Good morning and a warm welcome to everybody listening to today's earnings call of Scandinavian Astor Group. The CFO, Viktor Billström, is with me today and will guide you through the presentation in the coming, I think, yeah, half an hour, 40 minutes. Let's see. This will be followed by a question and answer session where you can ask your questions either via text or audio line. Without further ado, I will hand over the word to Viktor. Go ahead, please.
Thank you, Philippe. Hi everyone. Welcome to this earnings call. You know, analysts, investors, you know, and fellow shareholders in Astor Group. You will join me for the coming hour here and, you know, going through the 2024 numbers, and we will have some Q&A in the end as well. Please prepare some questions during my speech here if you would like to ask them in the later stages. Yeah, for the ones that don't know me, you know, my name is Viktor Billström. I'm the CFO of Astor Group. I started in the board of directors, but I saw that the biggest, you know, impact and contribution I can make is by working as CFO. For about, since about two years, I'm the CFO at Astor Group. My background is from asset management, you know, finance, insurance.
I previously worked as a CFO for a battery company in Uppsala called Altris. I am also the fifth largest shareholder in Astor Group, and you never know, I might be the fourth largest in the future. This is important to start the presentation. You know, we are very happy to announce that Astor is back in black. It's in Q4, it's with capital letters. On the full year, we made the cut. That's the most important thing. Here, I think a big thank you is in place to all our 150 employees, you know, for making this possible. You know, I'm merely the numbers guy, so I don't sell, I don't produce. That has been your hard work that made this possible to get us into black numbers. Why is this important?
Yes, it's important because it increases the interest to invest in Astor, and it increases the interest for us to be able to acquire new companies. They see us as a good owner. Above all, it makes us more interesting for us as an employer for hiring, you know, key attractive new employees that can contribute to our success story. Astor in brief, for those who are not acquainted to us, you know, if you look at the pro forma numbers, we are about SEK 300 million last year. You know, as if it were all the companies we own today, as if we owned them the full of last year, we would have had a revenue of SEK 300 million. We have a market about 60-40 split, defense civilian. We are present in three countries, you know, Germany, Sweden, Finland.
We have a market cap about SEK 1 billion, maybe a little less today, but we hope that will soon be up to SEK 1 billion again. Employees, we are about 150 employees, all the new companies counted. We have nine production sites. We have two business areas, and we have a lot of shareholders, 15,000 shareholders. Where are we based? We are based in Finland, in Vaasa. In Sweden, we have eight locations, you know, from Malmö in the south to Avesta in the north. We also have a sales office in Munich, Germany. We have several sales agents around the world that represent a lot of the subsidiaries we have. Moving on, this is a very important picture. You know, Astor Group has only been listed for about two years now.
We made the IPO in 2023 with a market cap about SEK 50 million and sales about SEK 50 million as well. We made a big journey to where we are today. We still see us as a small cap, but in the future, we want to be a mid-market player. We want to be much bigger than we are today. We see the market as a lot of small caps. There are many defense companies that are very small with only maybe a few millions in sales in Swedish. We see maybe that there are at least a couple of hundreds or maybe a thousand companies that, you know, could be interesting that have a, you know, defense business or an interesting dual-use product. We can be the acquirer of those and move on to the position to be a mid-market player.
There are not too many companies there today. I think MilDef is getting there. Invisio is maybe there, but we have a broader perspective than they have. We can acquire a broad range of businesses in our business areas. Moving on, maybe this is no news to most of you, but we have a target of SEK 400 million in 2026 with an EBITDA margin above 15%. Most of the companies, or all of the companies we own actually, they are niche players. They have a very strong niche, and some of them are the dominant company in their respective segments. Moving on to the business areas, you know, we have two business areas today, as I mentioned. We have Astor Tech and Astor Industry.
