Welcome to Alleima's Capital Markets Day 2023. Thank you all for joining us here in Stockholm today, and thank you for watching the event online. We will start shortly, but first, a few housekeeping items. We are broadcasting this live today, so therefore, all of you in here will be filmed, but only from behind. So at Alleima, we always put safety first, and for those of you in this room today, you have emergency exit to your left, at the back and here in front. And for those of you who are watching online, I trust that you are safe now, and that you know the safety routines of where you are located.
We have a full schedule today, and you will hear our CEO, Göran Björkman, and our CFO, Olof Bengtsson, talking about our performance, and also present some strategic focus areas, some key achievements, and also our ambitions going forward. We will also do a deep dive on the Kanthal division, presented by our President of Kanthal, Robert Stål, and then we will have a Q&A session. And if you like to ask a question live, you can dial in on the telephone number that you can find on alleima.com, and you can also write questions in the field beside the webcast. So now, let's start with a recap on who we are and what we do.
We have made a promise to always look towards the future and be a leading force in the world of advanced stainless steel and special alloys. There's not one sector that wouldn't benefit from more advanced materials. Across the globe, we work hand in hand with customers to move industries and societies forward. Our innovations pave the way for industry-wide breakthroughs. All manufacturing industries have the need for more advanced materials, even in the most delicately engineered life-supporting detail. We enable technology and make applications safer, more efficient, and sustainable. At any given moment, we're right there, where quality is essential.
So I'm now here with our CEO, Göran Björkman, and it's been a little bit more than a year since we were listed, and we hosted our first Capital Markets Day in Sandviken in August last year. Now, today, we would like to clarify some of our ambitions and dig deeper into our strategy. Please, go ahead.
Thank you, Emelie. Also, a warm welcome from my side. As Emelie said, it's a little bit more than one year since we had our first CMD. Time flies. If I look back on this time, I'm pleased with our operational improvements. I think we've been doing well. Today, main focus will be on sort of answering some of the questions we received during this year, fill in some information gaps, and mainly focus on how we will grow this company, and from that point of view, what are our priorities also from a capital allocation point of view. That is sort of the main focus, and as Emelie said, also, deep dive into Kanthal. But let's start with some basics. Look at us. We are really a niche player.
We have a premium offering, and we do that in advanced alloys, high added value products. We have a fully integrated value chain. That's really important if you want to be the technology leader, and if you're good, technology leadership comes with price leadership. And I think we really improved our financial foundation. If we look ahead, we have a lot of good growth opportunities. We'll come back to that, but looking at the global megatrends, many of those are giving us good tailwind. We'll also show how we're gonna grow. Of course, a lot of that will be focused on organic growth, both through our strong R&D, but we also need to do capacity expansion investments, and on top of that, we will continue to do acquisitions.
If I look at our financial position, we have a strong balance sheet, good cash generative company, debt-free, and I think there's a lot of value-creating opportunities looking into our financial strength, and we have clear actions to do this value creation growth. Let's start with really the basics. I think we talked about this before. We are, from a volume point of view, a really, really small part of the total steel industry, where we do the advanced stainless steel. We're also in the special alloys business, and we are in the medical wire business, which are over even more niche. We are in the sort of products and subproducts for industrial heating when it comes to electrical heating.
Also niche, and we look at that business itself, there's a nice interesting conversion going from fossil fuel furnaces to electrical furnaces. So I think, we're really small in volume when it comes to a total, but in the niches we want to operate, we want to have a leading position. I think that's typically Alleima. And sometimes I'm asked if we are, "Are you a capital goods company or are you a steel company?" I think that question is, it is a little bit difficult to answer. Either we are in between or both. I would say that we are a product company. Most of our products are engineered for very specific customer applications, but of course, they are made of steel, or other advanced materials, and we have an integrated, integrated value chain. So that is more steel.
I think our products are more, maybe more capital goods. So that was not a very clear answer on that question today as well, but at least you've, I gave myself the chance to think out loud. So to our segment exposure, we are, the way we define it, in 10 different segments. I think this is the strength of Alleima, the wide exposure. And, I mean, look at the current business environment we are in right now. What we reported in Quarter 3, also in Quarter 2, of course, we also see a general business sort of development becoming softer, and we see that in a number of our segments, consumer. We also see it in our industrial segment. But while others are continued strong, and especially the ones that are supported by global trends.
So we just quickly go through our segments. Our industrial segment, that is the largest. That is where we have most of our contribution business. So of course, if we look ahead, that is the segment with the lowest growth ambitions. Oil and gas, big segment for us, we have a clearly leading position through our umbilical and also improving the position in our OCTG tubing. This is still a very important segment, but I have to say, we are less dependent on this business today than we used to be before. Not that it's not as good as before, but we have improved a lot of the others, so we're not sort of as dependent on the oil and gas business as we were before. Chemical and petrochemical, big segment, very important.
A lot of opportunities connected to investments in the chemical and petrochemical, not least in Asia. I will come back on that. Industrial heating, electrical heating for industries. A lot of different kind of industries do different kind of heat treatments. Still, as you saw on the previous slide, maybe 70% of the world's furnaces are fossil fuel, so good potential to move that to electrical heating. And there we have the global market leader within Kanthal. Consumer strip is a lot in the consumer segment. Compressor steel, you saw that on the movie. Knife steel, shaving. Nuclear, interesting. We used to call this, what do we call it? Power generation, but it used to be both nuclear and coal, and I think we stepped out of the coal business, so it's.
We're sort of renaming this to nuclear. Next time we're having this kind of session, I guess I will talk even more about nuclear. We see a lot of positive things happening in nuclear, but the lead times are pretty long. Mining & Construction , that is the rock drill steel. It's the product that connects the drill rig with the tool, so this is mainly an OpEx business. Transportation, automotive, marine, and mainly aerospace. Medical, all three divisions are in medical, but I think the largest and the most fast-growing part is medical wire in the Kanthal division. And then hydrogen and renewable, still a small segment, very nice growth opportunities, and also a lot of interesting materials challenges, where I think we can play a leading role.
