Thank you very much. Welcome everyone to our Q4 meeting. I'm here alone today. Our dear CFO is in bed with the flu. I hope I can answer any questions still. I would like to start just with an overview of our operation. When we have got the 2016 numbers together, we see that we have been in 107 countries with business during 2016. Our revenue has increased over SEK 11 billion and the employees is somewhere 9,100+. If we look closer into our business overview, if we see our business operations, power generation today represents 15% of our revenue. You can compare that with 19% last year, or 2015, and 40% if we go back 5, 6 years in time. I think this is good that ÅF is less and less dependent on the very tough power generation market.
For automotive, we've had a slight increase, which represents today 16% of our revenue. Rail & Road also growing to 21%. During 2016, we have seen an increase from 15%-18% of our revenue is in real estate, which is a profitable and very stable business over business cycles during the last 16 years at least. We're happy for that. We're also happy for life science to slightly increase its market share of our business as well. This also comes through in our largest client list, where it looks more or less the same as last year, except that E.ON is no longer on the list and replaced by General Electric, which is mainly medical business. All in all today, infrastructure represents 40% of our business, and industry 45%, and power 15%.
Infrastructure is our fastest growing business, and industry is still the largest part of our revenue. When it comes to countries, we have grown significantly in Norway during 2016, having a 40% growth last year, and last quarter the growth rate was even higher than that. The other countries is on the same position as last year, and just to mention, Czech Republic, 1%, it's about 250 employees there. Our mission is we are an engineering and consulting company for these three markets. You could say 80% of ÅF's business is engineering and 20% is consulting. We claim that we have a unique range of technologies, that really this unique range of technologies is our tool to get our clients more profitable, innovative, and sustainable. This wide range of technologies is getting more and more important for the customer solutions we deliver.
We are a company which is totally independent from any other interest than our own and the client. We are for sure having products in our solutions. We are absolutely independent from all suppliers, and we always choose the solution that we believe is the most profitable for the client. We could have short-term wins in profit if we represented a certain vendor. Since we're selling trust, we believe strongly that this is the best long-term profitable strategy to be independent. Teamwork is the way for us to gather this large pool of experience so that every individual in ÅF has access to the complete pool of experience. We believe very much in great people, both when it comes to leaders and when it comes to employees.
In fact, people is our strategy, and I used to say that if I have to choose between a great strategy and great people, I choose great people. We believe we have a great strategy as well. The vision statement is representing our long-term strategy for our clients. We want really to develop partnerships. Partnerships requires trust requires long time together, and this is a way to make our clients more profitable, and that gives us, ourselves, an opportunity to be more profitable. We have an ambitious goal again for 2020 to get our business up to €2 billion. To have the best-in-class profitability, and to have a sound balance sheet. When it comes to our growth target, if we look on 2016, we have grown 12.4% during 2016. We have a growth target of 13%.
If we look forward for the coming four years, we need to continue to have an annual growth rate of 13% if we use the FX rate, €1 is equal to SEK 9. The acquisitions we made during 2016 secured a good growth from the acquisitions we made. If we do no more acquisitions, we need an organic growth of around 4% to be online with the target for 2020. We don't know if we're best in class with our peer companies for this quarter, but we've certainly been during the quarters that have passed. However, we haven't reached 10% over a business cycle. We're happy to see that the profit margin increases during 2016, but we are not on the 10% target yet. If we look into the strategy, we want to become number 1 or number 2 in each market we act.
This is something we have continued to work on. We have grown our presence in countries where we already are present, in Norway, in Switzerland, in Denmark. We have added China during the year 2016 for the automotive niche segment. I can't say we have an ambition to be the number 1 or number 2 engineering company in China, but we do have an ambition to be a leading player in certain niches, including parts of automotive design. Growth targets remain, profitability targets remain. If we take a look into our market situation, we have the long-term trends, and I think all of you have heard me talked about the importance of these trends and how globalization is forcing us to be more and more productive and efficient in our operation, but also that we can reach out easier with many of our solutions.
