Mats Rahmstrom : I mean it’s not getting easier if you look into the future. You can see changing market conditions due to conflict, geopolitical scenarios. And of course, as everyone knows, there’s a lot of elections that could change a number of things as well. But we will do our best. And so this is the underlying activity level among our customer segments between Q4 and Q1. It is not including seasonality. So then if you believe that Q4 is normally a bit weaker than Q1, for example, then that is not including in the statement. And then we expect that the customer activity will remain on the current level as we see it. And we don’t see any major reasons at this point then we have the negatives with the conflicts around the world.
We, of course, expect transport cost to slightly go up. It’s a smaller cost for us, but it’s still there, not so much in this quarter, but we expect a little bit more next quarter. We see the trade barriers as well. At the same time, we see semi being flat, but we see more construction, more activity there, which we find positive, although we don’t see that in orders received just yet. And then as we try to promote to you, and you will see me more on the Capital Markets Day that our product portfolio generates a lot of activity among our customers with sustainability, with efficiency, and then keep pushing more launches on new products. So that also generates customer activity. Maybe just to highlight that last year in Q1, we had exceptional orders from gas and process.
And also, we had long lead times in Power Technique. So those, if you look at those bars for Q1, they were very exceptional for that, and that might be difficult to meet some of those going forward. And that’s why we stay then on the current levels. So we don’t see any exceptionally positive or we don’t see anything exceptionally negative going forward at this point among our customer segments. If you take one more slide, it’s May 16. That’s a good date to be in on-track. This is when we have the Capital Markets Day, and you will have the opportunity to get to know our new CEO as well, Vagner Rego on his home turf, and we will be focusing on CT, Compressor Technique and Power Technique and also Daniel [indiscernible] that it’s almost sold out already, and we have 100 seats.
So you better sign up as soon as possible if you like to join.
Peter Kinnart: Thank you, Mats. With that, we have come to the end of the presentation and our comments to the quarterly results for Q4 2023. With this, I would like to hand back to the operator. But before we do that, I would like to once again repeat that as the Q&A session starts, please stick to asking only one question at a time in order to make sure that all participants have an opportunity to raise their burning questions. First, when there’s time, there’s a second round for more follow-up questions, if you like. Thank you. With that, back to the operator.
Operator: [Operator Instructions] The next question comes from Daniela Costa from Goldman Sachs.
Daniela Costa: I’ll stick to one. So as you’ve commented you’re very happy with the organic drop-through you’ve seen. It’s been increasing also over recent quarters. Just wanted to check. As we look forward, do you see this as the normalized level? Or is it — do you think there are some elements we need to consider that might not mean this is a continuous level from here?
Peter Kinnart: Thank you, Daniela, for your question. I would say, of course, the drop-through is always varying a bit from quarter-to-quarter. It also depends, as you could see also this quarter very much from the comparison in this case, Q4 for ITBA and VTBA was a bit weaker a year ago. And of course, that also impacts the ultimately the drop-through in relative terms. Of course, I think there’s nothing on the radar that would indicate that we would not be able to — with good revenue development, continue to see a good drop-through. But whether it will be exactly on this high level is, of course, hard to assess depending also on the comparison for example, Q1 2023, we’ll need to see how that turns out. But of course, on average, over a longer period of time, when we look back, then we have seen drop-throughs of 30%, 35% roughly, and that is, of course, what we are aiming for to achieve.
We will see, of course, in Q1, if we are able with the development of the economy to repeat these very good drop-throughs.
Operator: The next question comes from Klas Bergelind from Citi.
Klas Bergelind : Mats, Klas from Citi. So my question is on Vacuum Technique. There is a bigger decline than I thought in equipment in semis when I adjust for the early cancellation that we had last year, if I compare versus the gross starting point. We know that you will likely see recovery later than some of your peers, but I’m interested to hear, Mats, if this is driven by earlier strong growth in China coming off where you have a strong position, whether there perhaps has been some got a pull forward of demand in China that you now start to see some slowdown. I’m interested in the regional development, that would be very useful.
Mats Rahmstrom: Yes. I think with some of the limitations that we’ve seen in the past quarters, I think the Chinese have tried to order as much as they could. It was softer in this quarter, as we said in the report, if that [indiscernible] that they see other limitations outside our own to get to the smaller notes, I’m not sure. On the other side, we know that I’m sure that bigger notes that they normally work in is 80%, 85% of what they do in China anyway. So I don’t have a full conclusion on that. And I cannot fully follow your — accept that it was strong in this time in North America, a little bit softer, but it was kind of flattish, and we have seen a flat scenario over a number of months now. So, no specific that stands out at this point.
Klas Bergelind : What I was trying to say Mats is, obviously, you had SEK 1 billion cancellation last year at the group level and majority of that was in VT. So if I sort of look from an underlying point of view, it looks like year-over-year, you’re coming down quite a bit. So that was my point. And I was wondering what was going on in China?