Of course, as I said, we are in small niches, but we are big in the niches, and of course, we want to have a leading position with our products. Just to name a few applications. Industrial heating solutions, you can see the cassette, you can see different heating elements. Medical wire, a lot of that is for sensing and monitoring body function, you can say. Umbilical tubing, the oil and gas product for offshore oil and gas business. Steam generator tubing, the heat exchanger that creates the steam in a nuclear reactor. And then titanium tubing for aerospace. In all these cases, very good positions. So what makes our offering world-class? I think it's based on that we. It's on premium products.
It's both on the material itself, and that is so important to have the integrated value chain, that we have a strong solid metallurgy and a lot of processing on top of that. Advanced materials, both in stainless, titanium, zirconium, materials for industrial heating. And the products are premium. We, we don't compete sort of with, with, with standard products. So it's premium products, that's, that is what we are based on. And of course, that comes with strong R&D, that we invest in R&D. And R&D is not only about inventing the next material, which is, of course, also important. It's also to work close with your customers, understand the customer's challenges, and how we can support them to make the right choices.
And of course, with that comes a lot of good customer relationships. And I look at sort of what makes us selling our products, very often our product into the customer application is a small part of the total cost. So price is not why they buy our, our products; it's the quality and product performance. Of course, also service and technical support, and technical support is what I just said, how we work close with the customer, understand their processes, applications to help them, and of course, delivery performance. Lead times and delivery precision is always important. So if you look at our integrated value chain, I think one thing is important, based on very strong metallurgy competence. That is the basis of our materials knowledge.
But the more we refine the product, the more added value we have, so the better the margins are. So we have a strong own metallurgy, primary rolling and forging. We have hot working in extrusion, and then cold working and finishing operation on a global footprint, and also sales, an own sales organization, that is also global. And all along the way, R&D interaction and long-term customer relations. So we look at this, and we look at it little bit more in detail and, sort of understand why we sometimes need to have a contribution business. This is still an illustrative and simplified picture, but what you can see here is the starting with the primary melting, then we have intermediate hot working, and then cold finishing.
As I said, the main sort of high margins we have, when we have produced them through the whole value chain, but we sell products all along our value chain. We use, we need this contribution business to keep high scale and high utilization, especially in our back-end system. But of course, to manage this, I would say, puzzle, and to optimize the mix, both strategically, which we're going to show a little bit more today, but also operationally. Every time you need to know: Should I book this order? How is the backlog looking? What's the gross profit in my backlog? Should I book or not book the order? That's a very important part of how you run a company like us.
And to show you something, that illustrates that or proves that, is I think we've had a very solid financial development, during the last couple of years. We are growing the company, we are increasing our revenue, we also growing our adjusted EBIT, both in total and increase in margins. We are, as I said before, we are a cash-generative company. Of course, last year, 2022, was a little bit tough due to metal prices, and that comes back this year. So over time, we have a good cash conversion in the company. Net working capital, I think this is still a part where there is an improvement potential. Olof going to show more about that later.
The high numbers today has a lot to do with metal price and especially the currency impact on metal prices, because we buy all raw material in U.S. dollars. Our strategy is based on four pillars. It's based on profitable growth, it's based on materials innovation and technology leadership, operation and commercial excellence, and industry-leading sustainability. And sustainability, that is integrated totally into the strategy. It's impacts all parts of our operation, but it's also, and I said this many, many times, I think the largest impact we can do in sustainability is through our products, where we can support our customer to make their processes, their applications, and products even more sustainable.
So we have today a low CO2 footprint, but if you look at steel global steel industry represents roughly 7% of the globe's total CO2 emissions, but that comes mainly from blast furnaces. Blast furnace, that's where you add a lot of coal to make the iron ore into iron in that process. That we don't have. We are based on re-melting scrap, so we have a high level of recycling. We run most of our operations with fossil-free electricity, and we don't run blast furnaces. We run electric arc furnaces, so our CO2 footprint is very low, but still, we have the ambition to improve that. So the ambition is to reduce that by 50% until 2030, with the base year 2019.
Looking at us, since we are running electric arc furnace, most of that potential is not coming from the steel making itself. It comes from our downstream activities in our own heat treatments. Also, as I said, on a high level of circularity. As I said, the most important part for us is to support our customers to become more sustainable. I think that is illustrated by the next film.
The butterfly effect is the idea of how the world is deeply interconnected, how a small occurrence on one side of the planet influences the other. That's why we search for sustainable solutions in everything we do. It's a thrilling notion that our advanced steels and alloys help reduce other companies' carbon footprints. That unique solutions from Alleima have a positive impact on the planet.
If you look in the bags that you received, there is actually a butterfly in each of them, as a giveaway from us. And if you're a collector, we have 900 ways to do it, so it's 900 versions of butterflies. If you're a collector, you have the number one today. That was a lie, sorry. So, the important part is to look at how we can support, and of course, this comes with good growth opportunities. So let's mention a few. Hydrogen. Hydrogen, multiple use. Hydrogen is used in renewable sources, where you need to store energy when you have a good output from, for instance, windmills or solar mills. It's also connected to the electrification of, for instance, automotive through fuel cell technology.
And more and more, businesses and industries are also using hydrogen as a fuel, and with that comes an extra need of green hydrogen. Energy transition, different kinds of renewable energy, solar, wind, biofuel, et cetera. Also, carbon capture, I will come back to that interesting business. And then the electrification of industry, which is the home turf of Kanthal. Instead of running heat treatment processes based on natural gas or propane, you can have electrical furnace. We also do life-changing innovations with our medical business, supporting people to have both a better and actually also a longer life. I will now go through some of our clear building blocks for continued value creation. And of course, I will start with profitable growth. So we zoom in on our priorities for growing Alleima. I'll start with four segments.
We want to continue to grow industrial heating, and why is that? Of course, we have a very strong position, and it's a clear trend in industries they want to electrify. Also, accelerate the medical business growth. I think if we look back, you're gonna see a graph on that in a few minutes. We've really increased the medical business, and that we have the intention to continue to do, both based on it's a strong market, and also we have a very strong position through our products. We want to continue to strengthen the chemical and petrochemical industry and our business. This is very much based on.
If I look back what we've done last four, five, six years, when we have taken a more regional approach to this business, securing that we have the high-premium products also produced locally, that is really giving us growth and growth at good profit levels. So that we intend to do and to keep on doing. And then we have hydrogen and renewable energy. It's a lot of interesting opportunities. It's a lot of, you might not think so, but there's a lot of materials challenges within this area, and this is where we really can play a role because that's our what we are so good at. But then, of course, it's also other parts of the business that are important, but they will not be prioritized from a capital allocation point of view.
