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Securitas AB Interim Report January-September 2020 and reinstated dividend proposal

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JULY-SEPTEMBER 2020

  • Total sales MSEK 26 501 (28 214)
  • Organic sales growth 0 percent (4)
  • Operating income before amortization MSEK 1 327 (1 574)
  • Operating margin 5.0 percent (5.6)
  • Items affecting comparability (IAC) MSEK -112 (-60), relating to IS/IT transformation programs and the cost savings program in the Group
  • Earnings per share SEK 2.08 (2.56)
  • Earnings per share, before IAC, SEK 2.31 (2.68)
  • Cash flow from operating activities 199 percent (138)
  • Reinstated dividend proposal SEK 4.80 (4.40) per share to be resolved at an EGM in December

JANUARY-SEPTEMBER 2020

  • Total sales MSEK 81 477 (82 642)
  • Organic sales growth 0 percent (5)
  • Operating income before amortization MSEK 3 488 (4 241)
  • Operating margin 4.3 percent (5.1)
  • Items affecting comparability (IAC) MSEK -218 (-126), relating to ­IS­/­IT transformation programs and the cost savings program in the Group
  • Earnings per share SEK 5.18 (6.82)
  • Earnings per share, before IAC, SEK 5.63 (7.07)
  • Net debt/EBITDA 1.9 (2.5)
  • Cash flow from operating activities 163 percent (72)
  • Significant impact and uncertainty related to the corona pandemic

Comments from the President and CEO

The corona pandemic continued to have negative impact on the Group’s operations in the third quarter, but the overall business situation improved compared to the second quarter. The Group’s organic sales growth was 0 percent (4) in the quarter and 0 percent (5) for the first nine months, with all business segments improving during the quarter. The airport security business is still heavily impacted by the corona pandemic, with the largest negative impact in Security Services Europe. We have been able to offset some of the portfolio reductions with increased extra sales, helping our clients with their security needs related to the ­corona pandemic.

Security solutions and electronic security sales was 22 percent (21) of total Group sales. The installation business within electronic security is negatively impacted by the corona ­pandemic, but improved in the third quarter ­compared to the second quarter.

The Group’s operating margin was 5.0 percent (5.6) in the third quarter and 4.3 percent (5.1) in the first nine months, with all business segments behind last year mainly due to the corona pandemic. The operating ­margin was supported by cost saving actions and government grants but hampered by increased provisioning. The price and wage balance was on par in the first nine months.

The operating result, adjusted for changes in exchange rates, declined by 8 percent in the third quarter and by 15 percent in the first nine months. Earnings per share, before items affecting comparability, amounted to SEK 5.63 (7.07).

The Group delivered a strong cash flow in the first nine months, also when excluding the effects from corona-related government support measures. We have re-­initiated acquisition activities and in the third quarter we ­announced the strategically important acquisition of STANLEY Security’s electronic security businesses in five countries. The acquisition was closed on November 2.

In light of the improving financial performance and the solid financial position under a continued prudent approach, the Board of Directors has decided to reinstate the dividend proposal of SEK 4.80 (4.40) per share earlier withdrawn on April 28.

Preparing for a strong future

Although we experienced improvements in the general business environment in the third quarter compared to the second quarter, much uncertainty remains regarding the duration and long-term implications of the pandemic. We maintain focus on our four main priorities to handle the corona pandemic: the health and safety of our employees, ­delivery of our services to our ­clients and supporting their new needs, managing cash flow and cost.

In the second quarter we announced a cost savings program in the Group, addressing the profitability in parts of our business due to the corona pandemic. We have started to implement this program in the third quarter and restructuring costs of MSEK 59 were recognized as items affecting comparability. The first savings will start impacting in the fourth quarter and gradually increase thereafter. We earlier ­estimated a range of ­­restructuring costs of MSEK 350-500 with a payback period of 2 years. The final amount of restructuring will largely depend on changes related to govern­ment grants and the development of the airport security business. We expect to finalize the program at the end of the second quarter 2021.

Despite the challenging situation with the corona pandemic we maintain high focus on our transformation ­programs: the business transformation in Security Services North America and the global IS­/­IT ­trans­­formation. During the third ­quarter, we implemented an important part of the ­business transformation program in Security Services North America. The Securitas team has shown great strength and commitment through­out these difficult times with a strong focus on adapting to our ­clients’ needs. Our resilience, combined with our strong offering of ­protective services and solutions, gives us a ­competitive advantage also in ­­turbulent times.