Digitalization is a strong force for productivity increase, and I would say that where ÅF has come the farthest in digital solutions is within Industry 4.0. We have, during Q4, but also the whole year, made significant productivity increases in production lines in Sweden and international with digital technology. Urbanization and sustainability drives our infrastructure business, and the fact that our client is moving forward in the value chain means more outsourcing to companies like ÅF. But we also see that ÅF itself could do more for our clients in aftermarket and also in early phases. If we look at the short-term or the current market view, I think it's the first time for quite some time that we have a slightly more positive market outlook. It's for sure still a bit uncertain, but we are slightly more positive overall.
Automotive, pharma, pulp remain strong, but we also see in other businesses that we have more requests, and we see more investments coming through. Infrastructure remains very strong. Energy market remains weak, although we press release a new order for us with Fortum in Lithuania which is a new power plant to be built there, and we have hoped of actually some more power plants coming in during first half-year. Embedded systems, digital solutions, not only remain strong as it says here, but it's actually getting stronger for every quarter, I would say. It's our best Q4 ever. We have a profit excluding items affecting comparability. I'm a little bit unhappy with this line, we have to state it. It's very small money.
It's SEK 1.5 million for the whole year, it is about IFRS and how we value the earn out payments for companies that already have been acquired. Nevertheless, a good growth in profit, almost 16%. We believe that all divisions did a good quarter. Infrastructure, of course, standing out with a very strong growth, and technology with a strong organic growth. All in all, the growth in sales were 15.5%. The organic growth is, of course, suffering from the negative growth in the international division, the organic growth has picked up during the year, and I'm coming back to that. We take a closer look into industry.
We have gone through the overall market picture, I didn't mention that although nuclear, oil, gas, and mining is still a weak market, we see signs of stabilization in nuclear, very much thanks to the political agreement that was made in the Swedish parliament regarding the nuclear power plant's investments for lifetime extension. We started the year with more or less a complete freeze in investments in the nuclear power plants in Sweden, that has been a not insignificant part of our revenue and profits during previous years. Also in mine and steel industry, we see a little bit more of activity. The project portfolio, our turnkey project portfolio, is growing, we see more and more demand for turnkey solutions.
We are selective when it comes to which kind of turnkey projects we accept, we see an increasing demand, and we see an increasing order backlog in ÅF industry, which drives the profit. If we compare this quarter to last quarter, previous quarter, or the same quarter previous year, we have a better profit, the same profitability. Over the year, we have increased both profitability and profit. Q4 is always challenging. This year, we had four working days between Christmas and New Year, which affected the Swedish business with a lower attendance rate than normal. The organic growth, which was negative in the beginning one year ago for industry, is now up to 4.1%. Of course, we have higher ambitions than that, I'm very happy to see a positive trend here.
We have also strengthened the division with the acquisition of Reinertsen in Sweden, which is oil and gas upstream, it's refineries and other process industries. We believe that there is a lot of competence in this company, and we believe it was a good transaction itself. If we move over to our infrastructure division, we have a slight increase in profitability for the quarter. For the year, we are a little bit lower profitability than the previous year, but profit going up substantially as does growth. We had a growth rate of 27% in the quarter. We had an organic growth of 5.3% for the quarter. For the year, I think the number was 7.8% for infrastructure. Strong market. The profit margin has been affected negatively by the very fast expansion in Norway.
We believe, however, that this is a very sound investment, and we think the Norwegian market is very interesting when it comes to land-based infrastructure the years to come. We've started this year, as you know, with an acquisition of Midtconsult in Denmark, which we think will be a good platform for growth in the real estate area and construction area in Denmark. International division Again, for those of you who have followed ÅF, we typically have a better quarter in Q4 than other quarters. We have a weak market in Europe, but also in Latin America and actually in Middle East. The demand in Southeast Asia and Africa continue to increase.