Of course, we should maintain our leadership in oil and gas, not through the huge CapEx investments, but, for instance, we focus a lot of R&D, and we have the next umbilical grade already available. Also, in other segments, as I said before, I think nuclear has a nice future, but once again, a little bit longer lead times. And of course, manage our contribution business. I think also our contribution business, sometimes I get the question, "Okay, so you're on. You say you're gonna grow. How come? How much do you need to invest in steel plants, et cetera, to be able to do this growth?" This is where we have our largest capacity potential. This is still a rather big part of our sales. In numbers, 20-25%; in volume, even more.
So to reduce the contribution business and instead grow the high-margin business, is, of course, a way to utilize our capacity in a more clever way. So when we look at capital allocation priorities, we do it from four different perspectives. We look at it from market attractiveness, and that is market size and market growth, and we compare that to our market position. So that is one. The second, of course, we look at profit. We look at profitability margins, and we look at the total profit as well, of course. We also look at capital efficiency, and we do that from two perspectives, from the working capital and also invested capital.
So for instance, if I, if I need to grow my business with SEK 100 million, how much more working capital do I need, and how much do I need to invest to be able to do that? And the last is resilience. We look at the cyclicality. We look at both in orders and in revenue, because some of the, our businesses looks pretty cyclical when look it from an order point of view, but the way we play it, growing backlog in good times, consuming backlog in, in sort of more poor times, that's the way to reduce the volatility. On this slide, you show, we show the four segments, the targeted segments, according to two of these perspective: growth opportunities and profitability.
Obviously, they are better than average, both from a growth, sort of opportunity point of view, and also from a profitability point of view. And if I add all four perspectives: growth, profit level, capital efficiency, and resilience, you can see that when we grow these targeted segments faster than the average, we will improve profit level, we will improve capital efficiency, and we will reduce cyclicality in our total business. So let's look at our market, how we expect the market to grow. We expect our total market to grow around 7%. This is an updated number. I think last time we showed this, it was around 5%. That is mainly due to higher inflation. Roughly 50/50 of the 7% on price and volume.
If we look at this a little bit more careful, you can see that the targeted segments have, on average, a higher growth than most of the other segments. Of course, that comes with studying the growth potential. In some of the segments, we have less growth ambitions, industrial for instance. I mean, we expect industry to grow 6%. We're quite hesitant to drive a lot of growth in this part. There is some mix improvements that we could do, but we don't want to grow volumes in this area. Then it becomes interesting. We point out a number of segments which are the targeted growth, and this is also where we're gonna do our capital allocation. These are the segments that are gonna have majority of our CapEx investments.
It's also here we're gonna focus our M&A. And that's what's gonna happen. So today, roughly one-third of our business is within these targeted segments: industrial heating, medical, chemical and petrochemical, and Hydrogen and renewable. When we deliver on our growth ambitions, and of course, estimate how we're gonna do in all other segments, because the bar 2030 will be higher, the total will, of course, also be higher. We can see that we will grow this target segment faster than the other, move it from one-third to roughly 45% in 2030. We also want to stay in leading positions in what we call the other, more the core business, oil and gas, nuclear, aerospace, et cetera. But as you can see, the industrial part will be quite smaller going forward.
So more with the targeted and less of the industrial. This, of course, gives improvement to our total financial position then. One thing is cyclicality. This is, this is a simplified, it's an illustrative picture, but if you look, what is it, on to, to your left, you can see the group average on, on, revenue cyclicality. But look at the industrial segment, part that we will grow less than, than total. Quite volatile. Of course, this is short cycle, pretty price-sensitive business. I mean, you can see a drop in 2021. Of course, this comes with the oil and gas, and oil and gas is pretty cyclical. So if we move forward and grow more in, in the four targeted segments, look at medical, for instance. I mean, just growing, no downturns.
Look at industrial heating, also lower, volatility than today's group average. Of course, this, over time, will reduce the cyclicality in our total business. But it also unlocks, of course, potential for margin improvements. I mean, if there is one question I expect today is, okay, you have a, a, EBIT target of 9%, you're pacing, but isn't that unambitious? Looking back, looking back, that is not unambitious because we've never been on those levels. But I think we're doing good now, and of course, when we, when we develop the company, as I'm showing, EBIT levels will go up. First of all, continuously improving mix in all parts. Mix optimization, to be good at that is, as I said many times, crucial in, in our entire industry. Drive operation, commercial excellence, efficiency, secure price leadership.
Then when we grow the total company, I mean, that, that always brings leverage, and we say roughly around 20-25%, which of course improves margin. And then on top on that, with these four segments, with higher margin in total, this will bring up our earnings, this will bring up our EBIT margin. So how will we grow then? Growth will mainly be organic. That is sort of the DNA of Alleima. I mean, if I need to point out one thing, it's the materials knowledge we have in the company, both from a recipe point of view and from a production technology point of view. Of course, that's still the basis of our future work with business development, work with R&D, develop new products, work with the customers to help them do the right choices.
But we also see that in some, especially in our downstream activities, we start to need more capacities. We are doing growth investments. Come back to that. There are several that we are planning and also executing right now. And on top on that, do M&A. And as I said before, M&A, where it makes sense, where we can see real synergies. Adding something we cannot add, or to take too long time to add organically. Capabilities, product assortment, geographical position. So if I look back, we have done quite a few things, if I go back to 2018. We have done 8 acquisitions, and we've done some capacity increases. If I should do this really fast to mention what we've done in all of them.
I mean, we did 2018, Custom Electric, industrial heating in U.S. The reason why we did it was to improve our market potential in North America. We did Thermaltek in 2019, same as for Custom Electric, improve our market position in North American industrial heating, but on top of that, adding some products that we've made us more relevant to some of our key customers. Summerill, that is a Tube acquisition focusing aerospace. We have a very strong position in titanium tube, and we also see potential to improve our position in stainless tubes for the aerospace hydraulic business. It takes a very long time to certify, to qualify. This company had all its certificates. It was like you were to buy a driving license for that business, which speeds up our growth.
