Good morning and welcome to Canatu's Capital Markets Day 2026. It's great to see so many of you here in person, and welcome also to those joining us via webcast. I'm Mari Makkonen, Vice President of Investor Relations at Canatu. Before we get started, a quick disclaimer. During this event, we'll be making forward-looking statements regarding market development, our future business, and financial performance. These statements involve risks and uncertainties, and actual results may therefore differ materially from what we discuss today. Here is the agenda for today. Juha will start by outlining Canatu's strategy and the next phase of our development, moving from technology validation to scalable value creation. We'll then move into business units with Thomas first outlining the growth opportunities we see in the semiconductor business. We'll take a brief, 10-minute break.
After that, Jussi will discuss the automotive business, Nedal will continue with medical diagnostics, and Ilkka will outline how we are creating value with new business development. Mikko will then walk us through the long-term financial targets and how we plan to reach them. We'll conclude with a Q&A session and closing remarks. You may type in your questions on the event chat already during the presentations. We expect the event to last until approximately 12:30 P.M. Finnish time. With that, let's get started. Juha, please go ahead.
Welcome also on my behalf. I hope that we will give you a lot of answers for the questions what you have been asking from us during the last 19 months since previous Capital Markets Day. I have been working for Canatu now nine years, longer than in any other positions before. I have been inspired not only because of 100x revenue growth, but mainly due to kind of three things. Firstly, this has been enabled to be part of the making the products that has been never done earlier in the industries that are in great transformations. Also working with the customers, partners that are highly demanding, but at the same time they're kind of world-class companies. Thirdly, having around really highly talented people.
The key theme for today is that how do we move from technology validation to the scalable value creation. One slide about company. Canatu is a nanotechnology scale-up company specialized doing advanced carbon nanotubes. Fundamentally, we are a material company. This is based on the Dry Deposition very unique technology platform. Our core focus is in three domains: semiconductor, automotive, as well as medical diagnostics. We are operating globally, serving industry-leading customers. Couple of numbers there. The revenue has been growing roughly 60% during the last five years on average every year. We have the 72.5% gross margin. It's talking about having highly competitive position in the marketplace. Our cash balance is just very healthy and enables us to do moves and investments there.
We have also invested heavily to the people and to the leadership team we have here, for example, today, three new members. The current businesses where we are in are undergoing transformation. Firstly, semiconductor domain. Artificial intelligence, AI, is driving demand for advanced chips. These advanced chips are needed to make the same task faster, cheaper, and consuming less energy. There's all the time need for getting new nodes, newer nodes, and so on. This is fueling adoption for high-power EUV scanners from ASML, and thus also for CNT pellicles. We are very important part of this process of making next-generation AI chips. On automotive side, battery electric vehicles need smarter thermal energy optimization. Jussi is going to talk about that later. Higher level advanced driver assistant systems means sensor must have way better optical specifications.
On medical diagnostics side, healthcare is moving from labs to bedside. So, that the central laboratory diagnostics can be done actually near patient, near clinics, with the same level of the sensitivity way faster with low cost. Major driver there is this point-of-care diagnostics. There is a kind of rising demand as we are fundamentally carbon nanotube platform company. There's a rising demand for higher performance energy efficiency in many ways, and there's a kind of the potential and need for new applications to be developed. Let's get back to our capital markets day that happened 19 months ago, and what were the key assumptions at that time. Look at what we have done and what we have learned from this one.
Firstly, assuming with that revenue target, we assumed that there would have been broader adoption of CNT pellicles with these 500-watt scanners. We of course assumed that the roadmaps, the industry roadmaps that were available at that time would have happened. We also assumed that there would have been sort of delivery and customer approval timelines. Both that we could have done things faster, as well as our customers could have done their part faster, for these first two semi-reactors. We expected that this inspection membrane demand would have followed the number of these EUV inspection tool sales. That did not happen exactly that way.
We assumed that this autonomous driving, especially to level three, would have happened faster and there would be the faster launch, for example, lighter adoption and actually that has kind of then been now very niche in the marketplace. What we have then done. We have industrialized our CNT100 SEMI reactors. We have shipped two of those reactors. The first reactor has received site acceptance or the customer acceptance. They have licensed our technology for mass production and our kind of partner ready for commercial production. The second reactor is right now undergoing the site acceptance testing there, and it is proceeding according to plan. New orders, both with existing customers as well as with new entrants, are ongoing.
One manifestation of this one was the long lead time purchase order, what we just received very recently. On automotive side, we have deepened our collaboration with Denso and making their basically mainly for two application domain, so, full windshield heating elements as well as next generation solar cells. We have improved our conductivity by 100%, meaning that the efficiencies of heat anything there is no way, way better. We have initiated large-scale chamber development so that we can address not only like ADAS heaters there, but kind of full windshield or solar cell sizes. We have executed our validation trials for ADAS camera heaters. On medical diagnostics side, what we have done, we have launched our new strategy, and you will hear more about that one today and the roadmap.
We have established very strong team driving to execution, both in Finland as well as in USA. We have published scientific papers there and more to come. What the market has taught us. First of all, we do see that this AI is driving the paradigm shift and maybe even faster what we anticipated like roughly two years ago. That is enabling these nodes and the structural CNT pellicle demand. That's very important part. That's very solid foundation for this one. These ramp-up timings remain customer dependent. Reactor delivers have also built very strong learning curve for us. We have done the things there. We understand how to do the foundry inter-integration, and this gives us way more predictable future deliveries.
I say that the inspection tools did not follow the kind of the sales of the new tools there, and that has happened mainly due to things that actually the maintenance cycles with those equipments has been now longer than they were initially there. This ADAS level three rollout has been slowed down significantly. Lidar adoption has remained niche. What we do see there that this ADAS camera sensors are coming very central point. You have either fusion solution, where you have multiple different sensors, or then camera sensors. What we do see that many players are starting to rely more on the camera sensor side. There are way more opportunities what we as a Canatu, as a reasonably small company can address.
Let's talk about Canatu as an investment and what are our key strengths. We do see that material transformation is happening in various industries there. This our versatile platform technology is leading, is the one leader of this next wave. We have 2 business models that enables us to scale our business in case there needs to be centralized manufacturing or when there is a need that somebody is investing big money for scaling big operations. This deep customer integration, what we have done, for example, in on pellicle side, and this very unique dry deposition method creates high switching costs. The kind of the items number 4, 5, and 6 will be addressed by my colleagues there, by Thomas, Nedal, and Jussi and Ilkka.
As a highlight there, we are now on CNT pellicle technology. We see that we are moving from validation to the scaling. There are strong market drivers for energy-optimized automotive market, where CNT is playing a key role, and there is a clear benefit supporting potential market shift from centralized to the point of care testing. What we are seeing, when we are looking at these three businesses, semiconductor, automotive, as well as medical diagnostics in 2030, we have done in all of these domains significant market studies to understand the market better. We can estimate that this addressable market is large, and it is growing, reaching EUR 3 billion in 2030. Of course, as there are a lot of opportunities for us, we have to have focused execution and be disciplined with the capital allocation.
This all is leading for the careful estimation what we have done within the company, with the board members, that we see that our revenue target for 2030 is between EUR 100 million and EUR 150 million, and the EBIT target is between 20% and 25% EBIT margin in 2030. Let me get more towards now about this technology platform. Legacy materials, we do see, are reaching their limits, driven by demand for higher performance, energy efficiency, and the market is also moving from micro scale to the nano scale. Very much our digital age has been defined by silicon material, processors, memories, solar cells. What we do see that now there's a significant material transformation happening in various industries, and we do believe that carbon nanomaterials, like carbon nanotubes, graphene, are playing a key role in this transition.
We, as a Canatu, we can be here a forerunner in this material transformation based on our unique technology there. This CNT, advanced CNT is set to replace legacy materials and unlock entirely new applications. There are some examples what you can see here. For example, these composite pellicles that are silicon-based replaced by CNT pellicles. Or in medical diagnostics, traditional electrodes like gold-based, platinum-based to be replaced by CNT electrodes. When you go to kind of the main solutions that are currently silicon-based, those can be CNT enhanced. In conductive materials, like we are talking about today, about solar panels, next generation solar panels, where ITO can be replaced by CNT material. Our unique CNT technology creates very strong competitive edge. That is differentiating, it's IPR protected, and has very high barrier to entry.
Why there's a high barrier to entry? These advanced CNTs are inherently difficult to manufacture and customize at scale. Managing the variability there in this process is extremely difficult. We have put 20 years of technology development. We have invested EUR 100 million to be in this position of having this unique technology and protecting that one with over 300 patents that are either granted or are pending. This unique way, as an example, when it comes to pellicle development, as an example, compared to wet process, to other CNT process, it is using 80% less process steps. Based on this one, we can make stronger, longer, more pristine CNTs, resulting superior performance in end applications. These benefits are like high transmission, high mechanical durability.
We are talking about, for example, 40 G-forces in some semiconductor applications, being durable with over 1000 degrees Celsius, having great optical properties, having flexibility there, providing total energy efficiency, being ultra-sensitive, being scalable, low-cost solutions there. All of these parameters are giving us opportunities to get significant savings and improvements in productivity, in CapEx investments for our partner companies, improvements in the energy efficiency, and enabling high-value industrial applications. Here you see some examples of the companies that are either our current customers or our potential customers. Many of you have been asking questions that, how can you address so many things? The answer is here. Basically, we have one Canatu CNT core material and IP for everything what we do. On top of that one, we have two manufacturing platforms.
