Have you ever thought about how often is needed to move things with nanometer precision? Let me give you two examples, of many. If you, for example, want to affect or analyze a cell, a human cell, or if you want to produce, circuit boards with, nanometer accuracy, then you need extreme precision. We are Acuvi, w e have the solutions for single nanometer precision. To put this into perspective a human hair has the width of 100,000 nanometer.
So my name is Olof Stranding, and I'm CEO at Acuvi. And today, I would like to present the group and focusing on the revenue streams in Acuvi and explain them more. And also where I see growth, the coming years. And with me, I have Mikko Vähäsöyrinki.
Thank you.
So, Acuvi has a toolbox for high precision motion. We have 55 employees that are based, and our customers, over 500 around the world, is mainly based in Europe, North America, and in China. Two days ago, we published preliminary numbers for Q3, and they confirmed that we, looking 12 months, have a turnover of SEK 200 million, and show a profit on EBITDA level of around 18%. Considering what the world look like, is very important for us with profitability. Growing revenue is important, but we focus on being profitable. So the agenda for today, I estimate that it will take about 30-40 minutes to present, and then we have a, we'll have a Q&A following.
This was the introduction, and I will explain a little bit more about the revenue drivers. Mikko will present life science instrumentation, Sensapex. We will also present where we are on IVF. After that, it will follow a Q&A, and then we will close. Today, Sensapex will get a lot of attention. I will go back one. Sensapex was acquired in 2021, and we had big expectations on Sensapex, and I think that was mutual. It was from both sides. It took a while, but now we see a growing activity at Sensapex, and therefore, I think it's fair to give Mikko a chance to explain more what's happening. Our revenue can be split in three categories.
We have customized the products, and this is highly profitable products. They grow, looking three years back from now, about 7% per year in average. And this is the cash cow of the company. And mainly, this is the TPA business. Sales is created by customers coming to us, and we design a solution for them. So this also holds back the growth. It's profitable, but each sale takes resources. Off-the-shelf products are growing fast, 36% per year. And in this category, if you have followed Acuvi, is PiezoMotor , and I also put the plate handler from TPA Motion here. So growth is good, and new business added here will turn out, more or less, it will show up as profit, so it's highly profitable.
And this is important, and I will come back later to that. Sorry. And then we have the instrumentations, and that is the old Sensapex, and Mikko will explain more about this part. But it could be worth to mention here that this part of the business was the one hit hardest by COVID. So that is one reason for the slow growth here. So for all categories, product life cycle at our customers are quite long. So when we have a design win, we stay in that product for 8-12 years, normally. So we have a strong momentum in off the shelf, and we will enter 2024 with a very strong order book.
We see increasing number of starter kits, and this indicates a growing pipeline and revenue in a year or two from now. We also see growth in the US as a big opportunity. What you can see here is that if we follow the current growth, that is the bottom blue line, we will continue and see good growth. We have activities with big customer inflow. We have seen increased orders per customer. We are launching new products in this field, and we have an increased presence in the US. These items, I think and hope, will increase the growth the coming years. We also have a high volume micromotor platform called Ultra.
Those of you that have followed Acuvi for a while, you know that this is a relaunch of an old product, and we have very interesting projects here. The difference compared to our other business, that the customers here are very big. Big is very hard for us to drive them the way that we normally do with customers. It's also very hard to drive the communication and to set the agenda for communication because the customers are bigger and harder for us to work with in that sense. So changes in these areas will be press released, of course, but it could be worth to mention that the areas we are working with is within 5G, moving antennas and filters. It's handheld diagnostics and also applications around zooming functions and stabilization in mobile phone cameras.
So, and here, Mikko will take over and come into life science.
Thank you, Olof. As Olof brought it up, there are probably quite a few investors here who've been wondering what has been happening with Sensapex over the last two years. This is a great opportunity for me to give you more information about that, and also show how we think it will go forward. COVID hit this business really hard, so most of the existing customers are research labs in the universities, and they went to lockdown during COVID, and then there were limited amount of people allowed to go to campus for quite a while after that. Also, the funding shifted from the type of applications that they do with our products, more towards the teams that were really focused on the COVID type of things.
