Atlas Copco AB (OTC:ATLKY) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Operator: The next question comes from James Moore from Redburn. Please go ahead.

James Moore: Maybe could I just have a clarification on something you said earlier. And then the question. Just on your order cancellations, the SEK1 billion, do you adjust your orders negatively to net down for the SEK1 billion cancellation? Or do you show your orders gross excluding that? That’s just a clarification. And then my question is, could you scale the impact on the margin in PT from the one-off spot buys and the obsolescence, please?

Peter Kinnart: Yes, James, I think a very relevant question. The orders that are canceled or recorded as negative orders received. So they reduced the number of the total value of the orders received and they are not excluded from that orders received numbers. Secondly, I’m not 100% sure what you mean with the second part of your question because in Power Technique, we also do have some of these effects just like in all the other business areas, in fact but they are not as prevalent and we don’t really have significant onetime items or one-offs in Power Technique.

James Moore: My apologies then. I thought it was in Power Technique which was the division that had the particular inventory adjustment, obsolescence adjustment?

Peter Kinnart: It was in the Industrial Technique.

James Moore: Could you scale that inventory adjustment impact as a percentage of revenues by any chance?

Peter Kinnart: I think for Industrial Technique, like I mentioned, we basically have done — as we do in many of our different organizations, we do, of course, typically in the course of Q4, a lot of stock takings in order to prepare also for our audit together with our auditors. And then we also recalculate our provisions for slow-moving items. In the case of Industrial Technique, across the different divisions, this was a little bit more significant than it was for the other BAs. And in ITBA was roughly somewhere around 1.5% of the Industrial Technique revenues for the quarter.

Operator: The next question comes from Rizk Maidi from Jefferies.

Rizk Maidi: A quick question on your pricing strategy. Correct me if I’m wrong but you seem to be intentionally reluctant to charge your customers from what you call nonstructural cost inflation, so that’s spot buy in inefficiencies in your own operations. Obviously, this question is relevant to Compressor Technique and Power Technique and not Vacuum and IT, where you have sort of a concentration of customers and sometimes this copy exact thing. So it just feels that you potentially leaving some pricing on the table. Please if you can have any clarification there.

Mats Rahmström: It might sound like that. But of course, we are trying to price all our products according to the value we generate for our customers. So we try our best to increase prices. But when we benchmark a little bit, we can see, you’re right with that, that there are a number of components pricing material prices that we successfully have compensated for. But then we have some other areas where it’s also difficult for our customers to accept a price increase. And obviously, these are things that the operational will arrange anyway, so we get back to the margin where we would like to be. But it’s not like we are not trying to increase our prices and we always try to price our product according to value. And the biggest opportunity for us is always the innovation, bringing new value, transforming the market to something new, this is why we can have a higher margin than most industrial companies.