this revenue now comes from core and adjacent business lines, demonstrating that our strategic focus on SMEs is delivering both growth and margin.

The reduction in the operating loss compared to the previous year is in line with the strategic priorities for the segment. Transaction volumes within the Loomis Pay business line increased 24% in the quarter compared to the previous year and reached 2.3 billion Swedish kronor.

The migration to new POS platforms allows Loomis Pay to focus on larger SME customers in additional customer verticals. In this process, Loomis Pay has chosen to not migrate non-profitable customers, which somewhat impacts settled transaction volumes going forward.

Let's now move to the next slide where I'll share a few updates on our sustainability progress. I'm pleased to share that we are progressing well towards our strategic sustainability targets.

We have reduced our recordable work-related injury rate by 10% in 2025 compared to 2024. While this is in line with our targets, we are never done and we'll continue our efforts to keep our employees safe.

The board has adopted a new group operational health and safety policy. This program will be rolled out during 2026, strengthening our group-wide focus on employee safety.

Compared to 2024, we have reduced our scope 1 and 2 emissions by 4% if we exclude the emissions from the acquisitions of Borros and Kipfer Logistik. Including these, we reduced emissions by about 2%.

Continuing to grow the business while reducing emissions is of course challenging, but something we are committed to, and we of course aim to do so in a cost-efficient way that also supports our business. Efforts are already ongoing to include Borros in our carbon reduction plan by renewing their vehicle fleet.

To put this in perspective to our CO2 targets with a restated baseline for acquisitions, we have reduced our emissions by close to 26% compared to 2019, which is a step in the right direction to reaching 34% reduction by 2027. Now let's turn to the income statement slide where I'll begin by noting that despite a significant negative impact from exchange rate fluctuations, we have achieved strong currency-adjusted growth.

This quarter includes costs classified as items affecting comparability, primarily related to the communicated impairment of goodwill as well as provisions for the ongoing legal case in Denmark. The impairment also had an impact on the effective tax rate since this was largely non-tax deductible.

For 2026, you can expect an effective tax rate of about 30%. Our financial net has declined compared to the previous year following lower financial expenses driven by declining interest rates.

I would also like to highlight that also our net debt to EBITDA ratio has declined year-over-year and is well below our ambition to be below two times. Now let's move on to the next slide where I'll summarize our 2025 performance in relation to our history.

As we can see, we have a stable and resilient business model that continues to deliver. We ended 2025 with a record high operating margin of 12.7%.

Despite the significant currency headwinds, we maintained the level of 30 billion Swedish kronor in 2025. Our currency-adjusted growth was 6%, fully in line with our financial targets for the strategic period.

If the exchange rates had been at the 2024 levels, our revenue would have been above 32 billion for the year. 2025 was the beginning of a new strategic period for us.

It has been a year characterized by macroeconomic uncertainties, a heightened emphasis on societal resilience, and an increase in demand for security services amid a shifting and volatile global geopolitical landscape. In this environment, we made significant progress against our strategic priorities and delivered on our commitments, positioning the group well for the remainder of 2025-2027 period.

Before opening up for Q&A, I want to remind you of what we have committed to last year at our Capital Markets Day and what we have achieved after the first year of the strategic period. Here you see our four strategic priorities for '25 to '27, and I want to share my perspective on where we stand in relation to where we said we would be.

Starting with growing in our established markets, a clear focus here is to accelerate growth within the SME customer segment. We have seen healthy revenue momentum and solid margin contribution from SMEs across our key markets.

We have also seen strong performance within International and Automated Solutions. However, as we have been managing the impact of ATM business losses and are in the process of restructuring certain markets in Europe.

Cash infrastructure is increasingly being called out as being an important piece in crisis preparedness and societal resilience, and we are key part in keeping cash flows functioning in society. At the same time, we keep diversifying and our non-cash related services keep growing as well.