Pexco is a special one. Pexco is our extrusion plant on the existing tube site in Scranton, Pennsylvania. That has been a 70-30 joint venture. We had 70, one of our big competitors had the other 30%, and now we, we bought them out, and we are the, we are the 100% owner. The main reason for that, I say we were a little bit hindered to, to improve Pexco from a product portfolio point of view, because we had one of the main competitors looking over our shoulders, and we wanted, we didn't want to, show them how to do, and we were also, we had to, send those material to them, and we didn't want to do that. So that's the reason for the Pexco also reducing inventory. I think all of the thing we already.
With the cash we generated, with the inventory reduction, already paid for that acquisition. Gerling, Germany, that is in the hydrogen refueling, buying an engineering company that could do things without tubes, where we can do ourselves. It's a bit forward integration, especially into the hydrogen refueling station business. Endosmart, medical wire business. So why did we do that? Strengthening the geographic position in Europe and also adding nitinol to the product portfolio. I see that I forgot Accuratech in Switzerland. Also there, medical wire, improving the footprint in Europe, and we added plating capability, something we didn't have in the group. And this year we acquired the Söderfors. We have, for quite a long time, been looking for small-sized bar.
It's an interesting business, both in medical and in aerospace. We looked at it from a CapEx, because, of course, we could invest, that would be very expensive. Through the acquisition, we managed sort of to buy a factory at pretty low price, and now we want to run our own products there. So with that, it comes to our M&A agenda. I think one can expect roughly, going forward, what we have done. Few acquisitions per year, targeting these segments, and I think the main target is in medical. That is number one, but also in industrial heating and in hydrogen renewable. And as I said, now, I think this is the third time, we want to make acquisition where we have really tangible synergies, giving us new capabilities, giving us new products, or giving us new geographical position.
Going forward, I think if I look at that, Olof will come back at that. If I look at our financial position, we could speed up, we could do more acquisitions than we have done. If we find the right targets, we will not hesitate from doing that, but the most important part is to find the right targets. We're also doing now CapEx, CapEx investments also for growth, and there is a number here that is shown on this slide. To mention a few, if I look in chemical and petrochemical, I mean, in India, we started up a small-sized tube line in the spring. I'm gonna go there next week to inaugurate the heat exchanger line at that factory.
We just communicated about that we're gonna build a new factory on the existing tube site in China, and that is for I mean, we need more capacity for the nice growth we have there. And then at the same time, we're adding some capabilities and sizes and also capability to do hydrogen tubes in China. The Pexco acquisition is very important to be able to grow the high premium portfolio also in North America, and on top on that, we're adding some cold working capacity also in US. Medical continuously do medical CapEx. We never communicate them because it's honestly very cheap to do investments there. So we continuously do investments to speed up our organic growth, especially in medical wire.
In industrial heating, during these two last quarters, we've taken two decisions. One is that we are expanding capacity in Walldorf, Germany, to support the growth of process gas heaters and also some other kind of elements. And we also now, and that is new today, we will increase silicon carbide capacity because that's a fast-growing product part and very profitable within the Kanthal group. So if we look into that a little bit more carefully, silicon carbide elements are in the high temperature range. It is supported by growth in lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles, also in electronic semiconductor. Today, that's a single-site operation. We have to do that only in Perth, in Scotland, so we are now investing to expand the capacity in Perth.
But at the same time, we are also, also adding some finishing capacity in U.S., like a service center, because sometimes lead times is an important selling point, and this will make us more relevant on the American market. It's an investment on roughly SEK 100 million, will be done now during 2024 and 2025, and will be fully operational in 2026. And this will increase the total capacity of a silicon carbide elements by some 40%. Also, business development and R&D is important. As I said, now, that's sort of the DNA of Alleima, to work with new materials, new, new way of processing. This is an illustrative picture, and it shows where we have most of our priorities, and of course, most of our priorities are in the targeted segments.
But that said, some of the materials, of course, could be used. If you develop something from one segment, it can sometimes also be used in another one. I mean, the ambition and the goal is to just with new materials and new products, increase our sales up into 2030 with more than SEK 2 billion. To name a few, I mean, industrial heating, numerous of applications where we develop new, new, new, new products. One interesting area where we put quite a lot of efforts, and I think Robert will come back on that, and that is on industries with really high power need that also want to be electrified. This is the steel industry, cement industry, petrochemical industry.
Medical continuously a lot of R&D into the medical wire, and of course, with the acquisition of Söderfors, we're now sort of building our own products within small-sized bar that also comes for the aerospace part. Hydrogen and renewable , many new products in both into HRS, meaning hydrogen refueling stations. Also, new surface requirements or surface opportunities when it comes to coated strip steel, which we do for the fuel cells, but we also look at opportunities within electrolyzers. High nickel grades, that's for many kind of segments, not least in chemical and petrochemical. Duplex grades, that is sort of really something about our region. One interesting example, I mean, umbilical being one of our really important products.
At some point, probably because one needs to go to deeper wells, the pressure in these tubes will be higher, and with the existing alloy, it's been there for plus 30 years. It will be extremely difficult to weld that, so it's really not possible. So you need a grade development, and we already have done that. We have that grade available. It's done, it's patented, and we're just waiting for the industry, the offshore industry to go deeper. Now, my intention is to go through each and one of these four targeted segments. I will do it a little bit more shortly on industrial heating and medical, not to spoil Robert's presentation on Kanthal. But let's do them one by one, and I start with chemical and petrochemical.
If we look at that and look at the underlying demands, we can look at urea. Urea, of course, agriculture and sort of the globe will need more food because we are more on the globe. Strong increase, especially in Asia. Ethylene production, that is targeting different kind of plastics, growing middle class. It's growing globally, very strong, and if you look at China, particular high, high growth rate, ratios. PTA, that's a starting material for many kind of materials like PET, polyester, clothing, et cetera. Strong growth in China, but also in India. So the underlying growth in these industries are very strong. At the same time, we see, for especially in China, a modernization of their chemical industries. If you look at our offer, we have a very strong offer.
