Good morning. Welcome to Scanfil's Capital Markets Day. It's the first one in Scanfil's history. Scanfil was listed in 2002. It has been 19 years without the Capital Markets Day. Today, actually, this is a historical moment as well because we have the first virtual factory tour combined with our Capital Markets Day. Here is shortly our agenda for today. Opening words. We will go to our CEO, Petteri Jokitalo. He will introduce Scanfil's strategy. Timo Sonninen goes through our sales organization, our targets there, and how we are operating there, and what are our benefits compared to our peer groups. Operations. That is very exciting, actually. Riku will go through our operational system, also actually including our purchasing stuff and so forth. We will have a short lunch break, around 30 minutes. We will go to Scanfil SMART.
Markku, our CTO, will go through that. What I've seen actually before, there has been already quite many questions regarding the Scanfil SMART, what is it about, what does it do, and so forth, and about the investments as well. Regarding the investments, we will go to Kai, our CFO. He will go through the financials and our position there, and what kind of benefits and what we actually produce to our investors. To the historical part, the virtual factory tour to Suzhou, China. It will be live-casted from Suzhou, so it will take something like 20 minutes. We will go to closing remarks. If you have any questions from the crowd, we have some five people around here, so just raise your hand and Minna will bring you the microphone.
Also through the chat window, what you can see on the web, you can actually post questions there, and I will read those out loud here. Now, next to Petteri Jokitalo. Welcome.
Thank you, Pasi. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Scanfil CMD in behalf of me also. My idea was to tell you briefly about Scanfil, walk through the strategy, strategic key points, growth, profit drivers, competitive advantage kind of topics, then discuss a bit about our outlook for the year and our long-term target, talk a bit about very important topic of sustainability, including how we are measuring our customers' and people's satisfaction. Finally, there is a possibility to ask questions. Let's start Scanfil in brief, what we want to be and what we are. We are a trusted manufacturing partner for all the stakeholders we have, especially for our customers, of course. Our rolling 12-month sales until end of Q2 this year, EUR 632 million, sales coming from five different customer segments. The biggest segment, advanced consumer application segment, about 28% share of our sales.
Total amount of people, about 3,300.
About 2/3 of our people are located in China, Poland, and Estonia. About 10% of our people are located each of the countries, Finland, Sweden, and Germany. Finally, 4% of our people are U.S., Atlanta factory. We are present in seven countries. We have 10 factories, nine continuing factories. We are going to ramp down and close our Hamburg factory in few weeks, end of Q3. We have factory in China, in Suzhou, close to Shanghai. In Poland, we have two factories, one in Sieradz, other in Myslowice. Estonia, we have factory in Pärnu. Finland in Sievi, the place and city where Scanfil was born, 1976. In Sweden, we have two factories, one close to Linköping, Åtvidaberg, and other in Malmö. In Germany, beside Hamburg, we have other factory in Wutha. U.S., we have factory in Atlanta.
What we are doing as a trusted manufacturing partner, especially we are focusing on electronics products manufacturing. Electronics manufacturing processes, of course, are the core of what we are doing. Wide range of processes, starting from PCB assembly, and then moving to other type of assembly processes, going to final assembly, final testing phase. Beside our electronics manufacturing processes, we have quite versatile set of other processes we are able to vertically integrate to our offering to our customers. Those other processes are including processes like sheet metal manufacturing, cable harnesses, very large set of different surface treatment processes and so on. We think so that our customers are getting the highest value from Scanfil if they are really considering outsourcing the complete products to Scanfil, and so they can utilize the whole vertically integrated manufacturing platform what we have.
We have also services which are needed before the manufacturing itself. We are talking about product design or kind of a DFX kind of services. We are talking about services which are actually making product design really optimal for manufacturing. That kind of services are really offered our factories, as we are calling these close to customer R&D kind of factories. That kind of factories we have especially in Finland, Sweden, Germany. We have also so-called after-sale services, including repair, spare parts, retrofitting kind of services, and offered quite big amount of our customers. Moving to strategy and business drivers, as said, our most important element or choice what we have done is to focus on products with electronics.
There, especially, we are focusing on products which are manufactured in low volumes, then it very many times means that also the mix is quite high, and that means that also those production series are rather short. This is a rather important choice because then that means more or less automatically that our customers who has that kind of needs are pretty much industrial med tech kind of customers. Also it's really like a driver. We are going to hear more later today about how we are selecting our production lines and planning our production. This is like a main driver, a guideline, how we are selecting our production lines, how we are planning our factories and so on, that these are optimal for kind of high mix, low volume production.
What we mean about low volume production, then we are typically talking about that taking one single product, we are producing thousands similar products or maybe tens of thousands similar products a year, not millions or tens of millions like consumer electronics typically do. As I already said, we have also a clear factory strategy. We are two kind of factories. We are factories we are calling close to customer R&D kind of factories, and then factories we are calling close to customer markets. In factories which are located close to customer markets we are mainly serving our global customers, our large OEMs with global needs. Our close to customer market sites are located in China, East Europe, and U.S. There, of course, it's really core that we are efficient, we are able to improve productivity every year. We are really high-performing there.
We have factories, as said, it's located close to customer R&D. There we are focusing big different customers, maybe not so much our global customers, but more local, quickly growing smaller companies if not really companies who are at startup phase, then rather quickly after that startup phase. It's quite typical that kind of companies are really appreciating very wide support also starting from product design. That's the reason that we have our own resources to make product design or that a DFX kind of services or we have partners. We have two selected global design partners we are offering together their services and complete design manufacturing services to our customers there. Of course, the aim is to help those smaller product companies to grow, scale up and be one day global, we can offer our whole global factory network for the benefits.
If you are looking at our financial development top line as well as bottom line during the past 10 years, we can see that we have been able to continuously grow. Grow the top line and then grow the bottom line. We could say that at least during the past 10 years, we have been quite predictable company from that point of view. Why is that? We believe that one key is our customer base. It's quite versatile, it's quite wide. We have five different customer segments. If you are taking our top 10 customers, they are not real competitors. They are coming from different businesses. If you see, we have seen the clear positive development what comes to our customer distribution during the past 10 years. Ten years ago, our biggest customer was making more than 30%, and nowadays it's like 15%.
We see the same positive development when it comes to top three customers or top 10, whatever. We could say that having those industrial med tech customers, it's at that point of view, I think that we are very good position because these customers, they tend to create very long-term relationship with their manufacturing partners. We have customers we started cooperation early 1980s and still continuing. It's not so often. It's very basically, unusual to lose a customer if the performance is okay, if performance is satisfactory. Of course, our intention is to continue the same trend that the business stays predictable. Our intention is to even further development customer distribution and make sure that the balance between different customer segments is there. About growth drivers. Historically, we could say that the EMS markets as a whole has been growing like 3%-6% per annum.
Now there are some survey houses proposing that at least the coming two-three years, we will see higher growth, even talking about 6%-7% kind of tailwind as expected. Of course, the main driver behind that positive development is that basically intelligent is going into all kind of products and electronics is everywhere. Basically it's widely believed that the electronics need of electronics manufacturing is growing strongly. What comes to global mega trends, we see that our customer base is, as you see some brand names there, they are very well-positioned to get the tailwind from global mega trends. So we see that most of our customers, they have a great opportunity to grow in coming years. Then if we are serving them well, we are in excellent position to grow as well.
M&A acquisitions been always in Scanfil toolbox during the past eight, nine years. We have made three acquisitions. We have done always acquisitions even earlier. We have said that repeatedly that we are searching a market. Our balance sheet is basically ready for that. Our organization is ready. We know what we want. As soon as we identified a good company strategically well-fitting to Scanfil and the price tag is right, we are ready to move. What comes to profit creation, the key is being a successful manufacturing partner. The key is to keep the cost flexible and then fixed cost low. We have always understood that very well and still believe that is really key also in the future. We have been rather good for that and want to be so also in the future. Our clear factory strategy for sure is one profit driver.
We really understand the differences in factories. We understand them close to customer. Market factory, we need to pay really attention to our cost structure to be efficient, to improve productivity. Close to customer R&D market, our value add must be high enough that customers are willing to pay a bit higher price. If they are not willing to do that, then there's something wrong with our offering. Our business model to focus on high mix, low volume customers and also technology, which is so-called generic, we can use it for wide range of customers, is somehow key to keep our investments needs somehow on reasonable level, our depreciations as well. We think that somewhere to our typical investment need per year, including replacement and somehow reasonable new investments as well, will be somewhere between 2%-3%, as well as our depreciation also in coming years.
Business culture, last not least. For sure, we are coming from Sievi. We are basically being listed since 2002. Before that, we were a family-owned company, successful entrepreneur. We are pretty much taking the best part of that culture still with us and especially would like to highlight two things. We have quite effective decision-making processes. We are rather fast decision makers, we are rather good when executing the done decisions. There you can see some indicators that how successful we have been in order to use our asset, as well as the return on equity as return on investment have been about 20% level or close to that during the past years. A few words about first outlook for this year. In June, we revised our outlook. We were moving the sales or turnover range to EUR 630 million-EUR 680 million this year.
Originally, we stated 600, 640. Of course, the key driver behind that was very healthy customer demand, also some extent rising material and component prices, but main driver, very good customer demand. We also improved our EBIT range to EUR 41 million-EUR 46 million, originally EUR 40 million, EUR 44 million. There are two main risks in the year. COVID-19, of course, it's not over yet, even we have learned a lot to live with that, and we do not see any immediate risks with that right now. Other is materials and components availability. This is a risk definitely not over, and we need to fight every day in order to keep our factories and products lines running. It's very difficult to say when it's over. If talking with, for instance, semiconductor manufacturers, they're saying that it's at least next year, we can expect that situation to continue.
Some of them are saying that maybe even 2023. We are not expecting any quick recovery there. Long-term targets. Target we set two years ago, and in 2023, we are aiming EUR 700 million sales with 7% operating profit. It's really interesting to see how quickly market condition is changing that when I remember that in this year, February, when we published last year result, there were questions that, "Is this sales target really realistic to get to EUR 700 million in 2023?" I say that, yes, it's realistic, but that means that we need to be able to grow faster, that instead of growing 3% per year, we need to go up to 5% per year. We have taken actions, we have recognized, we are prepared as we are going to do that.
There may be questions that, "Hey, is this really aggressive enough?" Because we may be quite close to that already this year. This is pretty much because of this quite strong market change, what we have been testifying this year. We have started a strategy round just in Scanfil, and for sure, that will be one topic we will consider, reconsider, and then come out when we have possible new targets. This is still the valid target until we change it and tell it. What comes to 7% operating profit, even we are still a bit behind, I think that this 7% is really realistic target. That, of course, means that all factories are more or less in, let's say, decent shape, and we do not have any ramp downs or closings or something like that ongoing.
I said now Hamburg will be closed by end of Q3 in coming two, three weeks, and then at least next year it could be excellent condition from that point of view to try to reach that target. Very important topic of sustainability, what that means at Scanfil, a few words about that. Reaching that topic from using four different angles. One is, of course, environment. In environment, of course, we are pretty much thinking and setting targets and spending efforts to make our energy raw material consumption as efficient as possible. We also continuously try to reduce different kind of waste and our carbon footprint. Responsible offering and the efforts below are pretty much ensuring that our offering to our customers remains valid and is sustainable and responsible. It's pretty much we are listening our customers, what they want from our side.
We are committed to continuously improve our offering. Of course, everything, whatever we are doing, as well as our partners, should be ethically high quality. We also can take people angle, and we are taking the people angle. There again, this is really carefully listening what our people are feeling. Are we good workplace for them? Are we helping them to develop? Are we making sure that they have safe environment where they can work? Are they being continuously developed as well? Partners and community, we definitely want to be good corporate citizen, and we want that our supplier and whole supply chain, they are good corporate citizens as well.
If going to more exact targets, then if starting with responsible consumption, first of all, I need to say that you can see that we have a clear annual target on how much we want to reduce, for instance, carbon footprint. It's like a 4.2% per annum. This is based on the growth target that we have made, like a baseline that we are going to grow 5% per year, that sales is growing 5% per year. It's not guidance, it's not really financial target, but this is how we have calculated those reduction targets. That carbon footprint 4.2% per year. That means if we are able to do it that 2030, our fossil-free energy consumption is higher than 50%. It's pretty much then heating and electricity. If going that to responsible offering, we are continuously using KPI like customer satisfaction.
I'm going to show you a bit later one example of auto or snapshot of the latest study we did in June, how our customers are feeling. There are also other KPIs how we are measuring that. What comes to people, we are regularly measuring our employee satisfaction by measuring, we are calling engagement survey, and also showing you soon one snapshot about the development there. Partners and community, it's pretty much one tool there is Code of Conduct where we are defining how we want our partners to behave and what we mean when we are saying that we are expecting ethically high-quality behavior from our supply chain. Going to customer satisfaction. As said in June, we made the latest customer satisfaction is measured twice per year. Now in June, we have the latest result.
I'm just selecting one KPI, and it's like a Net Promoter Score where we are. It's like a score what our customers are, how they are rating us if asking that how likely you are recommend Scanfil as supplier and scale is from one to 10. Basically in that NPS score, we are reducing those promoters who are giving nine or 10 as a score. We are basically then reducing from that promoters to detractors who are giving score 0 to 6. Our NPS was in June 25. Using that scale there, it's still good. It used to be a bit better. We have seen growing trend use in the past years, and for instance, our December result was a bit better that most likely this material availability is bit negatively impacting now our customer satisfaction.
Still good level and quite close to actually great. If solving our employee engagement survey, we have used a similar survey since 2016. It is done for the whole personnel, all factories, using the same template. Here you see the group results, basically two key KPIs, like satisfaction and motivation. We are level 68. We have been growing quite nicely continuously from 61 to 68 during the five years. Loyalty is the other key KPI what we are measuring, and there you can see continuous improvement as well from 71 to 77. Our aim is to continuously improve both of these KPIs every year. That was pretty much my presentation, and now there could be time for questions.
Do we have any questions from the floor? Okay.
I do have one.
Okay.
Do you want to give the chance to next person?
That's okay. You can take the first one.
We continue in English?
Yes.
Yeah. I think I have followed your company. I remember it was EUR 0.90, I think it must have been eight years ago or so. Now it's 10x more valuable from the stock market point of view. Congratulations. I think you are a great Finnish company with great Finnish family owning it. I think following those eight years, your company, I think the great thing is that you are always underpromising and over-delivering. I think, as Petteri told, that's also the case in terms that two years ago, 2019, you thought that in four years' time, you want to be EUR 700 million turnover company, EUR 50 million or EUR 49 million liikevoitto, operating profit.
It indeed, like Petteri said, it was somewhat ambitious goal at that time, but now it seems that you are almost within a kind of a rounding error of already achieving it two years after instead of four years after. Now, of course, as a shareholder, I'm already kind of dreaming that when you are in the future, hopefully before 2023, when you are giving your next goal, I already dream of a EUR 1 billion company. Well, certainly $1 billion, I hope, but maybe even EUR 1 billion company. Interesting enough, the market value has gone up almost exactly the same line. Market value seem to be roughly your turnover. Obviously this is about the future, so you cannot say too much, but what can you say about the future goals of the company?
Yes, if starting that, assuming that our strategy also in future is pretty much electronics manufacturing, a high mix, low volume. I think that there are enough market to grow and be even multi-billion EUR company when it comes to sales. I don't see the market to limit our growth. Of course, this time, I think that growth itself without profit, it's not what we want. That it's important to somehow find profitable business model and profitable growth opportunities. Going to EUR 1 billion level, it's realistic. Timeline is not defined. We need to think about that. Why not? Scale also matters somehow in this business and see some benefits if being bigger, for instance, what comes to sourcing volumes, grip of suppliers, and that kind of topics.
Right. Next, Pasi Väisänen from Nordea has questions regarding our customer segments. What customer segments are the most affected by this global component shortage problem?
I don't think so, that it's pretty much related to customer segments. Basically, especially everybody who is using semiconductors or chips, they are negatively affected. That kind of intelligent where semiconductors and even chips are used, basically it's everywhere. What comes to material availability is related to metals. Basically, we have been able to solve these issues a bit better using some extraordinary measures. Maybe could we, Timo, say that we have more customers where sheet metal is used in, for instance, this energy and clean tech segment.
Yeah, advanced consumer applications as well.
Advanced consumer application as well. As said, we have been able to find, let's say, easier solutions there.
Yeah. Riku will actually continue regarding the subject as well. Another one from Pasi. Which customer segments will offer the best growth in the future in the next three years period?
I think that if you are thinking about the potential, it's pretty much then customer-specific. That we could have a great growth customers in each segment. Of course, someone could say that the customer segment connectivity is somehow maybe the center of very many mega trends. Percentage-wise, that's possible that we are going to see the strongest growth, especially taking consideration that it's smallest segment now, what we have.
Yeah, it is. Pasi continues regarding the risk in China, maybe because of our investment plan. Would it be possible that growth in China could calm down in the future from the levels what it used to be?
For sure, I think that if thinking what it used to be, I think that are we then talking about that officially communicated 5%-7% growth?
Yeah.
That I think that is quite expected, especially if timeline is not defined.
Yes. Also, Kaius Twaite, has the issue with components availability worsened during the last two to three months? This could be also answered by Riku.
How I see it, the situation has been very severe since Q2 this year, and at least basically no improvements yet.
A question regarding sustainability and customers. Are your customers more interested in sustainability, and are there any concerns raised?
Yes, all customers are interested in sustainability. Companies are really taking that topic in their agenda very seriously. They are expecting that their partners are also taking that seriously and beyond, so that the partners are taking care of their own supply chain.
Yes.
I think that no specific worries rose up, but for sure everybody is taking it really seriously, and the importance is going to grow.
Okay. Is there any questions from the floor? I see. Oh, one more.
Sorry. As a investor, advising couple of reasonably big clients. They love your company, but the problem is with liquidity. They would love to take a EUR 5 million stake, but I can't remember exact number, but Takanen family and couple of big other owners, I think it's, is it 80% of the shares? You probably know the number, but it's reasonably big.
Maybe if taking wide Takanen family, it's less than 50%.
Yeah. If I look at the 10 biggest shareholders.
Yeah.
I believe that we are going.
Yes, that level, yes.
This is, of course, mainly about the company, not about the owners. Any idea about will this change when you become a EUR 1 billion company that they would become more liquidity in the market and more reasonable price for the company, which seem to be undervalued at the moment?
This liquidity, of course, is recognized by the board and discussed there. Of course, it's difficult to say what's going to happen, but I think that this is more likely that, and less likely that after five or 10 years, there will be more liquidity, one way or other way. That's pretty much my personal opinion and feeling. That's recognized, that liquidity thing and there are, of course, different ways to increase the liquidity, and in some cases, there could be natural ways to do that.
Maybe a couple of words about this liquidity issue. Last year, I think that approximately 8,000 shares were traded during the day, this year we are around 12,000 to 14,000, so significant increase already there, not really deep pockets for EUR 5 million. Anyways, better liquidity this year already. All right. Okay. Thank you, Petteri.
Thank you very much.
Next, Timo Sonninen is in charge of our sales and also actually marketing and communications. Please go ahead.
Good morning. My name is Timo Sonninen. I have worked for electronics industry business since 1988, over 30 years for a couple of companies. Last eight years for Scanfil, responsible for sales, as Pasi mentioned. The content of my presentation, starting from some sales topics, going to why our customers are selecting Scanfil as a manufacturing partner. Sales activities, our elements, how to boost organic growth, starting from our sales organization. In global organization, we have roughly 30 people, three different function and areas are global account management people who are taking care of existing customers. We have a new sales function looking for potential good new customers, as well a quotation team providing the cost calculations for the sales people. It's a global organization. We have people in China, in Europe, in North America, as we had factories in Petteri's presentations as well.