You know, in AirSafe to the left, you know, we manufacture and sell aviation security in the form of parachutes, you know, for special cases like light grenades. Special people like paratroopers, they are the customers to AirSafe. We see this as a, you know, a pearl that could be really big in the future. With some add-on acquisitions, this could be very interesting. We have Oscilion, where we came from, you know, our electronic warfare business. We make jammers to jam everything, really, but to jam drones is one thing we are currently looking into the most, I would say. Oscilion have a very bright future, we think. We have ScandiFlash. I will come into more into ScandiFlash later, but it's a fantastic company here in Uppsala who make a light X-ray, which can see through steel.
We have Astor Industry, which supports the tech side and sells to other blue chip defense companies. We have Marstrom to the left. They make hard composite products. They make the crème de la crème, you know, composite products with autoclave based. There are no air bubbles, and it is the hardest, lightest, you know, composites to find. They have a world market they are selling to. Everyone wants to buy from Marstrom because of their high quality. We have Mikroponent, who is based in the south of Sweden. They make etching and laser cutting. There are only two etching companies in Sweden, actually, and Mikroponent is one of them. The other one is not selling to the defense industry and will not do that. We have a key player here. They make parts to ammunition and parts to other, you know, defense material.
Moving on. Now we come to the financials. The recent highlight, we had a very busy Q4 here with net sales above SEK 90 million with an EBITDA margin of 20-22%. We end the year with an order book of SEK 190 million, and the growth to last quarter, or the quarter in 2023, was 329%. We also listed ourselves in the Börse Stuttgart, up there in the right-hand corner. We made some visits to our friends in Ukraine. We also announced two acquisitions in ID Modeller in the south of Sweden and in Velas in Finland. Moving on to the numbers, there's a lot of numbers here. If I want to highlight a few of them, it's, of course, the net sales growth is very strong. The EBITDA margin for the quarter is also very strong.
You know, on a full year basis, we have an adjusted EBITDA margin of 13%. When I say adjusted, we do not include anything special in adjusted. We included the cost for the acquisition of ScandiFlash and a few minor things. We do not put in a lot of things in this adjusted number. It could be a lot higher if we did that. We also have a strong cash flow in Q4. That is also very important. The cash flow is supporting our journey we are on. Just with the cash flow, we can do some CapEx. We can do small acquisitions just by our own cash generation. That is very important. A very strong Q4 here. You can see in the bottom here that the net debt is not very high.
You know, we have a net debt excluding leasing that actually decreased a little bit year over year. We have a net debt of about SEK 19 million end of Q4 and about SEK 41 million if you include the leasing. There is room to finance more of the things we are doing by loans. Moving on to the segments we have, you know, we also, maybe I forgot to mention that, but we moved over to IFRS. That was a very huge thing last year. Since we did that, we also started to report segments, so the industry and technology segments. We can see there that we have a good EBITDA in both the industry and the technology side. Of course, ScandiFlash is contributing a lot for the technology side where we included them from Q4.
We expect this segment to continue to perform very well in 2025. I also want to highlight here that we, at least from my view, we see it as we are not adding a lot of extra costs on the mother company. We are not the group-wide costs. The overhead is not that big. We try to make it and continue and make it as slim as possible to be able to make the profit go up as much as possible, of course. We also want to support. It is important to show for the subsidiaries we have that we are not using up their money. I see that someone is raising their hand, but we will take questions in the end. Please remember your question. Yearly numbers, you know, you will remember we have a SEK 400 million target in 2026.
Is there a big gap here or is it not? If we look from the left to the right, we can see that our reported figures was about SEK 220 million. We will reach SEK 400 million next year. If you include the 2024 acquisitions, the proforma, we are at SEK 270 million. If we include the acquisitions we made this year, as if we owned them last year, you know, we are actually above SEK 300 million. The gap to SEK 400 million is not very big as we see it. This is Q4 numbers again. We have net sales for Q4 increasing by 329%. We have the adjusted EBITDA increasing. Yeah, it's a big number, of course, but 1,600%. Yes, we continue. Looking at the outlook for 2025 and beyond, you know, I got this picture from Patrik Brimedahl at Swedbank.
