Good afternoon and welcome to the presentation of IBU-tec's preliminary figures, 2021. My name is Stefan Steck. I'm the Investor Relations Manager at IBU-tec, and I'm sitting here with Mr. Ulrich Weitz, CEO of IBU-tec, and Mr. Jörg Leinenbach, Co-CEO and CFO of IBU-tec. Mr. Jörg Leinenbach will shortly start presenting the figures in detail, and Mr. Ulrich Weitz will follow up and take you through the updated figures of our strategy, IBU 2025. Our presentation will be in English, so our international participants will be able to follow. We hope that this is okay for everyone joining us this afternoon. If you have any questions, feel free to submit them in writing on your screen and during the presentation.
We will answer the questions afterwards, after the presentation, and if possible, we would welcome it if you could submit your questions in English. That would make it a lot easier for us. Without any further ado, I hand over to Mr. Leinenbach, who will start with the figures. Mr. Leinenbach, the floor is yours.
Yeah. Thank you, Mr. Steck. Welcome from my side, and good afternoon to all. Yes, I would like to start with the preliminaries. If you have a look at the first page of our presentation, then you see that I want to start to summarize right at the beginning, with the expression that 2021 was a successful year for IBU-tec Group. You have to remember that we were coming out of a year, 2020, which was significantly influenced by corona crisis and the fire damage at BNT at the end of 2019. We increased our sales by circa 34% to expected EUR 44.1 million, as you can see on the left side.
This despite a really challenging circumstances like the corona crisis, supply chain issues, the chip crisis in automotive, we exceeded significantly our forecast 2021. About 70% of this exceeding amount is based on higher raw material costs, especially tin, which we were able to take into account in our calculation and passed the higher prices on to our customers. The rest came from battery material, glass coating, and from a new product at BNT, for which we were able to develop a new market. If we have a look on the right side, the EBITDA figures, we exceeded our EBITDA goal as well compared to the forecast. This is really good news. The EUR 6.7 million EBITDA is adjusted for the costs of capital increase and is slightly above our forecast.
Adjusted for raw material effects, the EBITDA margin is within the forecasted range of 17%-19% on sales. We kept our promises and this under circumstances where we, as many other manufacturing companies, suffered from increasing logistics, packaging, and increasing material costs as well. Since both years, 2020 and 2021, were significantly impacted by extraordinary effects, we show a real operative EBITDA in the two thinner bars you can see on the left side. Adjusting the EBITDA for insurance, payments, and cost for capital increase. As you can see, we increased the operative EBITDA from EUR 2.2 million by EUR 2.5 million to EUR 4.7 million. This is a growth of circa 114%. Please keep that EUR 4.7 million in mind to properly assess the plan 2022.
Let's have a look on the next slide. Here we can see the forecast for 2022. We are anticipating a growth in sales of 25%-29% to a level of EUR 55 million-EUR 57 million. Battery material, glass coating, and service business are contributing to this growth. With the shown growth rate, we are absolutely on track with our strategic plan. With this EUR 55 million-EUR 57 million euro sales, we expect an operative EBITDA of more than EUR 6.8 million euros. A growth of more than 45% compared to the operative EBITDA 2021, and this despite the fact that 2022 will be impacted by still increasing raw material prices, logistics and packaging costs, and last but not least, significantly increasing energy prices. We had the opinion that this demonstrates very clearly that we are an economically efficient company and our business model is successful. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Leinenbach. I will hand over to Mr. Weitz, who will give you some insight into our updated figures for the 2025 strategy of IBU-tec.
Yeah. Thank you very much, Stefan. I'm very happy to present you our strategy IBU 2025, but I'm also happy that we meet our targets or met our targets for 2021, as Jörg Leinenbach explained or presented to you, because as he said already, I would like to underline this a little bit. It was a very hard year with a lot of influences, raw material prices, energy prices, corona and so on. Therefore, we are again very, very happy that we could achieve our results and I hope this will deliver also more confidence to our shareholders, especially if I'm talking now about the strategy IBU 2025. First of all, the update is positive. This is a good point and good news.