One is for more focusing on this freestanding semiconductor domain, and other is for more high volume, high throughput products, higher production capability that is typically put on top of certain substrate. When we move on here, it is reasonably cost-efficient to expand to new product families with minimal incremental investments supporting asset-light growth. That's a kind of the very important element, and of course, it allows us to not to be only in one domain, but to be in various domains. We're having this scalable business model, and I think that most of you are aware of this one. There's nothing new really here. We are either in selling our reactors and having the price of that one, as well as having the recurring revenue element there coming from the consumables and royalties.
The spare parts and the services are also playing a key role there. There's this product sales where we are manufacturing sensors, inspection membranes or in the future, sensors for medical diagnostics products. These two business models. I have been getting questions that, "Okay, when do you use reactor business model and licensing, and when do you use your product sales?" I try to answer for that one here. If you firstly look at what is on this graph on left bottom corner. Maybe first I can explain the axis. On x-axis, you have a process integration and the volume needed there. How big amount of sensors or membranes is needed to be done, and how deep is the integration making the full product.
The y-axis here is the business value of the customer product. Now we have on this left bottom corner the items that if you are doing, for example, ADAS camera heaters for the one OEM one car model, we are talking about maybe single digit million annual numbers or inspection membranes similar manner. It does not make sense for our customers to start building their own CNT manufacturing for this one because the investment levels are too high in the millions to do such a kind of investment. You need to have a consolidation point, and Canatu has been working so far there as a consolidation point for these high-value, high-margin applications. We can kind of enable that our customers can get this CNT material in a fast manner from this consolidated player.
In the future, there could be someone else also who is doing this consolidation. When we are getting these high-value applications where, for example, full windshield, solar cells, CNT pellicles or electrochemical biosensors, there are two things. If the something is something that it does not require significant integration efforts, as well as the volumes are reasonable, we do think that can be something where Canatu is doing the manufacturing. High value, reasonable volumes, high margins, and that's it. There are application domains like, let's say, solar cell, where in solar cell you have to integrate CNT directly on, for example, perovskite sensor. It requires that these are actually manufactured at the same place, so there's a very high integration. Therefore, you need to have that somebody else who is doing the total solution is also manufacturing CNT.
When we are talking about full windshield heaters, that is something that you need to have your manufacturing in all continents, in Mexico, in Eastern Europe, in China, and so on. It is not what we don't think is the role for us. Having this licensing business model allow us also to work there. That's kind of the flexibility with our business case is as we are material company to address the opportunities, various type of opportunities. There can be different also strategic end games from recurring revenue royalties to even out-licensing one day of certain applications. That's kind of the talking about business models. When we are talking about high switching costs.
Of course, this dry deposition method, spending 20 years, EUR 100 million, having very strong patent portfolio is one thing that is creating high switching cost. But another key element there is that when we have been developing the products, that has been never done earlier. No one else has done those. It is typically starting from the research and development, having the deep customer development there, getting them to manufacturing, validation, and so on. This process, for example, when we are talking about EUV pellicles, started actually in 2017. It has been a long journey to get here when we are ready for scaling. If you think about somebody would like to replace CNT pellicles from this market, it's a long, long journey. They have to go through this same path there. You have two major things that are creating high switching costs.
One is our unique way of doing this one, and the second is that there has been very deep customer and partnership work to get here. When we are talking about total addressable market, what we do see it is estimated to be EUR 3 billion in 2030. The biggest part of this one is coming from the CNT pellicle side, and Thomas is in next presentation, going to kind of address that one and going to kind of the deeper level. On automotive side, we have roughly EUR 0.9 million opportunity. The bigger opportunity on full windshield heater side. We have this point-of-care medical diagnostic, where the whole market size is roughly like $80 billion.
What we have been looking there, the addressable market for our hormone point-of-care diagnostics and sepsis diagnostics in 2030, that could be roughly EUR 0.7 billion . There is as a reference, there's also number from the various studies that total CNT market is estimated to be between 8-12 billion in 2030. Big part of this one goes for the bulk CNT that is mostly used in automotive batteries. What is the remaining for advanced CNTs that is estimated to be, like, EUR 2 billion. That is pure material revenue. If you are wondering what is the key difference between bulk CNT and advanced CNT, maybe the one key differentiator there is if you are purchasing bulk CNT, 1 kilogram of that one costs roughly EUR 50.
If you're talking about advanced CNT, what we are manufacturing, 1-kilogram costs more than EUR 1 million. So, there's a huge difference in terms of the value what is generated there. Then, like, so there are way more opportunities what we can do. So, how do we select the right application domains? Of course, we have been always thinking that what are those industries, where do you see high transformation going on? Because that allows you to have high, high value, high margin domain there. Then we are optimizing also in our cases, looking like long-term value generation potential over short-term revenue. You can think about this one, for example, whether we are optimizing reactor price or longer-term recurring revenue there. We are doing systematic validation and de-risking before scaling.
Ilkka is going to talk about a lot about stage gate and milestone-driven method, how we are analyzing these new elements there. Of course, we are always, like in the past, we deprioritized touch sensors, capacitive touch sensors, where we did not see, like, high margin potential. We are also actively looking at that if there's something that doesn't fit into our portfolio, how can we actively deprioritize those? Getting to the long-term financial targets. As stated, our revenue target in 2030 is between EUR 100 million and EUR 150 million, so we were looking now to kind of round timeline 2030 there. We have a range there. If you look at even at ASML, who has very established business, because of some unpredictability in the market, they have also ranged between $44 billion and $60 billion.
We thought that, hey, let's have the range that best describes where we could be based on the very careful analysis there. The EBIT target there is between 25%-30%, and this is reflecting that we have decided to invest heavily to the new domains, where the value creation and the revenue creation is maybe higher after 2030, like medical diagnostics or new business development there. From the relative revenue contribution perspective, semiconductor is expected to be large, automotive medium, and medical diagnostics and the new business development small. In relative revenue growth rate perspective, growth rate perspective, I would like to emphasize that one. We do see that in 2030, these medical diagnostics and new business development growth rate will be high.
Of course, if this is compared to the traditional businesses, even our medium is very high there. When we are talking about relative terms between these businesses. What we do see there that semiconductor, like said, is the key driver here enabling predominantly recurring revenue model by 2030. Coming from the royalties, consumables, product sales, and so on, not like the project sales like reactor sales there. I will summarize this one with the strategy. We covered the revenue; we covered the EBIT target there. Business target is that in semiconductor domain, we are targeting to become the leading CNT pellicle membrane in EUV lithography. Number one. On automotive side, we want to achieve established position in fast-growing full windshield market and as a kind of supplier of ADAS camera heaters.
Medical diagnostics side, to become a leading provider of point-of-care solutions for hormones and sepsis. In new business development side, develop new application candidates with focused product families there and creating significant corporate value. These operational priorities, those are mostly our internal what needs to be done operationally to achieve those targets. We need to get to next level to industrialize our reactor and equipment's there. There's ever-increasing industry requirements for defectivity. What we achieve now will not be enough in five years' time, so we need to continue that development there. We need to ramp up semiconductor-grade manufacturing capability and capacity as well to meet the market demand. We have to strengthen our core competencies, competence areas and expand our global presence in target markets.
We need to keep this culture of productization, high quality culture, but at the same time being capable of doing rapid innovation and development. With this part, I would like to now hand over to Thomas to cover our semiconductor business in more details.
Thank you, Juha. To briefly introduce myself, my name is Thomas Gädda, and I have, for the past six months now, had the privilege to head Canatu Semiconductor Business Unit. I have a 20-year background in semiconductor industry, developing and supplying materials for latest nodes. I'm personally absolutely delighted about the overall opportunity, and it's a great honor for me today to convey and reiterate on the strong situation where Canatu's CNT products are in the semiconductor space. The semiconductor applications for carbon nanotubes remain, the key area for value creations at Canatu. I want to repeat the message that Juha already conveyed. Today, the technology which Canatu has developed for semiconductors is scaling. In practice, this means that our reactors are being adopted by our customers and used for pellicle manufacturing in industrial setting.
The scaling also means that we are in dialogue with existing and additional parties for new opportunities which present themselves for us as additional reactor sales. Today, the single biggest driver for the semiconductor industry, of course, is artificial intelligence or AI. There's a massive demand for AI chips, and the capacity at semiconductor foundries has been sold out for at least a year forward. In the future, semiconductor applications will continue to and remain to be a significant revenue and value generator for Canatu. The reason for this is that many of the new business opportunities that Ilkka and his team are looking into are in the semiconductor space. Also, as a reminder, semiconductor is also the place to be in when your objective is to secure business in high-margin applications.
The applications which we have targeted continue to be the key drivers for short- and medium-term revenue. During this strategy period, we expect our revenues shift from equipment sales to recurring revenues. More specifically, we have analyzed the EUV pellicle market, and based on this analysis, the overall total addressable market in 2030 is estimated at EUR 1.5 billion. The serviceable part of it is estimated at EUR 800 million. I will get back to this split later on in my presentation. Because of the transistor scaling that is taking place in the industry, there's a need for extreme ultraviolet lithography, which ASML is the sole supplier of. This continues to be the structural driving force generating the need for the technology that we have developed and the products that we sell.
