I’ve highlighted a few points I found relevant and interesting from the press conference and, at the bottom, from the Reuters article. My English is a bit rusty and my “investment English” even worse, so I’m relying on a machine translator.
I could have picked out many other points, such as interesting details about weapons, weapon systems, and orders, but I decided on this selection.
Micael Johansson - CEO
We had a very strong year, and we are now looking at our current market position, which generated nearly 78 billion SEK in orders.
And this is an order intake that isn’t based on so-called mega-deals. So it’s a lot of medium-sized orders and also small orders. And of course, we are also chasing large orders, but we aren’t building our entire future on them. So this is really strong.
Our organic growth was nearly 23% last year.
Operating profit grew more than revenue, which we have always said would happen, and it was 30%.
We have now received permission to establish a company in India and own 100% of that company ourselves—the first defense company to receive such permission. And this will be an important ammunition factory for the production of the Carl-Gustaf.
And of course, we have continued recruiting. We added a net total of 2,500 people to our company last year.
As I mentioned, we invested 1.3 billion SEK more than in '22, and we will continue making quite large investments over the next two years, at least in building up capacity.
Christian Luiga - CFO and Deputy CEO
We have a solid balance sheet. It looks very similar to last year’s. We also had net liquidity of about 2.3 billion SEK last year. So it feels like reporting on the same situation. Due to our financial stability and position, as well as our earnings growth, the board has proposed to the Annual General Meeting that the dividend be increased by 21% to 6.40 SEK, compared to last year’s 5.30 SEK.
Source: https://seekingalpha.com/
REUTERS
During early trading, shares hit an all-time high of 742 SEK, a 6.8% increase, before the stock leveled off slightly. The share value has more than tripled since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
For the 2023-2027 period, Saab raised its organic sales growth target to around 15%, up from the previous 10% target.
Agency Partners analyst Sash Tusa said the growth in defense demand appeared structural as European countries faced major defense spending requirements.
He added that the company appeared “really well-positioned for what we consider to be a likely decade-long defense build-up.”
Source: https://www.reuters.com/