So that was a very hard market condition in general, but we have now recovered from that. Last spring, we also established this new business unit around the Sensapex business with the single purpose of being able to grow it faster. And since that time, we have started lots of new activities to ensure that we will start to make the progress that we can make. We see the growth coming here in the two phases. So first of all, what you don't see in this graph is the historical growth of Sensapex. Prior to COVID, prior to 2020, it was on average 26% per year. So the dip here and the flat period is not something we ever had before.
What we see now, considering the activities we have ongoing, is that next year we will return back to that growth rate. We have also started new initiatives now, more like future-oriented, which we are really driving to ensure that we can grow even faster after 2025 forward. Those will take a bit longer time before they impact the revenues. I talk here briefly about the three growth pillars that we have now identified that help us to make this happen. First one is in the neurotech market, and as a market, it's a big market. It's growing. It includes different kind of technologies and instruments that are used to measure or modulate the brain function, both in the research settings, but also in the medical side of the things.
In the medical market, those include, for example, the cochlear implants, like the very advanced hearing aids, and deep brain stimulation that is used, for example, in the Parkinson's disease. But our main opportunity here, if we then think about the medical side, long term, is the new brain machine interfaces, like the really finest, latest technologies that the startups like Synchron or Elon Musk's Neuralink are driving forward. And these companies are already entering the first clinical trials, so I think they are coming in not so distant future here. My own background is actually in neuroscience research before the Sensapex, and my lab was a neurotech lab, so I also like this path quite a bit for that reason. So the products in this segment, as of today, are still for the research customers, so they are Sensapex-branded standard products.
They have been designed and are manufactured in-house based on our own patented technologies. We have over 800 customers worldwide, so it starts to be quite sizable install base already. The good thing to understand is that the customers in this segment prefer to buy same thing as they bought before. While our customer base is accumulating, it creates more repeat business for us. For that part of the baseline growth, we don't need to invest that much into marketing. The products also have very high margins, so that together with the accumulating baseline provides us a good scalability in terms of profit also. I think we have a pretty good product line already here for the cell manipulation and measurement area.
This is a work that is done under advanced microscopes, where the brain cells are on the dish. Here, our main focus to drive the growth is really on improving the distribution. And this includes, for example, the Nikon partnership that we launched earlier this year. And the second thing that we see here as opportunity is to increase our lead generation through the web channels. So there we can be also doing much better work. The second application area under the neurotech is the neurosensing. So this is more new to us. It is a fast-growing niche, both in the research and the medical applications, and this is the one that relates quite closely to these brain-machine interfaces, for example. And here, the customers are working more with the whole brain level, but with the single-cell resolution.
So we launched a new product for that, which is like a system-level, automated, like even like a robot, that enables you to put the probes to the brain very precisely in a large scale. So the customers are recording, like, thousands of individual brain cells at the same time in the research settings. And we did the first deliveries for this in September, so this is very new to us, but I have to say that the market traction has been really good. So we'd never seen something like this before in the Sensapex products in the history, so this looks very promising for us. So for both of these application areas, we also see opportunities outside the research market.
So for the cell manipulation measurements, I think there's a good opportunity to develop more automated, even like a workstations for the biotech and pharma, based on things we have validated already for the research applications. And for the neurosensing, maybe first, more like a research systems for the companies who develop these medical applications, but then later, there will be lots of need for different kind of, insertion robots for the brain-machine interfaces. And I think long term, that would be very interesting for us. Then growth pillar number two, this is also new to us, so it's a modular instrumentation solution for industrial customers. Quite a mouthful, but what, what it really means is that it's a very mildly customized products for the customers who are not research labs.
They could be companies who sell to research labs or other companies from other vertical markets, but the business with the companies, not with the researchers. And here we are still at the go-to-market phase, and our initial focus also is on the advanced cell imaging market. And this is partially because we have existing products and technologies proven in that, but partially also because many of the big companies in this market segment are using heavily third-party manufactured products as part of their own portfolio. So we know that there's existing volume and demand there for the things we have. We just have to get to those customers and get the revenue going.