The inflection point for Canatu is taking place right now. The CNT pellicles will be adopted through the 2 nanometer and especially the sub-2 nanometer technology nodes. Our view is that the technology has now been validated and is moving to the scaling. The final speed of scaling depends ultimately on our end customers that adopt these CNT pellicles. The reason for this is relatively simple. The reticle or the mask on top of which the pellicle sits is at the heart of our end customers' operations, and it has to be working perfectly. I also wanted to remind the audience about the key benefits our technology enables. CNT is nearly fully transparent for EUV and other wavelengths of light. In transparency, our CNT outperforms anything that is in the market.
The transparency is the key driving property of CNT, and it has the potential of unlocking significant capital and operational benefits for our customers. The reason is that transparency has a direct relationship to the productivity or the throughput of the ASML scanner. Generally, the industry can expect up to EUR 1 billion total capital expenditure saving through a 10% throughput improvement, which means that out of ten scanners sold can be saved. What has been mentioned also creates significant other benefits. Running an EUV scanner is operationally very expensive. It costs tens of millions of EUR per year to operate one EUV scanner, and that means that the reduction of the scanner fleet will thus have operational benefits as well. I wanna highlight that one specific aspect is that these EUV scanners are power-hungry machines.
They consume a lot of energy and therefore, a reduced EUV scanner fleet also means, that the environmental footprint is gonna be reduced. The environmental aspects in the semiconductor industry is increasing in attention and, while the industry previously has been very performance driven. The transparency in other wavelengths, regions of light also translate to enhanced quality control benefits for our customers. The reason is that incumbent pellicle materials reflect light, and that generates two issues for them. The first one is that the process window in the lithography process is reduced, and secondly, the inspection capability that they have, is limited. Therefore, by moving to CNT pellicles, there will be also other benefits that our customers will, be able to enjoy.
I want to highlight that Canatu holds a very unique and critical position in the EUV process and EUV lithography. In the very center of everything that we do is the EUV reticle or the mask. This reticle replicates its print to the wafers containing eventually the highly advanced semiconductor devices. We already covered the benefits of our CNT technology for pellicles, and I want to remind that we have also been producing CNT membranes for EUV reticle inspection for five years. These filter membranes protect the mask during inspection of the EUV mask quality. In this way, we improve the quality control in semiconductor fabrication. These filter membranes also filter out-of-band wavelengths, and through the transparency and the filtering effect, we have the possibility to improve the accuracy and throughput of the inspection process.
Overall, our technology addresses the entire ecosystem of the EUV mask manufacturing from end-user fabrication to EUV metrology applications, and also EUV light source providers. In this way, we have the ability to understand the industry and the market trends and opinions, through the dialogue with the entire ecosystem. As mentioned, the EUV mask is the point of intersection of our activities and the semiconductor industry. Our focus is to manufacture reactor systems and eventually release improved reactor designs. Through the reactor, we also deliver the leading CNT to the market and work consistently to improve the properties of the CNT that our reactors produce so that we can retain our technology leadership.
As communicated before, the CNT membrane today is coated by our customers and mounted on a frame prior to assembly on the EUV reticle. This reticle mask combination is then used by the semiconductor foundries to produce the latest devices and end products to the market. I finally want to remind that these inspection filters or membranes are used throughout the manufacturing cycle to ensure that the mask prints the same feature over and over again, hundreds of thousands of times. In this way, we improve the yields and operations at our customers' foundry customers. From a market perspective, the drivers which we have communicated in the past still hold true. While AI is the structural change maker, it generates need for additional capacity. The mobile and personal computing space, it seems, are still strong demand generators for the industry overall.
A key aspect why AI is such a driving force in the industry is simply that a typical 300-millimeter wafer can only fit a certain amount of AI chips or dies on a wafer. If you compare these to mobile or personal computing dies or chips, there is substantially more that can fit on one wafer. When the AI is driving increased demand, it means that they are requiring the wafer throughput to increase significantly, and this is the reason why the semiconductor industry right now is being sold out. It also leads to the overall growth of the semiconductor industry, so advanced chips are growing with a 20% CAGR.
We see that investments on CapEx grow with a roughly similar rate, and in 2028, it's expected that there is EUR 50 billion investments in CapEx alone. Just to highlight a good example, a couple of days ago, SK hynix , the memory producer that produces also the HBM memories to AI chipsets, reported EUR 7 billion in procurement of ASML scanners. Our technology will be adopted for the future nodes and future scanner generations. We also anticipate usage in older process nodes as customers want to leverage on the economic benefits that our technology enables. The main critical driver for the replacement is of course the transparency, and it's also expected that older scanner generations will be upgraded to these 600-watt systems that are driving the CNT adoption.
Roughly one month ago, ASML publicly reported the very first stable demonstration of the future 1000-watt light source. This means that the light source improvement will continue as we move forward. There likely will be some intermediate models like 800-watt systems, but that remains to be seen. The key point is that all of these changes and the new technology nodes provide Canatu a greenfield opportunity to capture markets. The 1000-watt light source development is a significant upside and benefit for Canatu. This is because with increasing light source power or watts means that incumbent pellicle technologies may not be able to withstand the operational conditions in the EUV scanner.
Furthermore, with the 100,000-watt system, the coating that is presently applied on the pellicles will not be needed, and it's gonna be removed, generating a requirement for pure pristine CNT pellicles, which is at the core of Canatu's technology. This will reduce overall dependencies on other players in the field and makes Canatu's position stronger in the future. The delayed entry to the market was much based on the delayed adoption of the 600-watt scanner system, and these are now finally being introduced to the market this and coming year. Now I want to return to the EUV pellicle market and the breakdown to device level. We validated our previous estimations and see that the overall market is at $1.5 billion in 2030. This market can be divided into three segments.
It's the 3 nanometer technology nodes and above, which are in production today, the gate-all-around nodes of 2 nanometer and sub-2 nanometers which will be produced in the future, and then also a growing DRAM memory. Different technology nodes use different amount of EUV layers, and the common denominator is that EUV layers always increase with new technology. This of course is an upside for Canatu as a growing EUV layer quantity will mean additional opportunities for Canatu. In our estimations, we have also used pellicle lifetime to estimate its effect to our calculations. We have further segmented the market to the end product, which we aim to focus on.
The focus point for us and the industry today is the gate-all-around nodes of 2 nanometers and sub-2 nanometers. We also see that there is a potential upside for Canatu if we will be able to adopt in older nodes for the node 3 and also in memory production. The upside potential will then grow up to EUR 1.1 billion as a market. As Juha outlined earlier in his presentation, we are converting and transitioning to a period where Canatu can increasingly rely on recurring revenue sources. To put this into a practical example, I wanted to outline how this has been taking place with our key industrial partner, Fine Semitech Corporation, or FST. FST operates our reactor in South Korea.
It was shipped in September 2024, approved in July 2025, and later last year, we also granted them a license for mass production using the technology. After the site acceptance test, the pellicle needs to undergo a validation and then move to pilot and risk production. Pilot and risk production is also the place where we will unlock the recurring revenues for Canatu. Just to remind, the recurring revenues will be based on royalties, consumables we sell to be able to operate the reactor maintenance service, and of course, reactor upgrades. The final outcome of this process is the high volume manufacturing, which is then a stable production with minimum changes in the process, and this will be yielding then long-term steady benefits and revenues over the years.
For us, we expect that the pilot and risk production will take one to two years because this is the first time CNT pellicles will be adapted to production. We also wanna update you on the investments that we have done. We have invested into a new semiconductor production facility. This facility increases our capacity and improves our capabilities. The clean room that we are building is the largest of its kind that we know of in Finland, and the 800 sq m of space will enable us to build 6 reactors simultaneously with additional capacity in our existing facility. We hold this as a clear statement of our vision and belief for the future of our semiconductor business.
The construction model that we chose to use was a scalable modular structure or a Shell-First model, which is the term used in the semiconductor industry. This means that the infrastructure is built first and furnished later as additional capacity is needed. This model permits additional capacity investment with significantly lower CapEx moving forward. The construction started in Q4 last year, and construction is moving forward at schedule and under budget, and it's gonna be ready after the summer. We will be already moving in some of the equipment in the coming months, which includes then a state-of-the-art pellicle defect inspection machine that will help us in our efforts.
Now I have gone through the technology, our position in the ecosystem, and I wanna briefly take a look at our path to value creation. Overall, our path is crystal clear. The 2026 targets are from our operational plan. In 2027 and 2028, we aim to consolidate our position by growing the installed reactor base at our customers and focusing on the market segments that we outlined earlier. We also look to facilitate the transition of the company to recurring revenues and support our customers while we look at new market segments and develop the reactor technology. In 2029 and 2030, we have completed the transition to a company whose main source of revenue is based on recurring revenues.
This is also the time period when the 1,000-watt systems are expected to be commercialized and new scanner concepts will be developed for the industry. In this way, we have achieved scalable long-term growth and prepared the company for the future. I want to summarize my presentation by consolidating the key messages and emphasize points that drive value. We have evidence of customer scaling. They are moving from validation to pilot and risk production. We have been able to grow our customer base both for CNT pellicle reactor cases and inspection membranes, and these will convert to additional orders overall, especially reactor orders. This year, we also expect to start collecting recurring revenues. With this, I would like to thank you for your attention.
There will now be a short 10-minute break before we will dive into the other business areas presented by Jussi, Nedal, and Ilkka. Then there will be, of course, the finance update by Mikko. Thank you very much on my behalf.