He made this a very nice picture where we can see that disarmament from 1995, you know, Sweden were a much bigger military force back in the Cold War. After the wall went down, and you can see here from 1995, we actually have decreased almost the most our, you know, military spending based on GDP. There is a lot of room for increasing this number. Here we have that number. Here we can see that we are, this is Sweden's budget for military spending in the coming years. We can see that we are increasing them a lot. That, of course, means a very nice thing for being in this business. It is a bad thing for the world, but you have to be realistic and see that you have to spend more.
When you look at these numbers, of course, they will support our growth agenda very well. You know, when we started Astor, there were a lot of speculation, you know, if we were another of those buy and build stories that would, you know, do a boom-bust kind of story. We have the market with us for many years, as long as we can see, actually, as long as we can foresee. That is a big thing compared to the other buy and builds, I would say. I would not say we are a buy and build, but if you make that comparison, if you want to, we are. I see another question, but we have to wait, Christian. We are very, it is very supportive. You need to remember these figures.
I think a lot of Swedes and a lot of Europeans haven't really thought about this. This is, of course, very, very positive for the business we are in. What will this mean for us? You know, I think this works very well for us. You know, we have a strong acquisition pipeline to continue to work on. We will continue to expand in Northern Europe. We are also moving to a regulated market here in 2025. We have started up that journey, and we see that we will make it to a regulated market here in 2025. You know, the global polarization, they are self-explanatory, these pictures, of course, but, you know, the global polarization is driving our defense business, of course. We will increase our production capacity. We will continue to do a lot of CapEx and invest in our businesses.
I think it will not be more than we have, but it will continue in the same pace as we did last year. You know, this is also self-explanatory. We have, you know, 25 years plus of underspending in the defense sector, and as I showed you, especially in Sweden. I think this feeds very well into our M&A agenda. We have more than 50 companies shortlisted. There are a lot of them we have contacted. We have discussed with them. At the moment, we are eight subsidiaries in the group. The pipeline split with those 50 companies is about 15% Europe, I would say, you know, ex-Nordic. We are looking into the U.K. as well a little bit.
I would say, you know, short term, we would like to expand in the markets we are in and maybe looking into our closest neighbor as well, Norway. Here are some comparative figures. I think that maybe a few of you have seen this, but it's important. I think we made a lot of prudent acquisitions. We don't overpay. We bought a lot of really good companies here the last couple of years. You know, here are four examples. The first one we made, Marstrom, when I came in, actually, as an investor. We bought in 2022. You know, the multiple looks a bit high, but it included property. We have a big property in Västervik in Sweden, which is valued at SEK 30 million. We actually just paid for the property and got the business for nothing. It was a very good acquisition.
We will continue to make good acquisitions. Of course, the recent political turmoil and the rise of defense shares will probably mean that we maybe have to pay a little bit more than we have done previously. Do not be afraid of that. Building the next powerhouse in Northern Europe, why should you be part of Astor Group? This is also important. You know, we know that this is important for you to understand what we are doing, but it is also important for the companies we are talking with to understand. We treat them with a lot of respect, of course, but we give them autonomy. You know, we do not put ourselves in there and make a lot of changes. You know, we try to buy companies that are already performing well.
It is not necessary for us to put ourselves there and change things. We want them to, you know, as I said before, we want them to think big, you know, have a long-term vision, invest in their companies. A lot of them have been afraid to do that because of the disarmament for 25 years plus. Now they dare to do that, and we should help them with that. We have a lot of strategic support. We have a lot of defense industry knowledge. Of course, we have the scale benefits, et cetera, and the networks. What we are looking for when we are making acquisitions is, you know, they should be profitable. You know, it should be great teams. You know, it is great if they are a niche company in their sector and the long-term potential.