This is also a business area where we see that we can really, really leverage the Acuvi group synergies when we try to enter other vertical markets for other products and technologies outside the imaging market, for example. Growth pillar number 3, so this is quite interesting one also, that we've been thinking for a long time in the history already, and that's the in vitro fertilization market. So our vision here is to become the leading automated ICSI instrumentation provider in the IVF market. So what does it mean? So the ICSI is the procedure that is done in the IVF clinics, where the operator is capturing the single sperm and injecting into the egg by using the micromanipulators. So as devices, they are very similar to what we have in the neurotech segment: microscope, micromanipulators, and such.
The customer base is different, but the devices are very similar. That's one reason why it's a very logical expansion for us. We can think about this as three sub-segments. The first one is the research market, and this is something where we have a bit like an overlapping customer base, and it's easier for us to enter from that perspective. It also doesn't have any regulative aspects, like medical certifications. Here the customers are, in addition to this ICSI, doing, for example, injection with some genetic material or stem cells, yeah, to the eggs. As such, we think that this is actually a bigger niche than what we do in the neurotech market at the moment for the micromanipulators. It is a good growth opportunity for our research side of the business as such.
And we think next year, we can enter that with the new product variants that are based on the existing products, which makes it also quite efficient for us. Then next to that is veterinary applications, and these include things like ICSI for the horse or livestock breeding. And this is the segment here that we don't know as well as the other two. We think it's a good opportunity, that is a big industry as such, but I think we need to do more homework to analyze that and do our own go-to-market plan for this segment. And then the third one is the medical side or human IVF market, and this is obviously the one where we think that we have the biggest potential long term. It is also the one where time-to-market is longest.
Before you go there, you really want to perfect and mature your product to the research and other applications, and then you certify it medically, and then you can go to the clinics, and there's really no shortcut on that. What we are doing already in this space, with the human IVF, is working with other companies, partnerships, who are active in the human IVF applications, and that we see as a possibility to start getting revenues faster from this segment also. That's actually the last point I want to make now from my presentation. We were lucky to have some guest speakers here for our IVF sections, who are really experts on the IVF industry, and they are the same companies that we are also working as partners.
So I think with these words, I would like to introduce Andrew Drakeley from IVF 2.0, which is a partner that is working on the AI for the in vitro fertilization market.
Thank you for the introduction, Mikko, and thank you to the organizers for giving me this opportunity to speak about IVF 2.0. We're a medical software company working in the human fertility space. There are three co-founders who set this company up several years ago: Alejandro Chavez-Badiola, who originates from Mexico but did his IVF training with me in Liverpool in the U.K.; Jacques Cohen, who's one of the forefathers of embryology and currently works out of New York City in the U.S.; and myself, who's an NHS fertility doctor in Liverpool in northwest England. Now, the fertility market is an increasing market, and there's an increasing amount of subfertility for different reasons and different applications. For a lot of people, it's out of reach for different reasons, whether this be cost or staff training.
But up to 10% of babies are born through IVF treatment. Certainly in Copenhagen, that's the case of 10%. And millions and millions of people are being born annually due to assisted reproduction. It's a growing market size. Currently, it's estimated around about 4,500 clinics globally in all territories, and this is growing. Financially, it's a growing market as well, and the annual growth rate is said to be around 6%, and there are many drivers to see this increase. Now, there have been some technological advances over the years, although a lot of the approaches are still quite paper-based and quite antiquated. And therefore, we think there's an opportunity to digitize and automate the process.
So we believe actually that there's a role for automation in every step of the IVF journey, whether this be the clinical decision-making or the choosing of the right time to collect the eggs, the stimulation dose, which are the best eggs to mix with the best sperm, and then how to prioritize the best embryos. And so we have two CE marked products. The first is ERICA, which looks at embryo ranking based on its ploidy or genetic prediction. And then SiD, which is of interest to Sensapex and Acuvi, which obtained its CE marking in 2021. And for this, it's a computer software that looks at the motility patterns of each of the spermatozoa, but looks at them in a lot more accuracy and magnification than the human eye can imagine.
