NOTE AB (publ) (NOTE) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

So welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the Capital Markets Day of NOTE 2024. With me today, I have Johannes Lind-Widestam. So the agenda is we'll do some presentations and a quick Q&A, try to get the questions from the audience at the end. So we'll present different sections here, has been prepared. So I'd like to hand over to Johannes.

Thank you very much. During today, we will also -- I will start, will give you a short update of the group then our performance. Then I will hand over to our Managing Director in our Norrtelje factory, Christoffer Skogh. And then we will have an update on the component market from our CPO, Cecilia Örn-Lindberg. And then I will go through the status where we stand against our long-term objectives, where we stand and how we foresee the more long-term future. And then we'll finish off with a full Q&A.

So asking you, Johannes, comments on the updated guidance from this morning.

Yes. What can I say? I think we are meeting our own expectations for the quarter. We believe that we will be above the SEK 1 billion. We see that when we are at that level, we also reach profitability that we have aimed for in many years, to be on double digits. So we expect to be over 10%. This is not so much more that the customer orders more, it's just that we see that they are not pushing out so many orders as they have in the -- that we have seen for the 3 first quarters of this year. So we see more of a harmonization between what the customers are expecting and what they take out. We still have pushouts from customers, but the level of it is lower and lower. Q3 was the quarter where we saw the most pushouts so far. So we believe that we have somewhat of -- how should I say, we have reached the bottom of this economy. That is our assumption as of now.

Yes. I'm really looking forward to having -- participating in this Capital Markets Day and so should we...

Let's get this on the road.

Yes.

Okay. So a short update from myself, current trading, then we have the factories and so on. I think many of you, a lot of familiar faces. So I will say that most of you have already -- are already aware of who we are. Some business facts. We always talk about last 12 months. Given the latest report, that means that this is Q4 '23 and the first 3 quarters of this year is the numbers we see. We are reaching -- or with this, we have -- we're trailing just below SEK 4 billion. With the latest guidance, we will reach SEK 3.9 billion, about that. So we are expecting Q4 to be slightly lower than last year. We are 1,450 employees. We were over 1,600 about a year ago. So we have had a quite drastic reduction of employees. That has been to adjust to the pace we are having. We can also say that most of the reductions of head count has been temporary staff. So we have not done any major layoffs. We did one in China in Q3 because we see that, that factory is producing on maybe 35% below the last couple of years. So we had to do some adjustments there. We have today 12 manufacturing sites. We have not done any acquisitions in 2024. We did 2 last year. We will see what happens in '25. Profitability, 9.3% for the last 12 months. The underlying is lower, this includes our currency deviations. So that's the 9.3%. Equity ratio, we are at 49%. You could argue that we are -- or that our balance sheet is becoming maybe too strong. I don't believe that, that is a word that I will ever use, but it's strong. It gives us a lot of flexibility. It has been really helpful in '22 and '23, especially when we saw the inventories going up. We did not suffer that we had any cash problems at those times. We saw peers that were struggling a lot. We did not do that. So it's very good to have a good - to have your finances in order. Yes, and we have been listed since 2004. If I look at the last, say, 5, 6 years, where you can see that the Swedish part of the group has increased in size. When I started, China was our biggest country when it comes to head count. We were -- maybe 40% of the staff were in China, now it's down to below 20%. And that is not that the site is smaller, it's that the other sites has outgrown it. We can also see that our sales is up with maybe 200% or so since 2018, but our head count is up with 40%. So that is the reason, as I see it, why we have managed to increase our profitability to the level where we are that we have managed to grow without adding head counts. But the price of that has been a quite heavy investment plan. When I call it heavy, we have invested somewhere between 2.5% and 3% per year. So it's not more than that, but it's still quite a significant investment pace. And that has helped us. We have -- last year, we had Torsby here, we were talking about automation. I think Torsby has grown with 5x in this years, 4.5 at least, and we have grown the staff. We've doubled it, but not more than that. So sites are really focusing on automation, gaining efficiencies and so on. So that's how we see it. You can always argue, why do we have 4 factories in Sweden? I would like to have more. I think we -- I mean, we have a market share in Sweden that is maybe 14%, 15% of the produced EMS. And if you then add the ODMs or the OEMs, we probably are down to maybe 10% of the market. We can easily be 20%, as I see it, without hitting any ceilings and so on. So there's a lot more to do here. We do our best. We grow quite nicely organically. This year, we will be slightly below flat, we will have a few percentage down. But over time, we have grown Sweden significantly and we expect that to continue. Estonia is some kind of a factory that is producing mainly for Finnish and Swedish customers, some European. Finland. We have only one factory there, but -- so the market share in Finland is significantly smaller than Sweden. Finnish EMS and Swedish EMS are quite similar in how they operate. We have the same kind of demands or expectations from customers. So 2 very similar markets, as I said. So we would like to be stronger in Finland. We have had discussions with several Finnish EMS companies. We have never reached an agreement of pricing and so on with the owners. So we have not acquired anything there so far. We will see where that ends up. U.K., we have 4 sites. We believe the U.K. is becoming more and more of a closed market. After Brexit, we see that import and export is getting lower in our industry. So we believe that to have a relevant place in U.K., we need to have several sites. U.K. is also a very geographically small market in the sense that customers tend to choose EMS that are close to their own facilities. So every year, we look at how many of our -- which percentage of our sales is coming to customers that are within 70 U.K. miles, meaning 100 kilometers, and that is over 90% of the sales is in that area. So even if we have sites around London, we never compete with each other because they're on different sites of London. So it's very narrow geographic areas is where we are addressing customers. That is just how the market works, and we have not been able to offset that in any way. Bulgaria, one of our latest acquisitions. It's a site where we are trying to position as a cost-efficient offset to China. We have several large quotes from this factory at the moment. We have not materialized any of them yet. We are growing with existing customers, but it's still a very small site. I think sales there are maybe in the range of EUR 5 million to EUR 6 million at the moment, and we have higher expectations of it. China, I think we do maybe SEK 350 million from the site at the moment. So it's a bit below 10% of the group. It was up to 30% of the sales in '17, '18. So it has reduced in relative size. It's important to know that we are -- even with a quite big drop this year in China, it's still at the same level as we were in 2018, '19 in sales from China. So we have not shrunk over the last 5 years. It is the rest of the group that have grown, and therefore, the relative size of China has been reduced. So that's how we see it. Chinese economy is, how shall I say, struggles. We see some, what you call it, light in the tunnel and we don't believe it's the train that is coming against us. We see some positive signs in China from a low level. So we believe that, that will also recover to some extent in 2025. We have also seen -- we were lower -- the last few months have been slightly higher than the month or the quarter before. So we see some positive signals there. But we're far behind from '22 and '23, which were our record years in China. So that's a bit about the group. I always talk about the EMS industry as such because I think it's so interesting. And why can we expect growth? We call it the early years. We believe the EMS industry was founded in '99. That was when we were founded, so we talk about it as the birth of this industry. But the industry as such were founded in maybe in the early '90s. We saw he big OEMs, Ericsson, Nokia, Dell, HP and all these big companies, were starting to divest their production units. And then big EMS players were founded like Flextronics, Solectron, Sanmina and some others in that time. And they were growing hundreds of percent every year. So the industry went from nothing to be a really big industry in like 5, 6 years. That trend, I think, stopped when the finance crisis occurred. Then we saw that a lot of the business were really struggling and they were over capacity. We saw a big trend towards China in those years. All volume products should go to China. What was left in Europe was basically the small-, medium-sized production. That's why NOTE has a strategy to be good in that kind of volumes. And we saw that growth organically, especially in Western Europe, was in -- even if the industry grew, the organic growth were not there. Everyone went to China. So the companies like NOTE and our peers, we were acquiring other businesses, but at the same time, we were losing on our business to China and to some extent Eastern Europe. So very, how should I say, turbulent first 10 years for NOTE and also for our peers. NOTE did quite well in the first years until 2006, '07 and then we hit the financial crisis. And then sales were down. We started to lose money. We had a lot of problems. And then we started what we call the rightsizing period, meaning that we were divesting. We were closing. We were adjusting our cost base to a level of, in NOTE's case, maybe SEK 1 billion sales roughly. And we were at that level until mid-2016, '17 and then we started to feel that we had the right size. We were starting to earn money. I think we did like 5%, 5.5% in '16 and '17 and then we started to increase some of the margin. And then we can see the trend that when we saw that we were -- the market was coming back, our finances were in shape, we started to acquire and we started to grow. And what we can also see is the big steep growth that we have seen from 2018 until '23. And this graph, it looks like the acquisitions were the trigger of it, but the acquisitions are standing for maybe 30% of the growth -- or 25% to 30%. So the rest is organically. We have from 2018 to 2023, we had an organic growth of maybe 20% annually and we did 23%, 24% of CAGR in those years. If you now compare to our last 5 years, CAGR is now 17%, including acquisitions and maybe 14% excluding. I will come back to that later. So even with this quite weak year, we're still seeing quite strong growth over time. And what we believe of the future is we try to project it, but it looks very steep growth. But if you look at the trend from 2019 to '23, it's even steeper. So it's not -- we don't see it as unrealistic. We see that, that is where we believe the market is heading. All the analysis of the industry still points out that we believe that it will grow with 6% to 7% annually even if we will have the slowdown that we see in '24. We also -- if we listen to the analysts of the industry, they talk about we delivered a growth of 24% in '22 and '23 where the industry was growing 10-plus percent in aggregated level per year. So you can talk a lot about that. But we believe that the industry will recover. We are in a cyclic environment. When the customers are reducing their sales, they are reducing their inventories significantly. We have, for example, as a group, from our peak, we have reduced inventory of more than SEK 300 million. So our suppliers are seeing if we have gone down with, what is it, SEK 250 million in '24, our purchases from our suppliers is down with 15% more. And we are -- they are the last resort of this trend. And we have seen the same reduction of inventory from our customers and from our customers' customers. So there's a long chain of that. Cecilia will talk a little bit about how the supply chain is looking in our industry. So a lot of things happen that we are not really seeing. So what we can say about the guidance of that we do today for next year, we simply are guiding from the reality where we stand and we see that the inventory reductions at our customers are getting lower. We still see it, but we believe that the pace of it is reducing. And then we will simply, how should I say, grow back to the level where our customers are selling. So we will be closer to our customer sales than we have been in '24. We talked about this inventory reduction in '23 when our first assumption were that it would phase out in Q1 '24. That has not happened. It has been dragging out forever, but the reason is basically that the industry where our customers' markets are still struggling, and therefore, the time it takes to bleed out overstock has been significantly longer than we expected. So therefore, we are still believing that our growth capacity is very high. The market will buy more. We believe that European EMS industry will grow more than the world EMS industry will do. Regionalization is very strong and Europe has outsourced a lot of our production to, especially China, and that is moving back.