We're actually, we're also looking into once, you know, this black and black, as I mentioned, you know, it's important as well that we can start to buy into companies that are maybe not profitable. Maybe they have a very interesting dual-use product that could be used in a war situation or other stuff in the future. We have to dare to drive innovation as well. I think we can be that player now when we have reached profitability. Here is a little bit more in-depth. You know, we have one of our latest acquisitions, ScandiFlash, a fantastic company here in Uppsala. We bought them for SEK 95 million. That corresponded to an EBITDA figure of SEK 5.7 million for 2023. They have a market share of about 70%. They actually, during the Cold War, used to be government-owned.
They were a spinout from a Swedish Defense Research Agency. We are very happy to have them on board. Here is just a picture to show what kind of pictures you can take with these flash X-rays of ScandiFlash. Here you can see a bullet going through active armor, and you can see what happens with the armor. Of course, some of it you can see with a camera. You know, the camera developments is moving fast. Often, when they've done comparisons, you know, they see something happen with the regular camera, but they see something else when they see it in a flash X-ray. That is the truth. We see this as a very great company for Astor to expand on. You can see in the background, there is also the space.
You know, there's maybe, as you're aware, it's a crowding space out there with a lot of satellites and other things. You need to understand if there's a debris, you know, hitting your satellite, how will the impact be? That is something you can measure with the ScandiFlash system. We see great potential for this company. Yeah, and you know, if you were asking me, you know, ScandiFlash themselves would be valued as much as Astor is. Of course, that's my personal opinion. Here is another acquisition we made recently, ID Modeller AB. You know, it might be, you might be asking why did we acquire a company in the south of Sweden making molds and other things. Here's why, you know, Marstrom, they are a great company.
They, you know, they are together with ID Modeller, they can be the full-service supplier to the defense industry. You know, you can come, you know, our defense clients, they can come to Marstrom with an idea. We draw it, we cut it, and now with ID Modeller, we make our own mold. We can have rapid, you know, rapid response if you want and not, you know, trying to find a mold partner and, you know, can you make this mold for us? It will be much quicker. We can make, you know, test products. We can make everything will be a lot smoother. Marstrom will, you know, as I show here in the middle, they will have the full value chain of this. Our defense partners can come to us and get, you know, from an idea to finished product.
We can help them with that. That is very important. To the right there, we have a Bellotti, you know, the five-axis machine we talked a lot about. This is a recent picture from Västervik. You can see the new building there, nice lights and everything. You can see the machine there, and it is ready to be commissioned here in March. We hope we see a lot of potential for that machine. ID Modeller, they have the expertise in this kind of production with this kind of machines. We are also, we bought the know-how about these machines. Another thing to the left there, maybe to wrap things up, you know, we bought it for about SEK 30 million. They had an asset value in their books of about SEK 12 million.
If you would need to replace all the machines with new machines, and some of them are new, but if you need to replace them with all new machines, it would cost roughly SEK 40 million. We are very happy to, you know, have ID Modeller on board. They have a great team in Ljungby in the south of Sweden. With that being said, you know, I think we dare to believe that the best is still ahead of us. You ain't seen nothing yet. That's all for me. Over to Q&A.
Perfect. Thank you very much, Viktor, for the presentation. As outlined in the beginning, you have two options to ask your questions. You can either raise your virtual hand, which some of you already have done, so you can ask questions via audio line. What else you can do, and what else some of you already have done is ask your questions via the Q&A section. I will then read those questions out, and Viktor will answer them. We will start with the audio line questions, which will be followed by the questions you sent in before the call. Lastly, we will answer the questions in the Q&A. I have seen the hand of Christian is up for quite some time. Christian, please unmute yourself and ask your question.
Hi, Viktor. Thanks for taking my question. The first one I have would be on the margin in the fourth quarter. I am trying to understand a bit more how sustainable that margin is, right? How much seasonality is baked into that, and were there any one-offs that benefited it?
Yeah, sure. You know, of course, in the business we are in, you know, the fourth quarter is one of the strongest we have. You know, I would say fourth quarter and the second quarter is a bit stronger. I would say that the margin is over a year is as strong as it can be, even stronger than that, I would say, once we reached even more, you know, economies of scale. We have our long-term target of 15%. That is what we have, you know, communicated in margin going forward. We will not promise anything, but I think it could be higher, actually. Yeah, okay. It sounds a bit like the margin target is rather on the conservative side than on the optimistic side, the 15%. Oh, it depends. You know, Q3, you know, with the vacation and everything is a bit slower.
We will see. You know, we grow very quickly. We will know soon. As of now, you know, our communicated target is about 15%.
Okay. Another question on the recent announcement of the first order that you received at your German subsidiary. What is your expectation? How important is Germany as an end market for you to become over the next few years? I mean, from a news floor perspective, I mean, Germany is booming in terms of defense spending. I mean, there are discussions about EUR 200 billion additional defense spending. This should benefit you. How do you see this in terms of KPIs for Astor?
Yeah, sure, sure. Good question. You know, we would not have set up a flag there if we did not see it as very important for us.
You know, there's a long history with cooperation between Swedish people and German people. You know, we think we should definitely be present in the German market. We will try to grow as quickly as possible we can there with, you know, with some business or other current subsidiaries or, you know, looking into acquisitions. We already met a few companies there. We would like, of course, to expand there as quickly as possible, I would say. Another thing to mention is that, you know, our CEO, he's not here today, but he has good knowledge from previous experience at Saab from the German market. That is also very important here. We are not newcomers to Germany. We don't just set up a flag and hope for business to come, but we drive business ourselves.
Right. Because we were just touching point on the topic of acquisitions, with everything going on, right, and NATO probably having to raise defense spending, demand is not going to be really an issue. Do you see this impacting your ability to acquire companies at the multiples that you have been acquiring them? Because, you know, if their order books are starting to fill up, I would rather expect the price expectations of the sellers to increase. Do you see this or rather not in the, I mean, super small company space that you're active in?
Yeah, sure, sure. Yeah, I think at some point, you know, the expectation will go up. As of now, the acquisitions we made, it hasn't. Of course, as I said in the presentation, I think, you know, given the last 10 days of turmoil here, I think expectations is, you know, likely to go up. It depends. We will not overpay. If there's a good business, we have to find common ground and maybe pay a little bit more than we used to have.
Right. Do you have a set amount of acquisitions or a financial amount that you would like to spend over the course of 2025?
Yes, that's a good question. No, we haven't communicated anything separately on that. Of course, we made a couple of acquisitions last year, and I don't think we would like to, you know, slow the pace down. Maybe similar to last year, or at least, you know, if you look at maybe a bit larger acquisitions. If you look at the total amount of, you know, sales we are adding to Astor, maybe that should be a, you know, a bottom line that we want to add this year as well.
Okay, perfect. Yeah, that's it for now. I'll jump back into the queue. Thanks. Yeah.
Thank you, Christian. I see another hand up there from Robert. Robert, you can unmute yourself now and ask a question.
Hello?
Yeah, we can hear you.
Oh, good, good. I'm thinking about what Mattias is talking about. He says a lot of, he says a lot of, he's talking a lot of, sorry, he's talking about cooperation, co-op, working together with other companies. The question I have is, are there any plans for Astor to cooperate with other companies such as MilDef and Saab?
Yeah, that's a good question. I think, you know, what Mattias has said is absolutely right. You know, we should cooperate more. We should work together instead of separately as much as we can when there's common ground or if there's, you know, if there's a similar product that we are developing or otherwise. Of course, I cannot go into any, you know, specific discussions we are having. It will be for the future to show if there's anything. Yeah, good question.