It looks at its rotation on its axis, and you put the ICSI needle that picks up the sperm in the middle blue circle, and then it highlights the best three sperm within this high-power field. Now, normally, the embryologist would see fewer sperm because they would dilute and put the sperm in a media that slows the sperm down, but this is able to move in different fields and select the best sperm for pickup. And this was a unique product that was first in its market and its first to get CE marking, and then we're exploring the American market via an FDA application as we speak. So from a journey point of view, we have two products, so we're just going for commercial launch this year. We have a version two of SiD, which is looking at more sperm parameters.
So version one looked at two main sperm motility parameters, now version two, which is ready and validated, is looking at eight. Version three, which should be ready by Christmas, also adds morphology, so the shape of the sperm head to that. Currently, we're, we are active in 22 countries, and there are more coming on online. There's a steady flow rather than a rush, but we're seeing steadily, quite global spread in terms of Africa and Asia and Japan. From a testimonial point of view, we're getting good feedback from our users from different parts of the world, including Ukraine and the UK and Mexico and the USA. So from a cooperation, and we've been speaking to Mikko for several months now, and last month we signed a collaboration agreement.
And we really sort of see this as a shared, shared collaboration where IVF 2.0 helps provide the software and Sensapex the hardware. But the SiD software for the sperm selection would be integrated, optimized, and validated into the Sensapex ICSI workstation, and that would be a unique selling point because that's, that would be the only ICSI provider on the market that incorporates AI from the word go. We can also adapt our, our software to other areas of use, whether this be research and veterinary applications. So thank you very much for giving this short slot to speak to you, and I'm happy to stay on the, on the call to answer questions at the end. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Andrew. And then we have our second collaborator that is working also on the IVF automation part, and happy to introduce Alejandro, who's currently in Mexico, but was still able to join our event today. So please go ahead, Alejandro.
Hello, Mikko. Thank you very much for this space. So I am a founder, co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Conceivable. Conceivable, we have set the goal to democratize IVF through technology, particularly through automating the full IVF process. Now, IVF is a $22 billion industry. I think that there could be reasons to be happy, but if we see the big picture, it doesn't matter how we look at it, we're still playing for peanuts. Why am I saying this? According to the WHO, 16% of the world's population will face fertility problems, but still globally, 99% of infertile patients are still unable to access IVF. Barriers are time, of course, but mainly money.
Now, in a just world, we estimate that about 10% of all children should be IVF babies, and there are wealthy and eccentric countries which have done this experiment. Denmark is one example, Belgium, another example. In Denmark, 1 out of every 10 babies are product of IVF. In Belgium, 8.6. Israel is pretty much the same, which means that instead of having about 800,000 IVF babies born every year, we should be aiming at 1 million babies per month. This would effectively make or bring IVF for the people rather than for wealthy people alone, as is the case right now. However, for this, we need to radically change the way in which we are approaching the problem.
We need to think about incorporating new technology, in particular, automation, AIs, new business models, start liaising with OBGYNs, nurse practitioners, and of course, reproductive endocrinologists. What we're doing at Conceivable is developing robots for every single step in the IVF process. We have fully automated sperm preparation, egg finding, fertilization with ICSI, incubation, freezing, and storage. What we anticipate, and this is a publication from a few years ago, that by decreasing the cost of IVF by 1% of disposable income, the demand increases by about 3%. We believe that the right conversation, the discussions about the ethical side of IVF, should be about access. And what we're doing, we believe, is not only the right thing to do, but it's a massive commercial opportunity in the world today. I'm going to be using American numbers.
If we divide the full amount of money that is spent in the United States by, in IVF, by the numbers, number of babies born through IVF, the average cost to have a baby in the U.S. would be over $25,000. Now, if we're saying that there should be 1 million babies born per month, and we bring down the cost to $15,000 per baby, this would make a $180 billion fertility market. But of course, infertility is only a fraction of the potential market, because we estimate that recurrent miscarriage is also a problem that could be solved in some cases through IVF. Of course, genetic disease prevention is another use of the technology. And just based on a recent survey, LGBTQ individuals under 35, from these, 40% in this questionnaire, said that they would have children.