I think the most important that has happened during the quarter and also during the year, first, if we take a look on the quarter, we have acquired a company within renewable energy in Spain, ARIES Ingeniería y Sistemas, which are very capable and competent when it comes to solar energy solutions. Edy Toscano AG is an infrastructure company based in all regions of Switzerland, which is quite uncommon for infrastructure companies. We're represented in the whole country with three languages and so on. A very profitable and sound business there where we see synergies both with the Swiss hydro business operations, but also actually with our Canadian infrastructure business. We have today two Swiss companies involved in Swedish infrastructure projects. As you know, the year was affected negatively by the nuclear project in Brazil. This is still free. We have made provisions for possible costs that we can foresee.
We also have signs on that this project will be restarted during the first half 2017. I want to stress, however, that it would be very good if this project starts. If this doesn't start, we're not dependent on these projects, and we've taken the cost for this project. We look into our technology division, that like industry and infrastructure, had a calendar-wide tough December, but have achieved an organic growth rate of 7% during the quarter and have had a stable and good organic growth the whole year. Best, however, is that profitability has also steadily increased. The Q4 again was affected a bit by calendar, but over the year, this is the division that has improved the most during 2016.
I think it's strategically very important for ÅF to have the technology division that feeds IT and digital knowledge into the solutions within energy, infrastructure, and industry. It's also majority of the revenue it's remained in the technology division itself. But I think the technology division will become more and more important for ÅF coming forward. All in all, summary Q4, profit up 16%, sales up 15%, market looked a little bit better than one year ago, and we have strengthened our position in our home countries in accordance with our strategy. If we take a look at the full year picture, we have increased sales with 12+%. We have increased our profit even more, and our profitability has increased from 8.4% to 8.7% EBIT margin.
Maybe the most important that has happened during 2016 is that we were again ranked as one of the top employer among young professionals with a Master of Science degree in engineering. We're very proud of this and because the need for engineers is getting higher and higher, and the competition among the best people is tougher and tougher. This was what I want to say about ÅF Q4, and I'm happy to answer any questions. Thank you.
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Thank you. Hi, Jonas. It seems you're fairly optimistic about the growth prospects in the infrastructure business, and we can definitely understand that. When I'm doing my number crunching in the model, you mentioned 5% organic growth. If I recall correctly, you include FX changes in that. If I remove the FX effect, you're down to just above 2% organic growth in Q4. Can you comment on this, if that is correct? Also should we then expect this level to pick up in 2017 given the outlook that you now see?
Well, I wish I had my CFO right beside me now. My impression is that the FX effect has been 1% in Q4, just 1%, and over the year, less than that.
Okay. Is that specifically Sorry.
No, I don't recognize that number, to be honest.
Okay.
Thank you.
Because I was doing the number on infrastructure rather than on group level, and I guess you have a bigger portion of infrastructure than group in Norway, which is the big driver.
That's for sure. Maybe I should try to wake up from my bed.
We can take that back later.
The FX effects have been minimal overall. The Norwegian crown or the Swedish crown has, of course, come down here a bit during the year. I would say before your question that this year is the year with very low FX effects, including Q4, 1%. That number I know.
Yep. Okay. A question regarding to your high M&A activity now in Q4 and also continuing in 2017. Integrating these companies, has that been a cost that you have not really disclosed, or have you lost some momentum? Can you comment on that you have some hidden costs in the divisions that have been incurred, but you don't quantify that?
We commented that our fast growth in Norway has taken down our profitability. That is true, and I'm not sure it's so much-- It's partly integration costs. You can call it integration costs, but we have had some challenges with projects that were taken over from Rejlers. There were some projects that we didn't take over, and as you know, we also had at least taken provision for a credit loss due to the problems that the seller, Rejlers, currently is into.
Now I'm trying to answer your questions. I'm looking here in the documents. For your previous questions, we think that the FX effect for Q4 infra was 1.5% in Q4.
Okay. I think that's clear. Thank you, Jonas. I'll get back in line.
The Norwegian business, we have more to do there to get it up to the same profitability level as we have elsewhere.
Okay, understood. Thank you.
Thank you.
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I'm happy to realize that my presentation was very clear. We do not have any more questions?
No, sir. No further questions on the telephone.
I want to thank everyone for your attention and wish you all a great weekend. Thank you from Malmö