It's a long tradition, of course, that we've been in this, in this segment. If you look at fertilizer for the, for the urea industry, for the high-pressure parts, it's a lot of requirements on safety. Hydraulic and instrumentation tubes for different kind of, of monitoring and measuring. And today, we also have that in coiled tubing in Asia. We didn't have that before. High temperature, interesting. If I go back 10 years, there was not so much pressure on, on finding new solution for high temperature. That has shifted a lot, and I think that has a lot to do, actually, with, with the renewable. A lot of, of processes with high-temperature corrosion, corrosion, and we have a nice, offer for that. Heat exchanger, different sizes, different grades, different forms.
They can be straight, they can be bent, et cetera. The customer, what are they looking for? They're looking for premium, high-quality offering. They want to have a safe, reliable operation. And of course, R&D is then important. R&D is important to come up with the new materials, and R&D is important. I would say R&D/technical sales. Work close with the customer, understanding, so this, what is typical with this process? Which of our materials would fit best in this? Something we are strong in. And of course, with this comes the importance of proximity. Be close to the market, be close to other customers. So I'll come back to that, continue to improve our regional footprint. Of course, this technology leadership, this technology support, is really core to build long-term customer relations, also out in all of the regions.
So what are we doing then? Continue to develop our premium portfolio. A lot of that is, we have already entered, as I said entered, because that was some time. But continue to grow our sort of products in the high nickel and also in the super alloy part. Strengthen our regional footprint, secure that we have the right capability and the right capacity in the regions. Because one thing in the strategy has worked out so well is the locally produced premium products, and then we need to have the capabilities and the capacities. And with that, of course, build strong customer relationships. And we work both with the customers, we we work with the customer's customers and also different kind of institutions, the ones who set some kind of standards.
To improve the regional footprint, as I said, we are right now ramping up an investment that we decided a few years ago, increasing capacity and capability in India. It's roughly SEK 180 million investment, and the second of two flows will be inaugurated by myself and the two presidents next week. Of course, this is mainly India, for India, so mainly serving the Indian market, but of course also some export in the region. Expansion in China, we announced in quarter three that we would expand capacity in China as a SEK 250 million investment, and main part of that is add more of what we already had. The market is growing, and if we look ahead some years, we will sort of ran out of capacity.
We are adding more capacity and also some new capabilities to make us even more relevant. Broadening also the offer in North America. I explained the PEXCO acquisition, really crucial. We don't want one of our main competitors to work with us on developing a local premium portfolio. That we don't need to think about anymore. It's sort of 100% owned by us, and we're also adding more capacity, more plating, cold working capacity, also in the US. So if I should summarize, if I look back eight-10 years, we have roughly doubled this business. If I look at the market growth, it's around 7%, and of course, we are targeting 7% or more. Strong underlying tailwind from many of the different chemicals that is increasing, and especially Asia is increasing.
We have a very strong position in Asia. Continue to develop our premium portfolio, of course, strengthen the regional footprint by CapEx, CapEx investments, and by that, strengthening the customer partnership, and that development. So let's move into hydrogen and renewable energy. I think you need to look at because sometimes you get the question, what happens in the future with oil and gas, and etc. ? I think first, you need to look at the total scope. How much more energy will the world need? And what we see, there will be need of more energy, and we have already strong position in energy. We have strong position through our oil and gas offer.
We have a strong position in our nuclear offer, and I said before, I think nuclear will take some time, but that will start to grow a lot. On top of that, of course, hydrogen and renewable, because over time, the world needs to move away from fossil sources to renewable sources. That is also where we are focusing. And as I said, a lot of interesting materials challenges, and where I think we really can play a role. So to look at some hydrogen, when the expected growth number in hydrogen are really strong. And as I said, hydrogen for storage, if you invest in more wind energy, solar energy, you need to have something that stores energy, and hydrogen is a really good alternative.
In the electrification, the automotive electrification with fuel cells as well, that needs more hydrogen. Also, what you can see, I think Ovako was last when they built an electrolyzer, and then using hydrogen as a fuel, burning hydrogen in their furnaces. Also, carbon capture, so it's not only about the renewable resource, it's also to capture and store the CO2 that we have in the air, or that is produced in different processes. Interesting with that is that roughly the same tubes that we sold to, OCTG tubes that we sold to bring up the oil or the gas, can be sold again to bring the CO2 down and put it under pressure. Solar, strong growth with numerous of running good businesses for us today.
If you go back in the value chain of solar PV, somewhere in the value chain, especially in China, they produce something called polysilicon. That is the starting material. It's a pretty tough chemical process, high temperature corrosion, so Tube has a lot of good business opportunities into that. Later in that value chain, you need to heat treat the solar PV wafers. It's a business for Kanthal. And also we can look at CSP, concentrated solar power. That has sort of, it's not as much as solar PV, but it's interesting part where you use molten salt as the energy carrier. Extreme corrosion requirements, and of course, that fits us very well then. I know this slide is really a business slide.
I will not go through the details, but what you see here is different kind of renewable sources, including hydrogen. And on that level, you can see different kind of materials property needs. The black tick boxes means that we consider that we already have an offer that fits into this business. The green tick mark is where we are today, driving material science, could both be in metallurgy or in different kind of process steps. So what this indicates is that we put a lot of R&D efforts into this interesting area. To name just a few examples, as I already said, solar PV, high temperature corrosion, of course, we look at that. Surface performance, we have our pre-coated strip steel for fuel cells.
And also that we look also in could we use the same methodology into the electrolysis area? And in Kanthal, looking at the high power applications, what could that mean? So to summarize, this is growing from small levels, but the growth is extremely high, and I think it will continue high. This is the area where I think we will absolutely have the highest market growth and also our internal growth. And we're targeting a revenue around SEK 1 billion in 2030. I think a nd look in energy, we are well-positioned, both in the oil and gas and nuclear, and with ambitions and the and the projects we run in this area, we will have also very good position here. And because the ongoing shift is, we cannot stop it.
We need to reduce the fossil sources on Earth, and the ambition we have is to take a number one or number two position in the areas where we want to act. Industrial heating, I'll do this a little bit shorter, not to spoil it for Robert then. The overall thing is the electrification trend, where customer, many customer wants to move away from fossil fuel furnaces to electric furnaces. But if we dig a little bit deeper into some of the sort of subsegments of industrial heating, we also see a nice growth from there. Semiconductor industry, they need our furnace models in their heat treatment, good growth, lithium-ion batteries, very good growth. For instance, the silicon carbide expansion is targeting this area. Solar, as I already said, heat treatment of solar wafers.