So now, suddenly, we're not playing for peanuts anymore. We're not the size of the peanut market. We're the size of the full global travel and tourist market. And this is moving very fast. What I'm showing you here is an ultrasound with a heartbeat of our first pregnancy, with the first fully automated sperm preparation. The pregnancy is now 11 weeks. We have already filed an omnibus provisional patent, including 254 claims. This is the largest ever filed in the IVF industry, and we are filing 3 full patents every month. We believe that the future of IVF is automated, and the question remaining is: How will we collaborate? The good news is, we have already started. We have been in conversations with Mikko for a long time.
What you're going to see is the seed, AI, that Andrew show you, fully automatically chasing the best sperm, the one selected, automatically immobilizing it with laser, to load it also automatically, and then pierce through the wall of the egg to inject the sperm. Everything that you see here, again, is fully automated, and in this case, what we're using are the Sensapex equipment that we got from you. So thank you very much. This is my presentation, and again, same as Andrew, I'll stay for any questions. Thank
So thank you, Mikko and Alejandro and Andrew. I will just wait for my presentation to come back. So I will start.
Perfect. I will start to just repeat what I said before, the IVF section. Looking three years back, the revenue streams, you can see that we have customized customers, and that revenue stream is growing by, in average per year, 7%. We have off-the-shelf, that is the star of the group that is growing by 36% per year in average. Then we have instruments that is growing about 10% per year. If you just continue this and assume constant growth per year, we will have a situation where with 2026, we'll have more revenue from off-the-shelf than from customized. The important thing with that is that this really drive profit.
It's revenue, it drives easier for off-the-shelf, but also profit. So the trend is in our favor. And looking then at the momentum in the off-the-shelf, we have a strong order book, many starter kits, and we see opportunities in the U.S. And this will make us think that there is a very good chance of actually increasing the growth per year from a good 36% to something much higher. And that is through using the momentum, launching new products, and also increase the presence in the U.S. even more. So, so looking here at the scenario, just following the trend, we will have a turnover 2027 of about 350 million SEK.
And then if you can increase the growth, that is a scenario that I would say SEK 500 million would be realistic. And long term, we have communicated in the past that we aim to increase EBITDA to above 25% from today's 18%-20%. So the investment case then, the revenue today is about SEK 200 million and 20% margin on this. And we have very good opportunities, both in the current business, but also with the projects we have that can open up markets with higher volumes. And we have the technology that meet the demands for higher precision.
And that was really the idea today, to show the larger trends, but also to make a deep, deep dive into one of the growth areas we see through IVF, and also show, show and present you to some of our customers. So, by this, I close the presentation, and, I'm happy to answer questions. Thank you. Okay. So the first question is for you, actually, Mikko. What is your, USP for IVF? What makes, Sensapex so well fit to go into this market?
Yeah. So I think the one important thing is, what Andrew also referred to, is that we really think that, because of the very good technology platform behind Sensapex products, it's very suitable to be used as a platform to integrate different AI-based software features, for example. And also referring to what Alejandro showed, it was very easy for them to go from getting the device in their hands to have the first fully automated sequence for the injection. And I think these two really showcase that, the products are, first of all, good fit for these applications. They can do the job, but also that it's very suitable for other applications where you need a good integration and where the software can play a big role on what do you want to do with these kind of devices.
Next, I have another Sensapex question here. So what parts of the growth initiatives are required to reach the 26 pre-COVID yearly growth you had?
Yeah, that's a good question. So that growth rate is something that we see that it will happen with the research-based business that we have now. So the expansion to, for example, the biotech or pharma or medical side of the Neurotech or IVF, except for the research applications, are not included in that growth rate.
So for 26% growth, we have the products we need and the ongoing activities that we are already doing to support that for a longer period of time. And then accelerating the growth from there is what comes from these additional things that we have activated recently.
Thank you.
Thanks.
So another question here, maybe more for me. How is TPA expansion into Europe going? Well, we are working on it, and one thing now is to work as one company, meeting and working and going on leads together. For TPA, the product they have is this plate handler robot, and for that one, we are working with customers in Europe. We have a couple, one of them more for with better volumes and further, but it has not yet shown significantly on the revenue, but we are moving it forward.