Good morning also from my behalf, and welcome back from the break. My name is Jussi Rahomäki, and it's been a great pleasure to lead Canatu's automotive business for past two years. I have a background from advanced optics industry, so it's a very big pleasure for me and high interest for me that the optical performance is one of the key advantages of Canatu's CNT technology. Let's now spend some time to look into some high-value application in automotive domain, how we are moving also in this domain from qualifications to industrial scale, and also building the platform for long-term expansion. As Juha pointed out, briefly in his talk earlier, so automotive is kind of living with two key transitions that are relevant to Canatu's technology.
One being electrification and the second one being assisted autonomous driving. How the CNT is linking these trends, let's take example from this simple schematic of a car. Starting from electrification point of view. One of the main considerations is how to manage thermal energy, especially in cold conditions. Today, lot of hot air need to be pumped inside the car so that you can achieve a reasonable temperature and also keep the windows clear of fog and ice. Okay. That is obviously it's consuming a lot of energy. If we just kind of in simple terms try to minimize that consumption, we can today switch off the air conditioner or minimize it.
In cold conditions, like just few degrees less than today in Helsinki, what happens quite immediately is that your windows get fogged, and you cannot see anything, and it's obviously not the way to go. The kind of solution where CNT becomes very essential is that, instead of having a lot of hot air blown in the car, you actually heat the surface specifically. With the invisible CNT heater, a lot of surfaces can be heated and maintain this kind of a clear visibility for the driver and passengers, and also at the same time enable the less efficient HVAC system or more efficient HVAC system to take care of the air conditioning. Okay?
Other perspective here is that maybe more energy is also required, so the solar cell might be the part of the game. Also there are other components that similarly require either conductive surface or the heating elements. Now we are currently at Canatu focusing on a few key applications we see the highest value for today and for the short term. Given these applications, obviously this ADAS camera heater we have been talking earlier also in the previous CMD, for example.
We see that the market total addressable market is roughly EUR 200 million, which is relatively little bit smaller than the other opportunities, but it is very specific, and we can see like a very strong value add from the Canatu product there. Next kind of circle here, the windshield heater, naturally expanding from the small already windshield integrated camera heater to bigger format. This market could be something around EUR 700 million in 2030. If you look even longer perspective, so beyond this current strategic period, so early 2030s, we also see that the growth of this kind of novel solar cell application could emerge. We take a bit deeper look on each of these applications next.
Let's start from camera heaters for the advanced driving system. Basically, heating element inside the windshield where the camera is looking forward through the windshield. Here the critical thing is that the OEMs, the car makers, they are looking the way to enable hands-free driving. Even Juha mentioned that this so-called Level 3 autonomous driving where part of the responsibility would be already on the car. That is not taking as fast as we previously thought, but the hands-free driving feeling is still something that the OEMs want to leverage. It basically means that you have the same experience, but you still need to be keeping your eyes on the road, so the driver has the responsibility.
It basically means that, okay, safety aspect, the experience aspect is there. It will require this higher camera performance, higher ADAS performance, and when it comes to the CNT application, which is part of the optical stack in front of the camera. Obviously then, it is becoming very important this is high quality and provides the solution to support this advanced ADAS system. Where we are today, we have a number of partnerships and ongoing qualifications to get through these qualifications. We are seeing increasing interest from leading European, U.S., and Chinese manufacturers. We have since the previous CMD started new focused customer project on this domain.
Just this week, we also announced that we have engaged with new partnerships that is taking our technology on this domain even further to kind of support our competitive position in the long term. At the same time, we are also working with kind of ensuring full compatibility in this windshield integration process that is relatively new to the glass makers who are building these glasses for the cars. Okay. Kind of thinking a little bit further ahead, scaling from this small heater element even to the full windshield size. There is kind of similar demands over there that we are already dealing with the camera heater.
As we are already inside the windshield, with this camera heater, this is kind of obvious step forward. Full windshield heating point of view, as I already explained, this energy management is very critical part. If we think about the conditions like a few degrees Celsius and below freezing point, actually the driving range can be reduced by even 45%. This is not, of course, optimal from the consumer point of view. Finding a solution where the air conditioning and heating and ventilation system combined with this surface heating is actually enabling that even 60% of the wasted energy would be recovered.
The very same benefits I explained in the camera heater domain are here, but of course, here the emphasis is the energy efficiency of the CNT compared to these traditional wire heaters. Also, the aesthetic perspective is significantly better. Then, opposite, not saving energy, but even creating some more. There are the next generation solar cells that could be integrated, vehicle integrated. Currently, OEMs are testing with silicon solar cells. There are some limitations in the conversion efficiency, so how much electricity you can get out. Basically, combining certain novel technologies with such silicon solar cells together with perovskite solar cells, so this kind of limitation can be exceeded by far.
The CNT as an optically clear and very conductive material can kind of support this ambitious as well. From the perspective of how to get things accelerated in automotive domain, we have a long-term partnership with Denso, one of the leading Tier 1 companies in automotive domain. We have been collaborating nearly 10 years now, and we are kind of shifting a new phase where these large area CNT platforms are being developed and qualified for this kind of large area solutions. To highlight that, in Denso's public strategy, they highlight very critical business areas that are very relevant to Canatu's technology, and then they are putting like a significant more investment on those.
To conclude automotive side, on ADAS camera heaters, we are moving from initial mass production entry to expanding our footprint with new customers, and then by the end of the strategic period, establishing sustained revenues from them. On these new applications, we are moving from technology validation together with customers and partners to level where we can find a suitable business model to enable these, as Juha explained, slightly different models of engagement, and then aiming that the first customer would be commercially launching this type of product in by 2030. With this word, I want to thank you for your attention, and we can move forward to medical diagnostic, and Nedal will come to tell you about that.
Good morning, everyone. I'm Nedal Safwat, Head of Medical Diagnostics at Canatu. I've been with Canatu for the past 10 months, and I come from a background of medical diagnostics of over 25 years. Today, what I would like to share with you is how we are unlocking the value within medical diagnostics, leveraging our carbon nanotube technology. Healthcare is going through a major transformation globally that we've seen, and the major transformation that's ongoing is a shift from what we call centralized testing to point-of-care. What that means is we're trying to bring diagnostic tests closer to the patient, closer to the clinics to be more accessible and easier, and turnaround time is much faster.
What we are aiming to do and working on to develop is being able to bring value with our carbon nanotubes to medical diagnostics in a point of care setting. If we look at the market size in medical diagnostics is quite significant and growing at a steady state of about 6% CAGR. A key segment of the diagnostic market is the point of care, and again, this is the near patient testing, and it's been growing quite aggressively and expanding because of the demand that we see in healthcare. What we aim to do at Canatu is look at how we can leverage our technology to expand within that space.
We've done already market studies and identified two key domains, hormone testing and sepsis diagnosis, as attractive domains that would leverage our technology and being able to bring value to the point-of-care testing. Now you might wonder why those two domains specifically. Why hormone testing and why sepsis diagnosis? Let me start first with hormone testing. Hormone testing has been evolving over the past couple of years quite rapidly, and the reason for that is longevity. Our average age of living has increased. There's also chronic treatments where require hormone therapy to enhance lifestyle, improve the clinical outcome for patients. So part of that is making sure that we measure the level of hormones that we have and making sure that there's proper administration guiding the treatment to move forward.
As hormone therapy expands, there is gonna be more testing that's evolving with that. Within the guidelines, even the FDA most recently has lowered the bar to make sure that there is increased use of hormone therapy to make sure we gain the benefits of using that in healthcare today. Sepsis on the contrary is a global crisis, and it's a global crisis because it's a bloodstream infection that once it happens, the patient really has hours, at most, a couple days to live. Every minute counts on how you're able to diagnose sepsis and guide the treatment and making sure the patient is treated in an adequate time and with the adequate level of treatment that's required.
You've heard the stories many times of, you know, a kid or a child playing in the field, and they get injured, they get an infection, and before you know it, they're in the ICU. The key thing here is to make sure you're able to diagnose very quickly and guide the proper treatment for sepsis. With our carbon nanotube technology, we see that we bring the sensitivity, the rapid turnaround time, and the cost-effective way that we can test for both hormone diagnosis and for sepsis as well. I wanna walk you briefly through the patient journey that happens today, and I think you'll gain an appreciation of the impact that we are about to make on the healthcare industry.
If you look at this diagram, the patient basically comes in the hospital, the sample is collected, it's labeled, sent to a centralized lab. That's where usually within a big hospital or a remote location, that's where the testing takes place. It's batched, it's running through large, expensive machines with a complex setup. Once that testing happens, then it's sent back to the doctor or the physician, where they call the patient back in, or they communicate with the patient on the treatment and the next steps. This whole process can take 1-2 days. What we are developing at Canatu, leveraging our carbon nanotubes, is a technology that would transform this journey and change it to a 20-minute turnaround time, where the patient is at the clinic on-site, we're able to collect the sample.
The sample is run on a portable device, and the results are generated within the same patient visit, or in other more acute cases, right at the bedside of the patient, and the whole process taking 20 minutes. You can imagine the impact that this makes. If you compare the two journeys, you can see our mission to transform patient diagnostics moving forward and really make an impact on the way we diagnose patients today, specifically again, for hormone and for sepsis, and those are the two domains that we're aiming for. If we look at the market and what are the market needs and how we're addressing those needs, decentralized testing is a critical need, meaning being able to provide testing capabilities, not just in a central large hospital, but in remote locations, in clinics, in more accessible areas.