Magnus Ahlqvist
President and CEO

PRESENTATION OF THE INTERIM REPORT

Analysts and media are invited to participate in a telephone conference on November 3, 2020, at 2:30 p.m. (CET) where President and CEO Magnus Ahlqvist and CFO Bart Adam will present the report and answer questions. The telephone conference will also be audio cast live via Securitas’ website. To participate in the telephone conference, please dial in five minutes prior to the start of the conference call:

US: + 1 631 913 1422

Sweden: + 46 8 566 426 51

UK: + 44 333 3000 804

Please use the following pin code for the telephone ­conference: 621 490 78#

To follow the audio cast of the telephone conference via the web, please follow the link www.securitas.com/investors/webcasts. A recorded version of the audio cast will be available at www.securitas.com/investors/webcasts after the ­telephone conference.

For Further Information, Please Contact:

Micaela Sjökvist,
Head of Investor Relations.  
+ 46 761167443

FINANCIAL INFORMATION CALENDAR

February 4, 2021, 8.00 a.m. (CET)    Full Year Report January-December 2020

May 5, 2021, app. 1.00 p.m. (CET)    Interim Report January-March 2021

May 5, 2021    Annual General Meeting 2021

July 29, 2021, app. 1.00 p.m. (CET)    Interim Report January-June 2021

October 29, 2021, app. 1.00 p.m. (CET)    Interim Report January-September 2021

For further information regarding Securitas IR activities, refer to www.securitas.com/investors/financial-calendar

Artificial Intelligence

$10 million Artificial Intelligence Mathematical Olympiad Prize appoints further advisory committee members

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D. Sculley, Kevin Buzzard, Leo de Moura, Lester Mackey and Peter J. Liu appointed to the advisory committee for the Artificial Intelligence Mathematical Olympiad Prize.
LONDON, April 26, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — XTX Markets’ newly created Artificial Intelligence Mathematical Olympiad Prize (‘AIMO Prize’) is a $10mn challenge fund designed to spur the creation of a publicly shared AI model capable of winning a gold medal in the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO).