Usually, these projects take 18-24 months to come up to full production, and that kind of we have worked with it for a year, so it should show the coming years, the activities we have started. How is the plan to do the final payment for TPA? Share issue or bank loan? Well, I would say this could be a mix of things. One thing is to pay from our own cash flows, and one other thing could be bank loans, I would say, it's a combination of different financing activities. The good thing for us, where we are, is that all of them that are part of this stay-on bonus are still in the company.
They also have an interest that Acuvi actually can continue with its operations and in a good way, and that we can see a stronger cash. So we have a continuous dialogue with both these ones that are have the stay-on bonus. I would say it's a mix of financing sourcing. Do you see hard competition in the area you operate? Price pressure. No, we don't see price pressure in that sense. I would say where you can see a price pressure is where we go in and compete with the old motor technology. In many ways, it's important for us then to explain that we are looking at all parts the customer needs.
We actually are equal in price, but we have to educate customers how to calculate, because a stand, a classical old motor need different things than just comparing. It's kinda comparing apples to oranges. That, so it is a education of customers more than any other. Anyone in the audience?
Yeah, so in regards to the scenario that you explained, would you consider that guidance or just a possibility? And the second question related to that would be, does that take into account any of the extra projects like the 5G or the hand diagnostics?
I would say it's not a guidance. As you saw, we stretched out the trend looking three years back and stretched that out. And then we have said that we have activities that I think will actually increase, especially the off-the-shelf products part of the business. And by increasing that part, that this is a scenario of many. So I don't consider it guidance. And when it comes to your question about, if I include the hand-held diagnostics or similar projects, I would say that they are part of that. I mean, there are many things. We are launching new products, we are expanding in the U.S., so they are part of the total, of course.
But I would say that if they would really turn into what we hope, then it would maybe be another scenario, but it's too early to talk about that. It will be very many different types of scenarios. Was that? Did I miss anything? No.
Well, as far as I can remember, you haven't published the book of orders in the last years. TPA, you mentioned that once when it was acquired. But why, if you're not able to publish a book of orders regularly, yeah, why should we try to believe what you make in this scenario? For me, it's without substance. There are no basis for this.
Yeah. No, I mean, it's, I guess, proof is in the pudding. I mean, it's, it needs to be proven, of course. But, we, we haven't published our order book, other than what you mentioned with the acquisition of, TPA. Then we had, it was more an accounting thing that we had to take into consideration. So, but at some point, I'm quite sure we will start publishing order book. I think it's very relevant information, but we, we're not there right now.
Well, it seems to me also that you're forgetting PiezoMotor. That is one part in this in this, group. Why don't you mention it?
No, PiezoMotor is the main part of the off-the-shelf products. PiezoMotor is the main part of the off-the-shelf products. So if, if you would kind of translate it into, into the company's instruments, is mainly Sensapex. Customized is mainly, but not entirely, TPA Motion. And then PiezoMotor is mainly, but not entirely, the off-the-shelf products.
You hand it over to a new company, PiezoMotor. What is rest is in the parent company. So you're doing business in parent company and PiezoMotor. What's in the parent company b esides the subsidy.
The parent company is a holding company, owning the others.
It's not only. There are a lot of costs and expenses and revenues as well.
Yeah, the license revenue is in the holding company.
License revenues in the parent company?
So looking at the company, at the group, I would look at the total profitability, and then on the revenue streams. That's at least how I see it and how I draw trends out of it. Because it's different ways of selling in the different types of business, and the intention with this presentation was to show that, to make it more clear for a person outside the company to understand why maybe revenue is going up very much sometimes and why it's fluctuating.
At the general annual meeting, I was told that you are preparing or discussing to reveal the business areas, different business areas, the revenues and net income, and so on. How far has that discussion come now?
I think this is the first step, but not the final yet. So that's quite big thing, but to take the step and take it all the way out to the accounting, it's a quite big thing. But it will happen one day as the company grow and get the set the full group.
You're making scenarios for 3, 4 years forward. But you're not able to present to the shareholders what they want to see. Not scenarios for 5, 6 years. Well, thank you.