In this environment, we have adapted and grown our addressable market within precious metals by opening new geographical lanes and expanded our storage capacity. While we have some more to do over the next couple of years, I'm confident about our journey.

Moving to the second pillar, we have been very active in M&A during the year. Within core, we have acquired expertise and capacity within temperature-controlled logistics for pharmaceuticals as well as acquired a new storage facility in Toronto.

Within adjacent, we have expanded into first and second-line maintenance of ATMs and automated solutions, and lastly, we have strengthened our digital offer on the POS side in Spain. We will continue to focus on generating both geographical presence, but also diversifying our product and service portfolio through value-creating acquisitions.

Our margin expansion is a clear demonstration of our progress within the third pillar: driving operational excellence and scalability. Our restructuring initiatives in Europe and Latin America are showing results, and we've been seeing clear margin improvements over recent quarters.

In the US, the staffing planning measures and efficiency programs within CIT and CMS that were implemented since last year have consistently contributed to our profitability. Lastly, as I already touched upon earlier, we're advancing on our sustainability initiatives.

We're dedicated to focus our efforts on where we have the most impact and where it also makes sense from a business perspective. We have submitted climate reduction targets to the Science Based Targets initiative for validation, taking a key step towards focusing on reducing our scope 3 emissions.

This concludes my summary of the quarter and the year. Operator, we are now ready for questions.

Operator

Thank you. We will now begin the question-and-answer session.

Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and 1 on their telephone. You will hear a tone to confirm that you have entered the queue.

If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star and 2. Questioners on the phone are requested to disable loudspeaker while asking a question.

Anyone who has a question may press star and 1 at this time. Once again, for questions, star and 1 on your telephone.

We have a question from Simon Jönsson, ABG. Please go ahead.

Simon Jönsson

Good morning. I hope you can hear me.

A few questions from my side. First, on the international business, I think obviously it was one of the positive surprises on the report.

Taking a step back, you have been clear before that comps will become tougher and you'll also said before that some of these volumes should be viewed as temporary or short-term oriented. Of course, a lot has changed here in recent months regarding the precious metals prices and so on, but my question is where do you think we stand now from a broader perspective for your business, and do you think the long-term market dynamics have changed in any way, and what should we expect here in the coming quarters?

You said it before that we should view it as temporary, but was it even more temporary this quarter, or yeah, can you say anything about that? Thanks.

Aritz Larrea

Good morning, Simon, and thank you for your question. As you said, we need to understand that these businesses are cyclical in nature, but it is true that we have worked on growing our addressable market, as I said before, within the VIT.

We have diversified our portfolio, expanding into the pharmaceutical, and we still have other areas like mining, big bays, diamond and jewelry, low value packages. When it comes to the trend, we were saying that we had difficult comps because we had a big increase last year fourth quarter due to the US tariffs, but the shipments, especially of silver, have remained strong.

Then both the price of gold and silver have increased, and that benefits us, no? How do we see the trend?

It's difficult to say, but we think it will remain very similar during the first quarter, first two quarters, and then I don't have a view on how it will end up the year, but we will keep increasing and trying to grow the business organically.

Simon Jönsson

Got it. Thank you.

Moving on to other business areas. Automated Solutions also remains a very good growth driver, remain at good levels here.

Looks like that the growth is mainly coming from the US, but also from a broader perspective, can you maybe give us an update about the market for Automated Solutions, mainly I think smart safes for example, which you commented about on the CMD, for example. Maybe an update on what's going on in the market in the US specifically on smart safes, and do you think you're growing in line with the market, or do you think you're taking market shares, or yeah?

Aritz Larrea

Here it varies, as you said, when you look at the different regions. I would say the first thing is we still have a strong pipeline in Automated Solutions in both regions.

I would say that we have been growing, gaining market share in both regions as well, as in the US and in Europe. In Europe, although we started the year a bit slower, I think the second half of the year have been really good when it comes to Automated Solutions.