One comment on this one is that it's clearly that you are doing the right things. That's the way you can interpret this, the graph.

I think we can do more. I think when we have these kind of years as this, I'm not at all pleased with the top line, but that is another story. I think we have more to do. But thank you.

Yes.

Moving on. What we do? We produce electronics. Our core business is assembly of PCBAs, as it's called. We buy the PCBs and then we assemble them. That is our core business. About half of our sales is board deliveries. The other half of our sales is box build. It can be complete products as we do for, for example, Plejd and Charge Amps. We do products. We pack them in their shipping boxes. And we -- in many cases, we distribute to their customers. We can also do semi-finished box build, meaning that we can put maybe 3 boards in a box and then we fit that box to a customer that inserts it into their end products. But in the content of the 50% that is box build or subassemblies, half of the value of that is still PCBAs. And this is a big change for -- or big differentiation from some of our peers that are having mechanical or sheet metal production in their facilities. Then they have -- these companies have a lot smaller PCBA content of their sales. So that's how we see it. And we do some development work or we do NPI, as we call it. The development we do is production development, is what we call it. We never develop a product for our customer. We can take their design and then we can improve it, so we make it producible. That's what we call NPI or design for manufacturing, but we don't develop products. And we are not that big enough to sales. We believe that our core business is production. We -- that's where we put the focus. We should have efficient factories. We connect the factories everything from receipt of goods and then we do automated warehouses. We often say they should go to Torsby to see a state-of-the-art factory where we have inventory automations. We have an auto towers. We have component towers. I think we have 40,000 real positions in our automatic towers in Torsby. So it's fantastic. And now we try to link all this together with also robots that will populate the alleys to transport the goods between the different places. So take a trip to Torsby for those that are interested and follow us. That's worth -- it's worth the trip, as I call it. Norrtelje as well, Christoffer, so don't get me wrong. But Torsby has more automation. So that is basically what we do. And we believe that you can either be good at design, you can be good at something, but we believe that we should be best in class in production. That is what we tell our customer and that's the message that we want to convey. And that's how we want to be measured on. And we do annual customer questionnaire, so we ask feedback and we see that our performance is quite highly appreciated by our customers. And we believe that our operational excellence, as we call it, is higher than our peers. We have higher delivery performance. We have lower quality deviations. And we're quite easy to work with. And we are quite flexible. And unfortunately, that has an impact of our guidance because we allow customers to move orders back and forth. And when it's reductions, that will push out orders and that will have an effect on the current quarters. And that has unfortunately meant that we have been forced to have negative guidance in some quarters in 2024. But that's the reality. I always say that it doesn't matter if we push out the volume in Q4 and then we are having a lousy Q1. In my opinion, it's better to balance out the workload, so we don't spend overtime to get the goods out in Q4 and then we have to lay off people in Q1, then divide the work. I mean, the work is not going to be higher because we push it out in 1 quarter. So it's better to be in somewhat of balancing this. But then again, that can have an effect on that we miss our guidance because that happens within the quarters normally. So that's one part to us. But when you look at NOTE, we should be high efficiency. We should be good in delivery performance. We should be good in quality. And we should be flexible and easy to work with. That's our core message to our customers. And then we don't talk so much about buzzwords, we try to deliver and help our customers to be successful. That, I think, is our core message. Moving on, current trading. Last 12 months, underlying operating profit, 8.8%. If I would add -- take away Q4 last year, we did 8.5% underlying. If we exchanged 8.5% to 10%, we will hit 9.2%. So we will almost hit the 2023 number in underlying operating profitability. When we look into 2025, it looks we are better balanced today. For those that follow us, we know that Q1 we reached 8.8% in underlying OP. We believe that we're better than that today. We're better balanced for the workload that we see today. So we are expecting us to have better operating profitability for next year. If we hit the higher level of our guidance, we will be on the higher level of the profitability. That's how we see it. And that's how you should read it. If we hit the numbers that at the lower end of the guidance, we will be on the lower end of the profitability guidance because it's very volume driven. I will come back to that later on in the presentation. Our segments, we can see that Western Europe, minus 2%. Rest of World, minus 18%. And we have some acquisition effects of this. So Western Europe, minus 5% organically. Rest of the World, 19% down. We see China is down with 26% and Estonia, 15%. If I look next year, Estonia will bounce back very nicely. China will be maybe 5% positive growth, but not more as we see it now. Western Europe will bounce back a little bit as we see it. We also see that the profitability is heavily dependent on volume. The volume drop in Rest of World has meant a quite significant drop in our operating profitability. Western Europe, we are maintaining our margin fairly good as we see it. So volume is of essence. I've talked about it ever since I started that. We need to grow, that is the enabler of increased profitability. Now we have worked a lot with our profitability from the cost side this year because that is then -- when you decline, you need to work with what you have. So it's a little bit of 2 things that we have done. We adjust the cost base, but at the same time, we invest in the future. I will come back to that. Segments. We have one very big segment, Industrial. It also includes our defense production. Defense will hit maybe 10% of the sales this year, and we expect it to increase next year and the years to come. Communication, heavily affected by the higher interest rates. We have seen that big pushout of the rollout of the 5G infrastructure. That was one of the reasons why they did not hit the numbers that we guided for in Q3, as you remember. Medtech, we had -- for those who remember, we had 100% growth last year in Medtech. So this is more of an adjustment to the level we are at. We expect Medtech to bounce back good. Greentech. For those that have followed us several years, if you remember, we were hitting 29% of our sales were Greentech. And I believe that the Greentech segment has suffered a lot in the last couple of years. The installations of EV charging boxes and so on, that is down maybe 50% from 2022 in the market. And we see that the -- at that time, everyone was expecting it to just continue to grow I would almost say forever, but for the foreseeable future. But then the reality hit them and many of these companies are struggling, and I see that some of the companies providing EV charging boxes are actually closing that down if they have other legs to stand on. So it will be a change in there. So Greentech, we still believe it's a very good area to be in. I don't expect it to bounce back to be 25-plus percent of our sales in the near future. I think it has -- a lot of changes has happened in this segment. And we believe that we will grow the segment from where we stand, but it's not going to be like 50% to 100% growth to come back to the levels we were at a few years ago. So that's what we see. But a steady stabilization of where we stand with some growth in Communication, Medtech and Industrial and marginal growth in Greentech is what we expect for next year. As I said before, Greentech is becoming at the level where it cannot decline anymore. I said it a few quarters, I don't -- I have to rephrase that. But it's getting at such low, so it -- I mean, it's becoming more or less marginalized if we decline even further, but I don't think so. We see some positive signals in the segment as well, but at a low level. My last slide until I hand it over to Christoffer. A tricky year, but we are investing a lot in the future. The expansion of our Torsby factory, we're doubling the capacity. We are building for the future. It's a really nice factory. It will become even nicer. It has become our largest factory. It's quite significantly the largest one this year. In 2023, Norrtelje was actually largely when it came to sales with a few percentage. We are moving to new premises in Lund. In Lund, we have our own -- or our rented factories, like 5,000 square meters. Now we're subleasing -- or we're leasing a short-term lease in the building next to us, well, roughly 3,000 square meters. So we need more and more space in Lund. It's not efficient to be in 2 different buildings and so on. So we believe that this will be a very good investment for the future. We see good growth in Lund. Lund has increased the production in the last 6 years from maybe SEK 60 million local production to SEK 400 million-plus this year. So a big increase in Lund, and we need now a bigger facility to produce that. We also purchased out our property in Herrljunga. We leased it when we acquired it and now we bought it out because we think that's a good thing to do. We have done a repurchase of shares, as we you mentioned -- or seen. It's one part of our way of trying to use our cash position in a wise way. We also introduced an incentive program last year. And that was -- if we will have doubled the size of it, it would have also been fully subscribed. So it was a high interest from all the leading managers in our team.