We issued for the first time our strategy IBU 2025 at the beginning of last year, 2021. In the meantime, since that time, we have of course, and Jörg said this already, significant influences on our pricing of raw materials and also, what is a very positive point, we've got quite a positive feedback from our customer, and therefore we adjusted all of the forecasts. Not only the pricing of raw materials has an influence on our update of our strategy, also it's a volume effect. As you can see in this presentation in the first bar, 2025 new, there's of course our highest largest growth potential, our battery material.
We adjusted the numbers from EUR 30 million to EUR 60 million, so EUR 30 million-EUR 36 million is the forecast or the information we've got from our customer based on our forecast and the additional EUR 30 million on battery materials and an option or potential we have. That means in total in year 2025, if we are successful, and I'm pretty confident about this, we will have sales of EUR 60 million battery materials. The EUR 6 million, which you can see here, is also recycling on battery materials. EUR 66 million in total means EUR 60 million sales on battery material and EUR 6 million for recycling projects on batteries. This is more or less a huge part of the strategy IBU 2025.
We are very happy about this, and I repeat myself, this is mainly also the positive feedback from our customers since we are talking with them then, mid of last year. Another growth potential, and we presented this always to our shareholders in several conferences last year, is of course our glass coating material. You can see here a portion of EUR 19 million in the strategy of IBU 2025. The EUR 19 million is mainly the increase, it was before EUR 12 million, is mainly coming from an increase of raw material prices. In that case, we kept the capacity, the 1,000 metric tons we want to sell, in our strategy IBU 2025.
The 1,000 metric tons we kept, but as I said, the increase is coming from the raw materials, from the increase of raw material prices. I would like to underline this a little bit. We have here in Europe, we are the only source in Europe. There is no other supplier of this glass coating material than BNT Chemicals. In total, there are four sources, and three of them are our competitors located in Asia and the United States and in India. We think the potential, the market in Europe has a potential of 1,500 metric tons, and therefore we want to achieve a sales of 1,000 metric tons in 2025.
The rest of the numbers are comparable except the special chemistry. Even in the special chemistry, we have an increase of our IBU 2025 strategy. We have here EUR 30 million in total. These are products coming from the BNT beside our sister company. Besides the glass coating business and also from IBU-tec, a special chemistry for catalyst materials. We received also a positive feedback from our customers and so we adjusted here also our forecast. This is a volume effect as well. In total, we will achieve in 2025 sales of EUR 102 million-EUR 130 million.
If you have a chance to look in our website, you will find a small video where we presented in 2021 our strategy and this as well for this year and for the coming years is an increase of our strategy, about 30%. 25%, sorry. Yeah, the other bars you can see here from 2020 and 2021 and 2022 shows you the way where we are already achieving our targets. If I take the numbers from Jörg into account, the forecast he presented, that means we will have more or less. If we are successful in year 2022, we will achieve more or less 50% of our strategy IBU 2025.
That means we are on track. That is a very positive way, and we are quite confident that we will meet this strategy I have presented you here in this couple of minutes. A very important point for me is also to point out, if you take the old, let me call it traditional, not old, traditional IBU-tec, in 2019, for example, the business model was made 100% as a service provider for R&D activities and toll manufacturing. Here in this strategy, you can see more and more sales with products.
That means IBU-tec is in a transformation process in the next years, and this was the main part of our strategy, that we will be, in the next three, four, five years, a green tech company with very attractive and interesting products like battery materials for different application, like glass coating, and also very interesting products. This shows you that more or less, in year 2025, 75% of our sales will come from products, and the rest remaining, the 25%, will come from our service activities or our service business model. This is, of course, a benefit for us because we have, or we see much more growth potential in our products, for example, battery materials, instead of just the service business. The service business is a very traditional business.