So a lot of good underlying demand in Kanthal. And to summarize, we have grown in a good way. We are targeting a 8% growth as a minimum. There is ongoing investments, capacity increases done in silicon carbide, capacity increases in our German factory for process gas heaters and heating modules. Also, work with business development, find solutions for the high power applications. It's in a way, the same base technology, but applications that are sort of a thousand times larger. And of course, continue to focus M&A. Could we find the right targets? We want to do acquisitions in this segment. And the medical. And if you look at the medical business, I mean, it's growing based on many different things.
I think one, of course, the global aging population, where in average, we are getting older and older now, and of course, that will mean more need for healthcare, which is proven by the next graph that global healthcare spending is increasing. But on top of that, we see an interesting technology development. It's very clear that there is a technology development within the medical business, and you can say it's based on sort of keeping the patient out of the hospital. It's good for the patient, and it reduces cost in the industry. So a lot of sensing and monitoring things to sort of support the customer, but let the customer, yeah, it's the customer, it's the patient, not to come into the hospital.
So one example is this continuous glucose monitoring, which is an interesting and fast-growing business for us. There are other examples, like heart failure monitoring, for instance. I think we've grown this very good the last couple of years from not so much growth, and we're really focused this, of course, through acquisition and also high priority. I think, I would say this is, this is the number one capital allocation segment. They will never lose to someone else. And we have done it, I think, good. We are targeting an annual growth of 9% or more. It's a very straightforward strategy. Organic growth, we want to be even faster in making prototypes because that's good for our customers. Of course, we continuously ease increasing capacity, but pretty sort of cheap capacity investments.
We want to leverage synergies that we have from already done acquisitions. As I said before, we should not make do acquisition if we don't drive the synergies, so that is important. Of course, continue to develop together with the customers new products, especially for this remote patient monitoring. Once again, this is our number one M&A area. So if I should summarize, I think we have clear building blocks to continue to drive value creation. Everything is based on materials know-how, which is the basis in our company. The materials knowledge in Alleima is very strong. Several mega trends that play in our favor: electrification, energy transformation, medical. We see Asia as a good opportunity. Now we have been more clear.
So we target some of the segments that are our main priority from a capital allocation point of view. It could be CapEx, and it could be M&A, and here we can see good growth opportunities. Of course, when we deliver on those targets, we will also grow earnings, and we will reduce volatility in our business. Thank you.
Thank you, Göran. So, you're good. You actually have more time, so you can stay on. Good timekeeper. I had just a question for you. So, we have clearly improved over the last couple of years. What would you or how would you describe the difference between back then and now?
Okay, so before and after?
Exactly.
I mean, that's a commonly asked question. "Okay, you haven't grown, so why should we be able to grow now?" And I think there are. I would make that as a three-fold. I think, first of all, I think we have improved Alleima quite a lot. We are, I mean, the tube oil and gas business is still a very good business. We are not just so dependent on one. I think we improved both our efficiency, we improved our pricing models, and we improved a lot of others, so we are more ready for growth. I think that's, I think that's clear. I think when Björn was the Sandvik president, I mean, very clear. First, you work with stability, then you improve your profit, and then you grow, and I think we continue to use that.
And that is the new, I mean, the new reality for us. I mean, I've been presenting the Sandvik board many times, and I think nothing wrong with them, but I think now we have the full attention from the board, only focusing Alleima, and that is a big, big difference. And third, and then many people, both external, and I think also internally, had the view that sort of, Sandvik was supporting Alleima with cash. That's not true. We have been cash generative over the time, and now the cash stays in our company. So we're fully accountable and responsible, of course, together with the board and our owners, for our capital allocation. It doesn't go to any other part of our other big company. I would say those are the three most important.
Good. Thank you. Now, we are right on time.
Now I can go?
Yes.
Thank you.
Thank you. So now I am here with our CFO, Olof Bengtsson. Hi, Olof.
Hi, Emelie.
So you will now talk a bit about our financial performance and how we have improved and what we will do to improve further going forward. So I will leave it to you.
Yeah. Thank you very much, Emelie. So, yes, I'll start off with a few key financial numbers, and then I'll go on to a small recap into some specific areas like FX, energy, and also a bit on the metal prices and their effects on our income statements and balance sheets. So if we start off with the financial development, this is the Alleima journey since 2015. It shows the revenue development and on the bars and the adjusted EBIT development on the orange graph. And what we have done is that we have adjusted the numbers for disposals and also internal sales that become external sales, and so on. So the numbers are comparable going back in time.
And if we start with the revenues, we have gone from, well, the journey has been from SEK 13 billion in 2015, up until close to SEK 21 billion in 2023 on a rolling twelve-month basis. As you can see on the bars, the journey has been quite, I shouldn't say volatile, but it has been a bit of a change between the years. Growth has varied quite a lot. If we look at the average growth over this time period, it is around 2% per annum organically. That is might be perceived as a low number. However, we believe that we have been fairly close to the market growth, because there have been two downturns during this period. One was the oil and gas downturn in 2016, 2017, and then we had the pandemic downturn affecting 2020 and 2021.
So looking in that perspective, we think that we are well aligned with the market. And now we are in a rebound. 2022, we had an organic sales growth of or revenue growth of 13%, and then going into 2023 year to date, we are at 12%. So a very good rebound. And if we look at the adjusted EBIT then, and when we talk about adjusted EBIT, we mean the EBIT adjusted for one-offs and also metal price effects. As you can see, the EBIT has been bit volatile, but it's much less so nowadays. If you look at the first downturn, we were fairly dependent upon oil and gas then, both in the upturn, in the downturn and in the subsequent upturn into 2019.
And then looking at the pandemic downturn, and we are quite proud of what we did there . We managed to reduce the impact of falling revenues, especially in the energy and transportation sector. We hit the brakes early in that downturn, and so we were quite proud of bottoming out at around 7.6%. If we look at the whole period here, we had an adjusted EBIT margin of 8.3%. And Göran talked a little bit about it before, about our financial target being only 9%, but of course, with the historical hindsight, it's not a bad number, we think, to be aiming for 9% over a cycle. And looking into 2022 and 2023, a good upturn following the revenues, 9.1% adjusted EBIT in 2022, and then 10.2 on a rolling twelve-month basis at the end of the third quarter.