What we're able to do is develop our technology to be portable in a point-of-care setting that's delivering the tests that are needed. We would be the first point-of-care for hormone and potentially for other applications as well, differentiating our technology. The demand for turnaround time, again, we talked about how urgent it is to get the results, whether it's within the same patient visit, by the bedside of the patient to make sure we guide the treatment right there and then and make sure it's effective. We're able to bring a turnaround time that's within a 20 minutes range, fast turnaround time, rapid intervention by the physician or the clinician to guide the treatment. We're not changing the technology or the policy that exists in many cases.
We're leveraging our carbon nanotubes and using existing technologies to integrate using the policy that exists. This is very important because what we're able to do is use what happens today for diagnosing hormone levels or diagnosing sepsis and capitalizing on that by providing accessible technology and faster turnaround time, leveraging our carbon nanotubes. A key aspect is cost. You know, the healthcare setting globally is going through a significant cost pressure, trying to lower cost at all different fronts. By enabling a point-of-care device, we're able to lower the capital investment required to acquire this technology and to be able to test providing lab-grade results in a portable setting, in a point-of-care setting, which is revolutionary, and that's the mission that we have.
We're starting from a solid foundation, and I share with you this slide because I'm really excited to show that how we are advanced and how we have matured on different fronts. First, let's look at the left hand of the slide. What you'll see are available advancement with electrochemical sensors or material that's used for electrochemical sensor. Mostly are for research grade. They're not standardized. They're not able to produce in large scale or large capacity. They're mostly used for research use, exploration studies. There's a lot of, I would say, just very early scientific discovery that's happening with different material in this space today.
If you look at the right-hand side, this is where we bring the advantages of our carbon nanotube and what was mentioned earlier, the 20 years of experience and the investment that we've made to mature our carbon nanotube, being standardized, showing the sensitivity, showing the strong performance that we were able to demonstrate in diagnostics. We've well characterized, and that's what we're using for the hormone application and for sepsis as well. We have taken carbon nanotubes to fabricate sensors. What we have done is actually design, develop, and build these electrochemical sensor in a mature form with standardized performance to the industry standard for medical diagnostics. We're making more progress there. We're leveraging the infrastructure that we have today on the semiconductor, on the automotive to have manufacturing capability.
That's very unique to us because if you look at other technologies or other early innovations, they have not yet started any activity on the manufacturing capability or the infrastructure. A unique value that we bring here with the infrastructure that we have to provide manufacturing at scale. We started the development to build the tests in a proof of concept generating data, and that's ongoing and continues for hormones and also for some of the sepsis markers or the bloodstream infection markers. We're taking this all and integrating it into a device. That's very critical because we are providing a solution to the clinics, to the physicians, that they could leverage our technology in a very easy and accessible solution. I'll share with you some of the details on that in the later slides.
Our journey has begun, and we have done quite a bit of market research, a customized research study to identify the applications that we're targeting. As mentioned, we're starting with hormones, we're expanding into different hormone testing panels, and also for sepsis diagnosis. There are several markers, and we're building for those markers that are required for sepsis diagnosis. We've engaged with key opinion leaders and experts in the market to make sure we collect the proper voice of customer. All of that helped us define a roadmap with specific milestones and development checkpoints to make sure that we are advancing forward in a measured way.
We've built the technical competency, so we've recruited a world-class team in Finland here and in the US as well, with over 75 years of IVD experience, and also one-third of the team with advanced degrees. We've published already data on hormone testing. We've also published another paper, and then we're getting ready to publish a third paper. The data is being generated, and it's being released in the scientific community today. The next couple of years are gonna be very exciting for us. We've outlined the path to value creation, and again, with concrete milestones that we are targeting. In 2026, we have a major milestone to develop our first alpha prototype. What we mean by that is a functional system that's able to generate results.
We take that forward in the following two years to advance it to a beta system that would be prepared for clinical trials and in addition, expanding the menu for additional hormone panel tests that we would have. To make sure that we have a robust menu and expanding our menu and applications for testing in this space. We're taking that forward into clinical trials with our first hormone, which is testosterone, and that's a critical hormone that we've identified as having the priority, and then also taking or advancing the following hormone panels for additional testing into clinical trials, and aim to commercialize our first product by 2030.
I'm excited to share with you today our initial design of our portable device, and you can see here basically, it's a handheld portable reader where we take our carbon nanotube and fabricate, again, the electrochemical sensors that you see here, take the patient sample. The patient sample is basically into this cartridge that goes into the reader, generating the results within 20 minutes, and we're able to provide the results to the physician and to guide the patient treatment on the spot near the bedside at the point-of-care. In summary, we have a significant attractive market opportunity with a unique value proposition where we would be the first to market in a point-of-care application for hormone testing and potentially for sepsis applications as well.
We have a strong feasibility that's been demonstrated with the technology that we will continue to take forward into development. We have the competency with the core carbon nanotube technology that we've built, and also the team that we have to take it forward into development. We're positioned for partnerships because we're already getting some interest on possible partnerships on how to drive further applications, leveraging again the foundation that we have with carbon nanotubes. Importantly, as mentioned, we have a production capability at scale that would help us pivot very quickly into manufacturing with our new technology and our new application. Thank you for your attention, and I'll introduce my colleague, Ilkka.
Hello, my name is Ilkka Varjos. I'm CTO at Canatu and responsible for the new business development function. I joined Canatu in 2009, which means that I've happily been with the company already more than a third of my life. New business development function exists for creating significant upside without taking the focus away from our core. The starting point for all of this is our proprietary carbon nanotube technology platform. As outlined by Juha earlier today, the platform is already exploited across membranes, conductive films, and sensors. The new business development function is planning to build on that same foundation. Carbon nanotubes are a next-level general purpose technology. This creates very wide landscape of opportunities, and this is also very well documented by large number of research publications as well as market studies.
The total addressable market for advanced carbon nanotubes is anticipated to be EUR 2 billion by 2030. Most importantly, this is manifested by large number of inbound inquiries that Canatu constantly receives for novel CNT applications. We are not trying to do everything. We are choosing opportunities that are close to our current capabilities, primarily within microsystems and electrochemical sensors. We are screening those opportunities systematically. From day one, the execution is partner-led. We work with experienced industrial partners and leverage significant public funding to accelerate the development and to limit the use of our internal resources. To prioritize these opportunities, we use this simple disciplined lens, business potential versus technical difficulty. This means that we focus on opportunities and only on the opportunities which we can win, and by doing so, generate significant business upside.
This also means that we deprioritize opportunities that are either too difficult or that do not have the required business pull. In this slide here, you can see an illustration or graph where we have mapped the current set of opportunities, and we have purposely left these opportunities unnamed to respect the confidentiality. This would give you a perception of the volume and discipline we apply. To maintain the discipline, we use this simple but effective gate model. All the opportunities are run through these gates. It starts with initial screening, then moves to business case validation, and then to industrial proof. Only the opportunities that pass this industrial proof are then moved to productization. This enables us to learn fast and also validate both the commercial and technical viability of each case.
This also means that we can discontinue early if the opportunity doesn't reach the bar that we have set. We apply this what we call controlled optionality. We purposely limit the use of internal resources and stage the use of internal resources. The leverage comes from industrial and research partners that provide significant development capacity. The leverage also comes from significant public funding, EUR 10 million granted for Canatu and EUR 20 million for our partners, which then accelerates both the technical and commercial validation. Meanwhile, our core execution focus and capital allocation remains firmly on existing business units, semiconductors, automotive, and medical diagnostics. The value through new business development is not created by running multiple small projects but rather creating selected few product families with significant business potential.
We work with strong and industrial partners that provide us faster validation and market access. While we are doing that, we are generating a moat of IP to protect our position in these product families. It's the combination of product families, partnerships, and IP that turns this disciplined optionality into significant enterprise value creation over time. Here's the path to value. In 2026, our focus is in screening and validation. We go through relatively large number of opportunities, primarily within microsystems and electrochemical sensing. We also plan to sign the first development agreement with a major industrial player. In 2027-2028, the focus is in industrial proof. We plan to deliver first product prototypes and also plan to focus on product co-development on defined set of priority applications together with our partners.
In addition, we plan to provide CNT materials to selected partners to explore additional applications with minimum Canatu involvement. In 2029-2030, the objective is value crystallization. We plan to have the first product in mass production and also plan to have two to five new product families with significant business potential integrated into our portfolio. We plan to have a strong defendable IP position around those product families. While these product families create value by 2030, the significant revenue growth is expected to happen beyond 2030 when these product families scale. That's in a nutshell, new product new business development and the disciplined optionality. Large number of opportunities are screened, few are passed forward, partner-powered execution resulting in high value outcomes.
Thank you very much for your attention. Next, it's financials with Mikko Vesterinen. Thank you.
Good day. Thank you, Ilkka. Great to be here today. I'm Mikko Vesterinen, CFO of Canatu. I've been now in this position for about one year. Before this, I was working for a Lifeline SPAC I, which was the SPAC company through which Canatu listed in 2024. You have now heard the presentations from Juha and our business unit heads. I will now go through how all this translates into financials and into our long-term financial targets. In essence, this all can be summarized into five key highlights. First, our new long-term financial targets are EUR 100-150 million of revenue and an EBIT margin of 25%-30% in 2030.
Second, semiconductor business will be the key driver for the growth, and it's also the one which is paving for our way to a recurring revenue-driven business model. Thirdly, we have very strong competitive advantages, and we continue to see that those will support our pricing power and therefore gross margins. Fourthly, we have a scalable business model which provides operating leverage and helps us to reach our EBIT targets. Fifthly, we can de-risk the growth through focused execution and disciplined capital allocation while we have a strong balance sheet which continues to provide strategic flexibility for us. As said, we see semiconductor as the key driver for our growth and towards the revenue targets we have.