Thank you, Lars. Oh, here are some more questions. I will try to handle them. "Can you talk about the sales team in Switzerland, and how the progress have been there, from the day Rolf was hired?" Well, I think that, off-the-shelf, you can see a sharp difference the day we started to sell directly, and that was with the hire of a sales manager in Switzerland and building that team. So that, I would say, is the biggest reason for off-the-shelf to grow by 36% per year. That was about when they started. So, so yeah, so that's. So I would say that is the one, and then you can always work in different way and work closely. But, the sales team in Switzerland is, of course, not isolated down there.
They are quite frequently both in Uppsala and at different customer visits, so it's a convenient place to be. A question about the stock performance, but it's very hard for me to comment. I, of course, would wish things develop better, "Will you consider to change partner for mobile camera zoom if the partner is not showing progress?" Of course, at some point, you don't work with a partner that does not deliver. That's obvious. "Is the Ultra motor finally developed for full-scale production, or is it more tuning required?" Many things are in place, I would say, but it is different to build thousands and hundred thousands. Of course, it's not an easy thing, but we have a good plan for how to do it.
So that was all of the questions on the iPad, but we have more here.
About the Ultra product. So this, does this have a real client at this stage t hat is actually using it for live purposes?
Yes, we have had customers buying around 100 motors. So but we have a lot, many customers, but and no one is in thousands yet.
Okay. Are there repeat customers on the Ultra product line?
No, not yet.
Not yet. Okay.
Ja, jag har frågor om eventuella synergier som kan finnas mellan den utveckling som har gjorts av Sensapex och andra teknikområden som gäller cellmanipulering och manipulering av RNA och DNA, till exempel. Ja redan är på väg att bli industrialiserade genom användning i CRISPR-Cas9-tekniken för att manipulera RNA. Det skulle man kunna tänka sig med den noggrannhet som Sensapex instrument kan hantera innehåll i celler, enskilda celler.
Is it okay if I ask in English? So when you say synergies, do you mean synergies between Sensapex and other parts of the business, or do you mean synergy? What synergies do you mean? Sorry, you asked about synergies for Sensapex. Is the synergies between Sensapex and PiezoMotor?
Yes, I'm asking for synergies. Which are the synergies, or can there be synergies between the technology which is developed within Sensapex and the new advances in scientific for in RNA and DNA manipulation through the CRISPR-Cas9 technology?
I will be, like a politician first and just misunderstand your question, and say that synergies, between Sensapex and PiezoMotor, we start to see now, and that is about integrating, PiezoMotor products into Sensapex, different systems and stages. So that is something actually happening now after, two years, about, which is very good. But synergies other, Mikko.
Yeah, I got a few terms there that are familiar, and for the CRISPR and other things. So these are, you know, the recent techniques for gene editing, for example, and that's one of the core drivers for the micro injections at the research application. So you know, the IVF graph had the three areas: research, veterinary, and the human IVF. So for the research market, the part of the reason why that's growing for the micro injections are these CRISPR and other new gene editing techniques. So actually, that part is also growing quite nicely, not just the human part, but the research part of that also. And these are becoming more common all the time.
Was that the answer to your question?
Yeah.
I have another question about the opportunities within the telecom industry. I suppose there has been a delay, maybe because of the development of 5G, 5G and the fact that the introduction of 5G is, will be done stepwise. First, you have the bottom level, and then next, there come 5G advanced, and then we'll have 6G. Maybe the request of antenna, antenna manipulation may come with a request of what it's called, it's called fiber to the mobile, fixed I don't remember the name. Fiber to the home.
No, I think that we will see the developments in the 5G area starting, I think, with very specific parts of applications without going into more detail. So it's there are certain areas where it's more obvious to actually implement to automate certain things. So, but I cannot say more right now around that, but yeah, so I hope that was .
I'm not sure if this is for Mikko or yourself, but the business agreement with Nikon is primarily, I think, as I understand it, it's primarily a U.S. thing or a North American deal. Can you elaborate a little bit on your future expectancy of that agreement and what it might lead to in a few years' term, or, and if it's something that might grow to other regions and so forth? Thank you.