So that's the whole of Alleima. And if we look into the divisions then, or the operating segments, as they're called externally. First, we have Tube, and of course, if you look at the Tube graph, it very much looks like the Alleima graph. So saying that, what happens in Tube happens in Alleima. And that is, of course, still true to a lesser extent, though, nowadays than it was before. I think that Tube has become less dependent upon oil and gas. Of course, it's still an important business, and it's a business that is expanding very much right now. But it has become a more balanced division as we see it. We have nuclear growing, we have petrochem, chem and petrochem growing, that Göran talked about, and also transportation, the transportation segment, mainly aerospace then.
So a more balanced division. And the average adjusted EBIT margin for Tube has been 9.3% over this time, and they are currently around 10%. And they have grown from approximately SEK 10 billion to close to SEK 14 billion right now, so SEK 4 billion in increased revenues. If we look at Kanthal then, an average margin of 11.7% over this period, and you can see a very, very strong recovery or rebound post the pandemic downturn. It was a fairly small downturn for Kanthal. And as you see now, a very, very strong development coming from medical, but also from industrial heating, of course. And I won't spoil Robert's presentation. He will tell you more about this journey later.
And they are currently around 18% and have grown from close to SEK 2.5 billion to more than SEK 4.5 billion on a rolling twelve-month basis right now. So quite an impressive journey. Then finally, our smallest division, Strip, obviously having a little bit of tough time right now with the slow consumer segments, but you should look at their history, quite an impressive history, both revenue-wise and also margin-wise, having gone from a low margin, close to zero, up to a peak around 15%, two years ago, now around 7%, and with an average margin of 6.2%, but a journey from SEK 1 billion to SEK 1.5 billion.
So overall, I think, the divisions have all developed well, and less dependent upon single products, and also the whole of Alleima, I think, has benefited from the growth of the other two divisions, being a little bit less dependent upon the biggest division. So a more balanced Alleima. Cash flow generation, Göran talked about this, and here is a slide showing that. To the left, you have the adjusted EBIT on the light gray bar, and then you have the free operating cash flow. The free operating cash flow is the cash flow that our operations generate, coming out of the profit, less the working capital, less the CapEx, less the lease amortizations. You can see it's we are a very cash-generative company, most years.
Over this period, we generated about SEK 1.3 billion of cash coming from the operations. That corresponds to a cash conversion, if you measure the free operating cash flow towards the adjusted EBIT, you have about 87% free operating cash flow conversion. And that is probably, or that is a level between 80-85-ish that you will see us, that you should see us performing, given the current expected market growth rates. And another thing to notice about the cash flow is that it has a countercyclical character, meaning that in good times, when business is expanding and we're growing, we normally tie up more capital in our working capital.
But also what normally comes with good times is higher metal prices, and higher metal prices normally means that we tie up more in our inventories and in our receivables. So you have a different effect in the cash flow, and that opposite effect. In a downturn, you have the opposite effect. So normally, we release quite a lot of cash when business turns down, because we are releasing inventories, and normally also, falling metal prices comes with downturns. So the cash flow is a little bit different to the profit. Then, looking into the balance sheet, our net working capital, 34% of revenues on an annualized basis. It's a high number. Yes, we know that.
We are working constantly with minimizing our working capital, as it is a fairly big asset on our balance sheet. In total, it's about SEK 7 billion, and there's a lot of impact, of course, of metal in our net working capital. And we have a continuous focus on it. We try to improve it through a thorough inventory management. I'll show you a slide on that in a minute. Working a lot with max stock targets and visualizing the supply chain. Accounts payable, of course, negotiations with our suppliers, mainly our raw material suppliers, getting as favorable payment terms as we can and being part of supply chain programs. Accounts receivable, very important, of course. We have a constant tracking of DSOs, payment terms, and overdues.
And I think we have been quite successful here, but we can do more, we think. Our ambition when it comes to the working capital, it's not an external target, but we want to come down to around 30% of revenues. We have been there, we know we can get there, but it requires a lot of focus and constant hard work. Here is a good example of some good work being performed in the Tube division, our largest division. The bars, the standing bars, show the physical volume of the inventories. I haven't put a scale here for competitive reasons. So you can see a clear downward trend on the physical inventory.
The orange line shows the value of the inventory, and that has stayed fairly flat, as you can see, even though it has been a bit bumpy with the metal prices. But what we do here or what Tube has done here is that the Tube has visualized the different parts of the inventory, and we mainly talk about four different parts of the inventory. It's the raw material inventory or the scrap, the work in progress, the inventory for shipment, and the goods in transit. And by putting days to each part of the inventory, they have managed to visualize for the organization, the potential that you can find in each part of the inventory. Challenging, so to say, each part, and by doing that, actually, in a very good way, have been able to reduce the stocks.
And the stocks were. This is actually in September, the final bar there, and it's actually a record low levels to be for this division. And why hasn't the value gone down then? Well, might be different reasons. One reason is, of course, that you might have higher, more highly refined goods in your stock. So that is one reason. Another reason could be metal prices, of course. And if we look at this graph then, this graph shows the value, the top graph, the value of the inventory in Swedish krona, that is the orange graph at the top. The other graph shows a value of a metal basket. We define a standard metal basket based on. Well, it is an average basket of metals that goes into our production.
And this standard metal basket contains 70% iron, 20% chrome, and 10% nickel, and less than 1% other metals, like molybdenum, in this case. And these are volume factors, so these are the volumes. If you were to look at values, it will be quite different. Nickel will be about 60% of the value of the standard basket, while iron would be only 5%. So nickel has a big importance, and the nickel price tends to be fairly volatile. It's a very speculative metal, not only bought and sold for production purposes, but also for speculation. So it has a very volatile price pattern. And as you can see at the top graph here, the value of the inventory covaries very much with the metals. So that is a big explaining factor for our inventory values.
And then there is another factor, because metals are normally purchased in U.S. dollars. So the dollar, in this case, the weak krona, has a big impact as well on our inventory values. Not only translating inventories abroad, but also in the Swedish inventories, as the metals are normally bought then in foreign currency, in dollars. In the bottom graph there, we have and put the metal basket at fixed rates, and that is the orange line, and at variable rates, then that's the spot rates or the closing rates. As you can see, there is a discrepancy. If the exchange rate had stayed at the 2019 levels, we would have seen a lower inventory value. In this case, it's about SEK 1 billion, actually, that makes the difference between the two.