I know that MilDef is open to cooperate with Astor. I talked with them over LinkedIn. They say, "Oh, we know about them." Yeah, why not?
Yeah, yeah, sure. Of course, we have Ola in our board of directors who used to work at MilDef, Ola Alfredsson , who used to work at MilDef. Of course, you know, there are a lot of communications going on between the defense companies. Of course, that is also important for Astor. We want to be, you know, as I said, you know, a bigger player. For us, it is even more important to have these discussions.
Good. Thank you.
Yeah, thank you.
Perfect, Robert. Thank you very much for your questions. As we have no hands raised for the time being, I would suggest let's dive into the questions you asked beforehand. If you want to ask questions about audio line, please raise your hand. We will do this then afterwards. The first question that was asked before the call, Viktor, was Q4 a one-off given the good results you delivered? Maybe you answered this already before, but some work to do it.
Yeah, yeah, sure. Yeah, of course, as I said, there are some seasonality, you know, Q4 and, you know, Q2 being one of the stronger quarters. What I would say, you know, there is a possibility for the quarter to have been even a little bit stronger in some sense. Of course, all the companies delivered and delivered very well, all the subsidiaries during the quarter. It was, you know, a very successful quarter for us. As we grow, as I said before there, we grow so quickly. Of course, things could be different another quarter, you know, if we invest and things are, you know, stationary for a little while or so. You know, of course, it's a difficult question, but I think the future will tell us how it will be.
Thank you very much. The next question reads, how is the order book distributed across different customer segments and geographical regions? What types of orders dominate currently?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So our order book, you know, it's well diversified. You know, we have various customer segments and geographical regions. A lot of the subsidiaries we have, they sell globally and not just local. It can change a lot just in one quarter, you know. It's difficult to answer that question, right, you know, in any other way than that.
Understood. Thank you. The next question, what is the expected timeline for converting the existing order book into revenue?
Yes. Yeah. That's actually in our quarter report. There is a split there between 2025 and 2026. We are already booking sales in 2026.
Perfect. Next one, how do you view the possibilities of maintaining or improving the strong margins you achieve now going forward?
Yes. That's a good question. I think we will continue to invest in automation. We will try to increase our sales per personnel, our sales per person. I think we would like to have, you know, at least on the industry side to see that. The goal is to, you know, expand the margins on the industry side, you know, to make it more efficient, more automated.
Perfect. Thank you. Halfway through the questions that we received before. Next, how have the recent acquisitions affected the overall business strategy and synergies within the group?
Yes. I think I explained it a little bit when I talked about at least the last one there, ID Modeller.
The last acquisition we made here just this month, we took over the company. There are a lot of synergies there. We are also, in that sense, becoming a bigger supplier for the big defense companies. There is some synergy in that as well. You know, if you talk, you know, group-wide, you know, there are a lot of synergies. We try to make cross-selling. There are a lot of interactions between the companies. You know, all the companies we have, subsidiaries we have today, they used to be, you know, stand-alone companies, you know, CEOs, no one to talk to, no one to, you know, ventilate their problems. Now they have a lot of other CEOs. That is a classical thing when you are a part of a group. Also, you know, IT and, you know, security, you know, it is growing in importance.
We can do economies of scale of that. You know, we can hire, you know, IT security for all the companies in one and get a better price and so on and so on. There are lots of, you know, interaction and especially with defense industry knowledge. We hired this Frederik Bergman in the autumn area. He's a very well-connected person and very, you know, he's very energetic and very, you know, he helps all the companies as well. It is very good to have this group of subsidiary CEOs that can work together and share between them.
Perfect. Thank you. The next one reads, which markets do you see the greatest potential in for international expansion and what is your strategy for establishing yourself there?
Yeah. I think I said that as well, that we're, you know, we'd like to expand in Germany as quickly as possible. We would also like to add another country and maybe our closest neighbor, Norway, would be a good starting point. Of course, Europe is our focus to help Europe increase their defense spending and to help our close neighbor in the east.