This is our foundation. We get a lot of ideas and new business contacts through this business, but the growth potentials are, in the future, our products. This gives IBU-tec much more stability and hopefully a positive future. This is more or less the presentation from my side. I would like to hand over to Stefan.
Thank you, Mr. Weitz. I'll just quickly sum up what we just heard. If you look at the figures, preliminary 2021 figures, they confirm our forecast that we published last year, early last year. We are very well within the range that we gave there. Our operational growth for the group was very strong last year, you can see that at the EBITDA figures that we just saw. Our forecast for 2022 confirms that we are still on the growing path and that the trend overall will continue over the next couple of years.
In 2025, we expect to exceed EUR 100 million for the first time, something that we were careful to do or to publish in the last couple months. We saw that we are on track to be able to manage to exceed EUR 100 million. In the end, what we can take away, battery materials, glass coating are still our key growth drivers. They are very strong. We are very well situated here. This is going into the future, yeah, core products of IBU-tec. I think we're done here, thank you very much for your interest so far. We will go on with the Q&A. First question that we received is regarding the increasing energy costs. If I may read out loud. Can management explain how rapidly increasing energy costs have been managed so well so far and how these are included in the service contracts? Mr. Leinenbach.
Well, increasing energy costs, we took into account for 2022. In the year 2021, we had contracts, and so these contracts were with old prices. Yes, in our sales, I reported we have in 2022 the new energy costs. The thing we were able to pass on to our customers were increasing raw material costs. Tin, for example. Tin increased from I think $23 to over $40 during the last year. This was the real good information that we were able to pass this price increase thing to our customers.
If we are talking about energy costs standalone, though we have to look at our business model. For example, in BNT, our sister company, where we are producing the tin-based product, we have of course a high influence of energy cost because we use natural gas. We have to produce steam. We need electricity and so on. The good news is we have in BNT the possibility to produce our own energy with the power supply. This helps a little bit to reduce the energy cost. We decided in 2022 not to fix a contract with the supplier of energy because it was such a high pricing we received from them.
The decision was we will buy the energy on the spot market. What we are seeing right now, this was a good decision because we can manage our cost structure, you know, for energy a little bit better instead to sign a fixed contract with the supplier.
All right. Thank you very much. The next question regards our LFP pipeline and how it does look today compared to the most recent overview that we gave in another presentation. I think that's a question Mr. Weitz can answer the best. Mr. Weitz?
Yes. Of course, as we always presented in several conferences, we started to produce last year an amount of significant tonnage of LFP material in order to build up a stock to deliver to the customer short delivery times in the future. We are now in the process to discuss with customers and we received already the first orders. This is what we also announced to the public within ad hoc. In this first half, in this first six months of year 2022, we think we will handle this stock and we will have a lot of orders there.
In total, we will have business activity in 2022 from approximately EUR 9 million for battery materials. This is part of our forecast we presented to you. This is of course a very positive step in the right direction because if you take into account that it was for us not allowed to sell and to produce battery materials until September last year, and we are now six months later. I think it's a big step in the right direction.
Great. Thank you. Next question regards the EBITDA margins with our core products, battery materials and glass coating. Mr. Leinenbach, would you like to answer this question?
Yes. Currently our margins, our profit margins of battery materials are above 20% or around 20%, and we expect a significant increasing potential by getting a higher automation when the campaigns are getting larger than they are today. In glass coating, currently we have a margin of about 12%, and here we think that we will improve the margin situation because of a new production process which we want to finalize at the end of this year. The perspectives are positive. We think that the margins will increase in the next years, and we are working on that.
All right. Great. Thank you. There's another question regarding EBITDA. I'll just read it out loud. It starts with, you mentioned the headwinds from packaging costs, logistics, energy prices and raw material prices. Besides these, do you see any extraordinary effects, positive or negative, for 2022?