We continue to see that semiconductor is the business area where we have the highest gross margin potential among all of our current businesses. We expect to allocate most of our capital to semiconductor during this strategy period, both OpEx and CapEx. That said, all of our business units are expected to contribute towards our financial targets. Like, Juha already told in his presentations, we do expect that in 2030, the strongest relative growth will be happening in medical diagnostics and new business development initiatives. In the big picture, not that much has changed since our listing. We continue to see strong potential in all of our business areas, what we have communicated also earlier.
I think what my colleagues already outlined, we have taken significant operational, technological, and strategic steps across our business units, and these have clearly de-risked our growth compared to the situation where we were in 2024. This de-risking doesn't just happen, so it's a result of a strong and focused execution and active management, and these are things what we are doing continuously. Ilkka just went through how we do this from a new business development perspective, but we apply a very similar approach in all of our existing businesses. We continuously evaluate the businesses and assess them basically through three key criteria. What is the value creation potential? Meaning that what kind of a profit pool and these businesses offer to us and in what time frame?
What is the level of validation from technological, commercial, and operational perspective? What is the capital efficiency in these businesses? How much we need to commit capital for the next milestone, and what is our estimate for the total time and cost to meaningful scale? In this way, we can ensure actively that we allocate capital to those businesses which provide the best scaling potential, both absolute and relative terms, and we can also actively manage our risks. About the path to recurring revenues. Like said, semiconductor is the key for our growth, but it's also key for recurring revenue-driven business model. We expect that 2026-2028 will be a kind of a capacity building period. During this period, most of our revenue is expected to come from reactor sales.
These are inherently more volatile from our P&L perspective because very much depends on how they time between the years and between half years. We believe that towards the end of this strategy period, by 2030, we have a very good potential to reach a business model where most of our revenue is coming from recurring sources, i.e. royalties, consumable sales, maintenance services, and recurring sources and other recurring sources. Good. Let's then have a look at how our dynamics, growth dynamics actually work in this CNT pellicle market, which represents the largest part of our semiconductor business. In essence, you can think of it as a function of seven or so variables.
First three, EUV wafer demand, CNT pellicle adoption rate, and CNT pellicle lifetime result in a market demand for CNT pellicles. These are obviously things which are not that much in our hands, but in the hands of our customers and their customers. When we combine these with our market share, meaning that how much of this pellicle demand is catered with our technology and what is the process yield, production process yield in CNT pellicle production, then we get to the CNT reactor demand for us. Here, of course, market share is in our hands. We need to execute well. We need to make sure that our technology stays competitive and so forth. On the other hand, CNT pellicle production process yields are in the hands of our customers.
We have a limited impact on those because they manage the process, and there are multiple steps beyond just our CNT production. When we further add into this equation our business model decisions and our pricing power, we in the end get to the revenue what we can get out from this market. This is how it works. If we next look at the assumptions, targets, expectations, what are lying under our long-term revenue targets. First in the semiconductor and EUV pellicles, which is by far the largest part of our business, we expect that EUV wafer volumes on average grow annually 25% from 2025 to 2030.
We expect that CNT becomes the dominant material for EUV pellicles by 2030, and at least 50% of EUV wafers are processed using CNT pellicles. We expect that average lifetime of a CNT pellicle reaches 15,000 wafers per pellicle in 2030. This is higher than what is ASML's spec as of today, but this is our understanding of the market expectations. We target to stay as the leading CNT technology provider for EUV pellicles. We target that we have an installed base of our current generation CNT100 SEMI reactors of 10-20 reactors in 2030.
We target that we maintain and improve our strong technological advantages so that we maintain our pricing power and we can further develop our recurring business models during this period. In inspection membranes, we expect that the demand for the inspection membranes follows over time EUV wafer volumes. We aim to maintain our leading position in those membranes throughout this period. In automotive, we have two key targets for 2030. We aim to have at least one customer who reaches with us commercial market entry, either or, in windshield heaters or solar cell applications based on our CNT technology. We aim to manufacture and sell ADAS camera heaters for at least one high volume car model in 2030.
In the medical diagnostics, we aim to have or manufacture and sell one electrochemical biosensor for at least one point-of-care hormone testing application by that time. In the new business development, the aim is to have one first new product in mass production in 2030, and that is expected to come from the pipeline, what we are working on as of today. Let me now build the bridge from our revenue targets towards our EBIT targets. First, we have a strong gross margin track record, and we believe that we can maintain this going forward.
We see that we have a very strong position today, and we believe that we can sustain our strong competitive position, which is obviously key for the pricing power and the gross margins. This basically builds on four key factors, which are the same what we have had for a long time. This is a very high barrier to entry business. It is not easy to manufacture and develop these advanced CNTs like Juha went through, and we have invested in this now EUR 100 million and been doing this for 20 years. We see that there are only few capable competitors in each of our application areas.
We see that the products what we are manufacturing and selling and developing provide significant value add to our customers and their end products. Last but not least, we have a very strong IP position protected by over 300 patents and obviously like a big number of trade secrets. Like I said, we see that we have a scalable business model, and that provides strong operating leverage when we grow, and again, supports our EBIT margin targets. We had a very strong track record of operating leverage from 2021 to 2024. Our revenue per FTE grew from roughly EUR 100K to almost EUR 180K in 2024.
Last year when our revenue declined, of course, that was a break in this, like, strong trend. We do expect that we return to this track when we grow towards our revenue targets. Personnel expenses are the largest part of our fixed cost base, and actually also a large part of our other operating expenses are either directly or indirectly linked to our headcount. The key thing here is how our headcount grows towards 2030. We expect that the headcount would grow on average annually from 10-35 FTEs.
This is quite a wide range obviously, but the eventual outcome, we see that it largely depends on our new business development initiatives and what kind of teams we need to build for those. However, in any case, we see that from today to 2030, the headcount growth and the cost base growth will be a substantially lower or happen at a substantially lower pace than our revenue growth. We are very confident about operating leverage. Regarding CapEx, we expect that there will be a peak now in 2026, but after that, we do see that the annual average CapEx level, excluding R&D capitalizations, would return to the level of EUR 5 million-EUR 6 million.
This year is, like I said, exceptional from CapEx perspective and we expect that the CapEx will be in the range of EUR 14-18 million this year. That's mainly due to two factors. First, like Thomas went through our investments in our second factory infrastructure, they will mostly happen this year. The project started last year, but the CapEx is happening mostly this year. Second, we announced last August investment into a PELMIS EUV pellicle inspection system, and that was expected to arrive already late last year, but the delivery was postponed.
This year, CapEx will be booked now also for 2026. These are two very big items which will have a strong impact on CapEx this year. After this period, we see that the CapEx will come down and stabilize over time to EUR 5 million-EUR 6 million level. We do leave a small reservation here for a possible larger customer-driven capacity increases because we see that it's possible that some customers may want to have dedicated production lines. In such scenarios, of course, our CapEx will also be impacted. However, those possible investments then will come also with a substantial impact on our top line.
If we decide to do something like that, we will then communicate those separately to the market, so they will not come as a surprise. Good. Then let me summarize still. We target EUR 100-150 million in revenue and a 25%-30% EBIT margin in 2030. Semiconductor drives our growth, but all business areas, business units will contribute these targets. EBIT margin targets build on the revenue target and our strong competitive advantages, which we expect to support pricing power and margins. It assumes headcount growth of 10-35 FTEs per year and capital expenditure after this year of EUR 5-6 million on average. This is it from a financial perspective, and now we have, like, gone through all the presentations.
Thank you, and it's time for our Q&A.
Thank you, we have plenty of great questions here in the chat, but let's first address questions from the audience here at Sanomatalo. To make sure everyone has a chance, let's limit the first questions to two per person.
Hi, Waltteri Rossi from Danske Bank. First about the semiconductor segment. You target 10-20 semi reactors installed base by 2030. What would your market share be at that point, and how many customers would you have?
Maybe I can start, then Thomas, you can continue there. We informed there that we are targeting to have at least 50% market share. That was what we kind of say there as a kind of part of the assumptions. That is the kind of one key driver here. I think that what we also say there very clearly that this is still dependent on the various factors. What is the overall growth of the EUV layers in those elements? Then what is the lifetime? That is going to play key role. We assume they're larger than ASML standard 10,000 wafers, so we assume they're like 15,000 wafers.
They are the elements that are coming from the outside, Canatu's. One key factor will be also that what will be the yield level of this total pellicle production there? Not only our part, but there will be CNT post-processing. There will be coating part. There will be final inspections and mounting on the mask. That is going to play one key role there. Of course, from the revenue perspective, what will be our pricing power there compared to competition? That seems to be currently. Our competitive position is extremely good. All of these elements are impacting to this one, whether we are talking about installed base of 10-20.
A follow-up on that. How many customers would you need for 10?
I think that currently, as you know, we have two customers there, and as best we do know, in DUV industry, there are basically four players who are doing pellicles for way larger number of the companies. I think that there will be in this EUV pellicle side, I think that there will be room for two, three, maximum four players. The full market cannot be addressed by two players. I do expect that there will be more than two players in this market.
The next questions from the audience. Yes, please.