Yeah. Yes, we start in the US market, but of course, Nikon is operating globally, and we do some things with them in Europe also. The US market is where they are more active in these kind of applications where our products are used. The very nice thing about that is that they saw our microscope that is based on the Nikon optics as a new version of their own product, in a sense. They had the older product for that application segment, and when they saw that we had something newer, they were taking that in as a way to serve their customer segment better with this bundled offering.
So I think that is very important because usually the companies don't like to provide the other manufacturer's products, and the salesmen want to sell their own products, but this is truly like a cooperation package in that perspective. Yeah, we, we think there's a good chance that we can expand from U.S. to the other market areas, but the big companies sometimes are a bit conservative, how fast they roll out the other countries, but the U.S. is the biggest market for them, and thus it's a good, good showcase for that, that also in that sense. Big companies also have, you know, it takes a bit more time to get things to the, to the field, in a sense, but we are now active in their, their sales systems. Their salesmen are presenting our products to customers now.
So I think during the rest of the year, we start to get some results, like the first WAVE results from this cooperation with the U.S. because they are now active, active on the field there. Now, for the business numbers, these are something that are a bit harder to estimate, but, they have 200 salesmen in Americas. We have one in Oulu, so we do expect that they can cover much bigger customer base than we can. It is a good size market in general for these kind of special microscopes, so much bigger than our current business in total. So I think it might take a bit time to get there, to do the penetration, but even in the early phases, it should be a significant addition to our, our sales volumes.
The other very important milestone that we are now just about to reach is that they are also integrating control of our devices to their microscope software. What that means is that all the other companies who use Nikon-based systems can then use our devices with it if they use their software. This integration is ongoing and will be launched in a month from now. I think this makes it possible that we can offer not just the full solution to their customers, but also parts of that for example, just the sample stages , because it's then integrated in their software. It works for their distributors and partners in a much better way or easier way.
I think this is another thing that we are waiting, that we can now finish, and it allows, like, the wider rollout of their full portfolio.
It's important that it's not an exclusive agreement. So, therefore, we're hoping it will work, but we're not dependent on it.
Yeah. I will take a few more questions here, and then I will let you go. I had a question about the EBITDA margin, why it's increasing, and the one asking the question really answered it himself. It's about us, us, changing our cost structure. Mostly it's about pushing out consultants and moving in where we see a long-term need of resources, hiring instead. And in some cases, it's also about changing the type of resources we have in-house to more, more hands-on that doesn't drive consultant costs. So I would say that those are the biggest, biggest reasons. And then I have final questions about the news, the investments in production in Uppsala.
We had a lot of scrap last year, and the new ceramic line that shall take care of this, it will be installed now in November, and I think it will be up and running early Q2, April. W e haven't seen that much scrap the past six to nine months now, six months. It's looking better, but it will be good to have the new equipment in place.
Regarding the patent portfolio, since there is a revenue stream from Physik Instrumente in Germany, as far as I know is there any other actions happening in terms of the patent portfolio, in both in terms of risk that patents run out or in terms of new revenue streams that is not tapped yet?
Good question. Many of our patent, the basic ones, around the LEGS technology in Uppsala and around the old WAVE, all the old technology, they are running out now and will run out 2025-2026. In many ways, we haven't patented part of kind of the process of producing is not patented, and that has been by intention because those recipes are really critical to get a stable product. We are now filing patents in different areas, and most of the areas are around applications we see for the new platform. We have, if I remember correctly, 3-5 patents pending or just approved in those areas. We are filing new ones.
But it's hard to say what it will generate in the end in revenue streams, but at least we are protecting those applications.
Just to follow up on that, so but is there a strategy to build a new revenue stream of the patents, like, you know, selling the idea?
It's not a strategy we have, but it depends on the situation. So we're not actively working to get patent. It's not our business to have it. And if I could choose, I mean, it's good to have, but in a way, you prefer to protect what you have and sell products. That's really our key core business, not patents. So no more questions here, and we made it in about an hour. So thank you for good questions, and thank you for listening. And Mick and I will stay if you have any questions over coffee or so.
Great. Thank you very much. Thank you, Andrew and Alejandro, if you are still there. Very nice you could join.
Thank you very much. Bye-bye now.