What I can say is that there will not be another insurance payments. Yeah. The insurance case was finalized in the last year. We think that we have, t hat we took all effects we expect in the plan. Currently I can't say that there will be other effects. Important is to know that year 2022 is for us a very important year, especially if you are talking about EBITDA. As you said already in your question or what you put in your question, we had in the last two years some effects, insurance payments and other things.
Capital increase.
Capital increase. In this year there is nothing in, so we have to deliver the results out of our operational business as it is. There's no significant subsidized money by insurance or reducing like capital increase. Therefore I'm talking on, say, year 2020-2022 is for us a very, very important year.
Good, thank you. Next question regards our planning and services and recycling for 2025. It points out that we kind of reduce the planning in this area for the next couple years, and the one who asks wants to know what's behind this, that we reduce the recycling and the services and recycling business for 2025 in our outlook.
Yes. If you make a strategy, the best way is to do it on forecast, so the feedback you get from your customers. If you have no forecast, then you have to make assumptions. For us as a service business, we make assumptions based on our history, based on our activities in the history, and the market potential we see in this business case. What I explained already, we had a very positive increase in battery materials and special chemistry. This is based on forecast. This gives us more detailed figures on the end of the day, which we included in our strategy.
Therefore, we said, "Okay, we will reduce a little bit the service business," because there is not such a clear forecast and not such a clear feedback from our customer. This is more or less adjustments of this different business parts. Not that we can say in 2025 we have this or that business on service. Therefore, we reduce a little bit the service business.
All right. There's two more questions on the battery material. The first one is asking when we do expect to reach the 10,000 tons that we would like to produce LFP. When would the production be up and running?
The 10,000 tons is a very nice figure, I agree, but we always presented in our presentation, the presentations in the past on this several conferences, that we have at the moment a capacity of 4,000 metric tons. This 4,000 metric tons capacity we have currently available is the foundation, the basis, for our strategy IBU 2025. We can produce this EUR 60 million with our current capacity. We are now in a strategy and in an investment plan to set up our capacities. If you ask me specifically, when we will meet our target, or when we will meet 10,000 tons, then after 2025, of course.
Because we have to install additional capacities and if we have more capacities, we need for this 10,000 metric tons also our investment or money which we have to finance. This was the reason why we did in February last year the capital increase. Again, until 2025, we will have 4,000 metric tons capacity. This is our. This represents our sales, which we put in our strategy, IBU 2025. After 2025, we will have more than 4,000 metric tons, so let's say 10,000 metric tons.
All right. Regarding the number of potential customers for LFP, has it increased over the past three to six months, especially since we have started production of LFPs in fourth quarter of 2021, and are there any new opportunities here?
Yes, definitely. We are talking right now with approximately 50 customers on different applications. We are talking with customers from the automotive industry. We provide customer from the automotive industry with samples. They take our samples and they're qualifying this. We talk with them about future potentials, how much material they need. At the moment, as we said also in the last year, we are focusing our activities also on the other application like the slightly different which we presented in the last time for battery materials, for hearing aids and for marine applications and for forklifts and for 3D printing. Here we have new opportunities. We have met also new customers. Since the quarter four last year, we have a lot of more customers to whom we are talking.
Yes. Mr. Weitz was talking about 50 customers. Not 15. It was 50.
Yeah, sorry. 50.
Yes, exactly. All right. So far there's no more questions. We hope we answered everything that you wanted to know. If there is anything else, if you have any more questions, feel free to get in touch with me at our general email address, ir@ibu-tec.de. Yeah, we'll be happy to answer any follow-up questions that you might have or whatever if you'd like to schedule a call or anything. Feel free to get in touch. So far, as I said, there's no more questions, so I think we can end this presentation here right now. Thank you very much for being with us this afternoon, for you know joining and yeah for your interest in IBU-tec as well. Stay safe, and thank you very much. Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye.