Good morning and welcome to Kongsberg Automotive's breakfast meeting 2024. My name is Therese Skurdal. I'm the Group's Communication and Marketing Director. Along with my colleagues, I would like to welcome all of you for joining us here today, either via the webcast tool or physically here in Oslo. Before we get started on the official agenda, as you can see up on the screen, I would like to pay attention to safety. At KA, we put safety first. That's why I want you to pay attention to the nearest emergency exit. On the screen here, you see today's agenda and today's presenters, and you have them also represented here next to me as well. At the end of today's session, we will have a Q&A session. So if you're joining us via the webcast tool, you will be able to raise a question through the whole presentation.
If you're here, you will be able to raise a question by raising your hand when we come to the Q&A session at the end of today's meeting. We will try to limit to two questions per participant, and we would like the question to be raised in English for everyone to be able to answer them properly. So with that, I would like to hand over the word to our President and CEO, Linda Nyquist-Evenrud.
Tack, Therese. Så god morgon och välkomna till Kongsberg Automotive's frukostmöte 2024. And I think that's the only part I will say in Swedish for now, Norwegian. So good morning everyone and welcome to Kongsberg Automotive's breakfast meeting 2024. I'm happy to be here together with my colleagues today, and we will spend the coming two hours focusing on how we are to succeed with profitable growth towards 2028. What you can see on the slide behind me is a wide range of world-leading brands and producers covering both passenger car, truck, bus, coach, trailer, as well as off-highway vehicles and the industrial markets. They are key customers to KA and a reliable client base where top 10 direct customers of ours are representing more than 60% of our revenues.
New business wins are trending at record high levels, confirming that KA has the right products to meet the requirements from globally recognized industry brands. Behind me, you can see three product launches that have hit the road in 2024. The first one is a gear control unit, a valve-based device that is designed for manual transmission trucks, allowing them to be driven as automatic transmission trucks if desired. We have been producing the GCU product for over seven years, and this is the largest contract extension in KA's history. It was awarded by a major global manufacturer of transmissions for heavy-duty trucks, and this five-year contract is a continuation of our existing business and will run until 2028. Our plants in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, and Wuxi, China, are producing and delivering those products.
The one in the middle, the ARC Rotary actuator, is a compact park lock actuator that can function as a rotary actuator on powertrains, and the park lock actuator will prevent the vehicle from moving when it's put into park position. That is a seven-year contract worth 26 million EUR awarded to KA by one of China's leading manufacturers for hybrid and electric vehicles, and the series delivery started earlier this year, and our plant in Brześć Kujawski in Poland is both producing and distributing those products. The last one is related to fluid transfer assemblies and our Flow Control Systems business area, supplied to a European off-road utility vehicle manufacturer who is a new entrant in this space. Traditional fuel lines for diesel and gasoline and coolant assemblies are included in this product scope, and our plant in Brześć Kujawski in Poland is both manufacturing and distributing those products.
We are a global automotive and industrial applications provider with more than 65 years of experience working within the automotive industry and providing engineering excellence solutions. We are represented in 17 countries worldwide and 32 locations in total, including 22 plants and six tech centers. Our company structure was updated as per January 1st this year, introducing a structure that is based on two business areas: Drive Control Systems and Flow Control Systems, and last but not least, last 12 months' revenues per Q3 were EUR 814 million. I have been comparing KA with the big tanker that is to turn around and change course, and first, you need to start to put on the brakes, and after some time, you will start to turn it. 2023 was the year when we put on the brakes, and 2024 was the year we were to turn it.
Due to market adjustments and weaker demands, we will not be able to turn this around 180 degrees this year. We will need a little bit more time. We are though pleased to see that the results of our strategic initiatives to improve long-term profitability announced a year ago are materializing, and cost reductions and operational efficiencies help us to offset the impact of reduced customer volumes. We have reestablished the company's headquarters to Kongsberg in Norway, and in June this year, we successfully completed issuance of a new Nordic bond, four-year Nordic bond notes amounting to EUR 110 million, which allowed us to fully refinance the all-year bonds. And as I mentioned a few minutes ago, new business wins are trending at record levels, and the last 12 months are representing EUR 1.64 billion of lifetime revenues.
The most dominant market is commercial vehicles, which, as we have stated previously, is of major strategic importance for us and a clear priority. Two key drivers for KA's profitability and cash generation are cost-efficient operations and growth within higher margin products. Our ambition is to become a technology and market leader within our core business areas, offering our customers world-class mobility solutions for the future and creating lasting value for all our stakeholders. In a dynamic industry such as automotive, you need to adapt to be able to survive as a company. This is also valid for KA, and that is why we, in the end of October this year, initiate a new cost savings to further lower our break-even turnover and position Kongsberg Automotive for increased long-term profitability. These steps will help us to stay efficient, sustainable, and competitive in a market with underlying long-term growth.
We are also continuing the review of the operational structure to ensure closeness to our customers, as well as optimizing production, technology, and product portfolio based on competitive advantages and profitability requirements. We will continue to rebalance globally and regionally, meaning we become less European-heavy and generate more of our revenues in North America and China. Cost-efficient operations enable also delivery on Kongsberg Automotive's long-term financial ambitions while proactively addressing the impact of more uncertain market conditions on a near-term basis. The assessment is ongoing, and potential measures will be decided in 2025. We are expecting our industrial applications to grow to double size in the coming five years, supported by new product launches offering our customers unmatched durability and superior cleanability solutions. Building a winning team involves commitment from every employee in KA. It's about fostering an environment where every individual feels valued and empowered.
By strengthening our commercial mindset, ensuring that every decision we make is aligned with our overall business goals, and by cross-functional team approach and continuous improvement, we can create a resilient team ready to tackle any challenges and motivated to deliver outstanding results. I mentioned that we see an underlying long-term growth, and I would like to use the opportunity to share the projected growth in demand for commercial vehicles and what it means for our industry over the next years. In the timeframe 2014 to 2028 that you can see on the screen, the underlying growth rate is anticipated to 1.9% CAGR for commercial vehicles. If we narrow the time to 2024 to 2028, CAGR is increasing to 4.5%. Several factors contribute to this growth. Urbanization continues to rise, leading to greater logistics needs for transportation of goods.
As cities expand, the demand for commercial vehicles that can navigate both urban and rural environments becomes critical. And in addition, advancements in technology are fueling this growth. So, are we outperforming the market? And the answer is yes. We see a CAGR of 10% in the period 2024 to 2028, which is more than double the market prediction I just referenced and that you see on the screen. It is therefore essential for us to adapt our strategies accordingly, and this includes investing also in R&D to enhance vehicle performance and customer satisfaction, aligning our product capabilities with market demand, and preparing for shifts in regulatory requirements regarding emissions and safety. By understanding the factors at play and aligning our operations with these trends, we position ourselves to lead a competitive market.
From our regulations as well as megatrend perspective, considering the four elements that you see on the screen, electrification, autonomization, safety, and sustainability, we are well positioned in all our key product areas. We have a core portfolio of resilient and growth products representing a healthy mix of resilient harvesting and new products. An important note worthwhile mentioning is that content per vehicle is increasing for several of our key product areas as a result of the transition from internal combustion engines, ICE, to especially plug-in hybrids, but also when it comes to the transition to battery electric as well as fuel cells. Christian Amsel will share a bit more flavor on this in his part of the presentation later on today.
At the capital markets day in May this year, we presented our financial ambitions of about EUR 1 billion in revenue and an EBIT margin at or above 8.5% in 2028. By then, Drive line, which is no longer considered core business, will be insignificant in terms of revenues. Earlier in the presentation, I highlighted cost-efficient operations and growth within higher margin products as two key drivers for KA's profitability and cash generation. We are therefore pleased to see that the portfolio transformation that began in 2021 now is finalized. Products affected by the initial portfolio optimization that you can see as well on the left-hand side here make up more than half of the revenues of the entire 2021 portfolio.
This year, we have conducted a strategic product review of all remaining products, resulting in that we, within both Flow Control Systems and drive control systems, have a clear plan to grow revenues towards 2028 and beyond. Our focus is on organic growth and improved profitability, and as shown on the previous slide, we've successfully won several long-term contracts with well-reputed automotive brand names, primarily within commercial vehicles. By 2028, we expect that more than 80% of our revenues will be linked to commercial vehicles off-highway and industrial applications, where margins are higher than for passenger vehicles. Let me emphasize that our ambitions are not affected by the near-term lower market demand the industry currently is experiencing.
We have a sizable secured order book, including more than 90% of our anticipated revenues in 2026 already booked or awarded, and 80% of the 2028 anticipated revenues that includes 70% already booked and 10% contract extensions that come with a very high probability. And with that, I will leave the word over to David that will take you through the customer and market updates.
Thank you Linda. Good morning, everybody. My name is David Redfearn. I'm the Chief Sales Officer. I've had the pleasure of having this role for approximately two and a half years now. Prior to that, I ran the fluid transfer system division. So I'm going to take you through the market, and then I'm going to talk a little bit about business wins and the segments that we play in.
Then we're going to move on to Christian, who's going to give you more details when it comes to products and why we feel we have differentiation in certain areas. So as we've already mentioned, if we take a look at 2023 to 2024, it wasn't what we anticipated. I think we've had downturns in our core markets. Obviously, Europe is where we're most represented in terms of sales, and that's where we had the biggest drop, both in passenger car and certainly commercial vehicle. That was compounded for Kongsberg because we have significant business in trailer and bus, particularly for our air brake coupling. And those markets were also affected along with off-highway. Not what we hoped for in 2024.
I think we reacted as quickly as our peer group to try and control the cost base, and we tried to do what we could with both our industrial business and our aftermarket business. I'll explain a little bit later where we do have opportunities within the year with short order cycles to try and recover some of the gap that we have in our traditional truck and passenger car business. But from a scale perspective, of course, truck and car is where the bulk of our revenues come from. Regionally, you'll see some differences. South America had a strong recovery. We have sales there, but not enough to offset what we lose in Europe and North America. So again, not what we hoped for, and everybody was affected in a similar way. Kongsberg weren't specifically singled out here. We have global sales, and we were affected in each region.
The good news is, over the five-year frame, we are expecting to see growth, particularly in commercial vehicles. Linda mentioned the 4.5% CAGR for the market in the commercial vehicle sector. That's from 2024 to 2028, and it's about 1.7% in passenger car for that same period, globally speaking. I think most observers suggest that passenger car, in terms of real growth, has probably peaked, and if and when we get to autonomous driving, that won't help the overall volume of cars, the argument being more cars available for people to share and less individual purchases, so I think our focus in commercial vehicles, partly led by our products that we have available and also the market that's available to sell to, I think it's the right selection that we've made. There's more growth coming in commercial vehicles for the reasons that Linda has already mentioned.
Regionally, you'll see significant differences. North America, an operational challenge coming our way very soon. We're going to be very excited by the volume that we get in 2026, less excited by the dramatic decrease that we'll see in 2027, and that's purely driven by emission regulations. The cost of a truck in 2025 and 2026 will be between $5,000 and $9,000 less than what it will be in 2027, so you see this buildup of demand, and then it goes away for 12 months, so this is purely driven by our emissions, and we've dealt with it before. It's like a five-year cycle, and we know what to do with that. European demand is growing pretty aggressively. There's a lot of repressed demand in Europe. The fleet's getting older, so there will be replacement. We're hoping that that starts mid-2025 and that growth continues.
And then, of course, China is very dominant in terms of scale, and a lot of this is the India market coming on very strong. So I think over the five-year frame, better days are ahead in terms of volume. How does this impact Kongsberg, and where are we roughly growing within those regions over the five-year frame, four-year frame? 2024-2028 is what I'm showing you on the slide now, and the takeaways I have in the bullet points. I won't go through all of them, but in North America, we have significant FCS wins. Most of those are already booked. I'm going to get back onto the bookings in a couple of slides' time. In Europe, we obviously have a very dominant coupling portfolio.
TMS and e-Actuators are growing towards the end of our forecasting period, and FCS, both in industrial and within the off-highway segment, we have new products coming to market, which we again have bookings for, and some new opportunities that we still have to close, which is keeping Europe still the most dominant market for Kongsberg. China, slightly lower base, so we get a more aggressive CAGR over the period. And again, it's across the general portfolio, but mainly in commercial vehicle and the actuator products, which Christian is going to give you a deep dive on a little bit later. And APAC, India is important to us, and Korea. We've seen growth in both passenger car and commercial vehicle across the air brake portfolio and the actuation portfolio. So regionally speaking, we're in the right places.
I think one thing which I mentioned later in the presentation, a lot of our customers now, yes, you have to stay very competitive, but they want you in the region where they are manufacturing. I think this came out of COVID. It came out of the geopolitical concerns that we have, the Suez Canal issue. It's no longer everybody has to be in China and distribute from there. They want you in the region where they're building trucks and cars. And we are fortunate that in the majority of cases, we have the ability to produce our core products in each region where we're trying to grow. And I think versus some of our competitors, that is a differentiator, and it's something that we need to certainly maintain. And the customers need to pay the price for that, of course.
You can't expect to have everything you got when you were prepared to export from the, well, primarily from China. So that's something we need to bear in mind. We show this a lot, and I think it's because we're incredibly proud of it. I came to Kongsberg with the 2018 acquisition of TMS from the previous Teleflex business. And back then, when we were separate to Kongsberg, we would have been very envious of a customer list like this. It takes decades to create this many customers. There's a lot of protocols in automotive you have to go through, not least of which being approvals, quality audit, and obviously convincing the customers to give you a purchase order. It's a very competitive marketplace. Having said that, it's up to us to select who we want to work with. Doing an RFQ costs money. Designing a product costs money.
We need to make sure that through marketing, through prior development that Christian's team look after, we're trying to select the right companies and the right products to develop because, as I've mentioned, there's a cost to it. And I think we're getting that, broadly speaking, we're getting that right. But we show this a lot because it doesn't happen by accident. It takes years and years to create this much depth from a customer-based perspective. Growing and winning with Kongsberg. What are we doing right? Well, I think the new business wins. This is to the end of Q3, EUR 1.23 billion lifetime. As we've stated and has been for at least the last five years, we do announce contract, brand new contract, which is incremental, and recurring business.
When a contract has reached the end of its life and we re-sign the customer, we do treat that as a business award. And we'll explain that later with regards to our policy on announcing new business wins. So we're at EUR 1.23 billion lifetime. I think we've already stated that we hope by the end of the year, which I guess is a week away from working days perspective, we hope to be around that EUR 1.5 billion mark. We've stated that previously in the Q3 update, and we are broadly confident that we're going to get close to that level. And the number at EUR 1.23 today is a little higher than that, of course. This is a month or so old. So we still remain confident, and clearly, I'm the person who is broadly responsible, so I share that confidence. Hope you didn't.
Could we scrub that bit, Linda, just in case you want? Two recent wins, and because they're recent, we're sharing them today, not because they're particularly dramatic of scale, but they're important to us. This is a brand new company in the EV space coming out of, well, coming out of the UK, backed from the Middle East, to give you a few clues there. These are TMS assemblies, primarily coolant within the motor side, and also some battery feed lines here, and interesting business for us, lifetime revenue, EUR 24 million. This will be started in 2026. We'll be ramping up supply in 2026 out of Brześć Kujawski in Poland, and today, this is a business award where we are the supplier of air suspension lines to a very recognized electric vehicle manufacturer who only manufactures electric vehicles and are not Chinese.
I'm trying to narrow it down here for clues. This vehicle, you would either adore it or think you're about to take part in a military campaign. It's very shiny. That's the vehicle. Air suspension lines, it's a very important segment for us. It's niche. It's not on every vehicle. It's on heavy vehicles. It's on luxury vehicles. We do have some differentiators, but engineering support, design, being in the region where the customers are using these products because they're relatively complex to ship. It's basically it follows the skeleton of these vehicles. We have a lot of business with the four-by-four manufacturer in the UK. That's where we sort of learned how to do these types of assemblies. We're very, very good at this, and we make a reasonable return compared to the passenger car average.
And what we have to do is aggressively pursue more opportunities, and that's what we're doing. And we will also, over time, we will add on more of our own components into these assemblies. And given that we already do this part, no prizes for guessing what the other bit is. It's the connector, and we're in the process of getting that business as well. Book-to-bill, basically a formula which is trailing 12-month sales. So what we've actually supplied as revenue versus what you've won as new business over that 12-month period. So obviously, it's a mixture of recurring and incremental new business wins, and it also takes the previous 12-month sales. So 2024, being lower than what we anticipated, actually gives you a boost to your book-to-bill, providing that you're winning at your expected levels.
So if your volume is lower in the previous 12 months, your book-to-bill is actually higher for the out years. So I'll get into that a little bit later as well. But this is at record highs. We've not had this kind of level before. And it does show that getting towards this EUR 1 billion by 2028 is possible, and we are certainly confident of achieving that. Why do we show this more often? Well, because it's good news. We have strong forward order book. We have very positive business awards. We are at a level of 90% in 2026. And when we class our recurring business awards with very high probability, we're at 80% in 2028. That is pretty unusual for an automotive company. Now, I'll explain in a coming slide in terms of when we win versus when we supply.
So it will help give some context to this. But this is, again, probably as good as we've been over the decade that I can recall. And does that mean we have potential upside? Maybe. But of course, we're also taking customer estimates into account when it comes to the future in terms of volume. Do they always get it right? No. Do we try and sense-check it and go back to our own forecasting information? Yes. So we don't always take the customer information as gospel. We check that and we go into it. But the bookings are at a very solid level. And the business cycle, what does it actually mean? Well, in truck and bus and passenger car, where you're the OEM supplier of a particular component, you have quite a long time to wait before you get to invoice individual parts.
Now, along this development phase and testing phase, you can get paid. We can get money for tooling. We can get money for design and development, and we do. We're pretty good at capturing that value. But here's when you start to actually make a return. And that can be four years in the extreme and an average of three years from when you first get that purchase order, that commitment that the customer is going to buy. So, of course, betting on the right horse becomes very critical because you're spending money at this phase hoping the volume that they told you you were going to receive is broadly in line with what you've scaled up for, both from a capacity perspective and obviously from our supply base. They expect us to keep our commitments as well.
However, we also have a faster business cycle, which is our aftermarket business and our industrial business, where we have a specific growth project to double those revenues within the next four years. 12 months would have been a little aggressive, Linda. Within that period, within that area, we have round about EUR 35million-40 million in sales. We have the opportunity within the calendar year. The order cycle here can be as quick as 12 weeks. One of my sales guys can go out, convince the customer that we have a better solution, and they will take product from us. The industrial business is primarily PTFE hose products. Many applications. I have a slide explaining that later on. PTFE, previous brand name was Teflon. It's a fluoropolymer product with various braids and jackets.
So again, this is just to explain the cycle that we have and why when you see a new business win, you don't immediately see it in the very near term, i.e., following 12 months within the order book. It takes a while. The segments that we work within commercial vehicle, you're going to see some representations of where they are in the vehicle on the powertrain and chassis side. Fluid and thermal management, FCS assemblies, chassis coolant, battery coolant, fuel cell, and air management, air suspension lines, and of course, the air brake system, the product that we have out of Raufoss, Norway, still the market-leading product for air brake in truck, bus, and trailer. And we are, I would say, we're the market leader in Europe, and we have very strong ambitions in North America and Asia.
If I click again, you will see why we feel this sector is of supreme importance to Kongsberg Automotive. It's an area we've talked about for the last three years that we're pivoting towards more commercial vehicle business. We have some good products as we transition to clean energy. And during that transition, it's a benefit for us. Hybrids are more content for Kongsberg Automotive. We like that. And electric vehicles, we don't lose so much from a content perspective. If anything, we actually add from an actuation point of view. So content per vehicle, we aren't affected by this change to electric solutions. And it's taken a long time in truck and bus. And I don't think that's going to alter.
Product technologies, global customer reach, back to that huge page when we have all the brands there and manufacturing across four continents, again, becoming more and more important from all the customers we're speaking to. We have to provide audits for what we supply from what regions because they are concerned about the robustness of the supply chains. The product range we have within passenger car, again, as you know, we've separated driveline from the core part of the business. We slowly wind that down while respecting the customer commitments because there's other products we like to supply to that customer base. And then, as we mentioned, air suspension, coolant lines in general, and electric actuation are sitting within passenger car. We're not dismissing passenger car.
It's still a relatively important piece of the growth story for Kongsberg Automotive, but we will only go into opportunities that we feel we can create better than average returns. Passenger car is a very, very aggressive market, and we have to have something different to offer, and in these product areas, I think we do. So again, why do we feel it's important to Kongsberg? We've got good actuator growth in China. We have good products within the transition needs, especially in FCS. Again, hybrid engines, smaller gasoline engines creating more heat within the engine compartment. That lends itself to the products that we have. The HPC product, this is the air suspension coupling, which I mentioned. We're going to focus on the higher margin and niche areas, and the fuel line we have out of North America is still a very important product for Kongsberg Automotive.
Over the five-year frame, we're seeing steady volume. We're not seeing decline. That's primarily because of the delay in electrification in North America for passenger car. Off-highway agriculture, you see what we have there. Actuators, steering columns, and pedals are our main business. That's probably about 75% of our demand within that particular area. We are supplying more products from the FCS side, and we do have opportunities in material handling within the air brake area. We've got the cherry pickers and the lifts. We're putting more air brake couplings onto these products. Important segment for us. We're a market leader on two product areas here. We have good product coverage when the e-transition comes. It's taking far longer than it is in truck and car. Cross-selling opportunities have increased.
I think that's one of the benefits of centralizing sales, that we have the team out there presenting the entire portfolio at a good cost. Material handling, as I mentioned, is a new segment. And the market recovery, these guys got hit really hard in 2024, both on off-highway and agriculture. We're starting to see shoots of recovery. Recent forecast updates have given us some confidence for mid-2025. Industrial, the area where I originally started working years ago in the north of England, where we have one of our Teflon hose factories. These are the application types and market areas that we can supply to. And this, as I've already mentioned, is a high-focus area where we plan to do a little bit more work on the assembly side rather than working only and exclusively with distributors. We're growing across all geographical regions.
We have a very strong product offering, and we need to continue developing that. Compared to automotive developments, these are relatively low-cost investments to get a product out to market. And you can supply it into a myriad of applications. So we're not as dependent upon getting the volume correct from one customer because we can supply it to multiple customers. New product in pharma and the semiconductor markets. We've had some very strong growth over the previous five years in the semicon area. But again, that is cyclical. It follows a similar trend through no link to truck and bus cycles. It's like this four-year growth, and then it dips and then grows again. But obviously, with the policies put in place by North America, there's a significant amount of opportunities in the U.S. for semiconductor applications, which we are benefiting from, and we'll continue to do so.
Asia development is in high focus. We need to do a little bit more in that region because, again, we have a very strong reputation in PTFE industrial hose. The key takeaways from a sales perspective. Business wins. I guess we hit you over the head with it regularly, and it's because we're proud of it, and it's because it's the future of any business. Do you have customers that are accepting your value proposition? Clearly, we do. Forward order book reflects the growth in the key strategic areas. We're growing where we said we wanted to grow, and that's positive. We're getting more selective on the RFQs that we're taking, and our win ratios are pretty reasonable. They're better than the industry average. That's important. There's a cost, as I mentioned before, to taking on an RFQ in automotive.
Enviable customer list, back to the one that we mentioned, headroom market share expansion in all regions. We're not tapped out in any particular region. You can potentially argue trailer on air brake couplings in Europe, where we're such a dominant position. But outside of that, we have growth opportunities everywhere we go. That's good. It means we're not under attack in a dramatic way from our core business. The business wins at record levels, mentioned again, actuation, gear control units, and fluid transfer assemblies, the areas where we said we wanted to win. Industrial area and aftermarket, prime for growth over the short and medium term, and becoming a little repetitive. I've mentioned that once before, and overall, clearly, I'm going to say this. I think we have an efficient sales force. I think centralization has helped us be competitive. Obviously, it's not a sales focus on its own.
Purchasing, certainly engineering with automotive contracts, it's the whole Kongsberg team that need to get the customer towards a yes. But overall, I think from a win perspective, we're doing pretty well. We do have a value proposition that the customers like, and we need to make sure we stay focused on the areas that we've said we want to grow in because we've decided upon those based upon the product offering and the market growth within those segments. And I think we're on the right track there. So thank you for your attention. I will hand over to Christian Amsel, and Christian is going to take you through the product part of Kongsberg.
Thank you David. So good morning from my side as well. My name is Christian Amsel. I'm the CTO of Kongsberg Automotive, and I'm with Kongsberg since three and a half years.
I will guide you through the journey of new products and innovations in the next 30 minutes. As Linda said, we went through a significant portfolio assessment also this year, and I will show and disclose some more details in my presentation. As you all know, regulations in the different countries are driving further transformation towards e-mobility. The key driver currently is passenger vehicles, and we all know in 2035, there will be no internal combustion engine anymore in Europe, at least based on the current regulation. This can change, but today we expect no more internal combustion engines being launched in 2035 and beyond in Europe. For the commercial vehicles, you also see in the U.S. and Europe, for example, the similar trend that also in commercial vehicles, there are regulations forcing the different OEMs to introduce new technology to reduce emissions and fuel consumptions.
Not everything will become electric in commercial vehicles, and we'll see this later. Current studies on market data and latest publications from the global truck producers confirm that. You can see that even beyond 2035 here, only one-third of the global truck fleet will be electrified, whereas two-thirds of the global truck fleet will stay combustion engine-driven. I think that's important to understand this also part, and you will see this later in our portfolio of some of our product decisions that we still keep some of the products serving two-thirds of the global market, whereas we also prepare, of course, one-third of the growing market with new products as well. As mentioned by Linda, and in the last three years, Kongsberg Automotive has performed a significant portfolio adjustment with the sale of business units that do not strategically fit KA in the long term.
This year, 2024, we went through an intensive product portfolio review of the remaining products. You can see here the remaining products in 2024, roughly at this revenue level. We reviewed all products in this area to secure that we have the right products in our portfolio in order to meet our growth target of €1 billion revenue in 2028 and also meet the profitability targets of 8.5% in 2028. I will come to this clustering here a little bit more in detail on the coming slides, but important to mention, based on the market share, what I just showed, we still keep some of the products in the internal combustion engine area as we still believe there will be a market even beyond 2040 and 50 in this area, and we can continue to harvest these products. Other products are not affected by the transformation at all.
That's good for us because we can continue to harvest these products and continue to grow these products in the given areas. But also some of our products are taking care for the future. That's also important. And I think it's good to have a good balance between resilient internal combustion-related products and growth products for the e-mobility in the future. Here you see the split of the products which are focusing purely on, let's say, resilient product areas. It's clear in the industrial segment introduced by David, there is no impact by the e-mobility transformation. Other products are completely independent from that, like our ABC couplings in the air brake systems or vehicle dynamics or steering column modules in off-highway applications. Other products, we are quite strong, and you have heard about some new business wins even in this area.
We're still gaining a lot of new business in the internal combustion segment. We are scaling our technology to growing markets. That's a quite successful pattern. Just recently, we have been awarded for our EUR 500 million revenue growth with some of the products in this category. So that's still a strong growth area for us harvesting technologies. And these are the new growth areas securing then the growth to the EUR 1 billion. I prepared a couple of product deep dives, but let me first go back to the slide which we have shared already in the Capital Markets Day in May. Based on the two product areas, Drive Control Systems and Flow Control Systems, we have defined five product groups, and we believe in these five product groups securing the growth towards 2028.
And all the products which you have seen now in Linda's and David's and my presentation are the ones shown here as the so-called core products. These core products will secure the growth, and we are confident that these products are the right products in our portfolio for the future. I prepared three deep dives. What you can see here, air management, powertrain and chassis solutions, electric actuation and gear control units, and the next 10 minutes. As said in the beginning, many companies are struggling to define the right product mix, how much to invest in the current product portfolio, how much to invest in the future product portfolio. As shown before, our growth strategy balances out these risks between resilient as internal combustion engine-related and growth pillars in our portfolio. I think that's a good balance.
The product which are resilient to the transformation of e-mobility, these products will continue to grow as they will continue to be strongly demanded by the market in the future. One example is ABC coupling, what you can see here for air brake applications in the commercial vehicles. The braking systems in the commercial vehicle systems will not change. They are not affected by the transformation as mentioned. We continue to scale this technology to other markets and applications. One example is air suspension mentioned by David. In the current time, when the uncertainties in the global markets continue, for us, that's definitely an asset. In the middle, the internal combustion engine-related products still have a future because due to regulations, there are a lot of requirements to make current systems more efficient, saving fuel and reducing CO2 emissions.
This technology will stay, as I've shown before, beyond 2035, and there are plans to upgrade this technology by introducing hybrid drivetrains, combining diesel and electric motors in one vehicle to further improve sustainability. Kongsberg has a proven track record in this area, and as said already, we have successfully acquired new business in Asia just recently. In this way, we are balancing out, I think, the risk between mature and new technology products, and we continue the harvesting in this field in the middle. In the growth pillar on the right, we decided to invest into new technology, highly developed products that will fit with KA competencies in terms of market knowledge, competitor understanding, and technical capabilities. These products, in contrast to the other products, largely support the transformation and are designed to replace hydraulic and pneumatic actuation systems with our electrified solutions.
And we expect also here a strong growth in different markets, but we also see that the speed of introduction of this new technology is completely different. Whether you believe it or not, the introduction speed of this new technology is currently driven from China. We have launched already new products in China just last year in this field, whereas in Europe, still the OEMs are considering to test this technology, and then another three to four years to go until this product will be introduced in production. Coming now to the first deep dive in air brake couplings. First, I would like to explain a little bit the functionality of the air brake systems, and maybe you have seen this in the showroom as well, and I also would like to thank the both colleagues for presentation, Henrik Ruuth and Eva Haug, in the showroom before.
And whenever there are more detailed questions, feel free to join us in the showroom after my presentation. Yeah, air brakes, air brakes in trucks. Brakes in trucks and trailers use compressed air to actuate service and parking brakes. In passenger vehicles, it's hydraulic, but in commercial vehicles, it's air, compressed air. There are a lot of more systems driven by air in the vehicle, accessories, auxiliary systems. In total, we sell up to between 100 and 200 couplings per truck. It can be even more than 500 couplings per truck. So just that you understand how important this business is for us. And this business will not go away. As I said, it's a resilient business will stay for many, many years in the future. Yeah, as I said, the compressed air braking technology is being transferred from internal combustion engine to electric vehicles, so no change.
The technology is part of the homologation, how to approve vehicles for the end customer. That also means there's a high entrance barrier for any other new technology or new competitors, so once you are in, you are in. It's very difficult to replace that. That's also a strong asset, strong asset from our side. Our technology is a so-called push-in, push-in technology. Maybe you have seen this in the showroom, and we believe that this technology will become the global standard in all developed and emerging markets. We also see that in the agriculture segment, there is a new demand as well for these air brake applications due to new regulations coming up in the market, so another growth potential for us.
Proprietary technology is still a technology in the market, in other markets where push-in is not yet established, but we are working on it, and you will see this later. Currently, we have a very strong position. We are a market leader in Europe, considering buses, trailers, and trucks as a whole. We will grow our current customer base in new markets as our customers currently are localizing business. Our key customers in Europe, for example, are globalizing business in Mexico and North America, in China, and also in India. As I said, the entry barrier for new technology is high. That means we go with our customers into the regions and support their localization automatically. Our share in the global world will increase. Also this allows us to enter, once we are there, to enter new markets and new customers in parallel to this.
Furthermore, we will diversify. We'll diversify our product portfolio not only for air brake applications. We will enter new applications, and you will see this later. I don't want to explain all the benefits of this technology, but as I mentioned, we are a market leader here, and the push-in technology provided by us has definitely some unique selling points, which you can see here on the left side. On your own, in case of questions, feel free to ask later in the showroom. Overall, it's also important to mention the sustainability aspect. We save more than six kilograms weight due to the transformation from brass to composite material, for example. Also, we are working on new technologies, even replacing brass by more lightweight material. The new product portfolio, I think here you see a kind of firework of new technologies.
On the one hand, enhancing our air brake system offering, which is the core element of our offering, working on the next generation technology, making it better in terms of performance, but also more competitive. That means on a lower cost level to secure and defend our market share, but also to convince more customers to use our push-in technology, but you also see more product details here in this portfolio. We also, as I said, there are two standards. There's a variety in the push-in technology. We will integrate, as we cannot conquer this market so quickly, the variety market. We are a push-in market leader.
We will also integrate this Fierty technology into our portfolio so that we can at least merge it in, and we are able to connect to this product field and can offer also our product solutions and not leave it just to the competitors. I think also a clever approach. We generate, of course, new IP. Whenever we create new products, we generate new IP, and that's also very important. The sustainability topic, as you know, is getting more and more important. As mentioned, we are 100% recyclable, and we offer a lot of energy-saving features. For example, our system is more or less leakage-free. That means we save a lot of energy not using the compressor to create air pressure. For example, it's a unique in our system. This diversification towards air suspension starts. David just presented the new business award on the nylon hoses.
The other element on the other side of the hoses are the connectors, and now we already entered also as a system supplier for air suspension system with hoses, nylon hoses, and our connector family. We have diversified our portfolio, and that's also well perceived from the market. Just a short movie to summarize what I've said. You see here the air brake system, all the lines, and then in every corner and everywhere you find couplings from us up to 100, 200, 300 couplings per truck. This is the brake system, but as I said, we do not only serve the braking systems. There are much more systems driven by air in the truck, which we are serving with our coupling solutions. Here you see different integration possibilities.
Just to illustrate, this is our new technology as well, the Twist-Lock family in the very, let's say, harsh environment of in the chassis area. You will find all the details as well in the presentation deck. Yeah, key takeaways. Our technology is best in class in performance. It's more or less a market reference. Costly, very interesting. This explains why we are so successful globally. We are working on the next generation to defend our market and provide a more costly but better performance technology with some additional benefits on the sustainability side. We strengthen our IP, of course, to defend our strong market position. And yeah, I think we are on a good track here, and we will continue this growth path in this area.
Coming to the second deep dive, I hope that's not too technical today, but I want to give you a little bit of flavor why we believe and what are really the unique selling points behind this technology. AMT, automated manual transmissions. Everybody who started driving with a driver license, you had a manual transmission, putting the first gear, second gear, third gear, fourth gear. That's a manual transmission, and this is very inconvenient, and we started also in the truck segment. There are not four, five, or six gears. There are 12 or 18 gears, so much more to do. Manual transmissions are not the future anymore. We believe that these automated manual transmission systems, which are automating these manual transmissions, similar like in your today's car, will have a future in the truck segment.
It's already well-developed technology in current markets like in Europe, but we see a strong market in emerging markets like China, India, Brazil, and other countries. This technology also helps to reduce fuel consumptions by 5%-10%. Human errors, shifting the gears and so on are avoided. That means the lifetime of the transmission will be increased. And also the driver behavior, of course, based on new information, route data, and driver behavior can be analyzed to further optimize shifting strategies. In front of a hill, for example, you know it based on map data, and then you can start to optimize the driver behavior, and you save more fuel. Yeah, this technology has been pushed in the early years, the last 10 or even 20 years. This AMT technology became already a standard. We are strongly positioned there with production footprint in Mexico and in China.
OEMs are pushing this technology, and also logistics companies drive this. You know, some fleets in America with more than 1,000 trucks in one fleet. They are a strong influencer here as well due to the TCO, the total cost of ownership benefits. Yeah, our vision here is automated manual transmission technology will become the standard in all markets. As I said, in Europe and America, it is already well developed, but we see really in more cost-sensitive markets like China, India, Latin America, now a strong push in this field. The penetration of this technology is on the level of 20%-30% today. So still a way to go for us to harvest with our current technology to scale our existing technology in these markets. Also in these markets, there will be stricter emission regulations pushing this technology further.
There is, from my point of view, no alternative. The AMT technology will come in these markets. As I said, we are well established with production footprints around the globe. We have recently acquired a customer project in Asia to further diversify our customer base and to start harvesting in the growing markets. That is very important. And what is also quite interesting, normally you need, as David mentioned, two to three years for such a complex technology for the industrialization. On top, the OEM needs another year or two for the validation. We managed in Asia, things are different. You know it. The OEMs are more risk-aware, and we managed to develop such a technology in 18 months, so half of the time.
So we adjusted our processes, and I think this is a good best practice, which we want to transfer to other product development as well to make us more competitive, more speedy, and more successful in the very agile market environment we are in. Yeah, we continue to scale this technology. There's no need to step out. We are competitive. We are getting new business. And I think, as I said before, the next 15-20 years, this technology is still required in some markets, has a strong growth potential. Yeah, that's the unit which will be installed on top of a big transmission. And here you have the shift forks, which you can also see in the showroom on the other side. Here it's pneumatically driven. Our new technologies are electrical-driven shift forks. Yeah, key takeaways.
Yeah, we are able to scale our technology quite quickly because we have some building blocks inside of this technology, which we can scale quickly to other customer applications. As I said, we are very, very quick. We are even outperforming local Chinese or Asian suppliers in these different markets. I think that's very, very good and shows our capabilities, scaling our technology. We have also here multiple patents in place to secure and protect our technology. And we are continuously improving with value engineering activities to reduce costs from generation to generation. We also optimize here our cost base every time we are working on it. Coming to my last chapter, powertrain or electrified actuators. What you can see here on the left side, there are different electric systems in the market.
The most common one will be the multi-speed electric axle, but there are also other drivetrain constellations, but important to understand, our electric actuators, our powertrain actuators are serving all kinds of potential drivetrain configurations in the future, so for us, that's not an issue. Yeah, an electric axle also to explain this a little bit combines electric motors, gearboxes, power electronics into a single compact unit. For better efficiency, multi-speed gearboxes are introduced. Multi-speed gearboxes also means there is our technology where we are strong in shifting gears and opening and closing clutches is still required also in the future, and these systems, of course, significantly reduce mechanical complexity, minimize energy losses, and improve overall efficiency. This is also one of the reasons why these electrified drivetrains will definitely come, but as I showed before, with a different introduction speed in the different markets in the commercial vehicle segment.
Yeah, as I said, commercial vehicles are also underlying different regulations driving towards this new technology, but in different speeds in different markets. All OEMs are working on these solutions, but what we also see currently is a kind of interim trend. So hybrid technology will also enter the market, currently driven by the U.S., but also in other markets, we see this similar like in passenger cars as a kind of bridging technologies to meet the regulation requirements. Yeah, our vision, our electric actuators will complement existing pneumatic gear shift like AMT systems and clutch actuation systems mid and long term. We need to live in both worlds, the old world and new world. This is then the new world. Smart actuators provide much more functionalities compared to traditional pneumatic solutions. Pneumatic means on and off.
With the help of electric actuators, you can really drive the functions based on software and brushless DC motor technology in different ways. You have much more possibilities to control the functionality, which makes it much smoother, enhancing lifetime of the transmissions and much better functionalities. Yeah, and this is not only one function actuator. We can apply the actuation technology to different functionalities in the electric axle systems. We are already a successful player in the segment of electric actuators, like mentioned by Linda, for example, in the park lock segment in passenger vehicles. Our portfolio is well developed for new electric drivetrains. That means our risk is relatively low because we have the technology now in-house, and we grow with the market. Whenever this is required, we will develop like in Asia, already launched, and in Europe and the U.S. takes some more time.
We have a lot of unique selling points. First to market in 2024 in Asia, we have several bilateral projects running, which are enabling us to qualify and approve our technology then for future development. This is a dog clutch actuator launched in China. We introduced already the four-speed variant. It looks like this, and you can see in the showroom also this prototype. The next generation is our electric gear shift actuator. That is the next step beyond the dog clutch actuator, which you have seen before, completely driven by electronics and software and providing better features controlled by our software algorithms. Also here, highly IP protected, and a wide range of applications can be covered. Also here, I would like to close with a short movie. Here you can see in the electric axle where our actuators potentially can be integrated.
We expect up to three electric actuators in one e-axle. That means the content per vehicle from the AMT systems to the new e-axle systems won't change or can be even higher depending on the technology, which is finally required. For us, that's a great growth area. Here you see the dog clutch actuator, which has been launched as a twin, as a four-speed solution with two instead of one fork in China. That's a gear shift actuator, our newest development. Currently, it's a very, let's say, highly sophisticated technology. Nobody else in the world is currently offering such a solution, and we really have strong features here, which makes us unique in the segment. Yeah, also here to summarize, it's the end of my presentation. Yeah, we are ready for the new market coming up. We are adding smartness to our existing technology for improved functionalities.
And I think what is one of the key success factors, we are speedy to meet local market requirements, launching such a technology in less than two years. I think that's really benchmark, at least out of the European perspective. And we continue to transfer these best practices to other product developments as well. Yeah, and we believe that we will be one of the market drivers for this new technology in the future as we are well positioned with our portfolio, and we are one of the first movers here being first to market with such a technology in Asia. Thank you very much for your time. I hope it was not too technical, and yeah, later we come to the Q&A session. I will hand over to Christian, the next Christian now for the financials. Thank you.
So from one Christian to the other. So good morning, everyone.
Pleasure to be here. I'm Christian Johansson. I'm the CFO, Group CFO of Kongsberg Automotive since June this year, so I will talk to you today about how we are to what we are working with in order to improve profitability, cash generation while providing financial stability, and I will start with three slides from our quarter three earnings call, just as a base for us on where we are financially after three quarters of the year.
You have heard Linda and also Christian talk about our portfolio transformation that we are undergoing now. We have done some number of divestments the last few years. We last year took a decision to reduce our exposure to passenger car business, which means that we are winding down our driveline business over the years as the customer contracts expire.
This means that it's not so easy looking at our total revenues to see the trends. So this slide, even if it's messy, it's supposed to ease that understanding. So we have core and non-core revenues in the bars. You have three trend lines. The upper one is the total revenues of KA. The mid one, we have taken out the sales of divested business. And the last divestment was the sale of the power sport business to Bombardier in end of 2022. And the lower one, the blue one, we have, in addition to take out the divested business, we are also taking out the non-core business. So what remains is the trend on the core business. And you can see that since Q3 2022, where we were at EUR 608 million, we have increased our sales up to end of last year of EUR 718 million.
However, the decline, the weak demand this year has taken this down to 73, but this still means that we have grown more than 10% in our core business during these two years. So we are growing the core business, although this last weak business cycle has impacted the growth rate. Same basic principle on the EBIT slide, so the operating results, which we measure as EBIT now, not adjusted EBIT. We have the core and non-core in the bars, and we have the trend line where we then have taken out the results from the divested business, the powersports business, and the gain that was made of the divestment. So you see that we have made profits in the three quarters this year, significantly better results than year to date last year, so it's EUR 18 million positive for the nine months.
However, we had a weak quarter four with a lot of negative one-timers last year, which impacts the trend, so the trend line is not that impressive. We are negative 2.9 on the rolling 12 months. However, this will improve following the guidance for full year this year. Cash flow, same logic in the slide, and here we have then in the trend and in the bars taken out the significant gain that we got from this divestment. It was EUR 82 million gain from the divestment of the powersports business. We have a negative cash flow this year so far on EUR 24 million. However, there is a positive trend though, where at - 20 so far on a rolling 12, we were at the same time last year - 36.9, so there is a positive trend on cash flow.
If we break down the cash flow as we do in the table here, and if you look at the operating cash flow, which is the cash flow we have from the results and how we are working with our Capital Employed, we are positive, + 12 in the quarter, + 18.7 year to date compared to only 1.7 same period last year. So there is a good improvement on the operating cash flow. If you take the cash flow from investing activities, we are also there better than we were at the same time last year, both in the quarter and year to date, and when it comes to cash flow from financing activities, we are better in the quarter and relatively unchanged versus last year.
We are improving on cash flow despite that we have about EUR 70 million lower revenues than last year, which of course means that we have a significant loss of cash flow. For sure, we are not satisfied with this, and I will come back to how we intend to what we are doing in order to improve going forward. Linda showed this slide already, which says that we have an underlying growth in the commercial vehicle market. My take on this is also that to manage the cycle is a key success factor in automotive. Because even though you have during my 12 years involved with trucks, the underlying trend were roughly 3% per year. However, the volatility is ±10% is quite normal from the trend line. If you take the North American market, it can be ±20%-30%.
It's much more short-term, quick reactions in that market. And that can happen, for example, when you have an emission regulation step coming in, like we have now in 2027, that you get a lot of pre-buy, which means that you have a very strong demand, and then it becomes much less. So it is a key success factor to manage the cycle and to know and dare to act when you see the inflection points. And I would say the better you are in understanding where you are in the cycle, and the faster you take these decisions, the right decisions, the better you perform. And I would say that we in the KA, and you have heard it in the earnings calls, we saw already in the late spring that we have now a market that is weakening, and we acted fast on that. We took out cost.
We worked on cost. We come back to that later, and we increased even more our focus on the cash flow side, so another thing that is important here also, which is more of a maybe long-term thing to work on, is the cost flexibility. Because obviously, when things change, you need to flex your cost, both when it comes to supplier agreements where you have a good flex, but also your labor agreements where you can do it in different ways in different countries, and we have that too, and of course, the final take on this slide is that if this will materialize, the LMC forecast, which is the external forecast we subscribe to, we will prepare for an upturn by end of this year. Could be earlier also depending on this American development on the emission step, so improving profitability. What are we doing here?
I mean, automotive is a complex business, and I think you know that. And there is not one answer to this. It's a lot of hard discipline work in many areas across the different functions over time that gives results. So what are the focus areas for us? Yeah, first of all, it's innovation. You've seen some of the products here today. And automotive, as well as defense and aerospace, are technology-leading industries. And it is, and we are a relatively small player in the automotive industry. And it's really key for us to have a very clear focus on what to do in the engineering area, in the innovation, and see to that we have over time the engineering resources that are on an appropriate level for our industry in order to be innovative. And with this, we are absolutely working on. Secondly, growth.
You've heard today a lot what we are doing in order to have profitable growth going forward. Profitability of our new business wins, and David was on this. I will come back to it in the next slide, are set well before start of production. I come back, as I said, on the next slide. Improve margins on the existing business is another of our priorities, and this involves also all functions. We have had in 2024 improvements on the commercial side when it comes to getting cost compensations from our customers as part of the pricing there. We have also had cost reductions from the different functions, from purchasing, engineering, and operations. We have also done a product line profitability assessment in order to target this work in the future even more precise, but we should also remember that we have inflation. We have wage inflation.
We have energy costs. We have rents. We have also in our customer contracts, even though we have successfully over time been able to reduce the productivity expectations from the customers in terms of lowering prices over the contract period. But we have inflation. We have these customer agreements on productivity that we also need to compensate before we see the improved profitability in the bottom line. But we have a net positive effect in 2024, and I will show that in a later slide. Increased capacity utilization, very important to make our assets sweat. But the decline in demand this year has obviously been negative for this. And Linda has also mentioned initially that we have a workstream assessing our global manufacturing and logistics footprint. Cost optimization, very important to have a lean and efficient organization. We have done a lot of work on this year.
We have reduced more than 10% of the workforce during the last 12 months, and we recently announced another white-collar cost reduction program. I will come back to this also to show a bit on the numbers how it looks. This slide was shown by David, and David mentioned that before we sent the first invoice, we have worked a lot, several years on these projects. It means, of course, that the profitability also of this business is set well before the start of production, so we are taking engineering design decisions. We're doing supplier selection. We are agreeing on component pricing. We are agreeing with customers on the pricing for the whole contract period and the mechanism for how to adjust it, production assembly decisions, and so on, how this will work out.
So we have an absolute high management focus on how we are performing in the early stages of a project because that's critical for the profitability you will see when David's new business wins comes into play. And you can also, this is not an exact science, but if you look at our cost structure, all cost in KA, the absolute majority of it is product-related. So I'm not factory building as such, it's not our general cost, but most of what we have are product-related costs. And a lot of that is set before we start to produce a product. Cost reductions are implemented while keeping our innovation capacity. And you've heard that we are reducing costs. The upper slide is from our quarter three earnings call presentation. And it's the EBIT bridge year to date versus last year. So two messages to the bridge.
We have taken out costs, about EUR 22 million of lower costs, 2024 versus 2023, excluding warranty. This has more than compensated lost contributions from the lower sales and the net effect of price and mix, which in fact is positive so far this year. Cost reductions come from the program announced in Q4 last year. Linda also commented that we'll give EUR 70 million of savings on a full-year basis. In addition, we have reduced capacity costs by efficiency measures and other improvements also related to then taking out costs with the lower volumes. We have recently announced another cost reduction program, which will give a full-year effect of about EUR 10 million by the latest third quarter of next year. The lower graph shows the development of our sales general expenses as well as our engineering expenses in value and in percentage.
The message here is that we are reducing SG&A costs in amount and in percentage despite the sales declining, while we defend our engineering spend in order to assure that we have enough engineering capacity to be innovative to support our growth. The second message to the bridge is that despite the sales decline, you see, I commented before, we have a significant EBIT improvement versus last year. Improved cash generation, top priority for us. We do it by improving profitability with the actions I was talking to before and by working on our capital employed. What you have is our capital employed. It's EUR 324 million by end of quarter three. It's split in these categories. You can say there are two things we can impact. It's property, plant and equipment and the right-of-use assets.
I'll come back to that, EUR 160 million in this. And the net working capital, which is EUR 151 million. So if you start with the net working capital, last 12 months in quarter three, we were at 18.5% of sales. It's slightly higher than we were end of last year. There is a natural delay between the time when we get information about declining demand and the time we are able to reduce inventory on our production base. It takes some time to break. So another reason for carrying a slightly higher net working capital than last year is that the customer payment collection process is longer when you have these kind of economically more difficult times.
But we have taken a number of actions to improve in short term to see to that we get the full reductions related to the sales development, but also actions to enable a sustainable reduction of our capital tied up with about three days, which means roughly 1% of sales. Some of the actions we are working on, you have on the slides. I would say on inventory, the most important is to further improve our sales and order planning process, including production and also the situation with our suppliers' capacities. When it comes to receivable collections, we have stepped up and we are not accepting bad payment behaviors from our customers. And we show that by stopping deliveries, requiring shorter payment terms, and by being firm on penalty interest. Coming to payables and also stock, we are also doing an assessment of long-distance supplies.
It was commented by David also. Regional supplies and nearshoring is in general what we want to strive for in that area. When it comes to our machinery and equipment and right of use, I mean, these are owned or leased. You know that if you read our annual report that we report according to IFRS, international standards, which means that these are equalized. It's treated the same. Independently, they are in our balance sheet. CapEx, you can say, is quite stable over time. The dominating reason for us to invest is related to customer projects. We need some CapEx to grow. The action here is then to see to that we negotiate. David mentioned that as part of the overall contract negotiation, the funding responsibility of this CapEx in the best and most cash-efficient way for us.
We also have a process where we, ahead of an investment decision, check if there are other plants with excess capacity where we have a machine of a similar kind that can be internally transferred as an alternative to invest in new. Now, when it comes to buy-lease, it's a decision on the lowest cost of capital. And here we have Treasury on the group level involved in these decisions, comparing the group's cost of capital with what we can be offered locally by the machine supplier or by a leasing company. Financial ratios, leverage ratio increased in end of quarter three to 2.1, up from 1.7. Full-year EBIT declined somewhat and our interest-bearing debt increased slightly. Return on capital employed, no significant improvement yet. EBIT was weak in third quarter, as you saw. Return on capital employed should pick up in quarter four.
Equity ratio is at a good level and has improved since quarter two, since we are, as we talked about, reducing our capital employed in our balance sheet. When it comes to financing, I believe you're aware we successfully completed then the placement of a new senior secured four-year bonds in June. Initial issue was EUR 110 million with an interest of three months Euribor plus 525 basis points. Maximum issue amount is EUR 160 million. During the autumn, we have done some interest rate swaps from floating to fixed in order to lower our interest expenses on this. We have a rolling credit facility with Danske Bank of EUR 50 million, which at the end of quarter three is undrawn. We have an account receivable securitization facility, very long name, of EUR 25 million, which has been fully drawn by end of third quarter.
We are also, to some extent, using financing solutions from our customers when the conditions are favorable, which means that we are funding our receivables for those particular customers with their financing company. And especially some of our truck customers have a very strong credit rating and favorable financing terms on their side. And you can find an agreement and we can benefit from that. The final slide from my side is about investor relations and our capital market focus, which we intend to increase. We have today two brokers, investment banks actively covering Kongsberg Automotive. It's Kepler Cheuvreux and ABG. We have also ongoing dialogue with additional brokers and banks. And we do expect some further analyst coverage to be added in 2025. We have Capital Market Day in may. And we today have our second annual breakfast meeting.
Starting in 2025, we will begin quarterly new business wins sales announcements, which has been asked for from the investor community. The first issue is planned in early February and also a comment to the finance calendar, also based on feedback from investors, we will split the Q4 earnings release and the annual report so we will release the Q4 results on the 25th of February, and the annual report, the thick book with a lot of reading, will come later, on the 27th of March. For the rest, it follows the same procedures as this year so with that, I leave the word to you, Linda, for a summary.
Try to keep you awake for another couple of minutes. Okay, so moving into some key takeaways from what we've been discussing here now for a bit more than one and a half hour.
Why you are to invest in Kongsberg Automotive. Starting with the first point, we have a strong market position supplying globally recognized industry brands, as we've been discussing here today. We have a loyal and long-term relationship with Tier 1 and OEM customers, a diversified customer portfolio covering both our automotive and industrial segments. As we said, commercial vehicles is our key priority. The result of our strategic initiatives to improve long-term profitability announced a year ago are materializing. The EUR 17 million last year, the EUR 10 million this year with full effect Q3 2025. Cost reductions and operational efficiencies help us to offset the impact of reduced customer volumes. New cost savings, as I said, have recently been initiated to lower our break-even turnover and position Kongsberg Automotive for long-term profitability. We can see an underlying long-term growth and demand in the coming years.
We are well positioned to capitalize on this growth within commercial vehicles defined as our key priority. From megatrends and regulations perspective, we are well positioned in all our key product areas. We also are strategically placed in the market to leverage on the growth of electric vehicles. Last but not least, we have a sizable and secured order book, including more than 80% or 90%, sorry, of our anticipated revenues in 2026 already booked or awarded. We have 80% of the 2028 anticipated revenues, including then 70% already booked and awarded and 10% contract extensions that come with a very high likelihood. Our ambition is clear. We are to become a technology and market leader within our core business areas, offering our customers world-class mobility solutions for the future and create lasting values for all our stakeholders.
And to conclude, we are well positioned to navigate the current market uncertainties and deliver on our 2028 financial ambitions. So with that, I thank you for your attention. And we will move into the Q&A session. And I will ask the gentlemen to join me up here on the stage. And Therese, please, you can give some more instructions. Yeah?
Yes. Thanks for all the presenters. We will now move over to the Q&A, as Linda just said. So for the one joining us here physically, if you have a question, just raise your hand and we will come over with a microphone. And for the one joining us on the digital platform, you will be able to raise the question in the digital tool. So we have some questions, and I will start with one that we haven't gotten in here. And it's for you, David.
Actually, it's three in a row for you here.
Okay.
So can I sit down now?
No pressure. So can you provide an overview of how much expected revenue for 2025-2028 is already covered by existing contracts? And what is the total order backlog currently? Will this have an increased book-to-bill impact revenue growth?
The first question, I think we shared that in the presentation in terms of bookings. Although we don't specifically guide in the out years, only the calendar year that we are in, I think we've clearly stated that our expectation for 2026 is that we currently have 80% of our order book fulfilled versus our predicted sales volume for that year.
And in 2028, we have round about 80% if we count two things: booked business, which is somewhere in the region of 70%, and highly likely recurring business awards that will happen prior to that 2028 period that have a very strong probability. So we're at 80% for 2028. That was the slide I mentioned where I think we have an enviable booking list. In terms of the last question, which was order book backlog, we don't share that. We don't give the total order book that we have in the organization. That's something that we don't guide on currently. And when it comes to book-to-bill, it's an ongoing measure. So at the moment, we're round about 2, 2.1. Obviously, anything that we book, such as the award today, it does have an impact on that. So we will slightly have increased. So I hope that answers that.
Thank you David. We will continue with the next one for you as well. Is it possible to revise the current policy related to which contracts are announced?
I guess anything's possible. In terms of why we do it the way we do it, I think we have the considerations of we tend to be relatively vague about the specific award. And that isn't because we like to be vague. It's because customers don't always provide or rarely provide permission to use their specific name and/or logo to share that information. And from a competitive positioning point of view, you don't always want your competitors to know precisely what it is that you've won. And there's that guidance there. And in terms of frequency and other things, I think that's within the investor relations policy.
We can, of course, provide updates, but we need to be consistent so you can take a look over time at what we've won.
Thank you. Last question for you in this round, David. Could you consider disclosing first-time contract for new products even though the amount is not exceeding the current policy?
Yes, and I think we do that. Within the policy, we have some freedom if it is in an interesting sector, if it's a brand new account, for example, a specific EV manufacturer. And I think the one that we announced last week was slightly lower than the three million annualized sales threshold, but we did announce that because we thought it would have stakeholder interest.
Correct. Covering either new markets or new technology or, as you mentioned. Perfect. Then I think we can address a question from the room. Is there any?
So the question is related to factory volume allocation. So you have a lot of factories in Europe. How many do you have? And what would the potential be if you optimized volume allocation between them?
How many we have? You know, how many dots do we have on that list? We have, now I need to count, between 10 and 12 in total. We have a distribution center as well in Europe. And as I also mentioned in the presentation, that's an ongoing assessment that we are also planning then to take in conclusions on in 2025. But I think we've been open to the market that we see that we have a crowded area in Europe. And if you look into the expansions we've done now over the past couple of years, they've been to more of what we define as best-cost countries: Mexico, Poland, India, China.
So that's what has been the focus.
But it's very profitable if you do it, right? You've been working on footprint optimization already, so it's more into the operational side of things versus the administrative side of things. I've done it myself, so I know how profitable it is. That's why I'm asking. But you're looking into it and you will come forward with that in 2025, these conclusions?
Yeah, we are working on that assessment, yes. And we have covered, I think we've covered Europe. We still have some work to do on the U.S. footprint and the Asian. I also think we need to be conscious of what the customers are asking us as well in terms of these robust supply chains. We're having less push to be away from their plants. Of course, the cost consideration is very high in automotive, but they also want us close.
So they need to pay for that. Region, not countries.
Can you make the presentation?
Yeah, absolutely. We want to be in the region we're supplying to and not just use it as an export hub.
You mentioned how your customers, after COVID and everything, increased the need to produce close to the regions where the vehicles are being sold. But how are you assessing the tariff situation now in your exposure, not just in North America and Europe, but like in Mexico? Could there be tariffs hitting you internally in North America between Canada, the U.S., and Mexico, or hitting other plants, given your review of your footprint?
David?
From a customer perspective, after COVID, we're certainly trying to get way smarter in the contractual terms at the beginning of the project. Nobody could account for what actually happened in terms of volume drop. Now we can.
We can't say, well, that will never happen. So we're trying to legislate for it in the contract. The same goes for tariffs. The same goes for raw material clauses. We have, with the bulk of our major customers, we have those clauses in. Of course, the customers want to try and get you to absorb as much risk as you possibly can. And our goal commercially and certainly in sales is to try and share that risk with the customers. So there's a tariff task force that was set up literally the day after the election, which is led by Linda, and all of us are engaged with that. So I think we are pretty well prepared.
But from a customer perspective, we've made it very clear if this task or this goal is to put tariffs onto the suppliers, they have to pass it on to the consumers, and we will be passing it on to them. But I mean, the whole purpose with tariffs, and this is, of course, it's more political when it happens. I mean, that is to localize the business. I mean, that's the reason you have it. If I look back, I mean, it's long ago, but if you take a country like Brazil, which is one of the biggest markets when it comes to commercial vehicles in the world, they have had very high tariffs since long. And if you take Volvo and Scania, they decided very early to localize there. So they are on the right side of the fence, and they have fantastic business there.
This happens all the time. But I mean, if you take Trump's, and it's very interesting, I guess you read the papers and you see now that the Americans in general are now bunkering various products because they foresee high inflation to come. When tariffs come, prices will go up. So they are now bunkering various products, which they know will not be localized in the U.S. So there is a downside to that too. But I mean, we have already a pretty strong footprint in North America. We have two plants in Mexico. We have even extended one recently. We are in the U.S. But of course, we can do more, and we will have to evaluate to do more if this is something that would be sustainable, because that's also it. You never know.
Politicians, you know, they tend to change both in their own views and as persons, you know. But we have to adopt. And as David said, this is not our fault. We will tell our customers, you have to pay. We cannot swallow this. But could you risk being on literally the wrong side of the fence in Mexico and not being in the U.S. with your new plants? We have exposure there, but not as much as you'd think, because we're supplying an awful lot into Mexico to North American manufacturers. Then they have the task of taking the tariff once they sell the vehicle into the continental United States. So I'm not sure of the exact numbers, but a lot of our Mexico work is in-country. And I will say most automotive manufacturers for the U.S. market, they are in Mexico. They are within the same club.
I was on my way to say as well, we also did a transfer last year of our couplings business that was sitting in Willis, Texas, down to Ramos Arizpe, in Mexico, and also then, you know, just a few months ago, Volvo also then announced that they are now building their new truck manufacturing down there outside of Monterrey, which is 45 minutes away from our plant, so that's just one example on how this is kind of coming together. I mean, there could be a slight lag on the push through, but our commitment is to push it through.
You know, we're not responsible for the voting public, and we'll get our recovery back.
Thank you, then we will continue with the question here in the tool. It has been previously noticed that it has been expensive consultant used frequently in the past.
Could we provide an overview of cost allocations related to that today compared with level in 2022-2023? And have it been changes in a strategy to reduce cost related to consultant use? I would say that, you know, cost associated to consultants is something that we've been also addressing in previous communication. And that is a cost that is clearly being reduced dramatically, I would say, versus previous years. And that is also part of our initiative that we announced last year, the EUR 17 million then with the full effect for this year. That's also including then consultant costs being reduced. So clearly, there is in some cases, like on engineering side, you would need as well some external competence to be added in there in terms of the time to market.
Other consultants, like, you know, related to the strategic review that we know has been up for discussion in the past, those are gone in the company. I think that's the comment that we make on that.
Maybe to add, I mean, consultants can be a resource consultant or it can be a competence. If you have, I mean, competency needs you, it might be a good decision to take in a consultant for a short period. It can be an engineer, but it could be for other reasons too. For example, when you're moving your tax base from Switzerland to elsewhere, as you know, you need some advice. If you have constantly buying the same competence, you have, of course, some issue with your own staff and that you have to correct.
So either you bring it in-house or I don't know what, but I mean, you cannot have that extra cost for on a permanent basis, that's for sure.
Thank you. We will continue with the question related to the acquisition of Skriverf orm. How do you ensure sustainable solution in the supply chain, especially following the acquisition of Skriverf orm?
Skriverf orm we announced, I think that was in the breakfast meeting last year in November. And that is a vertical integration of an injection molding tooling manufacturer located in Tretten, for those who know that, very close in Øyer and Hafjell Lillehammer. They have been a supplier to us for many years, primarily to the Raufoss plant and our couplings part of the business.
We saw it as, as I said, a natural step forward in terms of then gaining more competence, in-house competence about injection molding tools and maintenance of those tools, not least. So the nearshoring that we're doing now with having that one there and also then the continuous integration of those operations into primarily our plant in Raufoss here in Norway, that is what we are having ongoing. And then we will also explore if there are other opportunities because it's not only in Raufoss that we have injection molding as one of our production streamlines as well. So that's an opportunity as well. That's something that we are continuously looking into. Staying on that topic, who are Skriverform's current customers and is there any outside of the automotive industry?
At the time when we acquired them, they had about 75%-80%, as I can recall, in terms of the business, and that was linked in to us. So we were the main customer. And that has increased over the past 12 months as well. So clearly, they are also supporting some other companies primarily in the region and on Norwegian base. But that is now more related to maintenance agreements and service agreements that are sitting in there. And we are the ones that are utilizing the, let's say, the full capacity they have for building new tools.
Before we continue with some technology and innovation question, is there any additional questions?
Hello. I think it's a question for David. Can you comment on the gross margin profile in your order book?
And in the weaker markets, do you have to accept lower margins, gross margins than you would do in a more normal markets or how? I think broadly speaking, we don't specifically call out margins and we certainly don't reference them when we announced a new business win. But obviously, we have an ambition that we've stated with regards to our EBIT requirements for 2028 and the journey we're on to recover some of the margin erosion we've had as we came out of COVID. That is kind of the litmus test that we have when we take on new business. Clearly, traditionally, passenger car has been probably the most aggressive segment that we're in. It's set up that way. There's so many competitors. Volume is so dramatically high. Commercial vehicle can be reasonable and is reasonable.
Industrial and aftermarket tend to be the best margins that we have overall, but the volume isn't there. So I think if I can answer it this way, what we are booking is in line with our strategic objective to get to this 8%-10% EBIT margin, 2028 on that journey. And they are reflecting that. And to Christian's point that he made almost in his last slide, the time to do that is at the award phase. And we don't get, even though we negotiate, obviously, raw material clauses and other things, the price when we set it is. It has an awful lot of attention. And everybody here for the majority of our contracts, certainly any of scale, are involved in that decision. That process is very tight.
I probably didn't give you every answer you wanted there, but it's broadly speaking, you have that sliding scale and passenger car is the most aggressive market we supply in terms of margin. You mentioned the transition to electric trucks and hybrids, but what exactly is it that you lose from the transition to a pure electric? And secondly, it seems in China that there's a big growth in natural gas powered trucks. Are you seeing that trend in other markets and does it affect your business at all? I didn't, maybe I'll hand it to Christian. I'll just take the coming out of fluid division. Obviously, what we lose when you go from combustion engine to pure electric, put simply, is anything that was on that pure engine. So from a fluid system perspective, it is primarily a turbo feed line, for example.
It is a traditional fuel line, is another example. That is the bulk of what we lose. The flip side of that is content-wise, what we gain is the ability to supply coolant assemblies, battery management assemblies, and other sub-applications within those new powertrains. So it's not the impact that I think we thought it was 10 years back. And then I can hand over to Christian when it comes to natural gas and whether we see an impact for that in China and other regions. I gave you the question again then. Thank you.
Thank you. So first of all, coming back to this content per vehicle topic in the FCS area, fluid control system area, we see that in the future, the content per vehicle will increase.
Just to give you an example, a couple of items will be eliminated, but there are new items coming up because cooling in electric vehicles is much more important. Cooling in fuel cell vehicles is even more important. The diameters will increase from very small to bigger and very big diameters. So the amount of material is increasing and content per vehicle is significantly increasing. For us, it's not a threat. It's an opportunity in the FCS area. And as I said in my presentation in the DCS area drive control system, in the electric axles, we see that we have a similar content per vehicle like before. The AMT transmission units, this big block, what I have presented versus up to three or up to six actuators in two axles in a truck can stay on the same level or also can slightly increase.
So for us, it's more an opportunity and not a threat. And the good thing is we have developed a portfolio. As I said, we are balancing now out the risk between old world and new world. And we are ready to serve the old world, already ready to serve the new world. So we are ready. Many other suppliers have problems to bet the money on the right horse, but we can run both paths and parallel. I think that's good. And for the other, let's say, fuel technologies, gas, hydrogen or others, I think it still remains an ICE engine, internal combustion engine. That means for us, the business model doesn't change. It means we still provide cooling for ICE engines as long as there's the ICE engine in the vehicle and based on gas or based on hydrogen. There are also hydrogen engines under development.
Nothing will change more or less to our business model, so we have a resilient model there,
and we had some products in here today as well, just showcasing, and I think Kenny was displaying some of that as well related to our Flow Control Systems and the coupling side where we then have solutions for those more niched areas, so we know that they will be there in the future, but clearly more niched.
Okay, so we will jump over to technology and innovation. How does our new camera cleaner technology differentiate from competitor solutions and what benefits can we offer users and the environment? Christian.
Yeah, thanks Therese. Yeah, maybe you have in your own car, you have recognized that some of your front and rear cameras already have a cleaning solution, but these cleaning solutions are based on today's systems. They need a lot of water.
After you have maybe washed your car in the morning and you activate your cleaning system, it's completely polluted with a lot of water. There are two reasons. It's too much water. It's too expensive. Our system is the best solution in terms of efficiency. We use less fluid and we spray away the dust from the camera lens. This is a clearly unique selling point. Also for us, it's not just the lens system we are cleaning. We are also looking for other applications in laser scanner systems. We can see if we can deploy this technology also to other advanced systems in the world of autonomous driving.
We will continue within this area. Could you explain how the Steer-by-wire technology works and which market we consider most ready for this technology?
Good.
So in the steer-by-wire systems today, you have a steering wheel and you have a physical connection with the steering column module to the steering system. You take away this physical connection of the steering column module. You just take it out. There's no connection anymore between the steering wheel and this steering system close to the side and the chassis system. This is a big difference. That means in the future, you will have a steering wheel and a so-called handwheel actuator. It's a kind of motor who is simulating the same driver behavior like you have. And then you have our, call it Chassis Autonomy, steer-by-wire solution in the chassis segment, which is then taking care for the steering itself. So you take out the mechanical physical connection. That's the key difference.
Then I would like to ask if there are more questions here from the audience.
Good morning again. Good morning. I am representing myself as an investor and some other people as well, 22,000 I think. There has nothing been mentioned about the stock, and maybe you cannot have any answer on it. But I'm just only because I have a big faith on the sales department and I have a big faith on the innovation and everything what we are producing. But I'm a little bit concerned about the bottom line and what you are performing for the investors. There's nothing been mentioned about that, and that's a little bit I'm a little bit concerned about as an investor. The reason for I invested is because I have a big faith on the developments on the car industry. I've been working for a company, a shipping company for many, many years, and they have a big faith in the future.
They are also very much aware about the investors. But from you guys, and I have to be honest, there is not much coming in my opinion. And I have been contacting some of you and trying to get some good answers. But then you talk about policy and some other stuff. But what are you saying about the stock? Because the stock has been going from like four down to almost one in a few years. Do you have any comments on that?
First of all, I will leave it also for Christian to mention, you know, when it comes to the bottom line that you mentioned. I think we also covered that in the presentation there and both the development and what we are now also doing in terms of improving it.
I think, you know, in general, no, we don't comment on the share prices, but we also know that the share price will reflect also the situation in the company. And with a steady improvement, we clearly also expect that that will give a certain, let's say, credibility in there as well. So that's something we understand that there has been some tough years. And it's also about regaining trust in the market from that perspective. And that's clearly what we are working day and night with as well to get this shaped in from our side of the company. And as we also said, you know, taking our cost to lower our, let's say, break-even point to be in a better shape as well when the market starts to turn upwards again. So, Christian, something you want to add?
No, I think I tried to cover, I mean, at least briefly the areas we are working on. And I mean, it is, and you know that if you know automotive also, that it's not quick fixes. It's a lot of hard work and tuning in various processes. I mean, it is a very competitive market. It is very, being a supplier to big OEMs, it's also a size difference, you know, in the negotiation situation. So you need to have a very strong competitive offer. You need to have a history of being a reliable partner. We have that both. We have innovative offers. We are a reliable partner. And we have just to continue to deliver customer satisfaction over time and that things should come. Yeah, but still. Microphone.
I can just say a little bit more because, you know, the disappointment is like is that, you know, like other companies, and I want to talk about the shipping companies, which they have a big faith in the future. Höegh Autoliners, they have been doing a lot of investment, and they are actually carrying what is produced. And you are actually giving some of the, you know, the stuff to the producers. So they have a big faith in the future. And if you look at Höegh Autoliners, they have had a big increase in their shares throughout like two, three years. And Wallenius Wilhelmsen has been the same. They have a big faith in the future. And I think that their bottom line is a little bit different from yours. And that is something I'm a little bit concerned about.
And I think that, and I understand that you have been doing a lot of measures towards that, but I think that you need to do some more towards the market and get the faith back. And I have been challenging Therese and Julian as well towards doing something towards the market. So the people, the 22,000 shareholders, which actually have faith in the company, that you really give them the faith back because they are investing their own money, whatever that is, if it is like from their own pocket or from their wife or whatever it is. You have to understand that it's 22,000 investments there, investors there who really care about the company. And we hope that you do the same.
And we do. And I would say as well, we are all also investors in the company.
Clearly, we will continue being that as well because we believe in the company. But it's a journey. It's clearly a journey. It's not a quick fix, as Christian said either. I would say that we've come a long way already. We have the cyclical changes in the market. We know that you saw the graph since 2014 and then further upwards. It goes a little bit up and down. It's a matter of also then balancing our portfolio in the way as we did. We also mentioned industrial, which is the non-automotive. We are also planning then for further growth, doubling that one within the coming four to five years to have those, let's say, the third leg to stand on as well that is not then impacted by those automotive cyclical changes.
As we said, we have, you know, more niched products in when it comes to the passenger car segment being a very competitive area in general, as David said. So I would say we are taking the right directions. But this with the time frame as well showcased by both David and by Christian as well, you can see that it's, you know, from an award until we go into serious production, it takes some years. And it's not done from one month to another. Clearly, some extension comes in on a shorter time frame, which is good. But other than that, new programs that has a certain time. So that requires a little bit of patience.
And then we will continue working in the meantime as well to ensure then that we are right sized as well and have the correct focus to be able to deliver on those ambitions we have towards 2028.
Okay. Yes. Okay. So the time is already up. So that would be the last question today. So we have come to the end of the session. And we would like to thank everyone and thank the presenters and all of you for joining both here on site as well as digitally. So thanks for taking the time to spend a couple of hours with us. We really appreciate it. And yeah.
I would say Merry Christmas as well. It's only a week away. So thank you for attending.
Yeah. God Jul. Thank you.
Thank you.