Customer survey, as already mentioned twice a year, survey itself of course is not the most important. More important is the feedback and how to utilize the feedback. We have a process. We are getting the feedback related to capabilities, capacities, but also how do we cooperate, how do we communicate with the customers, et cetera. Different areas. We are providing corrective action plans and presenting those to each customer that is this the direction you want Scanfil to go, and taking strong actions within few months before, of course, the next survey, as mentioned twice a year. Our main process is where sales is running and owning our new customer acquisition process, RFQ, so mean quotation process, and for our forecasting. We have a rolling forecast process by the customer and sales people. They are responsible that customers, they are really forecasting.
Nowadays it's really important to get forecast process to be run because of this component availability challenges in the market. At the same time, let's say roughly a year ago, when we started this year, 2021, we reorganized a bit our sales organization as well the processes we streamlined. For example, new sales, we have five different regional areas, responsibility areas in China, three areas in Europe and one in North America. Then this new customer acquisition process has been developed and focused. Especially Central European area is one focus area where we are growing nicely. Scanfil as a company is very target-oriented company, but also sales people and sales organization. We have clear targets, incentives. When the people are doing good, they can get some bonuses, let's say couple of few months per year as a salary level, if everything is going as planned.
For each key customers, we have a so-called customer plans, including needs and what kind of growth ideas, growth plan we are looking for. This is also plan that we are not hiding with the customers. We go through with each customer that are we in the same page, how do you see Scanfil potential and what kind of investments, what are the global factory footprint is needed, et cetera. Target is to grow. Of course, sales can't do that only with those 30 people. Our network, internal network, we have a cross-functional teams coming from different functions from the plants, very close collaboration. For example, each plant have a customer service management organization. Those people, they are taking care of daily order-to-delivery process.
Of course, account managers and sales guys, they are leading the team and we have a couple of customers that quite many our plants are producing the products to that specific customer. There is a leader coming from global sales, but then the plants of course are producing the products and taking care of order-to-delivery process. Marketing communication activity is very close with the sales and supporting to grow. Customer segments, once again, those five selected segments, and based on our market analysis, we really believe that we are in a growing businesses with our customers. There is some megatrend and key drivers mentioned in the slide that believing, and it seems to be also that if you look our top 10 customers, which are roughly a bit more than 50% from total sales coming today, and also those have been split quite nicely with different segments.
That's also good. Related to those mega trends, for example, this energy and clean tech segment, and as an example with Tomra, we have a huge growth potential. Tomra is really driven by mega trend for circular economy, and we are providing solution for them. It's really partnership mode, the production and shipments from our plants, we are already shipping close to end user. Can be Lidl in Hamburg or Prisma in Helsinki, we are shipping direct the line to the end user. Connectivity segment, as Petteri already mentioned, is one, and including some traditional telecom companies, but as well, quite many new startup and small companies, and there is nice growing potential, of course, related to industrial internet and connectivity solutions.
Today, our offer is covering the whole product life cycle, and our services, processes, functions have been built to serve high mix, low volume, medium volume needs. That's the key. Of course, core business is manufacturing services, producing the products, but more and more important also to be early involved in the phase when the product design is ongoing to giving strong support, even providing product design. When you go to the ramp-up phase, supply chain set up, cost optimization, and so on. Those are the phases our organization is really working very closely with customers. This is the partnership mode today. After mass production phase, going to the end of the product life cycle, we are also serving customers with some repairing services to keep product alive, spare parts, product maintenance, even some distribution services to keep some products in the stock, et cetera.
This has changed now. If we go back 10, 20 years ago, the business was mainly to manufacture the products and this part. Today, it's really partnership mode. In this industrial and med tech segment, those life cycles are typically quite long. We are talking easily 10 years and even more to produce one product. In some consumer business, you know that the product life cycles are much, much shorter. We are not working for those kind of customers. Of course, benefits to customer is that the time to the market is shorter when we are working together. Cost, I said that we are really focusing on what would be the cost in the mass production phase.
Of course, for us, it's that stickiness is coming, that customers, they are, as Petteri already mentioned, that more or less we are not losing customers. When they really select the manufacturing partner, we are working together to keep customers and time to market, time to profit even in a product level. Once again, those are our core services in manufacturing. Electronics, of course, is the key, producing PCBAs by our SMT lines and lot of equipment. Mechanics today is more supporting our system integration production. We are producing sheet metal parts, but mainly to build box build units and complex system integrated products to our customers. Last one on the right side is production outsourcing, and this is the area we are developing and, like I mentioned, one reference, Ankarsrum.
A year ago, they decided to outsource in Sweden their production to us, and now we are producing as a single source all Ankarsrum products, and it's already a quite good business. This is the area we are also focusing on and looking for good growth potential. Time to life and to market those, as I mentioned, this product design, and those two mentioned partners are Sigma Connectivity, focusing on, of course, connectivity solution, and Etteplan is our partner also in this product design phase, as we have also our own resources, mainly in Sweden. Once again, depends on the case by case. Sometimes we can take the responsibility to have a total package or part of the product design.
There is very good references, for example, that from product idea, one quite big our customer, they came to us with the product idea, and we took the responsibility of the design with partners. The time from the idea, and we were in a mass production, was nine months. That was better what even this customer was expecting. Expectation was to have it longer. That was a really good project. Design for excellence, very key area. How to do the design, component selection, test strategies, et cetera, that the product is easy to produce and cost optimization is in place. Prototype manufacturing.
We have separate processes by the plant to produce prototypes a bit because the lead time is crucial, so there is some shortcuts in the processes, but those have been agreed with customer, for example, to use maybe some alternative components what are available and so on. Lead time is the key. One case I can mention, Vaisala. We have worked a lot with Vaisala technology company to reduce our lead time in the prototype manufacturing and give the good feedback to them that how to design the product that it's easy to produce and so on. This is really working nicely and good feedback from Vaisala. Test development is the area also that today more and more customers, they want to outsource test development. It's not their core.
We are taking responsibility and not only anymore those production-related ICT testers, but also functional testing solution, and we take whole package, whole test strategy of the product and using our own Scanfil ODIN test platform to produce and serve, offer test solution. Somehow the basis of the product and partnership is here and before we go to the mass production. Some product maintenance services, distribution, of course, as I mentioned, optimized supply chain balancing and easier balance factory loading. There is some agreed buffer stocks, to be able to fulfill, for example, non-forecasted demand. There is always coming some demand from the customers that they haven't forecasted, but we have been able to quite nicely to ship. Repairing services, as I mentioned, to keep product alive, do some revision changes, software changes, et cetera.
Cost improvements, not only in the early phase, even in the mass production phase, we are running value engineering project with the customers to keep costs and even, in the same level, certain level, or even going down. There has been some customers that who has awarded us because of this function. For example, two years ago, it was Nokia who gave the Supplier of the Year award for us related to cost improvements. Supply chain always, of course, important, but today even especially important how to set the supply chain, how to have reliable suppliers to get components. Okay, we can also split our customers with different ways. Mention those startups. By quantity, we have even more than about 15% from our total customer portfolio. We have a small company, startup companies.
Of course, with those ones, they are not investing at all for operations or for own production. It's like a fully packaged for us. We are the manufacturing partner for them and target is to, as Petteri said, that scale up in the future when the business is really flying. Of course, there is some risks that some cases are never flying and that we try to be and we need to be very selective at who are the potential partners with those startups. Our legacy customers, of course, 85% from total customer portfolio by quantity. By turnover, of course, even more than 85% coming from established customers. The question, why those very well-known international companies who are market leaders in their own segments, why they are selecting Scanfil as a manufacturing partner? Starting, I think quality and trust is the key.
Not only quality of the products we are producing, but quality is everywhere. When we are providing quotations and whatever we are doing, it must be no compromises with quality, our processes and so on. Of course, we have quite a wide manufacturing service. We are able to produce in-house cables, PCBAs, sheet metal mechanics, and finally, the system integrated products. That's a very good, unique selling point as well in the market. We know, of course, the market very well. Scanfil has been almost 50 years and focusing on industrial and medical businesses. We know that.
Reference customers, there has been cases that some new customers, when they know who are the partners today, it's also a very good point and can be quite important also that they can trust that when we are working with those mentioned big boys, so many smaller companies, at least they believe that the processes and services are in a level as good. Global reach, plants as well, sales organization, as I mentioned, and so on, are global ones. We are able to serve locally and globally. That's the key. Many smaller customers, they are more locally, and plants are taking care of the business and communication. When growing, we have a global organization and service footprint to give to them. Okay. Let's say that, once again, to be as a manufacturing partner, so today the roles are very clear.
Our customers, they focus on their own market, sales and marketing, maybe some research and those activities. When going to product design, it's already started very good close cooperation during the product design. Scanfil is responsible for production operations and taking care that the products are in life as long customers see some needs from the market. Also, the sales, sometimes I have received a question that how many people are working for sales at Scanfil? Of course, you saw that for global sales organization, 30 people, but sometimes I'm saying that 3,300 people. Somehow whatever we are doing, we are working for sales.
Thank you, Timo. Are there any questions from the floor? Antti. Just a sec.
If you got, let's say, clearly more financial resources at your use, what would you do to improve group sales at first?
What was the background?
If you got clearly more financial resources.
at your use, what would you do at first to improve group sales? Where would you invest?
Difficult to hear.
Where would you actually spend the money if you had all the resources?
to invest in sales, what would you do? Very close.
I still believe that we have had quite good resources to do what we want to do. As I mentioned that we have reorganized, we have hired some new salespeople, we have refreshed our processes. I don't see big needs, and I don't see that the money helps too much this moment. Of course, by the acquisition, it's easy to grow, as you know very well. There we need money. If you look organic growth, yeah, as we have seen how the growth has been in the past, normally in this business, it's a one-digit growth we have had and we are looking for. More, of course, yeah, I don't see that money helps too much. I don't know, Petteri, do you have any other comments to that?
For sure, we have been now increased our sales activities in China and U.S. We are still somehow at the beginning.
Exactly.
Most likely we are going to increase our resources there.
That's true.
As you said, we have financing in place that we are going to do that organized way when we are ready.
Correct. Okay. Good.
We hired last year and this year as well.
Yes.
New staff for the-
Yes.
for the sales. Yeah. Pasi from Nordea. Are your products and services cheaper or more expensive compared to industry average or compared the main competitors? That's the pricing issue.
I think it's, of course, different customers and different business models agreed in the agreements that what kind of business models, and that's varying, of course, depends on the customer. Of course, if you look our competition, we can say that company profit level point of view, we are in the page. That's also our understanding that how our competitors what kind of pricing models they have. We are in the same page.
Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Another one from Pasi. If all customers in the sector are sticky, would it also mean that it's hard to get the new big customer from a competitor?
Of course, yes, that's true that if competitors has already selected some partner, of course, it's not easy. There must be some big issues if they really want to get rid of the current existing partner. There has some cases has happened, but of course, then many of those big customers, they have a sourcing strategy to have at least two partners, not only as a single source. It's always competition of the market share.
Mm-hmm. Previously, Petteri has been mentioning that in Germany, some who has insourced manufacturing, they might be outsourcing it. It might be a new chance as well.
This one focus area is Central Europe, where we can see big potential because many OEM companies, they are still producing electronics and system integration by themselves, they haven't outsourced yet so much as here in Scandinavia.
There's a question regarding the connectivity. I think that Petteri already touched this subject upon. Connectivity segment is rather small, 5% of your revenue. Do you have any plans to grow it, or how do you see the future of this segment?
Yeah, definitely the target is to grow, and yeah, as mentioned, that segment is including some, let's say, traditional telecom players, big global ones, but also startup companies, and we can see potential to grow.
Okay. Thank you. Another one. How do your customers take a global shortage of components and materials? Can you get the price increases in customer prices?
We have a regular process to update our prices with customers, not only in this situation, but always. There is a component market prices are changing, but as well currency exchange rates and so on. In the agreement with the customers, we have a process to update our prices even monthly, quarterly, annually, and that works. Of course, always question that, is the timing exactly in the right place? As a big picture, yes, definitely we are doing that.
Yeah. Jyrki Hilli has a question. Maybe it's kind of a follow-up question on this question. How many new customers do you get in a typical year? How is your new customer acquisition pipeline now compared to the end of last year? Some kind of an indication.
Yeah. Okay. Pipeline by quantities and by potential, what we are measuring is higher. Those changes we did, that we have those new, for example, in North America and China, we started early this year, new sales activities. We can see already some results coming. As well this year, it seems that we are able to fulfill even our actual sales turnover by the new customers, what we planned when starting this year.
Okay, good to hear. All right. Thank you, Timo. Next, we will jump into the hot topic of materials and components. Operations, welcome, Riku Hynninen, our Chief Operating Officer. Floor is yours. Thank you.
Thanks. Hello, everybody. Another day in the office. Sales is making their pitch, operations comes to the stage and tries to take care of the operations stuff before the deadline, which is lunch today. Happy to be here. My name is Riku Hynninen. I've been with Scanfil since 2018. My background is in a Finnish telecom giant for a little bit more than 20 years, having worked in different operations leadership positions there. I will go through some highlights around Scanfil operations, starting from the factory network, which we have been addressing already today, go into the sourcing part and the materials market, which is having challenging times. I will spend a few minutes on the flexibility and how the flexibility is achieved in Scanfil operations.
Finally, I will end up with the kind of a core of operations management, which is performance improvement and continuous performance improvement. You have already seen the factory network, I'm not going to repeat a world tour once again here. One thing that I would like to highlight related to the factory network is that all of the Scanfil factories are P&L responsible factories. They are not like cost centers. They are responsible for delivering the profit. They are the kind of profit realization engines of Scanfil. The management in each of the factory is incentivized to deliver not only operational performance, but also profitability. Moving on to sourcing, which is today especially very important part of supply chain. In the past few years, it was mostly about how much we are able to negotiate the component prices down.
Now on top of that. There is a huge effort getting the components in on time so that we can deliver the sales. How we are organized in sourcing, we have a global sourcing, which is the kind of looking after global categories that are commonly used across Scanfil factories. We have category management in place for those global categories. They are taking care of the global suppliers' relationships, handling the price negotiations with the global component suppliers, and also taking care of supplier development and performance improvement. Global is about suppliers where scale matters, that we can benefit from scale. When we move to the local sourcing, which is basically smaller sourcing teams in each of our factory, they are focusing on local suppliers that are typically used only by that very factory. It's very local type of business.
They are doing the same in smaller scale. Looking after the relationship, supplier performance, and trying to negotiate the best overall terms and conditions, including the prices. These global and local teams, they are working in a sourcing community. Also how it works, that we are starting from the global category strategy, and then we cascade the targets and objectives to the local teams in different factories. In total, it is about 50 persons taking care of all this in Scanfil. Moving on to the market situation. Obviously all of us who are following Scanfil and following the supply chain in this world are familiar with the certain challenges that the supply chains of this world are having. First of all, before the pandemic broke up, we started to have trade war signals.
Came the pandemic, which turned into global supply shortages, especially in semiconductors and metals, led into a price inflation in selected categories. Also still today, we see disruptions in transportations, which are very unfortunate because they impact us with the sudden surprises of not getting the materials on time because the transportation was delayed. What we are doing, we are putting a very high effort on mitigating the impacts to protect our customers from the supply chain disruptions. First of all, it's very important that those long-term partnerships we have established with our preferred suppliers are nurtured, because trust and relationship gives you a better position in the game. Second, we have made a lot of tactical moves like extending the forecasting periods that we are giving to our suppliers.
We have increased the supply lead times in our ERP system so that we are shooting the orders earlier than we used to do before. In selected cases, we are placing fixed orders for certain time period for a supplier. All this is being coordinated in a company-wide war room activities. In very many cases, especially the list of most difficult components that are really having biggest business impact, we are also working very closely with our customers. It's like a three-party, sometimes even four-party escalations that we are having with our customers on our side, with our distributor, and with our supplier and ourselves trying to make the best out of the situation. There are, of course, other ways than just to escalate and try to order as timely as possible.
It's also about our component engineers finding alternative sources that would fit as a replacement for a certain part. We are working with some redesign cases to design out the worst components with shortages and things like that. There's maybe one reflection of the situation. This is like an open question to the industry that everybody is saying that the semiconductor difficult situation will carry over to 2022, and nobody exactly knows when it will be over. It will be interesting to see what is happening in those design laboratories, those companies who are designing the components with new selected components, which components they are choosing, and how this will change the game over two, three years of time. Moving to flexibility in operations. The three key building blocks of flexibility in any given factory is first of all built on a flexible employee base.
In Scanfil, we have about 3,300 internal employees. On top of that, we are using a more flexible workforce of about 1,300 external and temporary employees. In all of our countries where we operate, we have established channels, hiring people. Naturally, as part of our sustainability agenda, we very much respect all the local rules and agreements and laws related to employment. As second, moving to technical capacity. Another source of flexibility is equipment. Equipment flexibility can be thought of in two ways. one is that you can always trigger investment purchase for a new equipment and expanding your capacity to get more capacity, to get rid of a bottleneck. You can swap the machinery and equipment between the factories, which is based on the idea that in Scanfil, our different factories are sharing the same platform when it comes to production technology.
For example, surface mount technology, intelligent vehicles, et cetera. Not only talking about physical equipment, but also talking about the digital world and digital platforms. In Scanfil, all the 10 factories, they share a common ERP system. Which makes it very transparent and very flexible. For example, if you need to have a team from another factory supporting another factory for a period of time if they are having a capacity shortage in that area. Digital working instructions enable quick movements of products and production documents between the factories. Come to third lever for flexibility, the subcontractor. In several factories, we have That can provide us quick capacity increase, or they have a complementary technology that Scanfil does not have as its core technology and probably not a very attractive business case to invest in such a new process.
In those cases, we are benefiting from this partnership networks, call it subcontracting. It's both about capacity and capability, subcontracting. Next slide, I will further elaborate how the flexibility dynamics work. Starting from the employees. Typically, when talking about external temporary employees, depending on the local laws and regulations, we can achieve quick improvements, quick flexibility impacts. I'm talking about days or weeks maximum that we can scale our capacity up and down. What comes to internal employees, it's of course not as flexible. However, we can do a lot with overtime arrangements and adding shifts, et cetera. Always in compliance with the local rules. Second area, subcontractors. If we are outsourcing capacity to a partner, which is established for that factory, it can be done in matter of days.
If we need to develop or we are talking about new parts for the subcontractor, we would be talking about few weeks. What comes to equipment and tools, I pretty much addressed that already, that it gives us a possibility to optimize our global capacity across over the factories. Naturally, when we see a need for additional capacity, we are making fast decisions, triggering investment requests, and going forward with that. Depending on the lead time, we are talking about weeks, sometimes months that is needed to increase the capacity. Fourth picture, which I added here, which is not like a single factory thing. Of course, we do have the factory network. We can invest in the factory network, expanding our factories. We can do cross-manufacturing.
Not only using subcontractors to help with the capacity bottlenecks, but also move some part of the capacity for another factory, which has similar equipment, similar processes. We are talking about weeks or months, and that can be done. Okay. Last part of my presentation is related to performance management. Let's talk about continuous performance improvement. The Key Performance Indicators that we are measuring is if we are delivering on time, if our customer perceived quality is good or not, how is our inventory turns. Factories are also responsible for managing the net working capital on their part. Fourth, the productivity, which we intend to improve every year. How do we operate? Once in a year, as a part of our annual strategy review process, we are talking with each factory and setting long-term targets for the factory.
It stems from a strategic analysis that we do in our factory network, looking at what is the strategic position of the factory and what is the performance of the factory. That ends up in a four-field analysis of strategic position and performance. We can see there are some factories that are in urgent need to improve the performance, and some factories might have excellent performance. We see that the strategic position is a little bit soft, so the performance might be short-term unless we improve the strategic position. That's the thinking process behind, and then we set the targets. That ends up in a consolidated plan that the operations organization is coordinating, and that is cascaded down to annual targets for the key performance indicators, improvement projects. They are strategic and proactive by nature. They are aiming at forward-looking improvements in the performance.
Naturally, as every company and every operations manager in this world has a lot of KPIs to deal with and following that in the dashboard to make sure that there's tight grip on performance. Then the annual targets and the One Plan execution is followed up on monthly basis in the reviews. The main emphasis is on these proactive matters, but also along the way when surprises and different kind of events happen, there are also some reactive things that we get on board once we see there is an issue somewhere and try to fix that by setting up new improvement actions. In addition to that, I would say that really the core and heart of performance improvement is happening every day in the factories.
In front of the whiteboards with the key people gathering there every morning, looking at the performance, looking at the targets for the day and for the week, handling the issues that come up in order to have what should look like a seamless execution to our customers. Just an example of this continuous improvement concept that we have been applying recently. Starting from the top right corner, you see there is like a three years trend of performance of on-time delivery. You see that the target has been improved or increased year by year because we have seen that, what the heck, this factory is out-achieving the targets every year. What we are looking at those graphs is the trend.
The trend need to be improving and also it not only improving, but if we see a lot of variation in the month-to-month performance, that also raises question, what is the reason the performance is varying month- to- month? To support our analysis, we are using our analytics platform to crunch the data and look at the Paretos. Okay, which customers are the delivery issues related to? Also what are the reasons in the processes, which processes are causing the delayed shipments? As an example, we do that for the other KPIs as well. Based on that, we are not only having a short-term reactive view on issues, but we are also able to follow longer-term results where the problems really are in order to have the most effective measures to overcome those issues.
On the left side, you see there is like a traditional action table to demonstrate the actions, responsible persons, and deadlines. Okay, thank you bearing with me operations part. Now see if there are any questions and answers.
There are a lot of questions actually popping up. Maybe the first one will go actually to Kai instead of you because it's a P&L question. Any negative impact from the price increases in semis and metal regarding your own P&L, or is it always passed on to the customer?
Yeah.
Could it be you or Petteri?
I can come back to that in my presentation. There is
Yes. We will come back to that in the last presentation when Kai is on stage. Pasi Väisänen from Nordea again. Are you in some cases a subcontractor to another EMS company, or are you only supplying products and services to your own end customers?
Well, we have some very limited cases where Scanfil is a part supplier for another EMS company. From what comes to business relevance, it's really minor.
A question from Miikka. This is actually regarding sales. Maybe to put it in, well, have the supply chain challenges during the pandemic caused changes in the behavior of your customers? Do you think your customers want to diversify their range of electronic suppliers to a higher extent as this could perhaps secure their supply situation better than doing business exclusively with one supplier? Have we seen any cases that we have lost customers because of this?
Maybe I can start, and then Timo, if you would like to complement. What has materially changed is that instead of meeting the customers face-to-face, instead of having customers coming in person visiting our facilities, we are doing all that virtually. That is one of the biggest thing I have been amazed in COVID pandemic, how well these things work on virtual setting. Personally, I do not see COVID pandemic driving big changes in customer sourcing strategies. There are maybe pros and cons, and one pro would be that if you have a reliable supplier who demonstrate that they can deal with COVID issues, they can deal with supply chain issues, then I think it's further building the trust with the customer.
Do you want to continue, Timo?
Shortly, we have not lost any customers because of COVID and vice versa, actually, with those new technologies, as Riku mentioned, that we have won some new ones even more or less without meet new potential customers face-to-face.
Good to hear. One further question regarding the biggest bottlenecks at the moment, what you see?
Biggest bottlenecks, obviously, certain parts, especially in the semiconductor side, certain suppliers there. I don't want to go into names, but it actually comes down pretty narrow number of suppliers that are the biggest gatekeepers at the moment in the market. Then, as I explained in the flexibility on the operations, we have seen a very healthy demand this year, and we have been working a lot with the factories to increase the bottlenecks. This is basically what we are constantly doing. All those internal bottlenecks can be solved, and we can influence them. What is difficult part is the semiconductors that nobody can really make a big change.
Yeah. Okay. Thank you, Riku. Very interesting. Next, we will have a short break. It's around 25 minutes break, and we'll be back at noon Finnish time, and then we will continue with Markku's SMART presentation. Thank you. Now for the break. Welcome back from the lunch break, back to Scanfil's Capital Markets Day. Next we will have Markku Kosunen, our Chief Technology Officer, actually telling about Scanfil SMART. Please, Markku.
[Break]
Thank you, Pasi. Hello, everyone. My name is Markku Kosunen, and I'm working as a Chief Technology Officer in Scanfil Group. I've been in EMS and contract manufacturing business since early '90s in several companies. I joined to Scanfil 11 years ago, 2020, and first, around six years, I was leading the global operations. 2019, I started in our current position and then led this Scanfil SMART program, which I will tell you in next. The content, at first about SMART vision and mission, then how the future Scanfil factory would look like, what are the main initiatives, projects in this year ongoing, then what kind of benefits we are looking from SMART program, and then we take a look at what kind of SMART technology roadmap we have, and in the end, how we are investing into the future.
In the end, of course, place for questions. Scanfil vision about the future factory. Our factories will have connected, transparent, proactive, and optimized end-to-end supply chain and operations. Our SMART mission is technology-driven transformation in customer and employees' experience, as well as improving performance and our competitiveness. How to get there? We established multi-year program, indeed five years program, called SMART. In early phase, we made a study and we decided to take technologies into the program like IoT solutions, mobility, overall connectivity of devices, even people into the program. Manufacturing Execution Systems in next level, different kind of flexible automation, collaborative robotics, autonomous intelligent vehicles, et cetera. Automatization doesn't stop to the shop floor. We decided also that we want to take this kind of robotic process automation, so indeed, software robotics in use in back offices as well.
Because of connectivity and such, we are able to get much more data for the future, we included also the big data environment creation and cloud services into the program. Of course, to be able to utilize the data, we decided that we need to select business intelligence analytics software and later on add also some artificial intelligence features on it. Let's take a look at how Scanfil future factory will look like. This is showing the ecosystem overall. This combines and enables Scanfil's competitiveness and technology leadership. We can see the factory from the left where materials are coming in. We have and we will have automation inspection, automated receiving, then smart warehousing and warehouse automation, then autonomous intelligent vehicles moving materials through the whole factory.
In the middle, we can see that our production lines, modern lines, are connected and then we are getting the real-time data all the time from the processes, as well in the future from materials as well. After the manufacturing of PCBAs and mechanics, there are integration lines and their collaborative robotics are helping people to improve the efficiency and making the most simple work in there. Whenever all these devices are connected via MES system and manufacturing execution system and data is getting to the cloud in our big data environment, then we are able to utilize the data to improve the processes, develop our analytics, make it possible to give better views for decision-making to the management and optimize our operations overall.
We can see that analytics will be and have been taken in use in basic level at first to get KPIs and reports, now we are adding some intelligence in there and having predictive analytics in coming year, then adding AI and the artificial intelligence on it. Whenever we have all this data available, it makes it possible for us to create a digital twin, virtual twin of the factory. From that virtual digital twin, we are able to see what is happening all the time. Addition to that, if some changes will happen in customer demand or circumstances overall, we are able to simulate the new situation and optimize again. In the end of day, people make this all happen. Even automation is there and we will be able to attract best talents also by having these kind of technologies in use.
This is showing Scanfil way how we are introducing new technologies and then rolling them out to the other factories. Selected factories have been implemented these technologies mostly in 2019 and 2020, which are in the left side in here under rollouts. After that, those factories have taken those technologies in use. Now we are rolling out them to the other factories to maximize the benefits. This is possible because we have around 10 people in our technology global organization who are owning these technologies and are coordinating that best practices and experience are transferred between the factories. However, couple of new technologies taken into the program still in this year. Smart sensors, we found out that we have still some machines, some processes which are not possible to connect with straight IoT systems to our manufacturing execution system.
We decided to take this kind of study for SMART sensors to be able to get the data from all kind of processes and even older machines via this technology. Digitalized services, like mentioned in 2020, we created our big data environment, selected tools in there. On that platform, we are now developing some applications like corporate KPI dashboard, customer portal, which gives our customers possibility to get instant information about their products and deliveries, for example, and quality. We are studying also operators flow. This means that we are having the possibility to get the positions and tracking how people are moving in the factories anonymously, of course. This gives us possibility to further develop our layouts and efficiency. HR mobile application mentioned as well as one application to improve the communication between factory management and all employees. Why we have this SMART program?
Of course, we are looking for the benefits. We are defining so that benefits to the customers, to our people, and of course, to improve our performance. Customer people performance. Customer benefits from these initiatives, customer portal was mentioned, it was shown earlier that it's in our core to have the early involvement possibility in design phase with the customers. We are now having the new tools to create this kind of design for excellence analysis and reports then to customers. Addition to that, via Manufacturing Execution System, we have a comprehensive traceability available, not only in the components level, but also our process parameters and operators known who has produced all PCBA. People benefits, some to mention.
We are studying and having the trials now to utilize this enhanced learning with extended reality glasses in NPI, in remote advice together with customer, for example. Like Riku mentioned earlier that we have digitalized working instructions. It means that such tools in use that we are able to create very fast and high-quality working instructions and share them in the shop floor. Virtual visits for all factories, what we can see later today. What comes to the performance, of course, we are by automation, improving our productivity. By getting data, we are able to improve our overall equipment efficiency, find the reasons that if things are not in optimal. Also improvements for quality, like quality yields and strict process control to avoid mistakes, et cetera.
Here is our technology roadmap that we created for this multi-year program full of different kind of technologies, what many of them already mentioned previously. Target is to show in here that when we recognized plenty of new technologies, we made a roadmap that what is the right order to implement and roll out these to the other factories. We are now in the middle of the program exactly indeed right now. Just what is ongoing right now this year and some studies, some examples that smart wearables is a very interesting area. We have two kind of studies ongoing. First one is that in warehousing, people can have integrated barcode or QR code scanner in gloves. This makes it possible to collect things by hands more efficiently, and that is, of course, connected to the manufacturing execution system.
Second, wearables can be that what I already explained, that we are able to track the positions of the people. It will happen so that we will have Bluetooth Low Energy tags, which can embed it to the collar or sleeve of the working coat, we can understand how people are moving in the factory. Investments. Scanfil has a strong balance sheet, that enables us to make long-term investment plans. Like Petteri said earlier, we are investing around 2%-3% of turnover annually. All in all, what was mentioned also earlier that we are investing to generic machinery and equipment, which are optimal for high mix and low volume products.