Hi, it's Matti Riikonen, Carnegie Investment Bank. I have two questions. Firstly, I was a bit surprised to see your market size estimate EUR 3 billion. I think 1.5 years ago in 2024, we talked about or you talked about roughly over EUR 4 billion market size consisting of semiconductor market of EUR 3 billion, automotive EUR 800 million, and medical from EUR 400 million to EUR 1 billion. Now it seems that the automotive and medical diagnostics estimates are pretty much the same, but the semiconductor market now seems to be the I think it was EUR 1.5 million that you mentioned instead of the 3 million or billion that you talked about. Could you help us bridge what has changed in this 1.5 years' time and what basically causes the difference?
I can start, Thomas, please continue based on what we have done. Last time we informed on semiconductor side that it will range between EUR 1 billion-EUR 2 billion. In case of, if it's used in this advanced nodes, that would have been EUR 1 billion. If the full potential with memories and everything, that would have been the kind of EUR 2 billion. We have done, like, new studies that was very much based on the number of the ASML scanners we anticipated to be on the marketplace and what kind of generation scanners there are. Now we have done the kind of the different analysis there based on the number of the wafers. Thomas, you can explain how this study is done.
It's not that largely different, but Thomas, please.
Yeah
provide the analysis.
Yes. I think what Juha outlined is the biggest difference in how the analysis has been conducted. Previously, it has been based on ASML scanner generations and how those will be adopted. This time what we have been using is basically technology nodes, the customers that are applying these technology nodes, how many wafers they are producing, and also how many layers there are then in each of these technology nodes. That gives a more granular structure of the overall market and provides more accurate information and, therefore. From my perspective, roughly what we have been communicating in the past is still in the same range what we have arrived today.
Thank you. If the market size then is just slightly smaller than how you described, but then your revenue estimate is clearly. It is kind of much, much lower in the short term, and it's only at the low end, EUR 100 million, in 2030, which is, of course, quite a long time from now on. I'm thinking that what has then changed in your assumption of your market penetration or market share going into 2030?
Maybe I can start. I don't know, Mikko, whether you would like to continue on that one. If we first look at this EUV and CNT pellicle market, there. Like I covered in the first place, our assumption earlier was that there would have been higher penetration of the CNT pellicle already with 500-watt systems as well as with 2-nanometer tech. We expected that this penetration would have started in larger scale one generation earlier. Now it's starting one generation later. That is the kind of, maybe the kind of biggest difference what we see, that we see that the market and the revenue is developing not as fast as we anticipated, like, 19 months ago.
Okay.
Hi. It's Atte Riikola from Inderes. You mentioned that now the 2026-2028 will be the capacity building period in semiconductors, and you also mentioned that the FST pilot and risk production phase will take, like, one to two years. Could you say anything about that, how you're expecting the recurring part of the reactor business to develop in the coming years? Because you're expecting some recurring revenue already this year, but how, for example, the FST ramp up? Is it already, like, meaningful in that risk production phase, or do you have to get to the mass production when it's, like, really meaningful from your perspective?
Typically pilot and risk production in semiconductor industry already consumes quite significant amount of wafers. It's a time when the industry is basically maybe analyzing the output a little bit more carefully, and therefore they cannot reach the full high volume manufacturing throughput yet. This is already an area where we start to recover a significant amount of recurring revenues. It's not like a small-scale production. It's steadily ramping up and increasing over time as the customers are improving their yields and getting the production ready to what they consider to be high volume production.
We now know your long-term profitability target, but if you think about the path towards that, and do you expect to be profitable already on this, let's say on 2028, or can you say anything about that, how you're expecting your profitability to develop in coming years? We know that you're still investing pretty much, but.
Yeah. It's We do not give, like, targets for this midyear , so to say. Like we target 2030, but of course, obviously, like, we expect that these operating leverage and other scale benefits start to kick in during this journey when we grow.
Antoine Lebourgeois from Stifel. The first question, can you give more details on how you built your 2030 revenue target? Is this mainly a top-down assessment based on the market size and market share, or is it more like a bottom-up build derived from a customer-by-customer pipeline? Second question about the impact of the licensing business model on market size as opposed to a direct product sales model. Because as an example, looking at the EUV pellicle market, you project a serviceable market of around EUR 800 million in 2030. So, let's say EUR 400 million if we factor in 50% market share. But I would say your revenue target imply around EUR 100 million in revenue, broadly speaking in this space.
Does the gap reflect the licensing business model and what the math here, if we can understand it better?
You can talk about model.
If I start with the how we have approached this. It's bottom-up approach. In the semiconductor, like we went through, the pellicle market is the primary source of revenues and growth. There we have built the scenarios on top of the expected wafer volume growth. That's how it builds up from bottom to up. In the other segments, in other business units, in automotive, medical diagnostics and new business units, these are the targets based on our current customer base and current pipeline. It's also kind of a bottom-up approach there.
Maybe answering for your share. Like you say that if the addressable market is like EUR 800 million based on these very advanced gate-all-around nodes. We are saying that our revenue is between EUR 100-150 million. Of course, the difference comes that we are not making full pellicles there. We are primarily. Our revenue is coming that we are selling reactors. We are then having royalties based on the kind of the number of the pellicles our customers are selling, as well as from these consumables and the service model there. Based on that one, you get some understanding of the amount of the licensing fee we are getting there.
Is it reasonable to assume, like, you capture about 20-25% of the value of a full pellicle?
I think that's a great work for analyst to kind of analyze that one. Yeah.
Thanks.
Hello, Janne, private shareholder. Regarding the throughput of your CVD chamber, what is the throughput? How many pellicles or raw material can customer get when they are using the CVD chamber?
That's kind of the one of those secrets which we don't want to give to our competitors there. It's kind of the something that we don't publish.
Okay, thank you. Regarding the pellicle lifetime, the 10,000 wafer exposure, is it estimation or coming from customer side already?
10,000 wafers is the ASML specification, but we did our calculations based on the 1,500, so the higher numbers. Because we—when we are discussing with our customers and our end customers, they do have requirements that, "Hey, this 10,000 might not be the kind of final point," but especially memory is requesting kind of the higher lifetimes there. Therefore, we have estimated based on 15,000.
Waltteri Rossi from Danske Bank. Two more questions. In one of the slides, you placed CNT pellicle membrane production between self-manufacturing and licensing. Does this mean that you already today are offering these two options for your customers? Is that part of the discussions with customers today, like they have two options?
Yeah, I think that currently, as you know, with our two customers, our business model is that we are selling reactors and we are licensing. We have had active discussions about whether Canatu would be in future at certain point in time in a position of making full membranes there. That of course would require that there will be additional pellicle manufacturers in the future. Yes, kind of the active discussions we have had, but there's nothing to disclose at this point in time.
Fair enough. The second question regarding this PELMIS system, which I understand is quite expensive. Can you remind us why did you
acquire this machine?
Yes. We acquired the machine so that we can improve our inspection capabilities. The present capabilities that we have were not sufficient and it is needed so that we can produce eventually reactor models that produce a minimum amount of defects for our customers because defectivity is, in addition to transparency, one of the key points that the industry is looking into. It helps us to develop the technology going forward.
Matti Riikonen, Carnegie Investment Bank again. One question related to 2030 when you talk about your segment growth targets and the assumptions. You use terms like medium and high growth. Could you be able to quantify what that actually means in numbers?
Well, I think you have said that in each of these segments the growth is strong, but relative to each other we see that the growth rates are strongest in the medical and the new business development. That's of course partly due to the fact that they start from a very small base. In the semiconductor, we do see that it's a very high growth compared to what you can see in many other companies still.
I need to repeat my question. What does high growth mean, and what does medium growth mean in numbers?
We do not give that-
Is it 20%, 30%, 10%? What?
It's relative to each other, what we are saying. We are not commenting the actual, like, percentages at that point. If I may still continue, why do we are saying like that? It's an important thing because we see that the value in medical diagnostics and new business development is substantial, and you start to see it when we go towards the end of the strategy period, and their growth starts to accelerate. That's the point there.
Thank you. Let's now take a couple of questions from the chat. When will new semiconductor reactor orders realistically materialize? Is your plan more back end heavy, materializing around 2029-2030, or do you expect more steady development?
Maybe I can start, and then please continue. I think that if you think about that, what we are saying here, that the main big inflection point is going to happen now with A14 nodes, basically together with this ASML 600-watt systems, and then that node is going to be introduced based on the current industry roadmaps end of 2027 and 2028. That is gonna timeline when we are expecting that our customers' need to have initial set of the capacity to fulfill that kind of the level. They are, of course, all the time increasing the capacity to that node. They are going to kind again build capacity for that one.
Then comes the question that how much they will introduce the CNT pellicle technology to the earlier nodes that we actually in our calculations took very little into account. If they will start doing that one as well, then they need to have additional capacity to kind of fulfill the current manufacturing capacity what they have for example, for 3 nanometer technology. I think that we expect a initial jump to go for this scaling, what we are saying as a kind of key theme here, starting this year, next year. I think that it's kind of you can expect reasonably gradual increase of the reactor orders heading towards 2030. I don't know, Thomas, do you see it?
Well, that I think is a very good summary of the overall situation. I mean, we have discussions in the pipeline, and we expect them to increase over the time when we move forward in the strategy period.
What about the schedule regarding the recently announced reactor long lead time pre-order announcements? Any estimate when this would materialize?
I think the estimation is that it's gonna materialize in the coming months.
Question to maybe Mikko. What level of recurring revenue do you realistically expect by 2030? Can you quantify this predominantly recurring revenue in a little bit more details?
Sure. Predominantly to us, it means that more than half.
Mm.
We do have like different scenarios where there's a range of the percentage, but more than half.