That sounds good from all perspectives.
Yeah.
Next question are, which technological trends in the defense and security sector are you focusing on the most and how are you investing in them?
Yeah. Yeah. Actually, I would say the technological trend in defense and the one we're focusing on the most at the moment is the counter-UAS systems that we, for example, we launched it late last year, this Astor Eclipse. We see a great future for that product. It's actually like, you can say it's a spin-off product from the Astor 4. We use the same technology as we developed for Astor 4, and we use it in the Astor Eclipse, but more, you know, smaller, much, much smaller. We see it as a great potential to counter the drones, the drone problem we see that especially our neighbor in the east have, but maybe we will have in the future.
Perfect. Thank you. How does your business contribute to society at large beyond delivering products and services?
Yes. That's a good question. I think, you know, in the short term, our main priority is, you know, to contribute to a neighbor in war. In the longer term, you know, everything we do is actually, there's some sense of greenness into it, you know, you know, in the carbon fiber, everything is, you know, it needs to be more lightweight. It needs to be, you know, battery-driven. The carbon fiber business, there's immense potential in the long run for good quality carbon fiber. Of course, we would like to give back to society at large at some point. Probably that will show in the future. In the short term, we focus on helping our neighbor there and decrease the defense spending.
Perfect. Sounds good. Thank you. The last questions from the questions we received before the call reads like this. What is the competition like in the international markets and how do you plan to compete?
Yes. That's a good question. A lot of good questions. This one is, you know, if you look at ScandiFlash, they already have 70% of the market. We are not at the moment, we don't see that changing. We hope it will increase. Of course, we need to add new products. We need to update our product offering and, you know, all the time to keep it competitive. You know, especially in the electronic warfare business, of course, there's a lot of good, very good companies there, a lot of competitors, but a lot of them are American. Of course, that could mean that if we focus on Europe, you know, it could be even more positive for us. I think that's, and, you know, that's also important in this carbon fiber business that we are now, you know, we are an in-house, you know, full-service supplier.
We can be that supplier which you can come to and develop new products quickly.
Perfect. Thank you very much. In the meantime, I've seen that we have another raised hand from Shashi. I hope I pronounced it right. Please unmute yourself and ask your question.
Hey. Thank you, Philippe. Hi, Viktor.
Hello.
Hi. Very nice presentation. Thank you so much. I'm so happy to be with Astor. I have a question about the Astor 4. I mean, it has been promised for a very long time, but we haven't seen any news. I mean, do you have any update about that?
Yes. Thank you, Shashi. Good question. As I said, I think the priority in the short term or for the time being is the Astor Eclipse to make that into a success story. That's where we see the closest, or in the short term, the biggest potential. We do not see any less interest for Astor 4. You know, in the long run, it is a great product. As we said, I think we mentioned that in the quarter report.
We see that we are, you know, getting close to a good testing scheme here and down in France. We just have to wait. We do not see any negatives. We only see that it is, you know, it takes a little bit longer than we have wanted. In the meantime, we have developed this Astor Eclipse, you know, as a spin-off from Astor 4. I think we managed the situation well.
Okay. Thank you so much.
Oh, thank you.
Thank you very much, Shashi, for your questions. I would say let's dive into the questions that were asked in the Q&A. We are seeing a lot of questions, so let's try to get through them. Let's start with the first one from Alexander, which is in Swedish, but thank you, Louisa, for the translation. What strategic initiatives do you plan to implement in 2025 to further strengthen your market position, including potential acquisitions, expansion into new geographical markets, or development of current product areas? You said earlier that you plan to become a mid-cap player. How will you work towards further?