Which is a very good sign. And everyone believes it's actually what you're doing are right things. And this is a great sign on that as well.

Yes.

Poised for growth.

Yes. Yes. That was my last slide.

Yes. So I'd like to invite Christoffer Skogh, MD of Norrtelje, to stage to give a little bit on the status update and what you guys have been up to.

Yes. Thank you for that. So maybe I could introduce myself first. Christoffer Skogh, the Managing Director at NOTE Norrtelje. I've been in NOTE for many years. It's more than 2 decades now. So I actually started before NOTE was founded in a company called Norrtelje Electronik. So I don't know if we can call them an EMS company, but in that direction anyway. So just before that factory and some others, Torsby and so on, was creating the NOTE Group. So yes, so I've been in the EMS industry for quite some time. Moving on from me and to the factory in Norrtelje. Norrtelje, I think you're probably aware of that, is 1 hour with car north from here. So there, we have a facility of about 6,000 square meters for manufacturing. Quite a lot of complex manufacturing, a lot of box build and final product assembly. So in general, we could just say the facility in Norrtelje is a modern factory that has all the certificates, the processes, the routines that the modern EMS factory should have. On top of that, we are also quite strong in the Medtech area. We got ISO certificate for manufacturing Medtech in 2017 and I think that was a quite smart move. We will see this in next slide because we have been -- since then, we have grown a lot not only in Medtech, but in more segments. Overall, we are specialized in -- we have customers that have high demands in quality, in delivery precisions and not least a lot of planning and replanning. So we really need to have a setup in our organization and in our supplier base to be able to always adjust and adapt quickly. So overall, you could say, Norrtelje, we have a lot of customers in all those segments that Johannes presented before. But I would say we are a little bit heavier in Medtech area and also in -- has been in the Greentech area.

Now I got the opportunity to meet Norrtelje site some 20 years ago, and I've seen the enormous improvement you guys have made. Super professional people. Everything you do is super close to the customer, and it's really impressive to see that. So I can, from an outside, confirm that it's an impressive journey.

Yes. Thank you. I've been -- maybe it's not only me, but I have been there a long time. Okay. Moving on to -- I think this diagram is quite interesting. You could see it from different angles. But to start here, I could say, since 2017, I was referring to that a while ago, we have had a, maybe I should say, significant growth in actually in all segments. Not only 1 or 2 customers in those segments, it's several customers in every segment that we have been growing quite heavily in. Recent years, we increased even more in the Medtech area that was Johannes was referring to. 2022, 2023 was a major increase in that area and not least in the Greentech area like EV chargers and smart batteries and so on. The demand from the market there was super strong. But then something happened in -- as you can see in 2024. We have some major drops in -- especially in the Greentech area with 2 of our largest customers. We had a run rate of about SEK 200 million, both in 2022 and 2023. Went down to about SEK 50 million. So that's about half the drop of our turnover. And then you could say we had -- the rest of the drop is quite evenly splitted in Industry and Communication and somewhat in Medtech. We haven't lost any customers. We have just -- I see it as just a bump in the road. So I'm really comfortable going forward. You could -- I would say I have poor forecasting there. Rapid changes. Maybe I could say in the Greentech area, I think we have to know that a lot of customers there are quite immature. It's a young segment. It's a new segment. And yes, the customers -- a lot of those customers are more or less startup companies that hasn't been around that long. So it's a lot of communication, a lot of work there together with them to help them understand what we can do, what we cannot do and so on. And sometimes we succeed better to help them understand how we should do than other times. Then again, there was something happening in 2024 with high interests and also the electricity bills were going sky high. I think they are again now. So the consumers -- I mean EV chargers and smart batteries is a little bit, you can say, a consumer product. So they were not receiving any orders yet any longer, more or less. So they were adopting, they were reducing. I mean, they have high stocks, high warehousing, both at themselves. We had it and also at the distributors. So yes, that was a heavy drop in several steps actually with those customers. So we were adapting once. We were adapting twice and so on to -- yes.

But even for the Volkswagens of the world, they were surprised for this market change as well. So there's a consensus in the market for that side. So I think what -- yes, there's a drop, but still you managed to adapt to a quite drastic reduction in sales. So all this...

Yes. Yes, I'm actually quite proud that we have managed to been able to adjust in the way that we have done it. We're still keeping, like Johannes said, of course, some hit in the profit, for sure. But I think many companies should have been showing red numbers. We have still quite good profit in Norrtelje. So we have just been adapting in numbers of people and definitely in the warehousing. And I think Johannes was referring to that earlier as well. It takes some time, but we are there now. So you need to have ability and commitment in your mid-management, in your organization and not least the suppliers. So I'm really happy to see that NOTE have really succeeded in having the right sourcing team with dedicated personnel that has also, together in communication with the sales team and also, of course, the customers, to pick the right suppliers that fits us, that are able to quickly adjust when we need to. So they have supported us tremendously. And I don't think many of our competitors has it that way. I should say I'm always convinced that they don't have that kind of partnership all the way that we have because, otherwise, we hadn't done this as good as we have done. Going forward, I'm really comfortable with the future. We don't need to invent anything more or anything super special. We have a concept that is working. As I said before, we haven't any loss in customer base. We have just a small reduction or had a reduction in Greentech and -- but it will come back. And what I can see now is that Medtech it has been stabilized now, but that will increase. Why I'm also very comfortable with the future is because I used the word COVID hangover here. I don't know if that's a widely spread word, and maybe it's better said it's a release of the hangover, you know the feeling. I mean, when we had this COVID in 2021 and so on, a lot of customers were really afraid of investing in new projects, in research and development. So they save the money and waited to see what will happen in the world. It was not only the COVID. It was the component crisis market, I think you have heard about as well. And yes, a different crisis that we have survived quite well, too. I mean, the COVID was -- you can see we had a significantly increase in COVID and that was mainly because -- not only, but mainly because of Medtech. So those customers were increasing. And you can take that example today. Today, security and defense customers is increasing heavily, and we are on them. So I could see that the COVID hangover is kind of released now. We have a lot of new projects working with both existing customers and new customers. That will not be a significantly higher turnover for next year in those projects because it takes time. Some of them take 6 months, some of them take 2 years. But why I'm comfortable is that I'm totally assured when the project are ready, the prototypes is done, the customer is ready with his or her research, we will have an increase of that business. And we're just more or less totally sure of it. The thing is just it's hard to predict when it will arise. Maybe I didn't mention that in the slide before. We also have a clean room assembly in Norrtelje. That's a little bit, I don't know if I should say, odd or unusual, maybe unusual is a better word in the EMS industry. So we have a really capable clean room for micro assembling of microelectronics. And that has maybe a little bit uncertainty, but definitely a strong potential to be something in the future. I think it was like 7 years ago, about that, we started. We had like 2 people in that room. Today, I have more than 30. So we're working in shifts and so on. Not many of our closest competitors doesn't have this, not in this level. So that's also a segment you can increase in. That is also in the - for Norrtelje, that it's mainly in the Medtech segment. So we have survived. We have adapt. We have an organization to handle this kind of rapid changes. For me, it's not a big difference of adapting when you increase the business or if you decrease the business. It's more or less the same principles and the same things you are doing there. Okay, it's more fun for everyone if you increase. I think we can agree on that, but it's -- anyway, it's more or less the same work you have to do. Maybe you have to be a little bit closer to your organization and your people, too, yes, put some extra oil in the machinery or something. So...

Super impressive, Christoffer. So a question to you, Johannes. So what do you believe in the Greentech segment? Will it come back to historical levels again? As this now says there's 2 largest Greentech customers. So it's very isolated to very few customer accounts that caused this. What's your opinion?

We believe that the Greentech segment will come back to some extent. We are -- the levers that we saw on especially these 2 customers in '22 and '23, maybe not in the near future, but I believe the Greentech segment will change or evolve. it's going to be other products that will take the lead in the growth. I think it's an area, and you can argue, should we be in it or not? I believe we need to be there because here's a lot of innovation is going to come. It's going to be a lot of growth when these companies are reaching what they expect. The trick for us is to have a business model where we are not taking on too much risk in this case. So we are working with the customers where they have to finance their own investments, so to say. Then it's a quite a good thing to do because then you don't need to understand how good these companies will perform. If we only risk our own time, then that is a risk we are prepared to take. But we need to be. Otherwise, we will lose on the ones that we will be winning, 1 out of 5 we'll be winning, and the rest -- a few more will survive and 1 or 2 will die, so to say. That's what we have learned. But definitely, we need to be here, but I don't expect it to be bouncing back in '25 in good levels. But some growth, I expect.

