Hello Everyone here at Incap forum! Thank you very much for the interest in Incap, excellent questions during the Q4 Webcast and the general activity here! Please find below summary of the Q&A:
Q: Incap has a good situation with regards to its balance sheet, so why are you taking a loan to pay for the Lacon acquisition?
A: We are now focusing very much on the integration of Lacon, but still, our growth is a story we are expecting to continue. Once we have successfully integrated Lacon, we expect to continue with the M&A track, and for that, we need firepower. This should be seen in the longer term and in a bigger picture.
We see this also from the perspective of risk management, and we want to be able to act on opportunities as they arise. For example, we have to be ready for immediate actions if our clients’ business would keep developing to a positive direction and our production volumes would rapidly go up. We must then be able to finance networking capital increases quickly. We saw in 2022, when India increased volumes with 100 million, that in these types of cases, the cash is needed immediately. It is preferable to remain flexible. If there are opportunities for inorganic growth through major acquisitions, again, time is money. The companies who can react fast and have solid financials in place are a credible buyer to the seller and other counterparties. In addition, there’s going to be loan amortisations coming up. We prefer to have some buffers rather than keeping it too lean.
Q: Are you able to give some colour on the organic growth part of the guidance and what is the foreign exchange rate impact in this clearly higher guidance?
A: With the announcement of the acquisition, we shared Lacon’s numbers showing their past performance, but we haven’t shared that detail in our outlook. We don’t speculate with the exchange rates. It is reflected in the latest development, and steering we gave is based on the current exchange rates.
Q: How does your order book look for the coming three to six months?
A: We are not reporting our order book separately, but we’re expecting growth both through the Lacon acquisition and generally. Our forecast is based on our actual order book and also on the firm forecasts of our customers.
Q: You have said that your defence exposure will be growing with the acquisition of Lacon. How much of your net sales will come from the defence sector?
A: Even with the acquisition of Lacon, our defence exposure is still not very big. We are not dominated by defence, and we think it’s very important to keep the business balanced. There is a big race currently on defence sector but it’s also important to think about the times after that. We expect our defence share to increase during this year and next year as many of our major defence customers are expecting to grow with different programs. Percentage is not that big currently, but it is expected to grow. We are still under 10% on the group level even if we include some expected defence customer growth for this year and Incap unit-level development programs.
Q: Could you elaborate on the expected revenue for 2026 and if there’s anything to comment on the different markets and their impact on your demand?
A: We are not reporting by sector, but we have mentioned defence before and current growth around data centres. There is some growth in other sectors as well but that is more on a company level. In general, we are quite positive with our expectations for this year, and we expect growth organically and inorganically. Overall, we think we will have positive development in many sectors.
Q: You mentioned that there have been some personnel reductions in Slovakia. What was the reason behind those reductions?
A: We discussed that also in the beginning of the year and mentioned that there were postponements of some customer projects. We are always balancing and trying to fit our capacity according to what is the demand for the moment. A part of being an EMS company is to increase and decrease capacity when needed, and in Slovakia we took down the capacity to match the demand. We do that in all units, and it can be increases or decreases.
Q: Could you give an overview of the growth in India?
A: India is developing very nicely. Inderes made some videos when they were visiting us in India, and we gave some examples of the projects that we have ongoing there with positive development. We have new big customer accounts in India that we are developing and ramping up as well as balancing out our largest customer that has its manufacturing in India as well. I wouldn’t say that our third factory is full yet, but there is a lot of activity.
. Profitability does, of course, fluctuate somewhat on a quarterly basis along with the mix, so one shouldn’t necessarily draw any broader conclusion from this other than that the company remains in top form. Cash flow for Q4 was also pleasingly strong, and the balance sheet is indeed very robust, even taking into account the already completed Lacon acquisition. To top it off, the most important part of the report—the guidance—matched expectations in its wording, so the starting point for the current year is looking quite promising.