Yeah, for us, it's important to grow, you know, both organically and, you know, through acquisitions. You know, maybe I forgot to say that, but there's also this aspect that we can pay for acquisitions with, you know, giving out shares. That's where we wanted to be. Now we are there. We do not have to, you know, always raise cash through a direct rights issue, similar. I think we would like to, you know, grow as quickly as possible. Yeah, I think I touched upon that a lot. You know, we want to expand in Germany. We want to maybe move into another Nordic country here. We want to see our current businesses growing a lot. Maybe we will add a new business area. That is also something we are looking into. I just need to shut the window.
No, no worries. All right. Let's continue with the next one. Short question. Are you allowed to sell to NATO? If yes, what is the market outlook on NATO level?
Yes, that's a good question, actually, because it's a bit special for they have a lot of cooperation in electronic warfare in NATO. We see a lot of potential there being the electronic warfare player we are. We think NATO will affect us positively. Absolutely. That is something that will, it will not, you know, change from one day to the other, but in the long run, it's very positive.
Thank you. We touched on that before, your 2025 and 2026 outlooks. One listener would like to understand how will you ensure that you will reach your goals for 2025 and 2026?
Yeah, actually, we haven't communicated any external goal for 2025. We just have the goal for 2026. As I mentioned there, the gap is not very big as we see it. I think I will not expand on that as of now.
Perfect. Thank you. Do you today own a company in the AM or 3D printing sector, or are you looking into that?
Yeah, this is the, I showed a picture of this Belotti machine. That's a 3D printer we have in Västervik. As far as we know, we are the only ones in Sweden which have a machine like that. We know there is a bigger defense company that has a similar machine, but it's for hard materials, I think. We are alone with this machine. We see a lot of potential for it.
Thank you very much. There are three questions from Thomas, also referring to Germany again. I think we touched on it already, however I will read them out. First question is, which subsidiary segments do you see as the most relevant in Germany and how do you plan to compete? You want anything to add?
Regarding Germany, I think I already answered that question.
Let's maybe skip to the third question of Thomas. Could you please elaborate on the expected development and overhead cost and also resilience development cost?
Yes. Yeah. If we look at the overhead cost, as I said in the presentation, we do not want to add any extra costs, unnecessary costs. As I have said before, we are not trying to enrich ourselves, but we try to make the profit per share as large as possible for our shareholders. That might, of course, mean that we need to invest in some development. I think we are at that stage where we can maybe add a little bit on development. I do not think Oscilion, maybe, you know, Oscilion, you know, they are hiring more people. In that sense, development cost will rise, but we will hopefully meet that with new orders for our sales agenda, you know, as we mentioned there, Astor 4, Astor Eclipse, and so on.
I think it will be net positive. Also, we are looking into, you know, there might be, you know, consultants helping out in some of the subsidiaries, and we maybe will replace them on top level with a person, but it will also be, you know, no extra cost. It will be a zero-sum game, but we will get a much more focused individual, you know, focusing on Astor 4.
Perfect. Thank you very much, Viktor. I think we have time for one more question. What is the selling point of going into the Astor community as a company? How do you enhance scalability? Does your company help each other, do your companies help each other grow? Does Astor support the single companies with strategic expertise in different areas such as security, context, etc.?
Yeah, I think it's yes to all those questions. The selling point is coming into Astor 4. I think I mentioned that a few of them, you know, we have the network, we have the, you know, financial power to help them, you know, invest in a lot of the companies we bought today, you know, this machine, I talked about this 5X machine in Västervik. You know, they talked about it for 10 years before we came in as an owner, and now they have it in Västervik because we helped finance it. We put in a lot of effort to help them grow on all levels, but we don't want to change something that is working. We just want to give them everything they want to continue to grow.
Perfect. Thank you very much. We still have some questions in the Q&A here. I see that. As we do not have further time, we will provide you with answers to these questions in a separate document on the IR side at a later point. Thank you from my point. For closing remarks, I hand the word over to you again, Viktor.
Thank you. Thank you. I think I already said enough here. Thank you for listening in. If you're not a shareholder today, I hope to see you in the future. Please feel free to contact me directly also if there's any questions here after.