Yes. No, it's interesting. No it's -- so thank you, Christoffer. Very insightful presentation. So with an applause, I need you off the stage.

Thank you.

And then inviting to Cecilia on board to showcase now, as Johannes and Christoffer said, referring to you now for the dedicated supply chain and the purchasing organization. You guys are doing a great job there. So tell me more.

Thank you. Thank you for the presentation. So my name is Cecilia Orn-Lindberg, and I'm the CPO at NOTE. And I'm happy to give you some more insight about the electronic market in the next couple of minutes. So maybe all of you have been reading about in the newspapers or watching in the TV about there's been a constrained situation in the market, supply of electronics components during 2020 until 2023. I will give you some more insight what is the reason behind and what can we do in order to mitigate that going forward. I will also go through the availability or the status of the electronics component today, how we see it from NOTE component. But first of all, I will start to explain what is the electronic component market and what is the component driving that behind. So if you start to look at the picture in the down left corner, you see a cut of a PC there, printed circuit board assembly. This is the heart of what NOTE are doing. Those boards are included in all our products. And also in your homes, you have those small boards, bigger boards mounted in your end products. But you also can see on this picture is that it's a lot of different components, different sizes, different costs. They are cheaper and they are more expensive. But the most important thing is that when we produce our board, we need to have each and single of those components delivered to our facilities in time. And NOTE, I think we have 40,000 unique components in our all sites. On one board, maybe we have around 500. So that make us understand that it's quite complex supply those components. I try to visualize this. If you look in the upper corner, there you see the supply chain. What we will focus on right now is the manufacturers that are producing the components and also the distributors or suppliers that we buy these components from. During a constrained situation, it tends to end up in stock level on each and every part in the supply chain, which also build up a lot of stock. So what has happened the last year? Since like June 2023, the lead times have started to decline again. And I think now for the first time, we have lead times back to normal levels. And that also means that we have a better, from a customer perspective, availability to place orders on a shorter term. But that also means that we just have visibility for 1 or 2 quarters ahead. When we have this really constrained situation earlier, we had -- we forced the customer to maybe place an order for 12 months ahead and that made it easy for us to build up capacity and also inform our manufacturer how much we need going forward. With that said, now when we just have visibility of 1 or 2 quarters ahead, it makes it more vulnerable from one perspective because we don't see so far ahead, but it's also making more sufficient supply chain. What more to say about the electronic market today? We are back also from a delivery perspective. On-time delivery are back to normal levels, which is perfect. I think we have now 95%. I would be happy if we are at 98%. So we will continue to force up that. We have a really -- we've seen a lot happening on supply chain or the suppliers are getting back to the better delivery precision. We also see that the electronic market will start to recover during next year. We see already now small signals in the order book where there will be an upturn. And I would like to give you also some bigger perspective about what is the driving factors. Now we have also bigger geopolitical tensions in the world, which are the tariffs, the trade wars, et cetera, that, of course, will have an impact. Many of our customers ask us, can you have some local production? Can you supply in another way? All this kind of requests we constantly like absorb and try to make the best setup for each and every customer. We also try to have and see what is the possibilities to go down to the right cost levels again because what happened during the pandemic was that the prices were boosted when we didn't able to supply from one part or one channel, the customer ask us to place on different channels, which also made us get an overstock of components. And during 2024, I think Johannes mentioned it already, we tried to like reduce the stock level. That means that we also, from a supply perspective, have placed a lot of -- less material to our supply this year than compared with the year before. I will go to this slide because this is actually what is a quite interesting slide, if I can say it myself. Here, you can see exponential curve and it's reflecting the ship -- amount of shipment. And that is quite -- when you look at this, it's a quite huge trend that we need more and more electronic components. And all our products going forward are included. They included PCBAs and also electronic components. What you also can see on this curve, you see smaller ups and downturns in the curve. If you were -- that were working in the telecom industry, maybe around 1999, around 2000, there was the IT blooming. Then we had WCDMA on the market, we needed to change the kind of shipment and then suddenly we have this constrained situation, right? And then you see it turns up and then a smaller dip down again. Why those small changes in the curve happens is mainly because we don't have the capacity enough at the manufacturers. So we need to give some kind of signal so they know when to do the build-out. We can also see 2009 here. I don't know if you or someone you remember here, but then we had the financial crisis in U.S. The build market was boosted and then suddenly some investment banking got bankruptcy that we can also see on the curve in this. Then you have the bigger curve you further you go. So 2019, you have the trade war starting to have some boundaries between different regions. Then you also see there's an increased demand, you start to supply, then you don't have the capacity and they go down again. So yes, maybe...

No, because I'm adding to this question here. I also see another trend here that you have the WCDMA, the telecom crisis. 2007, the introduction of iPhone. You have, 2015, iPads and everything coming to fruition. And you have the buildup of the green energy. And then now you have the AI and that consumption of chip. So what's your expectation? Will the fluctuation increase or decrease in the future? What -- best guess?

I mean, my best guess is that we will continue to follow the curve, but I think it will be deeper and steeper curves depending. If we ask the manufacturer that we're actually quite close to, they think it be an even steeper curve up again like the same level as it down now, up again within 2 years.

From my perspective, looking into this as well and seeing your capabilities as a supplier, this -- as you're working so close with your customers and your partners that supplies parts to, I think, once again, you've proven once again that you're capable of coping with this fluctuation really, really well. So the fluctuations, are they driven mostly by external disruptions? Or do you see any technology shifts? Or is it -- what do you think will drive it?

Yes. It's a really good question. And what you can do, you can look in the history and then you can try to predict what is coming in the future, right? And in all these like curves, we realize we need to be really quick footed. You need to be flexible. You need to understand what is happening in the market and how can you adapt to that. With that said, I think it's not easy to predict what will come. I know for sure, the AI will explode, for sure, also the environmental cars -- sorry, the EV cars, et cetera. So we will have a steeper curve up. Then how the buildup of the capacity, I hope it goes in line because I think many of the manufacturers out there are doing that, but I think it's also a matter of how quick you absorb the new information and work with your supply chain.

Yes, and customers.

And customers.

And then also you have the regionalization of semiconductor now moving to the U.S., coming back to Europe. So there's also a shift there. So the only thing that's hard to predict is the future, that's what you're saying. But you're well positioned for it and dialogue with the customers as well, so...

And I mean, a little bit based on this, we do all the investment in the company. I think it's super important to understand that our global world are going to more and more electrification and notice an important part doing the PCBA for that. So then it's a matter of which customer we have.

Yes. No, this is for the electronics industry itself, this is the growth curve. This is what will happen. So super interesting.

Yes. That was actually what I wanted to say or share. Maybe you have some questions in the audience? I'm happy to...

So yes -- coming back to you, Johannes. So thank you, Cecilia, for your presentation. Bringing Johannes back on stage again. So aware of time as well. So about the company's performance and strategy, Johannes. So you experienced strong growth in recent years. What do you believe are the key factors behind the success? What's brought you to this position that you're in right now?

I often referred -- I think I said a few things, but I think 2 things that we are missing, speed and flexibility is very important. We run a decentralized organization, and we want to make decisions fast out in our factories. And I think we differentiate ourselves a little bit in that. So we -- I call it push down decision-making into the factory. So it's quite easy to be a Managing Director in our factories because you have a lot of, how should I say, power to maneuver, as I call it. And I have a very -- I think I have a very strong Board, a very, very, very capable Board that is allowing us to make decisions out in the management team. And that is very good for us. We can be much faster than many of our peers. I also believe that we have a quite a small head office where we only focus on a few things. Sourcing is one. And the rest of the decision is made out in the factories. We don't have any global account teams where we try to control our big customers that is done out in the factories where all the, what I call, action is happening. So I think that is our key for meeting these constraints.

And if you share some key initiatives and projects in the past years that you're particularly proud of, what would you highlight?

I would say that the most -- what makes me more proud is that we can say in a year that has been this problematic that we will be back on a double-digit profitability in the fourth quarter. I think that's very impressive. That is something that I thought we could do, but it was not a given, as I see it. I think that has taken a lot of time, a lot of work, and I call it a lot of work, but it's -- Christoffer and Karin and the team out there that is doing it. We only, what do you call it, we encouraged to make the job and we were trying to help them out in our factories to do it. But that, to me, is the most -- the thing that I'm most proud of. You can always talk about customer wins and some other things, but that's -- the trickiest part is what makes you proud of, if I can call it, and this has been tricky.

Yes. No. And future and outlook here. And I think how do you ensure that you remain competitive in the global market? Great segue to the future and outlook on as well.

I can't give away all of our tricks. But what I think is important is still to be resilient, listen to what customer wants, deliver what they expect. I think -- I come back to it every time I present, operational performance is to me the key message. If we deliver what the customer wants, if we deliver that on time with high quality and we also allow flexibility, then we become very easy to work with. We also have strong teams for industrialization, which is very important. And that is also a real important thing for our customers. So again, our performance. Then I think we're easy to work with. I'm always available for customer meetings. Our managing directors is available for that. We have the team at the head office is also working a lot with it. Cecilia's team also heavily involved in a lot of customer dialogues. That is what makes us strong. We're not hiding behind our desks. We're out facing the world and try to become better. So that, I think, is our -- is the reason why we are...

Every time I call you, you're out on a flight or a factory floor somewhere or meeting a customer. So that's -- I can concur to that one. So it's super impressive. No, yes.

Yes. Continuing?

Yes, please.

Until last year -- I love this picture. The last year has been a little bit problematic. I will call it -- we will call this a bump in the road in a few years, but it's a big bump and it was something that we thought that we could cope with the inventory reductions and the slowdown in a better way. But we have suffered as everyone else, as I call it. We might have suffered less. When we summarize the EMS industry, I would say that it will have a lower decline than our reporting peers. So I think that we have coped a little bit better, but that stands for me. What we also see is that going forward, what will happen? I think that if we look at -- we often forget one part in that steep growth we had in '21 and '22 and so on. We also informed that we see that the spot buys where we pay an extraordinary high price for components, that is part of our sales in '22 and '23. And that part is completely gone. We sold that without profit or without margin. Some of our repairs added margins on it. But that is part of our reduction. I mean, half the reduction is price on components, half is volume. So the reduction is less big when it comes to volume. And that is also one reason why we managed to keep our profitability higher because the content on the lost material price sales is very small, but that's part. So I think that this is -- we still believe that we are in a growing market. And I like the trend curve that Cecilia showed, that's not us. That's not Europe. That's not -- that is sales of semiconductors in billions per month, and the curve is pointing quite steep upwards. And you can also argue, why does -- it looks very small in the shift from the center line or from the growth line. How can that create a shortage that were so severe that we had like up to 6 months to get a car delivered? And when you've got your car, you didn't get your GPS system. You had that upgraded when they got components and so on. That was very -- it's also a very unusual situation. But I think we will come back to hit the trend then because that is however one foresees this. But it's interesting. But I will come back to this. But for me, it's important to say when I look at 2025, it's -- you have a view of what it will happen. And then you have your customers' expectation, what they talk about. Then we have, so to say, navigate between what are they expecting, where do we expect the inventory reduction sitting, what will happen if we get them -- if we get an interest rate that will be pushed down another percentage in Sweden and in Europe, how will that affect our customers' demands? I think that will be quite strong. We don't anticipate that. We are just saying, okay, this is what we see now and we look forward with the pace we're seeing. So if we go back to like the '22 and '23 -- if we look at '21, that is a very interesting year to look at. We came in it from some kind of post initial COVID problem. We were declining maybe 3% in second half. We had a full year with 6% or 7% growth. Then in '21, I think we had like 7% growth in Q1, 20-something in Q2, 16% in Q3 and 75% or 78% in Q4. I don't expect that to happen. But what I'm trying to show is that it can go very fast from this low speed of economy into a high speed of economy. So my expectations is that '25 will not fall out as we plan. It will be deviations. I think that we are -- we know that we have been hitting most of our customers' bottom in terms of inventory reductions. So we would -- so small positive things in the market will create quite drastic increases in demand, not only for us, but for our peers. So it goes fast because we should also know that the customers' inventory levels are at a very, very low level at the moment. So if the market starts to increase, they will start to build inventory and that will add to their sales. So I'm talking about that we should -- that we need to get our sales to match our customer sales, and that will happen when the inventories is in balance. But when they start to grow, they will start to grow their inventories and also their channel, as Cecilia described, where the customer and the customers' customers are starting to increase. So it's very, very tricky to predict, but we take our cautious view of the future by looking at what we see today, not -- we don't price in any improvement on the market, as I call it. So that's what we -- how we should read this. So when we look at the future, it's -- yes, we still believe that the market will bounce back and then we are expecting us to hit our financial targets. We pushed out the targets from '27 to '28 earlier this fall, but we still believe we will reach there. We see '24, as what I often refer to, as a lost year in terms of sales growth. But it's not lost in any other way because we have built the group stronger. And that, I think, is very important to keep in mind. So our financial targets remain as is. We believe that the future looks very interesting. And we are expecting the years to come to be fairly strong. I often call NOTE that we are working on a growth strategy. What do we mean with that? I think the important message that we keep -- should keep in mind here is that if we don't grow, our ability to increase our profitability is quite low. Because I need -- I believe that growth will enable us to utilize our fixed assets in a better way, our fixed cost base and so on. And that, we have seen. When I started in 2018, we started to follow what we call a fall-through target. Any additional sales should add 15% of the sales value to our bottom line. And we have reached that level. We are on that level. So we see that this, how should I say, the formula works in a way. And if you then extrapolate on that and say, okay, if we double in size with -- and then we should add the double sales and we add 15% profit on that, then we will continue to increase our operating profit margin. And I think that is where we see. So we invest a lot in how do we ensure that we get there, our share of wallet on our existing customers to increase. It sounds very easy. It's very simplistically put that we should grow with our existing customers. I mean we have ABB. We have Atlas Copco. These are enormous companies. Why can't we get more of them? That's because everyone else wants to get more of them as well. So it's not only us that wants to do this, this is what everyone wants to do. So we have to convince them by our performance that we are the supplier to choose. And we are quite successful in this. And over the years when I've been here, I think that maybe 55% to 60% of our sales has came from our existing customer base. So we are growing more on the existing even though we think that our new customers are also important because we're not -- we cannot satisfy our growth ambitions with only 1 out of these 2. So both has to be fully aligned and be strong. So we constantly see how can we improve our processes to become even better in this. How can we be better in quoting? How can we get better costs out of Cecilia's team? And how can we convince our customers that we are the player or the provider that they need for their success? And we work a lot on this. And I think that I've often said that when I get calls from our customers, CEOs asking, can we have a Board meeting at your facilities? Then I know, okay, then we have done something good because then we know that they are proud of us as their supplier or as their manufacturing partner. So we want to be that good towards our customers that they want to bring their management or their customers to visit us. That's when we know that we have a position that we will never be challenged on. Never is a strong word, but it's easier for us to retain those customers. So that is the level that we always aim for. And we also continue to invest in our facilities to be more efficient. And I think that is something that we are quite unique on, that we are driving the efficiencies through investments. We often exchange our equipment to get better utilization or better output from the existing machines. If we take a new SMD line and compare that to a 15-year-old, it often takes maybe 40% less staff to run it and we get twice the volume out of it to have some kind of equation. But it cost you SEK 20 million to buy. So you can argue you need to have quite good volumes to offset the higher depreciation. But if you have that, it's a fantastic calculation behind it. The way we do this, and we have a good team out there that can handle those investments, that can analyze what is best for their factories and how can we become even better. And we often talk about SMD because it's a very simply -- or a very harmonized process, then everything else we do in the factory is as important. Coating. I don't know how many different coating substances we have in Torsby. I would guess it's 10-plus or something because every customer has their own. How can we have machines that can handle all these variations and do a seamless setup between them without having machines sending still. Those kind of things is what drives efficiency.

But also, as was mentioned before, you guys are the manufacturing experts of your customers and the value that you provide goes in line with that. So I think you're required to have this amount of technologies because in order to enable the customer to actually get the product that they need, want and require. So I think it's super impressive to see that in the journey.

But I believe that if the industry, we talk about 6% to 7% growth in the European EMS over time, we have an ambition to grow twice as fast as that. We have proven that we can do it. Also including this year, we are still reaching far better than the industry. So we believe that this can be done. What we haven't talked so much about the last years is acquisitions. And I would like to mention a few things about that. In '23, we acquired 2 sites. We would have liked to acquire sites in '24. You can say the augmentation with the selling partners in this equation, they were very much looking at '23 as their expectations from sales price, the multiples on '23 and we saw that '24 was going down. So everyone was trying to exclude '24 in their own valuation of the company. So we had a bit of a delta between what we thought the factories was worth and what the sellers wanted to get out. So we took a very cautious view of this and did not engage in so many cases. The ones we engage in we didn't reach an alignment on pricing. I think when '24 is closed, it's a year you cannot neglect. Then I think the deviations between expectation from sellers and what we are prepared to pay is going to be significantly more aligned. So we will look more, how should I say, more thoroughly into this concept. Again, balance sheet is also very strong. We probably have several hundreds of million that we can spend of acquisitions, if needed, and if the Board sees that.

But on that topic, do you expect that you'll widen your offering with, for example, product development or sheet metal production? There were some competitors that made a sheet metal acquisition the other day. So do you see that as a way forward to widen the offering? Or...