What we want to take care is also that we have globally harmonized machines and processes in use to be able to support the factories if needed from other locations and also make technology transfers easier. Overall SMART, flexible manufacturing automation and then digitalization and connected factories on focus right now. To the end summary of SMART program. Automation, digitalization, together with all factories, we are able to maximize benefits and getting the competitive edge. Thank you.
Thank you, Markku. Are there any questions from the audience? That actually covered everything, so no questions. Thank you. There was actually a question coming from Twitter. What blockchain are we using? Very specific one.
Yeah, indeed. I will go back in here and explain what this means. Let's say more futuristic technologies, what we have not selected to our roadmap is shown in here. We can see that in the right top corner, adding public data like weather forecasts and such to our model, which indeed can affect, for example, to material availability if there would be tsunami or storm somewhere. The second one is in the shop floor what we can see that we want to improve the productivity by having this kind of gamification of the production. The third one is the blockchain mentioned in the left side. This is not in use, but this has been seen that in some time perspective this may be used, for example, to secure the original source of the components and avoid fake components getting from the market.
This is not in use, but this has been seen that it may be one technology what we will take in use in the future.
Okay. Thank you. A question regarding what are the first factories to adopt new phases of SMART and why did you choose those?
Indeed. It's not so simple to answer, but I will give an example so that we selected seven, eight main technologies, what we started to study 2019. It was not so that one factory started the first technology and the others were waiting. For example, AIV technology has been studied and taken in use at first in Åtvidaberg in Sweden. Manufacturing Execution System and digitalization and IoT connectivity was taken at first in Suzhou, China. Back office robotic software automation first time in Sievi. We were able to develop this in parallel now rolling out to relevant factories. That's true that Suzhou and Sievi, they are two biggest electronics factories, they have been able to adopt fast the new technology, they are in frontline.
Okay. Thank you. You said that the investments are 2%- 3% of turnover. Is this only SMART or all investments? How much do you see that is needed in the future to keep up the pace?
This 2%-3% is including all investments totally, including SMART. It's a little bit difficult indeed to separate in these days that what is SMART and what is non-SMART because whenever we have the need to make the replacement, we are taking always the modern technology in use, and you can call it SMART. They are together.
All the investments are.
All the investments, 2%-3%.
Yes. Thank you. Additional question actually from Pasi from Nordea. What is the profitability difference between the best and the weakest factory? Well, maybe Kai will have some kind of an indication regarding this, but we haven't been actually saying this out loud. There is a slide regarding these kind of things. Is there a risk that high volume companies using the same technologies may be able to move to low volume business efficiently? How do you see that?
Of course, there is a risk, but we believe that we can be very flexible and we are in the frontline with these technologies. We are in good position in developing this and especially looking for flexibility and generic processes and equipment.
Okay. Johannes Ries, as digitalization is moving, is it right to expect that the SMART will have a follow-on program after 2023?
Yeah, of course. This will be our normal life, and we wanted to create this program to accelerate the development, especially in these years. Of course, we will continue after that.
The new program will be launched.
Our normal life, I don't know.
Okay. Any questions from the floor? Okay, no further questions. Thank you, Markku. Now to our CFO.
Thank you.
Kai Valo. Welcome on stage. There were already some questions for you, but let's go first to the presentation, please.
Okay. Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Kai Valo. Been in Scanfil now next month, five years, let's say I have been in this EMS or similar business over 20 years. Out of which, close to customer market in Taiwanese-owned company in China, about six years, seeing a little bit from the different perspective. I would say that after that, nothing surprises me any longer. Okay. Let's go to the presentation. This was my favorite topic. Okay. The content, we start from the long-term turnover and the profitability. A few words maybe answering the question also that how to get the 7%. Opening up a little bit more about this question regarding this cost structure and impact to the profitability, I hope. Balance sheet and financial position.
Go to the cash flow and then sharing the dividends over the time, and then the one slide about the total shareholder return. Let's go first to the big figures. In fact, quite small, but starting from the sales. We have been growing in average last 10 years in sales 16%. That, of course, is including also acquisitions. One major being here in 2015 when the PartnerTech company was acquired, and then more or less the revenue doubled on that time. There is other smaller acquisitions also over the time, but mainly organic growth besides that and pretty much following the market overall development in revenue.
What comes to the revenue of 2021 first half, you can see that there is a bit like a swing upwards and the growth has been a bit more organic growth, 12.2% of revenue growth in first half in comparison to the previous year. That, however, is including low margin sales, securing somehow the customer product availability and invoicing of the cost for that. That is EUR 6 million roughly out of the total. Impact is like 2%. It's not much. 10% growth even excluding that. Good figures. Of course, overall there is like this low margin business, like nearly EUR 17 million included to the total. That is good to keep in mind because that, of course, it's not swallowing the profitability, but it's impacting to the operating margin, which then is lowering for that reason. Go to the profitability.
The profitability growth over the time has been 24%, of course, also supported by the acquisition, but also the good work. I would say that it's somehow evidence of the quality growth we have been able to do with and without the acquisitions. We are reporting, like you can see, we are reporting then the official figures as well as then adjusted. We are trying to avoid report like pro forma figures. Of course when you do some extraordinary moves like acquisition or divestments, then of course you need to somehow normalize the figures and present the normalized. Like last year, in fact, then the normalized figures were lower EUR 5 million than what we reported. It can be worked both ways, upwards and downwards. Usually only upwards.
Last year that was a combination of selling this Hangzhou factory and also the decision what was made regarding Hamburg operation shut down. The combination of those EUR 5 million, like a positive, and the normalized then was the EUR 39.9 million, roughly. What comes to the operating margin development, you can see that we have been very close to reach out the 7% already in past, then have a COVID year next 2020. I would say that the result of that is very good, even operating margin is slightly less than the year before. In this year, 6.1%, it's lower, but then I can maybe explain that in the upcoming page where I can show the cost structure and how that is impacting the cost structure, because otherwise it's difficult to illustrate the impact.
The profitability year-over-year first half absolute terms euro-wise, we are growing EUR 2 million more profit than the year before, so that is not shrinking. Okay. Go to this page. This is demonstrating how we develop our business, and there was a question about this, which companies are the most profitable, which least. We are not publishing that information. This is like showing that how we are managing the factors. On the horizontal line, you can see the strategic position, and then vertical line is the performance. Of course, we are trying to drive all the sides up to the northeast corner somehow. Of course, I believe that the corner is also moving more far when the more you drive.
Anyway, it's like a continuous improvement, so that in short term, those sides which are performing less than expected, then we are trying to drive them, and driving the performance better. In longer term, driving the strategic position in terms of our customer base and capabilities and so to be better in the longer term. It happens that there like here is two red spots that illustrating what has happened in the past that with Hangzhou we came up to the conclusion that it was performing quite well. Then we came to the conclusion that with other owners' hands that could better fit than being along with Scanfil. Actually that was good match. Unfortunately, this also happens, and we have to be capable to make decisions also.
We decided to shut down Hamburg operation as after long trial period, we just couldn't make it good enough and better, and then that is then how it is. Also it's a question of decision-making to make the quality growth and improvements in the operation. Come back to the subject, which if the heart rate looks like this, then call ambulance. Here is like you can see the cost structure year by year, 10 years. You can see that it's pretty much stable. If the big bar is the material cost. Sorry. Then have the personnel cost is the next from the bottom, and then we have other operating expenses and depreciation. There is no big swings over the time, so it's very stable year-over-year.
If looking closer, of course you can see here 2015, 2016, you can see impact of the acquisition and the cost overall percentage especially personnel and other operating expenses increased after the acquisition. We have done our homework and improved the business, the percentage have become lower, the profitability improves. When we come to the near history this year first half, I would point out here that if you look at the material cost, that has increased 0.6%. That's what I was trying to explain, that we have the low margin sales, which is good. It's covering the cost, but we are not making much margin with that. That is a bit confusing. Basically, to understand the figures excluding that, you can come up with them.
We have not published what that kind of pro forma figure would be. You can like looking this chart, you can see that there is 0.6% increase in the material cost and same time almost the same impact in the operating profit. Some conclusion can be made based on that. Otherwise, the cost is more or less washed out. There is a bit less good development with the personnel cost, a little bit more other operating expenses and quite simple. Okay, go to the next. Balance sheet. Somehow being proud of the situation, proud of the balance sheet that okay, 50% of equity ratio could ask that is that too much, but of course that changes usually then suddenly more if change so that if something will happen, then acquisition or such, most likely it would look different for a while, and then need to climb back up.
In this situation, it's good to have a reserve. Then you can see that the debt accordingly is low, EUR 40 million of debt, out of which 40% is leasing and 60% is loan. It's pretty healthy. We have also some cash, which could be used to cover most of the loans, EUR 17 million. What is remarkable that if you look this, then you can see that the working capital elements are quite dominating. The inventories, accounts receivables, and accounts payables, and all are growing. Of course, along with the volumes, but inventory is also growing for the material situation ongoing, and we are investing a bit to inventories to be able to do our best to support the customer. That's what we are aiming for. Fixed asset is about EUR 60 million there. Go further.
Few words about still repeating this strong financial position. You can see that the net debt/EBITDA has dropped on the left side, has dropped from nearly one to now has been less than 0.5. It's very low. Other point here in this chart is there is a dotted line on the H1 net debt/EBITDA. That is kind of illustrating that, okay, how much the debt per EBITDA could be. Our policy is that our net debt shouldn't be more than half of the equity. That is like a stated policy. That is the low end of this dotted line. Temporary, based on the decisions accordingly, I believe that we have flexibility to have from the financing point of view and from the companies offering the financing, I guess that we can go far beyond that.
I have ended the line 2.5, maybe the scale ends there, but anyway, we can say that standalone, everybody can calculate the figures. It's about EUR 1 million-EUR 150 million standalone, the possibility. Loans, leasing, and there is the breakdown of that. Maybe no need to go too much through that, but you can see that there is still separation of how much is leasing and how much is loans, and also the cash, very light line on the top. Next. This is about still describing a bit the cash flow situation. Again, I think the trend is somehow showing the fact better than 1,000 words. If you look the cash flow from the operating activities, it's this blue or light blue bar, and then you see the cash from the operations, which is this gray color or light color.
The difference of those is the working capital or change in the working capital. Normally, in the past, it's quite stable. It's about less ±EUR 10 million along with the revenue growth. It's pretty stable. This year it's a bit larger, and of course, the revenue growth has been more, but also then, like I mentioned, that we have been investing a bit, bad word, investing inventories, but anyway, buying more inventories to be able to make the supplies. That's the logic. That's why then you can see, and that's, of course, reflecting to the cash flow then at the end of the day. If looking this year cash flow figure 1st half, it's positive, but of course, it could have been better.
This is a decision that to make the future revenues possible, we need to invest a bit to the working capital. On the other hand, our position is good to do so. We can do so, unlike maybe in some other situation cannot do. We can do. Okay. I have a couple of minutes left still. Here is the dividends per share, and every year growing from EUR 0.04- EUR 0.17 the last year. I don't know what is the figure for the next year, and I will not answer that kind of question. Anyway, the trend is good. The policy in principle is that around one-third of the earnings per share is paid as dividend. That is probably the last.
I would say that to conclude how we are managing and how we have been doing in the past, this is somehow showing the result in how we are appreciated in the market. Of course, it's always as good as is the everyday work. I believe that in long run, this is the only way to create the shareholder value, to do good job.
Don't know how the future looks, but we do our best. Okay, any questions?
Actually, we will have a short break for one-two minutes. We will test out the lines to Suzhou in the between, and then we will actually continue with the Q&A.
Okay.
Please take some refreshments in the meanwhile. Welcome back from the technical break. We were testing some lines to Suzhou, so bear us for that while. To the questions. We have one question from the floor already to Kai. Please go ahead.
Joonas from Evli. It was said earlier today that startups make 15% of your customers, and more established ones make 85%. I think that was in terms of customer account numbers. Could you maybe tell us how is the revenue mix is like there? Or if that's not possible, maybe give an indication of the potential. I think your largest customer at the moment is around 10% of your revenue. How large might the largest startup customer of yours be?
Do you, Timo, want to?
Totally, startup companies are less than 5% from our total sales today. In Petteri's presentation, he mentioned that the biggest customer today is roughly 15%.
Okay. There's one additional question.
Yeah.[Non-English content] It's important to indeed emphasize that operating profit is the important euro number, and operating profit margin does not really mean anything when we talk about paying dividends or something like that one. Which, of course, kind of then brings the question that when you have your new target for the next four years, when you will reveal it eventually, so far it was EUR 700 million turnover, 7% operating profit margin. Maybe the question would be that, is that margin the most important? Maybe even the target could be EUR 1 billion sales and EUR 17 million. Of course, it turns out to be 7%, but maybe the emphasis would be also there. It would be millions of euros instead of a margin and figures instead of Yeah. Thank you.
Yeah. Okay. Is there any other questions that was more or less, I would assume, a comment? Thanks about that. Antti, please.
It seems that your factories have quite little deviation in terms of strategic position and performance. On the other hand, top stars are lacking. What should you do to create one top star? Is it possible that one of your factories become really a top star leading the line for the whole group?
Do you want to take, Riku?
Riku.
Actually, one point related to this metrics that Kai was demonstrating is that each year we are calibrating the absolute values that we are measuring in terms of strategic position and performance into a scale between zero and 10. We could do it easily by recalibrating the numbers. I think the key is really not so much about if we are really in the top right corner, but that we can find really differences between the factories, and we understand what is needed to improve the strategic position and performance. Yes, indeed, we are pushing forward with further improving the best ones, and I can tell you that they are making good progress at the moment.
Maybe I can also say that perhaps we are a little bit humble also that I think there is stars.
Could we go back to the slide regarding the cost structure and more explain about Johannes Ries's question or regarding the P&L and the semi and metal effect on there? Should we check it through again?
You mean this cost structure?
Yes. You explained it already quite much, but just to have a review there. Was there any negative impact from the price increases in semi and metal regarding your P&L, or is it always passed on to the customer?
I think that Timo partially replied to this question already that, yes, we have a process that with a contractual defined frequency, renegotiate the prices either quarterly, monthly, or yearly basis. On the top of that, there has been invoicing for kind of extraordinary expenses, perhaps, which then is also covering the cost for certain materials and the deviations. Basically, yeah, there is a mechanism and was emphasized from the audience that, yes, it's really so, but then need to keep in mind that the percentage is indicator, but then the euro is what matters, and we are making way more operating profit than we did year ago, and even the percentage are looking a bit like tail at this point of time then.
Let's say that when the situation normalizes, this kind of tail of trading business, what we have in this year will. We are not in this kind of trading business eventually. That will go away. When the material situation normalizes, I guess we should see back to the normal also in terms of percentage. That will automatically correct itself. Now I think the good and important message is that we are able to cover the cost in difficult situation. Also, more important is that we are able to do our best to keep and satisfy our customers. That is anyway the long-term, most important thing that our customers are satisfied and we are able to make the deliveries.
Yeah. The extraordinary invoicing in the H1 in the first half of the year was something like EUR 6.1 million, if I remember correctly.
Yeah, EUR 6.1 million, and this trading then about EUR 10 million more.
Yeah. That is the effect there. Is there any further questions from the floor? Okay. Pasi from Nordea. What is the amount of future order book or orders received per quarter? How long is the sales visibility at maximum? I think that it was maybe over to Timo. Just a second.
As mentioned that we are receiving rolling forecast from our customers on a monthly basis. It has been in the past 12 months. Nowadays, quite many of our key customers, they are even providing 18 months rolling forecast in this moment because of this component availability. Of course, it's a question that what is the accuracy of this forecast always that the actual demand will change and is fluctuating. We can see by the forecast one to one and a half years from now.
Book value we have.
Order book value, then there is even in the product level that the order to delivery time is starting from one day and can be one week, two weeks, one month, couple of months. Depends on the business model by the product.
Okay. Thank you. Any further questions from the floor? We still have some eight minutes in between, or should we continue directly to the Suzhou or take a break? We are actually ready to go to Suzhou, let's start a virtual tour a bit earlier than originally agreed on. Okay.
Break a leg. Okay. Are we online? Looks like, yes. Okay, good. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Christian Kesten. I'm leading this Suzhou plant. Suzhou is located in Jiangsu, one and a half hours away from Shanghai. We are operating in China, of course. I would like to take the opportunity today to briefly show an overview of our plant operation and also touch upon the planned expansion investment that we have released. Main focus will, of course, be our virtual factory tour. We will go through. We don't have time to cover the whole production, but we will select strategically, pick up some key points that also address the smart operation program that Markku Kosunen have told about earlier. We will show you in detail about the automation activities as well as the digitalization activities, what that means to us.
To my help, I have not only myself, but part of my management team, and it will be Ivan Song, our Technical Manager, it will be Harry Lee, our Plant Director, as well as our Production Manager, Brian Fu, that will guide us through the production. Let's start off with a short video giving a brief overview of Scanfil Suzhou.
[Presentation]
Okay. That was a very short overview, but anyway can give you an idea on how it looks where we operate. We will then switch over to our virtual factory tour, and I hope that you can see our presentation, where we show the floor plan. We will start off following the logical flow of production from incoming to outgoing. We will start with our automation warehouse activities, presented by Harry. Switch over to our SMT manufacturing line, where Brian will show you how we have digitalized that process to have a strict control, and that also enables traceability to our customers. After that, we will show you some examples of automation applications, both focused on mid to high volume, but also what is key for us, high mix, low to mid volume manufacturing, where change over time and generic processes and flexibility is of key importance.
Finally, we will demonstrate our war room, where we have a cockpit overview of the whole factory, and we will demonstrate how we are operating our daily life and to drive our continuous improvement activities. Without further ado, I would like to switch over to Harry, that will start from our warehouse automation.
Okay. Hello, everyone. My name is Harry Lee, Plant Director for our Suzhou site. Welcome to our smart factory. In past years, so with our employees' efforts and great support from our headquarters, so both of our new technology and smart solution develop very fast. Meanwhile, more value created for our customers, stakeholders, and our employees. During this year, our sales revenue, operating profit, our quality and productivity also had a remarkable improvement. We participate and are leader most of smart projects in our group. In our site, the smart solution already cover all process. Our smart manufacturing are also be qualified by our Chinese government. Today, we will share some of our practice to you for our smart solution application in our site. Now I'm in our warehouse.
Behind me, you can see, we introduced the automation solution for our raw material management in our Suzhou site. Now we have around 28,000 SKUs in our warehouse, within 3,600 sq m. As I mentioned, in past years, we introduced our automation solution, and we designed a specific software for our raw material management. All of the key parameters, for example, the raw material cycle, first in, first out, material shelf life, and material traceability will be controlled by our software. We designed this software by ourselves based on our ERP and MES platform. Because of these activities, in past years, our SMT raw material warehouse capacity increased around 10 times compared with traditional material shelves. At the same time, our employees' productivity also has more than 7% year- by- year. As I highlight that, all the key factors were controlled by our software.
This means that we can avoid 100% manpower mistake. Of course, because our fast business grows, now both of our warehouse and production space will be the constraint for us. In past months, we got the green light from our board to start our new packaging project. Now we are preparing the project plan for that. Okay, considering the limited time, I would like to hand over to my colleague, Brian. He will introduce our smart application for our SMT area. Thanks.
Okay, good morning, everyone. This is Brian, production manager. Let me shortly introduce our smart manufacturing solution in shop floor. First, I will share my screen. Okay. Can you see my screen?
Yes.
Yes. Okay. Actually here is our virtual factory, which is from our MES and provided by Siemens. Our engineering will build the machine's 3D model in system, and it link to our IoT box. You could see detailed for SMD, all the machine, all the station status from here. Core SMART solution include NPI tool, planning tool, shop floor control, until our finished goods ship out. Okay, let's move to my big screen. From our big screen, you could see all the SMT line status, our current efficiency, our line quality, also what is current order, what will be the next one. In here, it will be for management team to see whole factory situation. In front of each line, you also could see details of our shop order planning.