XTX Markets is delighted to announce the appointment of five further advisory committee members. This group brings great expertise in machine learning, including D. Sculley, the CEO of Kaggle; Lester Mackey, a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and a Macarthur Fellow; and Peter J. Liu, a research scientist at Google DeepMind.
Prolific mathematicians Kevin Buzzard, who achieved a perfect score in the International Mathematical Olympiad, and Leo De Moura who is the Chief Architect for Lean, the automated reasoning tool, also join the advisory group.
They join the existing advisory committee members Terence Tao and Timothy Gowers, both winners of the Fields Medal, as well as Dan Roberts, Geoff Smith and Po-Shen Loh.
The AIMO Advisory Committee will support the development of the AIMO Prize, including advising on appropriate protocols and technical aspects, and designing the various competitions and prizes.
Simon Coyle, Head of Philanthropy at XTX Markets, commented:
“We are thrilled to complete the AIMO Advisory Committee with the appointments of D., Kevin, Leo, Lester and Peter. Together, they have enormous experience in machine learning and automated reasoning and are already bringing expertise and wisdom to the AIMO Prize. We look forward to announcing the winners of the AIMO’s first Progress Prize soon, and then publicly sharing the AI models to support the open and collaborative development of AI.”
Further information on the AIMO Prize
There will be a grand prize of $5mn for the first publicly shared AI model to enter an AIMO approved competition and perform at a standard equivalent to a gold medal in the IMO. There will also be a series of progress prizes, totalling up to $5mn, for publicly shared AI models that achieve key milestones towards the grand prize.
The first AIMO approved competition opened to participants in April 2024 on the Kaggle competition platform. The first progress prize focuses on problems pitched at junior and high-school level maths competitions. There is a total prize pot of $1.048m for the first progress prize, of which at least $254k will be awarded in July 2024, There will be a presentation of progress held in Bath, England in July 2024, as part of the 65th IMO.
For more information on the AIMO Prize visit: https://aimoprize.com/ or the competition page on Kaggle: https://www.kaggle.com/competitions/ai-mathematical-olympiad-prize/
Advisory Committee member profiles:
D. Sculley
D. is the CEO at Kaggle. Prior to joining Kaggle, he was a director at Google Brain, leading research teams working on robust, responsible, reliable and efficient ML and AI. In his career in ML, he has worked on nearly every aspect of machine learning, and has led both product and research teams including those on some of the most challenging business problems. Some of his well-known work involves ML technical debt, ML education, ML robustness, production-critical ML, and ML for scientific applications such as protein design.
Kevin Buzzard
Kevin a professor of pure mathematics at Imperial College London, specialising in algebraic number theory. As well as his research and teaching, he has a wide range of interests, including being Deputy Head of Pure Mathematics, Co-Director of a CDT and the department’s outreach champion. He is currently focusing on formal proof verification, including being an active participant in the Lean community. From October 2024, he will be leading a project to formalise a 21st century proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem. Before joining Imperial, some 20 years ago, he was a Junior Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge, where he had previously been named ‘Senior Wrangler’ (the highest scoring undergraduate mathematician). He was also a participant in the International Mathematical Olympiad, winning gold with a perfect score in 1987. He has been a visitor at the IAS in Princeton, a visiting lecturer at Harvard, has won several prizes both for research and teaching, and has given lectures all over the world.
Leo de Moura
Leo is a Senior Principal Applied Scientist in the Automated Reasoning Group at AWS. In his spare time, he dedicates himself to serving as the Chief Architect of the Lean FRO, a non-profit organization that he proudly co-founded alongside Sebastian Ullrich. He is also honoured to hold a position on the Board of Directors at the Lean FRO, where he actively contributes to its growth and development. Before joining AWS in 2023, he was a Senior Principal Researcher in the RiSE group at Microsoft Research, where he worked for 17 years starting in 2006. Prior to that, he worked as a Computer Scientist at SRI International. His research areas are automated reasoning, theorem proving, decision procedures, SAT and SMT. He is the main architect of several automated reasoning tools: Lean, Z3, Yices 1.0 and SAL. Leo’s work in automated reasoning has been acknowledged with a series of prestigious awards, including the CAV, Haifa, and Herbrand awards, as well as the Programming Languages Software Award by the ACM. Leo’s work has also been reported in the New York Times and many popular science magazines such as Wired, Quanta, and Nature News.
Lester Mackey
Lester Mackey is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, where he develops machine learning methods, models, and theory for large-scale learning tasks driven by applications from climate forecasting, healthcare, and the social good. Lester moved to Microsoft from Stanford University, where he was an assistant professor of Statistics and, by courtesy, of Computer Science. He earned his PhD in Computer Science and MA in Statistics from UC Berkeley and his BSE in Computer Science from Princeton University. He co-organized the second place team in the Netflix Prize competition for collaborative filtering; won the Prize4Life ALS disease progression prediction challenge; won prizes for temperature and precipitation forecasting in the yearlong real-time Subseasonal Climate Forecast Rodeo; and received best paper, outstanding paper, and best student paper awards from the ACM Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, and the International Conference on Machine Learning. He is a 2023 MacArthur Fellow, a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, an elected member of the COPSS Leadership Academy, and the recipient of the 2023 Ethel Newbold Prize.
Peter J. Liu
Peter J. Liu is a Research Scientist at Google DeepMind in the San Francisco Bay area, doing machine learning research with a specialisation in language models since 2015 starting in the Google Brain team. He has published and served as area chair in top machine learning and NLP conferences such as ICLR, ICML, NEURIPS, ACL and EMNLP. He also has extensive production experience, including launching the first deep learning model for Gmail Anti-Spam, and using neural network models to detect financial fraud for top banks. He has degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Toronto.
About XTX Markets:
XTX Markets is a leading financial technology firm which partners with counterparties, exchanges and e-trading venues globally to provide liquidity in the Equity, FX, Fixed Income and Commodity markets. XTX has over 200 employees based in London, Paris, New York, Mumbai, Yerevan and Singapore. XTX is consistently a top 5 liquidity provider globally in FX (Euromoney 2018-present) and is also the largest European equities (systematic internaliser) liquidity provider (Rosenblatt FY: 2020-2023).
The company’s corporate philanthropy focuses on STEM education and maximum impact giving (alongside an employee matching programme). Since 2017, XTX has donated over £100mn to charities and good causes, establishing it as a major donor in the UK and globally.
In a changing world XTX Markets is at the forefront of making financial markets fairer and more efficient for all.
 

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Artificial Intelligence

Hikvision redefines urban mobility with AIoT-powered solutions at Intertraffic 2024

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HANGZHOU, China, April 26, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — Hikvision made a significant appearance at Intertraffic Amsterdam, the leading global trade fair for mobility and traffic technology. At the trade event, Hikvision unveiled a suite of traffic, transport, and parking management solutions and products powered by Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) technology, which promised to improve urban mobility, road safety, and operational efficacy.