I will never say never, but I think that, that is not the best way of going. It's very hard to have -- I mean, if you have half year sales is sheet metal manufacturing, half is PCBA manufacturing and box build, you will all see that these 2 legs are very, really walking in balance. And when I was at Flextronics some 20 years ago, we tried to do this and we always realized that it didn't matter how many injection molding machines we bought, there were always one d*** machine we missed to be competitive. So we invested a lot of money into this. You should also know that producing sheet metal, if you outgrow your equipment and need to invest for growth, you get a lot -- you spend a lot of money for every SEK 100 million you grow. I think it's a 10x delta between EMS growth and -- or electronic growth and sheet metal growth when it comes to investments. So it's very investment heavy to grow in cutting and turning machinery equipment. So I think that is, to me, a signal for staying where we are. And I also believe that if you look at the last, I'd say, 5, 6, 7 years, we have proven that the pure EMS and source in the component that -- or the plastic and the sheet metal and so on, that is a business concept that works. You don't necessarily get better margins just because you have more in the group. We have strong suppliers. We work a lot in how we develop our supplier base. So I believe that we should not move out of this. Development is another story. When I was at Kitron some years ago, we closed down a lot of our development sites because we tend to never have the right competence for the work we gain. And I think Kitron is not -- do you know that, Egil, do they run and development part now or no?

[indiscernible]

Yes. And that's what -- that's -- so -- but if you go into Germany, I mean we will get it for -- because that's the concept that the German market is working on. So then we would need it. So it's a bit of a mix of where we go.

Now I've got a question here from the audience on the web, someone from [ Texas Instruments, Ana Water ]. He said, you shared 2% of your revenue comes from services. Can you comment on the forward-looking strategy for services NOTE offers, which goes in line with that development work. But also at the same time, you are providing an extreme amount of value to your customers with your manufacturing know-how as well. So...

I would say that it will probably -- the relation between volume manufacturing and NPI or services and so on will probably remain fairly much in the same way. We -- as we grow, we will have more sales in that area, but at the same time, we will increase our base business. So it's -- for me, it's not a target to have more services. It's not an objective to have less. We think this is -- we have the service part of the sales that is something where we try to help our customers to design better products and for us to become better as a supplier. So...

Which is the value -- one of the greatest values of NOTE as well. Super impressive.

So with this said, we will continue to focus on our 3 avenues to growth. We will see which one that will have the most significant impact in 2025. But we are working actively in all 3 areas and they need to be -- if we are to continue to outgrow the market, we need to be good in all areas. I always say that acquisitions, we should not use that as an enabler to hit our growth numbers, but it will be a part of our total growth over time. We will only acquire things that we think add value to the business. That is very important to say. This is how we project the coming years. We put in for 2025, some kind of, what you call it, some placeholder, which is in the mid of our guidance. As I said before, guidance of 2025 is a bit tricky. 2024 was tricky. I think '25 is more -- if I say easier, I will have someone to tell me that I was wrong in the future. But what I mean with that is that we are -- customers' expectations and what they take out is much better aligned today than it was 2, 3 quarters ago. And then we still believe that the market will come back very strong after '24, quite weak. '25 is the expectations in the market is quite weak. If I look at our peers, they are even -- maybe even less optimistic than we are on this. So I think that it's -- '25 will be a year that we -- that we'll have some different, how should I say, phases throughout the year. I think it will start a bit slow. We'll start the year with some speed roughly where we stand today. And I think we will see a gradual increase because we will still work with inventory reductions at our customers and in the first half of next year, which we didn't expect a year ago.

No, I just received a question here from the web from [ Johan ], Bostrom Capital Consulting. Have you been more cautious when creating the 2025 forecast compared to previous years? That's a good question.

Yes. Yes.

Good answer.

We have suffered from negative updates on our expectations and we are more sensitive. We have built in more and more, how should I say, security in how we see it on the coming year. We might have a slightly higher expectation internally.

Okay. Good answer.

And this is -- it's -- we are expecting a quite stable growth over the years to come. '25, still a sidestep, if you put it like that, but that is more reflecting of the slow turn over the economy at the moment.

Once again, comment to this one and in reference, I think the numbers speak for themselves. The 17% CAGR is a very good growth, looking to the peers in the market. Yes, there's been a slight downturn, but many others have been suffering way more. So I think it goes very much in line with all the initiatives. It's a thoughtful growth plan as well. So super impressive.

And I can say, just to have some comments on this because it's -- to make Excel-driven growth plans is super easy. It's much more hard to have substance behind them. And in these numbers, we -- every year, we are making growth plans from the factories. And then we look at what we expect from existing customers, from the newly won customers, how will they develop over time. So we look at this and we say, okay, what is the growth plan if we don't add any new customers, if we have 0 new wins, which is unlikely, but then we look at that as a lower end of what we expect. And then we add in what the sites are expecting from new customer wins and we have that as a higher end. Then we make some kind of first year, lower end, further down, maybe more of new wins included. So there is -- in '26, we can go into our Excel sheet and look at what is the sales expectations from every single customer we have. So it's not put your finger up and see where the wind is blowing. We have an idea of -- from every single customer until '27 in our growth expectations. And this is on the lower end of that expectation. That is how we see it.

Yes.

You will get the microphone here.

Yes, yes.

Just one question on how much M&A you put in this estimate, so to say, in this one? Or is this purely organic?

This is organic. So -- but we are expecting some M&A activities in it.

Okay. So this is sort of a bull case, you can say?

I would be -- it would be too optimistic to say that. But this is how we see upon our customers' growth and from what we expect to be some kind of mid- to medium level of that. Moving on. I show this picture every year because I like it. This is our cost elements, how they are in percentage of our sales. We have -- the green line is white collar. The red line is direct labor or blue collar, other costs and then we have depreciation. And then the dotted line is our operating profit. Until '22, it was fantastic. Then we can see the problem of cost development when you have declining sales. To mitigate that, to keep at same level, that's really tricky. So what we have tried to do is to put that down as high as we can. And to offset the costs or the lower sales, we try to mitigate costs. So in real terms, we're not increasing the cost, but relative to our sales, the cost is going up. But what happens is that when we start to increase our sales, which we expect to do in next year, these curves will start to decline because we're not intending to add that much cost in the near future. So we are -- so when we look at this and we -- the projections of how sales will develop in the coming quarters, we are seeing that we'll start to decline in what we call our nonmaterial costs, which someone told me that, that is -- that could be interpreted in other ways. What we say is that all the cost elements that we have, excluding direct material, we expect that to start to come down. And since we don't expect the price increases on the component market, we expect our margin after material to be fairly flat. We are now at roughly 36%. In '23, I think we're down to 32-point-something. And that was because we had too much material in our sales content, now we're back to somewhat of a normalized level. So we are expecting that the curves will start to decline, and we are expecting the operating profit to increase with that because we think the contribution margin after direct material is expected to be fairly flat. So if the -- then if that remains at 36% and then the more we can push down the total value or the total cost base in relation to sales, the higher our profitability will become. So we follow this very, very detailed. But again, growth is so important for us to keep our cost in relation to sales at the level where we want to keep it. You can say that, okay, we have a slight increase. But if we go back a few years, we're still significantly better than we were.

And also many of the initiatives that you made with the investments in Torsby and Norrtelje. There's a question from the audience.

Very interesting slide. But given some cost increases you're planning with capacity increases here and there, what type of sales growth do you need just to keep the operating margin at the current level?

I think we are expecting that we should increase the operating margin even at the current level because we -- it has taken some time to get costs out of the books this year. So -- but if we -- when the Torsby plant is ready, when we have moved to bigger premises in Lund and so on, if we have -- we don't much more sales to get there. Say that we need -- if we have SEK 300 million more in sales, we will offset the extra cost on that level. So it's not -- the investments in buildings is not that high when it comes to the capacity possibilities you get. So it's more of -- still buildings will be a small part of the cost base. The salaries are more critical because they are much higher in relation to sales. So investing us out of...

So as long as you get at least SEK 300 million extra sales from here, you keep the margin?