At the same time, we've taken advantage of the acquisition that we did with Cima. Cima is now our main supplier, not just in Europe, but also we're also exporting safes and recyclers and front office machines to the US, where we plan on growing.

That's what we said at the Capital Markets Day, Simon. It's not only smart safes.

We're talking about recyclers, we're talking about front office machines, we're talking about kiosks. Everywhere where we can add the cash component to the digital or the technology-driven solutions, we will be there.

As I said before, in the US, it's been 16 consecutive quarters growing at double-digit growth. As I said, we still have a strong pipeline, and that will remain strong in the following year.

Simon Jönsson

All right. Do you think it makes sense to assume that you expect double-digit growth to continue then?

Aritz Larrea

We will continue being strong there.

Simon Jönsson

All right. Your view is that the underlying market is growing double-digits?

Aritz Larrea

Yes.

Simon Jönsson

Yeah. Thanks for that.

Moving on to maybe my last question here on capital allocation, or two-part question basically. You didn't announce any buybacks.

I know sometimes you don't do it on every quarter, but there can be obvious reasons for it, but can you say anything on the buybacks and why you don't announce a program here, or how should we view it? Maybe start there.

Aritz Larrea

Yeah. To summarize, let me tell you that our capital allocation priorities remain exactly the same.

Our aim is to use our capital in the best way to generate return and to maximize distribution to shareholders. That has not changed.

We will continue maximizing distribution to shareholders. That's what I'll say.

Simon Jönsson

Yeah. All right.

Do you feel it's fair to say that you also balancing the buybacks with, now you have a extra dividend, should we keep that in mind that you are viewing it as a total pool of capital return?

Aritz Larrea

Share buybacks are always in our mind, and we will continue doing share buybacks in the future.

Simon Jönsson

Yeah. All right.

Then lastly on acquisitions, I think you made it clear that you will continue to look for value-creative acquisitions, but can you say anything about what is going on with the pipeline right now? Do you think is the pipeline building?

Are you changing any sort of areas you're prioritizing? Have you made further shifts into what you look for, for example, do you look more into international areas to broaden that business, or yeah, where are you currently looking and where do you think the M&A pipeline is more tilted towards?

Aritz Larrea

The M&A pipeline remains the same. It's a strong pipeline.

We have not shifted. When we presented our strategy at the Capital Markets Day, we did talk about not only investing in CIT, CMS.

We were looking into the VIT and VMS areas as well, and we prove it to do that with the facility that we acquired in Toronto and the pharmaceutical business company as well. We have those in our pipeline as well.

We haven't made a shift. The pipeline remains the same, and our strategy remains the same as what we communicated.

It's both cash and non-cash companies that we're looking into. Then, as I always tell you, it all depends on meeting the seller expectations when it comes to price because obviously we want these acquisitions to be accretive to us, no?

No major shift, and yes, with focus on the international business as well.

Simon Jönsson

All right. In terms of price development, what have you seen here in recent quarters, or in 2025 in general, what did you see in terms of shifts?

Aritz Larrea

I think it's pretty stable. I talked about in the past that before COVID everybody had very high expectations, then after COVID those have come down.

As I told you, we need to meet the seller and us regarding the price, and prices are more or less stable. That has not changed either.

If you look into international, for example, obviously with such a strong quarters in international business companies, the price is higher, obviously. Due to that it's cyclical, we need to do the right analysis.

Simon Jönsson

All right. Thank you so much.

That's all for me.

Aritz Larrea

Thank you, Simon.

Operator

As a reminder, if you wish to register for questions, please press star and 1 on your telephone. Mr.

Larrea, there are no more questions registered at this time. I would like to turn the conference back over to you for any closing remarks.

Thank you.

Aritz Larrea

Thank you very much, all, for listening in, and please reach out if you have any follow-up questions. Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, the conference is now over. Thank you for choosing Chorus Call, and thank you for participating in the conference.

You may now disconnect your lines. Goodbye.