Elevating urban traffic intelligence with AIoT
One highlight of the Hikvision stand was its intelligent urban traffic solution, which leveraged the power of AIoT to deliver comprehensive real-time monitoring, incident detection, and traffic control. This solution intelligently reshapes traffic dynamics, offering a more responsive and data-driven approach to enhance situational awareness and traffic management. Key innovations in the solution included:
Hikvision’s radar-video fusion camerasThese combine the range perception of radar with the visual perception of video. The 4 MP Radar and Video Vehicle Detector, for example, helps to enhance road safety by providing early warning of potential hazards in challenging situations such as blind spots at intersections and obstacles outside the visual range.Hikvision’s All-In-One Traffic SpotterThis stands out with its multifaceted design incorporating video, radar, and lighting technologies for heightened traffic violation detection. Its streamlined column design facilitates effortless installation.Hikvision’s Radar-Linked PTZ Camera This ensures consistent performance in adverse weather and lightening conditions, and minimizes false alarms with advanced deep-learning algorithms.Innovating parking management
Hikvision also introduced its parking management solutions. These combine extremely precise license plate recognition and intelligent barrier controls incorporating highly accurate radar sensors. This comprehensive approach enhances security, reduces the need for manual intervention, and streamlines traffic flow across parking areas. The Global Shutter CMOS* (GMOS) ANPR camera was a new addition to the lineup. Designed to seamlessly blend in the environment, it is tailored for the task of discreetly capturing license plates at parking facilities that prioritize subtlety.
Advancing public transportation safety and efficiency
Attendees also had the opportunity to explore Hikvision’s latest public transport solutions, integrating AI-driven analytics with advanced video security, on-site voice broadcasting, and centralized management for enhanced onboard security, improved passenger experience, and operational efficiency for buses and taxis. This included the Four-way monitoring system and the Panoramic Auxiliary System, both designed to reduce blind spots and provide high-definition imaging to improve driving safety.
“As ever, we are continually expanding our suite of technologies to enhance traffic safety and efficiency,” said Nick Wu, Project Product Director at Hikvision Europe. “Our commitment lies in minimizing the need for extensive roadside installations by incorporating comprehensive perception and robust AI within unified device frameworks. These innovations automate and streamline every aspect of traffic management, from violation detection to traffic flow monitoring, driving safety, and parking management.”
To find out more about Hikvision’s urban mobility products and solutions, please explore its official website.
Note: CMOS stands for Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor.
Photo – https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2398456/Hikvision_redefines_urban_mobility_AIoT_powered_solutions_Intertraffic_2024.jpgPhoto – https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2398459/Hikvision_redefines_urban_mobility_AIoT_powered_solutions_Intertraffic_2024.jpg

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Artificial Intelligence

London Blockchain Conference Launches the No Future Campaign

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LONDON, April 26, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — The London Blockchain Conference is excited to announce the launch of its ground-breaking, ‘No Future Campaign’. This initiative aims to create a strong narrative surrounding blockchain technology by challenging perceptions and sparking conversations. By creating this platform, the campaign aims to instil a fear of missing out (FOMO) sensation among the audience, positioning the London Blockchain Conference as a gateway to securing a stake in the future and unlocking the potential of blockchain technology.

With a bold and evocative narrative theme, the campaign will initially confront the audience with a jarring reality check of “NO FUTURE” and then resolve the statement “WITHOUT BLOCKCHAIN” to spark curiosity and engagement with the optimistic revelation that blockchain holds the key to a prosperous future.
The ‘No Future Campaign’ started on 17 April 2024 with the London Blockchain Conference creating and executing content on/with media platforms and partnerships:
Wharf Life inserts (17/04/2024) – Print and a digital advert/editorial-sponsored pieces.Animations being released on paid and organic channels in a 3-week campaign.Alex Stein, Conference Director said, “The No Future Campaign is a call for individuals, enterprises, and governments to recognise the importance and role of blockchain in shaping the future. Through the London Blockchain Conference, we aim to educate and inspire attendees to understand and harness the potential of blockchain technology.”
The three-day London Blockchain Conference at the ExCel will bring together politicians, business leaders, and innovators. The conference will be running from 21 – 23 May 2024 and will focus on disruptive and real-world applications of blockchain technology and the impact it is having on politics, emerging technologies, and enterprises.
For more information about the ‘No Future campaign’, visit the London Blockchain Conference website.
About the London Blockchain Conference
NETWORK. LEARN. ENGAGE. 
 At the London Blockchain Conference, we show how Blockchain will change the world and help people see another way to manage data, build scalable on-chain solutions and achieve great things. We do this by creating valuable, insightful, and engaging events that educate and inform, allowing you to connect and network to build strong business relationships. Our conference is the best avenue to see blockchain innovations, ecosystem announcements, product launches, technology updates, keynote speeches, panels, and fireside chats from blockchain leaders. Join us and experience it for yourself. 
 
 

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