Yes. When we have taken these bigger facilities on and that will happen in a year, basically. Continuing. Even if this was -- we argued, Frida and I, should we show this because it's a negative picture, but I -- as you know, I also want to show you also things when they are negative. So we don't only want to show you the positive things. But we follow this very thoroughly. And what I'm most unhappy with is that we have not managed to keep the direct labor down because that is in our hands. We should have been able to do that better. And that is one of the reasons where -- the reason why it's this high is that it has taken time. When you reduce, it takes some time to get the cost out of the books. So it has been, what we call, a lagging effect during this year. And we have not taken so big one offset our peers has done, then you get the curve down directly because then you don't -- you offset the cost that you have over time with an one-off costs. So that's how we have thought over this. Sustainability. We still think this is one of our most critical things to reach success. We are working a lot on our energy consumption. Now energy is also becoming more and more expensive. So it's not only in the sustainability target. It's also a cost target for us. We compensate for our emissions that we do in Scope 1 and 2. And we are investing in solar panels where we can. We are -- in extension of Torsby, we will fill that roof with solar panels. We'll do the same in Estonia. Estonia is more important. The energy is much more expensive. We have solar panels on the roof in Windsor now. We invested in that in the first half of this year. We have it in Bulgaria. We will have it on more sites in Lund. I think we also have it in, if I remember it correctly. So we try to extend our own generated energy. We think that is our way of offsetting the carbon dioxide increase in the society. Even if we buy -- try to buy renewable energy or fossil-free energy, still, if we use that -- or if we free up our consumption, someone else can use it. So therefore, we think that, that is -- even if we would reach 100% purchase of fossil-free energy, if we create our own energy, we will use less. So that will be a benefit for the society. So that is something that we do. Also, work environment. We are very keen on that. We are constantly investing in safeguarding our factories for the future, which everyone that goes to work should come home as they were. We don't -- we are working a lot towards reducing the level of work-related injuries. You can say in our industry, we have very few injuries. And in here, for us, it can mean that you cut your finger on a paper basically. But we have -- we measure those as well. If you -- every lost hour due to injuries is something that we measure. So very strict on that. And we have very few incidents every year. Still, it's important. And I always say the further out you have factories, Bulgaria, China and so on, those are the factories that you need to pay more attention to. Swedish work environment is fairly good, if you put it like that. So we try to have our -- the factories that is furthest, as far out as you can come, we put more focus on them. That's very important for us.

I think as well about leadership and corporate culture, tying in very nicely to this as well. So what do you see as the core of NOTE's corporate culture? And how does it contribute to the success? Because I think this -- I have the opportunity to travel with you to several of the factories. And one thing that I'm always amazed over is the amount of super smiling, happy people that come to work every day to do a great job. I've seen it from the outside. Could you comment on that?

I have a very friendly face. No, just kidding. I think it's an open management style. It's where we're quite -- everyone -- we allow people to grow. If you look at our management teams in the factories, I would say that 80%, 90% of the people in them are coming from internal recruitments. Our MDs, internal recruitments, almost everyone. So we are trying to develop our staff to grow in their positions, and we try to have that as our management. And we are also very keen on not -- how should I say, we don't punish initiatives even if the initiatives are less successful because we want to have initiatives. We want to have factories that are able to grow and to make clever choices on their own. So we encourage initiatives. And then not all of them will be successful, but then we adjust and adopt and try to make the best out of it. So we try to be open, we try to be engaged and we try to be reachable. I mean, I have quite a few direct reports and a lot of other people that are needing my attention and I try to be open and committed to have all those discussions. And the same goes for the management team, and I know the same goes for all the Managing Directors in the sites. So we try not to cover or hide behind the desk or hide in conference rooms. We try to be visible and show that we are dedicated in what we do. That is what I think is important. And I love to go out in the factories and see what we have done, the improvements that we have done and how we make -- how we measure things and how we can see progress and how we can measure and try to take more steps in developing the progress that we do. So that is what I think is important, that we're interested in what we do from myself and throughout the organization.

I see that a clear way of you inspiring the team and the growth journey. The number speaks for themselves despite the small bump in the curve. But I think a very thoughtful growth plan. So super impressive.

Yes. I think this is actually my last -- I will have a short summary and then we'll go into an open Q&A. Key takeaways. I call it strong performance even when sales are lower than anticipated. If we managed to reach our guidance, and I'm quite confident we will, otherwise, we would not have guided today. We will hit 9.2% in underlying operating profit, down from 9.3% or 9.4% last year. It's not a significant reduction. It's quite flat compared to that. It has taken some quarters to get back to this level. But now we are there, and we intend to stay on a good level. We also know Q4 is slightly higher than other in profitability for some seasonality effects. So we should not expect that we will have all quarters being in double digit, even if we reach that in Q4. But the guidance is where it is. We believe that the growth trends are strong, and that is important to know. We are investing in the future built on what we believe from our customers, what we see from the market expectations, how we see that the usage of electronics will continue, how we see the regionalization will affect European manufacturing. And I also think that we are well positioned in Sweden. Sweden has become a much more competitive country to produce in than it were some 10 years ago. So we believe we have a footprint that will match the general economy growth in electronics and how the regionalization will drive this towards our factories. We believe that 2025 will start fairly slow or at the same level that we end and then we will start to see an increase going forward in the year. And the increase will be dependent on what happens on the market in a bigger picture. But just -- when all the inventory reductions are rolled out from our customers, that will mean a continued increase of sales for us for this year. So that's what we believe. Q4 guidance, we have talked about it so I will not go into it more. But we are seeing that it will be a stabilization on a level that are lower than we expected when we entered '24, but it's a stabilization of level that we have expected for the second half. And we also believe in our long-term objectives. We think that we are positioned for it. We are investing in capacity in terms of buildings. And what we can say is that when we have moved into new premises in Torsby, we have, as Christoffer mentioned, we extended our Norrtelje factory last year. We are looking at the factory expansion program in Estonia. And we are moving into new premises in Lund. When we have all this done, we have more or less, building capacity to reach quite far to the SEK 7.5 billion sales. If the volume increase comes in the right factories, I would say that we can produce the SEK 7.5 billion in those facilities. Then again, it's very rarely that the customers are ordering from the sites that we have built for it. So it's -- we will always run out of capacity somewhere, so we will continue with this. But it's important to know that we are building for this. We're continuing to invest in equipment and automation to be ready for when the volume comes. We are working with the suppliers, as Ceci said, how do we do this together with the suppliers to be ready when we see the small shifts in demand. We should know that it's not so much increase of semiconductor sales that are needed until you start to see lead times starting to increase again. So we need to be really on our toes when this is happening. And we were that in the last component shortages. So we try to be that again. And I think our open price models with our customers is enabling us to have the dialogues with the customers at an early stage when we see cost increases coming. So I think we are positioned us. We have a strategy that is supporting growth. And we have a balance sheet that is really strong. We need to do something clever with it. And we will see what happens, what we do from that. But we're very positive. We look at the '25 with respect for the challenges, but with a level of priding what we have done and the position that we have set ourselves up for. So that's the message that I'd like to give with everyone that have been listening to this. I will stop now. Otherwise, I can continue forever.

I have another really great question from [ Johan Eriksson, Altitude Capital ]. What's the competitive environment for new customers or new products? Are you more aggressive on margins now versus before in order to win new businesses? Or...

I would say that the latest wins we have done has been on similar margins than what we're quoting. We are looking and we're trying to see where the market is heading. It might be that we will see more ambitious costs coming from competitors when the industry goes down, that I have expected that to happen. I have not seen it yet, but we will see. If that happens, we will be prepared to work on that. I don't foresee any major changes on margins because if you -- even if we might be earning 1 or 2 percentage more than peers, I mean Scanfil is doing fairly good. Kitron is doing fairly good. Incap is doing really good. Some others might struggle with margins, but the industry as such is performing fairly good as an industry.

But also coming to the comment that you said with the open price model that you have for the customers, you are in early-stage dialogue with them. So I think even though if there's a price erosion coming from a competitor, you are still able with the value that you can provide as a manufacturer, also work closely with the customer, too.

Yes. But I mean, we have customers that are earning very low margins, maybe in the low end of single-digit. And if they can get 2%, 3% from somewhere else, they might take the opportunity. We will see upon that. So price sensitivity is very, very tricky. But we try to be as close to our customers who understand when they are doing this. And I think so far, we are meeting those expectations. And we haven't seen that we have lost to price in any way more this year than we have done in the past. So far, it feels stable.

Yes. Thank you, and I'll open up for questions.

So I have one question on the -- if you could comment anything on the order intake or how the order backlog is looking here in Q4 versus last year.

We were quite close to the same order backlog when we closed Q3 and we don't summarize that up and aggregate it until end of December. So I cannot comment on it.

Okay. But you have seen the orders have stabilized more and more in the second half of the year, it sounds like then?

I'm looking at Frida and she nods, so I would say yes.

Okay. That's good. And then I had a question on the purchasing of the components. I mean, you have a slide there that's going through -- cutting through, I guess, the distributor side.

You saw that arrow.

Yes. Could you talk just a little bit about that and how much -- how far you have come with like savings on procurement there? And how much is left to do?

I mean, I would not comment on savings. I think we know that the distribution in some areas is adding quite high margins. PCBs is one. We know that semiconductors is in an area where we want to go more and more direct, if possible. And the bigger we become, the more interesting we become as customers. We have -- we have started with 1 or 2 of the semiconductors to order direct. That will help our price -- our ability to keep price. And the bigger we become, the more direct relations we have, the more aggressive we can be on pricing. What we do on the back end of this is that we also discuss with the manufacturers directly even if they supply through distribution because we want to have the direct dialogue when the next shortage is coming. We want to have an open route of escalation when we need more components. So that is one very important area. Even if it's still a purchase through a distributor, we want to have dialogue with the manufacturers to be able to get our fair share on the allocation.

Good. Then I have a question on the Greentech side. I mean you're more maybe a bit more consumer heavy, you could say. But I mean, on the Greentech side, there's also this big infrastructure investments going on. Is there any opportunities for you to take on new customers in that space to grow the Greentech business, I mean, with grids, et cetera, all that's going on there?

Definitely. This is one of our target areas to become better in or grow our customer base is probably the word of putting that. Yes, definitely. I mean, we try to look -- I mean, when we jumped on the Greentech on the EV side, we saw that this was an area that was exploding at 2020, '21. So we wanted to get more customers in here. It felt really good in '21 and '22, and then suddenly, it became a bit more problematic if you put it like that. So yes, we are looking at where are the main trends going in different directions. So this is, of course -- I mean, everyone talks about the grid. What can we do on the grid?

Yes. That's good. And then also one question on defense. I mean, it's 10% of sales, I think, you mentioned for '24?

Yes.

Can you comment a bit on what you expect in terms of growth in that space going forward? Because I remember you won some new contracts like 1.5 year ago, maybe that you now maybe ramped up a bit or...

We expected defense to continue to grow -- to outgrow our business in the coming, say, 3 to 5 years, that is the expectation we have. So even if we meet these growth numbers, we expect defense to be growing as a share of our sales also for the coming, say, at least 5 years. If you look at the spending of material that is expecting through the NATO area, it's enormous growth numbers, but we are -- say that we expect maybe 30% year-over-year in the next 3 to 5 years with, of course, some plateaus and some -- but that's -- I mean, defense is long-order horizons, but you have some ups and downs in it, but the trend is really positive.

And I know we have one large customer within defense, but do you have more -- or how broad based is your customer base within the defense?

We have a few -- one is larger, the second one is large and then we have a few that is smaller.

Okay. And just my last question is on Q4 guidance, I mean -- or the Q4 numbers. Because, I mean, we all remember that Q3 was very weak. Q4 come in quite okay-ish, I guess, in this environment. So is there any risk that some of the orders were pushed out from Q3 into Q4, so it was a little bit abnormally good in this market environment in Q4. Or do you see any risk that, that was the case?

No. I think the pace we have now is -- I mean, what happened in Q3 was basically the summer was really weak, as I call it. So September, October, November is fairly aligned, if you put it like that. So we believe the speed we have now is more aligned with where we are. But I think many of our customers took longer vacation periods and the sales were pushed down through that. So my view is that sales in the summer period was really weak.

Coming back to the sourcing question. In what extent can you influence what your customers want? What components they want on the PC boards if you get better deals on one component that is similar to another? Yes, do you get the question?

Yes, I understand the question. If you put it like this, the semiconductor side, the more expensive the components are, the less likely it is that we can affect it. The cheapest stuff on our board, we can often choose from maybe 5, 6 approved suppliers from the customer side. PCBs are an area where we are seeing that there's a lot of cost potential. But then that is often related to that we need to have the development teams from the customer end to really go through this. The PCB is very important on the -- for the quality side of it. But we try to be on the half standard semiconductors, which is a quite big amount of products. We can often -- there is often products that are -- yes, or claim to be equivalent to each other. And there, we try to affect our customers to select the brands that we feel that we have better price on and that we feel that we have better relations with the suppliers or the manufacturers. So we tried to push that and we can, to some extent, do it on our own, but in many cases, we need the customers' approval of it. But it's an area where we are gaining, how should I say, strength towards our customers' side. And it's an area where we want to be involved because we believe that we can do this better. This is our core business. The customers are often designing the board and then they want us to just produce it. And so they should allow us to be more open on this. But it takes time. And the bigger we become, the more direct relations we will have and the better ability we will have to do this in a professional way.

And how often or is it a necessity that your customers use kind of similar products from you, different customers for you to get that scale benefit? Or is it so specific what your customers want that it might be difficult anyway to get that scale at least before you -- your individual orders to an individual customers is super big.

If you look at this board, we took this up because it's a little bit educational. This is like -- I think this is a memory -- a processor that you will never change. If you have -- you often you select a processor and some components around it, and that's fixed. If you change that, you have to change maybe 30% of the components on the board and the PCB design. So that will never happen. If you have smaller semiconductors that are these type of products, those are often semi-standard or standard, then you can select from others. But in some cases, even an equivalent doesn't have the same standard as the other. So they can say, yes, on the paper is the same, but we have tried them and you can only use this. So it's a bit of question. If you see all the small components, those are standard. You can choose from different. So that's basically how a board is built up. And that was very simplistic, Mattias.

And also the board itself can be changed in case it's designed correctly.

Yes.

Maybe I can comment one thing because when you sell like -- ask about customer if they are more open nowadays, and I think many of the customers was a little bit burned on the last constrained situation. So now they want to redesign, so they have 2 alternatives. So I would say working in this area for quite a long period, I see the openness now is much bigger than it used to be. Then it's still really difficult to do the change. But I think it's quite interesting how much more they listen now than early. Yes.

Any more questions from the audience?

One more.

Yes, one more.

Getting new customers is always somewhat tricky in EMS business, but you have won something and aim to win something more. So my question is from where do you win new customers? I mean, do you win it from direct peers? Are they like early stage life cycle companies that are expected to grow? Or is it outsourcing from OEMs or something else?

I would say the outsourced part from the bigger OEMs is fairly stable. So we're not getting any market growth from that side, more or less. We could get -- if we do the board, we could do some sub-assemblies and then we grow the business on it, but not more than that. I would say that maybe half of our growth in new customers is peer's products that we take over and the other half is some kind of new products or new companies coming up. So you can say that, yes, half of it is mature business that we win and then we take over a production that is already happening, so to say. And those are the, you can say, that if you are managing a company, those are the worst losses you can have because then you have gone through the problematic phase of industrializing them and the early phases with a lot of changes and low volumes. So when you win those, you know that you will hurt someone else.

Yes, I see. And the second, what are the main risks in your eyes that could prevent you reaching '28 targets?

I mean, I look at different risks, and so -- I mean, if you exclude the political crisis that can occur, China, Taiwan and those, I would say that there is -- if you have studied, what we call it, economics in the good old days that I have in the '90s, everyone talked about when the automotive industry is strong, the economy is strong. If that still is valid, we see that automotive industry in Europe is quite weak at the moment. That could be an indication that European economy will struggle to bounce back the way -- we are not guiding for that, but we are expecting that to happen over time. But if, say, for example, that the German car manufacturers are getting even worse and the French car manufacturers, then again that will have an impact of the overall industrial climate in Europe. And that will affect the European growth of electronic use. So that could be one area because we don't make products to automotive industry, maybe in 1 or 2 exemptions. But a lot of the products we make are somewhat related. It could be products to -- for assembly lines for car industry that they invest in. And so I think that could be one area. Otherwise, I think that European economy is weak or the growth pace is very low. So that will come back, but it's a matter of how much will the problems in the automotive industry affect the rest of the industrial climate in Europe. I think that could be one of the risks that I look at. So I really hope that the German automotive manufacturers are bouncing back. So don't buy -- just kidding. I won't say that.

I could also ask one question. I was wondering what kind of customer structure or segment structure is optimal for you in order to balance risk and profitability? And are you -- would you say that you are satisfied with your current structure?

I will just show the current structure. When you look at this graph, you can say, okay, Industry is too big. And I agree with that in terms of the reporting segment because it becomes how can you look at ups and downs in the segment that is 55% through sales or, I don't know, but in that range. But since we are following the customers on a customer basis, if I look at the Industry segment, it's maybe 10 subsegments or even more. So we look at customer by customer, and then we say, okay, yes, in Communication, it's more aligned because those products are more linked together or systems and so on. So I think that -- for me, we try to say, okay, which customers are in niches that we can follow. And then we say, okay, there are similarities. EV chargers, for example, low demand and so on. But in Industrial segment, the split is enormous. I mean, now defense is growing, and therefore, we are looking on how to make you aware of how that is working in a good way. But in the rest of the Industry, it's enormous-wide. So I think that we don't see that our split between the different segments is of essence in that way because we follow the customer by customer. We often report on that our 25 largest customers are standing for 55%, 56% currently. Our largest customer with this year will be maybe 6.5% for the sales. It has been between 5% and 7% ever since I started. So the balance between, say, the top 20 largest customer is really, really stable. The customers in that bucket is changing a little bit from year-to-year, but the size and the relative size is fairly strong. Margin-wise, we don't see any major differences in this. What we see is that margins are lower when you have really expensive material that you assemble. If you have, for example, big batteries in the product, margins are smaller and so on. But that could be in -- it could be a Greentech, it could be a Medtech, it could be an Industrial customer that have this. So we don't see that big similarities within the segment. So even if Medtech would double in size, again, it did that in 2023, that would not have any impact on our margins. It will be the same. We have good margin customers there and we have low-margin customers in the segment. So it's -- there's no -- it's very hard to group them because you can have one Industrial customer and one Greentech customer that have very similar board. Then those 2 are much more equal than to Greentech customers. So it's -- yes. We're running out time.

Yes, we're running out of time. Any more questions from the audience? If not, I'd like to thank Johannes and participation, most importantly, all the audience that come here physically as well as the one that participates on the web. So thank you very much, Johannes and team.