Our operator could see from this label when produce what, and also when they have done this, and the current product yield change over time. Also, this TV has the Andon system. It will call someone when it meets some problem. We have this out like material shortage, human resource shortage, machine problem. The operator could call someone from this TV. It will be sent by message similar like our Facebook. The supporter will come in and boarding here. Also, in front of the line, we have MES line computer. You could see in here, the green means machine working. Yellow means machine waiting. In here, we also will control all the tooling, like our sensor usage, our solder paste shelf life. All those will be controlled by MES. In here also, we could see details of machine, like machine material being verified.
It will remind us this material could be used in how many minutes. It will avoid our line stop. The operator could be before line stop connect a new material for us. When we have this MES system, we improved our performance at least 10%. Let's continue go to next process. Before the board come to our machine, we have the scanner, which will read all the barcode. With this barcode, we can fully trace our process, our material used by which machine and by when, by which parameter of the machine. In here, all the line have online solder paste quality system. This machine will detect out our solder paste quality and create out our online SPC to guarantee all the qualified board go to next process. Scanfil Suzhou have latest generation X-ray machine, which is more faster and stable.
In here you see all the feeder with green light. It means those material conformed and right. We avoid any mistake in the advance. Continue, you see our operator, they have the SMART solution to collect our material by the quantity wise. SMD is a more valuable process. They will mount the component to our PCB. When the material on the PCB, we will move the components to our reflow. In our reflow, next we get all the temperature by oven. It will be controlled and this data will link together to each serial number of the PCB. We continue when the board done the oven process, it will move to our online AOI. With online AOI, we have 3D one.
It means they will from different angle take picture, compare with our target picture to identify the soldering quality and position of the components, also the mark of the components. Here is all the process for SMD. When the process done, we will move the board to THT process. Okay, I will hand over camera to Ivan. He will continue introduce our high volume product solution.
Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Ivan, Technical Manager here. I would like to introduce our high-volume solution in our automation line. The annual demand for the product which produced in this line is more than 3 million pieces a year. Now, from the productivity point of view, way before the automation, we total needed more than 20 operators. Now we only need 8 operators to meet our customer demand. From the quality point of view, currently the customer PPM is 8. Exactly means till now, we already delivered more than 1.3 million pieces to our customer, but only received 10 pieces defect. For our automation solution, during develop, we always bring a lot of the SMART solutions and always bring a lot of the mistake-proving ideas.
In this line, for this product, we have a lot of the critical dimensions and a lot of the CTQ we need to control. Where all the data in the process is linked to the MES, and the MES will control whole the process to make sure our quality. From here, you can see AIVs incoming. In Scanfil Suzhou, 1,080 AIVs between each area and the total running around 14 km. Thank you. I will hand over to our colleague, Harry, to continue for the presentation.
Okay. Welcome back. Can we start?
Start.
Okay, welcome back. Here is our another smart solution application area for our low and the mid volume products. Behind me, you can see this is our cobot UR. Actually, are they all open? Can you see? Okay. Welcome back. Here is our another smart solution application area for our low and the mid volume products. Here you can see this is our cobot UR. We design this automation solution for our gluing process. In past years, because of this solution, our productivity improved much more. At least now we can see, every day we can more than two operators saving. The key point is that our yield improved much more. Before this solution introduction, our process yield is just around 95%, but now it's always 100%. It's really very smart solution for us.
On my right hand, you can see another smart solution application for our testing area. Here you can see, here is our another UR cobot application for our testing area. One cobot will control 2 ICT machinery, instead of traditional manpower loading and unloading. As we highlighted, all of our machinery were linked to our MES by the IoT solution. All the database, for example, our test log file, our machinery utilization, our process yield, and our testing times for every board. All database will be uploaded and saved in our platform, MES platform by IoT solution. All of this data will be real-time data for our engineering study. It means that we no need to manually collect all the data, what I mentioned.
Our engineering team, our management team, will just check the data real-time and take the fast action. It's really benefits for our faster response. At the same time, we had more and more the same solution for other process, for example, for packing, sub-assembly, and integration. Considering time, we will not introduce one by one. Now I need to hand over to my colleague, Brian. He will share our database in our MES platform, and share how to use this data for our continued improvement. Okay, thanks.
Okay. As Harry said, we have so many SMART solution, and we collect so many data. In our joint war room, we'll show you how we utilize the data. Here is our joint war room. In this room, we have show out the data, what we have tracked out from production.
You could see here is our daily pass yield, like FTY yield, DPU, those data. Second is our machine efficiency. We see our OEE data, quality data, availability data. In here, in middle, you could see our quality in pass rates. You will see what is top 1 defect in our house. In the right, you could see the scrap cost in here. This is a 3D whole factory situation we visualize in here. We also have details for the line. We could see the different line data in here, like availability, performance, all the data in here. We can touch and choose all the data if anyone interesting. Also in here you could see we have small team, their ongoing discussion, what happened.
Here we have some line yield data like SMD data, THT data, what is top one happened for which customer, which station. They will take some actions when they see some data. In here we have some scrap cost. We really care of the cost for whole company, so we will try to debug out where we can improve from this MES system. In here we also have some small TV. In this TV we have some training. What is ESD, what is safety knowledge. We are training our operator. I will hand over camera to Christian, continue introduce.
Okay. Yeah. That was actually a very short overview of our operations, and I hope that it has given you a flavor of what our digitalization and automation program, and yeah, SMART really means in reality, and how that also can improve our operation. Now we open up for questions, and we'll try to manage from there.
Currently, we don't have any questions from the chat. Is there any questions here in the audience? No questions. I think that you stunned everyone. No questions. Thank you for the tour. It was really interesting to see and like I was actually expecting to have some minor issues with the connections, and we saw that, but minor details. Everything worked okay, really well. I hope that the audience enjoyed it as well. One note regarding the on-demand version. The factory tour will not be actually available on demand afterwards. For the customer intimacy reasons, that is what we actually decided to do. Petteri, should we go to the closing remarks? You're actually a bit ahead of schedule now, but I don't think that nobody minds about that. Now over to Petteri.
Thank you. Thank you, Pasi. Yes, you had opportunity to see our factory in China and participate in virtual factory tour, and basically that's the way we have been working with our customers now about 1.5 years. That since the COVID-19 started to spread, basically no one from Europe was not able to, or U.S. able to travel to China. Meanwhile, we have won new customers to Scanfil Suzhou. We have ramped up new products using such virtual factory audits. I personally, I don't think so that we are returning back to old life, that we are traveling so often to China or U.S. or somewhere else. It's easy to understand the benefits that if we can win one-week trip by having one or couple of that kind of virtual meetings or audits and do the same job in practice.
No need to return completely to the old life. Some summary about what we discussed, Scanfil, a trusted manufacturing partner for products including electronics. We have global factory network, and that means that we are capable to operate globally. We are capable to serve our customers globally. We are very proud about our customer basis. It's very versatile. It's strong. They are global leaders in their customer segments. They want to be long-term partners with Scanfil. Besides those well-established global customers, we have a nice portfolio of quickly growing smaller product companies. Market looks strong, especially this year, maybe next year. There are also good drivers to make us believe that there will be good demand for electronics products for a longer time. Drivers like intelligent and electronics really will be embedded in all kind of products into foods.
Our customers are also very well-positioned when it comes to global mega trends and tailwind from this. Risks are mainly related to materials availability right now. Then I'm talking about foreseen risks this year, maybe next year. Timo asked a good question in his presentation that why our customers are selecting Scanfil. I think that this is really a key core question. As he said, of course, we need two things. We need the right set of services, right quality of services, then on top of that, we need trust. Customer need to trust that we also have a right type of services, right quality of services after five years or 10 years. Two things are needed. How to make sure that our customers really believe that we are right partner not only now, but also after five years, there are a few things.
First, we need to continuously improve our operations, as Riku well explained. We can never stop. We need to improve our productivity. We need to improve our quality, our OTD, everything. Every day, every month, every year, we need to aim higher targets. We need to continuously invest, as Markku explained well. We need to invest in latest technology which is best serving our strategy to focus on high mix, low volume. State-of-the-art technology. We need to continuously consider how good a factory network we have, as Kai explained. We need to try and we need to develop our factory's performance as well as strategic position every month, every year in order to be competitive, not only right now, but after five years. Last but not least, we need to show our customers that we are also right partners when it comes to sustainability.
Whatever we are doing, we need to do it in a sustainable way, the way that we are taking consideration environmental aspects, our people aspects, our partners, so that we are good corporate citizen today and after five years. A few words about operational model as Riku opened that. Centric points where our value is created are factories. They're the real customer value is created, factories. We want that factories are quite independent. They are able to run the business in the local environment where they are. That they are also profit loss responsible. Take total responsibility.
Top of our factories, we have a global organization. The key reason why we have global organization, of course, is somehow to set kind of a frame where we are operating, showing direction where we are going as a group, giving some guideline, some support when needed, and especially to make sure that we are getting scale benefits. Scale benefits could be, for instance, related to global sourcing, easy to understand, or taking care of our global customers, and so on. How to make sure that our profitability remains and even improve? I think that that's key. I think that quite many of us, if not all, mentioned that the flexibility is the key. Keep our cost flexible. Flexibility is key in very many ways when we are serving our customers, also in order to control our cost. Keep the fixed costs so low as possible.
Continuous improvement, of course, there as well, and evaluating our strategic position on factory level year after year. If thinking the Scanfil business case, one attractive thing is, as said earlier today, is that our investment needs are quite reasonable. By fulfilling our existing strategy and serving our customers by generic machines, factories, and so on, it's really like controlling the need of investments and making the business case stronger. Our balance sheet is strong, as explained by Kai. It's giving a good fundament to further invest and also consider some attractive acquisition opportunities. Our main aim is to grow organically so that always the profitability goes first, but grow organically, but also we are looking for acquisition opportunities. Thank you very much for participating the first CMD of Scanfil.
You had a great opportunity to somehow go a bit behind the numbers, understand a bit more about Scanfil operations and processes, and so on. I hope that you found it interesting, informative, and you enjoyed. Thank you very much. Have a good day.