Maybe question to Juha. When thinking about these four business areas or three business areas and new business development, which of those has the highest risks? What are the risks, and how do you kind of mitigate the risks along the way?
Yeah, of course, when it comes to semiconductor domain, that is somewhere where we have been working longest as well as we have already received, like, mass production license and getting the kind of the systems validated there. Of course, from execution perspective, that is like a lower risk. There is more, like, the questions about what we discussed very heavily here that how fast adoption is happening by our customers and by customers' customers. When it comes to kind of the other end, of course, the other extreme is the new business development, where we are just in the phase of exploring new opportunities from the both technical as well as from business perspective.
There, when we are making the decisions to start productizing these new domains, we are going to make kind of the high level of the analysis to understand the risk level there. Of course, as we are not even started the productization there, we even don't know what are the risks. You could say that is absolutely most uncertain as in such. I think that Nedal very well actually covered the medical diagnostics domain where I think that the fundamental technology and sensitivity and the elements what we do have, the kind of foundations are very well there. I think it is a question that how do we put the whole system together?
We need to make now on top of the CNT and the kind of all the kind of the clinic industry, those ones. We need to make the kind of complete sensors, cassettes, as well as the kind of reader element there. I think that's a kind of technology that exists today in the marketplace. It's not like from the execution perspective, high risk. Of course, the kind of key element, and we have a kind of great team and a very competent team there, is that in that domain, getting the FDA approval in USA is very fundamentally important. I think that we have a team who truly understands what does it need to take that into account. I think that is also, like, a manageable risk.
What Nedal will say there is that when we are comparing our solution to the many other kind of the startup solutions in the marketplace is that typically they don't have any manufacturing capability. Where we are based on this, our platform, and based on the capability we have from automotive industry, we can manufacture these sensors and films very much based on the same thing. We have a capability of doing millions of those sensors. It's kind of on different level. I think on automotive side, our product has been validated for this ADAS camera heaters. It has been ready for a long time. It's more like the kind of integration element, what is needed there, and then this integration to be done.
That's kind of the domain, and then we are getting very close to that one. Then of course, when it comes to this, especially this windshield heater, there's still work to be done. We need to. We have improved our conductivity by 100%. We need to continue doing that one. We need to make this large scale chamber, so that is the kind of work that is ongoing, and then we are doing that one. I think we have started to scale from A4, A3, 600 by 600, now getting to kind of large scale. I think we have done it. It's more like engineering work. Then we still need to improve also throughput there.
I think that maybe there, if I'm thinking this one, maybe the biggest technological steps that are needed are on this windshield, heater side. Sorry for the long answer.
Great. Question to Nedal on medical diagnostics. Are you developing the medical diagnostics applications to a certain point and then, for example, selling them? What is the business model? What is the product or what is the kind of overall model that on the medical side?
Thank you for the question. One of the key things on the medical diagnostics side is that we define and own our destiny, and that really creates our value for us. What we want to ensure is that we're building the product, preparing it for commercialization, and we would be open to partnerships or joint development along the way, licensing potentially, and that's very typical in that space. Again, we wanna make sure that we own the solution, we built it, we create the value end to end on that.
Maybe another question to Nedal. What kind of FDA approval process is required to get the product to market? What's your approach to that?
Yep. That's a good question in the sense of, you know, we're very sensitive when we go to FDA approval that we're leveraging the existing guidelines, meaning hormone testing is established, sepsis testing is established. What we are doing is introducing a technology that accelerates the testing. The guidelines are there. We're leveraging the guidelines. We're leveraging, you know, the existing, infrastructure and policy that's there. That lowers the barrier to entry from an FDA standpoint. We still would have to do a clinical trial, and it would be what we call an equivalency clinical trial, meaning we demonstrate that we're equivalent to some of the guidelines that exist, except we have the faster time to result and the sensitivity that's needed
Related to that, what is the first concrete validation milestone? When should we expect to hear news regarding concrete progress of the medical diagnostics business?
We're very keen and focused on generating publications as we progress along the way, and these are peer-reviewed publications, demonstrating how our results are advancing towards our development in congresses and also as we start the clinical trials and publishing the data once we advance through the clinical trials. We have a third publication coming out very soon this year, and then we have other publications in 2026 and following in 2027 and 2028 as well.
Thank you. A question to Jussi on automotive business. How dependent is your strategy on Denso?
Yeah. Thank you. Obviously, Denso has been a very important partner for us a long time, as I explained previously. We are less kind of dependent on this collaboration in this camera heater business for ADAS, but they are obviously very critical partner for scaling our capabilities, these like a large scale technologies as Juha also pointed out in the risk discussion. I think not critically dependent, but they are a very important partner for us to take our technology forward.
Question to Ilkka on new business development. How do you ensure focus and avoid spreading your resources too thin?
Thank you. It's a good question. The key approach is that what we call, and I called in my presentation, this disciplined optionality, which means that first of all, we assess each case through this gate model very carefully that which ones we want to invest our time in, and then we leverage the development capacity of our partners to significant extent, those being the industrial partners and research partners. That's the procedure to avoid stretching our own internal resources.
We have one final question. The growth plan obviously includes steady recruitments of new talent. How are you able to compete and recruit the best talents globally?
I think that Canatu is in a good position in that sense that the business what we do and the products what we do, we are in the businesses of making major industry transitions. If you are part of doing the most advanced chips or you are part of enabling autonomous driving or you are part of making the change to point-of-care diagnostics, that is something exciting for people. Because nowadays people are looking something, doing something meaningful. The vision what we do there and the purpose what we do is something really meaningful. The second element there is that we have been managing to capture great talent. I think that we have been talking about having almost 40 different nationalities.
We have managed to recruit very international, highly talented team. Typically what happens there that when you have a talented people, the other people who are talented would like to join that one. That here you are there with the people that are talented. Thirdly, of course, the key enabler for this one has been that what Mikko was showing also our balance sheet, the cash position there. That enables, "Hey, okay, this is something exciting. This is like is also from that perspective." You cannot never say in growth companies that something is secure, but it gives you more comfortability having the cash position what we do have there.
Thank you. Now it's time for closing remarks.
Thank you. First of all, I would like to thank the team here. As you have noticed, 50% of the persons were new ones, so we have done significant also changes in our leadership team. I also want to thank the cooperation with our board members because, of course, when you are accepting your strategy that is done very much together with the board members there. I think that I would like to thank you also for active discussion, lot of good questions, clarifying questions. I hope that also what we tried to do here today was to try to answer questions what we have been hearing a lot during the last 12 and 19 months when we have had the discussions with analysts as well as with investors.
If I'm trying to summarize today, we are talking about moving from validation to the scaling. What are the key strengths here? We have been talking about that there's a material transitioning happening from these conventional materials to the new carbon nano materials and what is driving that one is better energy efficiency, better performance, and getting to the nano scale. Our technology there, this unique technology, highly patented technology, is in very good position for doing this. A good examples they are going on. We have the scalable business models that we can address sometimes when the consolidation of manufacturing is happening, but Canatu is providing it today.
In some cases, where the kind of the very significant industry investments are needed or then you need to have very tight integration, we have this licensing business model for that purpose. We have been creating very high switching costs based on this technology that we have invested EUR 100 million, 20 years, having very strong patent and trade secret portfolio there, as well as having the deep integration and long-term collaboration with our key customers and partners to create these products. These products are something that no one else has done them earlier. So, we are really truly creating something totally new. Like pointed out on CNT Pellicle business, we are moving from validation to the scaling.
We gave you the level of the number of the reactors, 10-12, and that is 10-20, and that is important to understand that that is based on our current generation reactors' capacity. If there will be new kind of generations, the number might change based on their capabilities. There are key market drivers for this energy-optimized automotive solutions, whether it is starting from the ADAS heaters, enabling autonomous driving in any weather, whether it is the windshield and all window heating, making this possible for having significant energy consumption savings, or whether it is creating new energy based on this very novel tandem solar cell solution, providing up to 35% more energy compared to current silicon-based solutions.
We are addressing this significant transition happening from the centralized labs to the point-of-care, making like near-bed, near-patient testing. You saw our portable tool there, how we can measure, in our cases, first level hormones and sepsis, get the results in 20 minutes, and this saves totally the journey with the patient there, enabling the healthcare systems to save significantly money and time. The total addressable market is large, what we are anticipating and are forecasting based on all the three researches, what we have now recently conducting to be kind of the size of EUR 3 billion in 2030. Having the potential based on the new business development even beyond that one. There are more opportunities what we can address.
When we are making our choices, what do we start productization and what products do we bring to the market, we need to have very focused execution and discipline with capital allocation, with resource allocation. The one thing what is very important here that what you saw today, there's very clear product focus with these business unit leaders. For Thomas, it is pellicle and Inspection membranes. For Jussi, it is ADAS heaters, it is windshield heater, and then this is the next generation solar cell. For Nedal, it is the hormones and sepsis. They have clear execution focus with this one, with the resources and so on. Then if we are analyzing something new, that is analyzed and studied outside of that scope.
That is also very important from the organization perspective, that there is clear focus doing what we really want to achieve. This leads to our revenue target for 2030 being between EUR 100 million and EUR 150 million, and from the EBIT margin perspective being between 25% and 30%. With this presentation, I'm kind of concluding this Canatu's Capital Markets Day 2026. I thank you for active participation here at Sanomatalo, as well as in webcasting. I hope that we will have a kind of the great sessions in the future as well. Thank you very much for your attention.