Another key number is, of course, ROCE, return on capital employed. How well do we manage to get return on our assets and liabilities? And this graph here shows the development, or these graphs show the development here. The graph to the very right is the ROCE. If we look further back, if we look back to 2015, we've had a ROCE of 8.2, and in the ROCE calculation, I am excluding the cash because we want to focus on the operating assets and liabilities of the company. So 8.2 up until today from 2015. However, if we look at the more closer period, going from 2021 to up until the third quarter on a rolling basis again, we are at 12.6, excluding cash again.
We normally, when we explain how the ROCE is calculated, we normally take the route from the EBIT margin, and in this case, we're using the reported EBIT margin because we have a lot of metal in our balance sheet, so we need to relate that to the EBIT with the metal in. And then we also, when you want to arrive at the ROCE, you multiply it with the capital turnover ratio, and it's been increasing. We are currently at 1.2, so we're leveraging well on our fixed asset base, and that then comes out at the average of 12.6. And of course, this is also a focus area for us.
The way to improve is through focusing, of course, on increasing the profitability and the margins, but also with the net working capital management and, of course, CapEx management, having prudent CapEx procedures. And of course, also the focus on less capital-intense businesses that Göran talked about will bring an improvement in the ROCE. The balance sheet, finally. We have a strong balance sheet. We want to keep it that way. We are very happy about that. As a CFO, I'm very happy about that. It gives you some comfort, especially in times like this, with high interest rates. If we look at the composition of the balance sheet, if you look to the right there in the simplified netted balance sheet, we have working capital of SEK 7.1 billion.
I talked about that. Fixed assets, about SEK 10 billion, and there we would find all our machinery and equipment, our property, and our land. We own most of the properties where we operate, and we also have some goodwill, SEK 1.7 billion of goodwill that comes from the Kanthal acquisition once upon a time. So it's not a disturbingly high number, and it also belongs to an asset that is very profitable. And then on the asset side, you will also find our net cash position or our net debt position, which is SEK 300 million positive. But, in there, you would also find SEK 1.2 billion of cash. All of this is financed by equity, more or less, 6 close to 16 billion of equity and some other long-term, non-interest bearing liabilities of SEK 1.7 billion.
So that is the balance sheet. I think a very solid and good balance sheet. Going to capital allocation. We spend a fair amount of money on CapEx. If you go back to 2015 and looking to 2019, we spent about SEK 750 million per year. Looking in the more closer period from 2019 up until today, the spend is lower, around SEK 600 million, and the reason for it being lower is that we cut back quite a lot on CapEx during the pandemic downturn in order to protect our cash flows. This year, we are guiding for around SEK 800 million, and if you split that into to the different parts, around SEK 400 million goes into maintenance investments or reinvestments, just to keep the production facilities up and running and in good shape.
We spend another SEK 100 million-SEK 150 million on productivity, IT, and EHS, so safety-related investments, around SEK 100 million-SEK 150 million. And then finally, growth investments, SEK 200-SEK 250, and that is what Göran talked about before, some different investments in India and China and so on. So that is the CapEx spend. Well, as we see it, a controlled CapEx spend. And talking then a little bit about capital allocation, what do we do with the funds that we generate? And there are basically three ways to use them. First and foremost is, of course, growth. We can spend it either on more growth CapEx or M&A. We can pay it to our shareholders, normally in the form of a dividend, and we have a set dividend policy.
50% of net profit over a business cycle should go to the shareholders in the form of a dividend. Or we can, of course, keep it for future growth or shareholder purposes. So that's basically how we see allocation. And if I just, I can make an example based on so to say, current numbers. We are currently around a revenue of SEK 21 billion. If you apply the financial target of 9% to that, you get to roughly SEK 1.8 billion. Then you take a cash conversion, around 85%, that brings you roughly to SEK 1.5 billion-ish. And then you take away tax and finance net, about half a billion, and that gives you SEK 1 billion. And that SEK 1 billion, you can say you can spend either for growth or for return to shareholders.
So that is the very, very high level calculation based on, so to say, known numbers, and it's no guidance, it's just, just a way that it should come out. Provided, of course, that metal prices are not behaving very strangely, because they can, of course, impact the cash flow, quite a lot, as you have seen. So that, that is the end of the financial session, so to say. Now, I just would like to mention a few, point out a few areas that might be of interest to you. And the first one is FX. We are a very international group. We have a lot of international sales, but I, I would like to say that I think that our exposures are fairly balanced.
But this is, of course, because of our footprint. We have a lot of local production and local sales, of course, that balances our flows. However, a lot of our products originate out of Sweden, from Sandviken or Hallstahammar, and that, of course, creates a surplus of some currencies. The main currencies are U.S. dollars. We have a surplus of about corresponding to a value of SEK 3 billion. In euros, it's about SEK 2 billion, and then as we have a very large production site in the Czech Republic, against the krona, you have a deficit of roughly SEK 1 billion. And then, of course, this is a transaction exposure. Then we, of course, you have translation exposure as well, but in terms of transaction, this is how it looks, in brief.
Another, so there's a limiting factor in the exposure is, of course, that we buy many of our metals and scrap in US dollars, and that, of course, balances the dollar surplus. So that's the FX. Another important area is energy. And that is an area that has moved up on the strategic agenda for us, considering that we are a fairly large energy consumer and, of course, that the energy prices have been quite volatile over the past few years. There are different ways of managing the energy prices. One is, of course, hedging, and that is something we do both for electricity and gas. So that is maybe the most used way of managing this. But over the past years, we have also introduced energy surcharges to our customers.
That was quite common a year or two ago, not so common any longer, but it has been a way of doing it. And then, as a third method, is temporary shutdowns of production facilities during peak price hours, and we have actually used that at several occasions in, for instance, in the Sandviken mill. Looking at energy costs, they are in the range of SEK 650-700 this year. We expect them to be about the same level next year. We have put in a few hedges for next year. We have a hedging policy that is very clear. We normally increase our hedges as we approach the year in question, and we, for next year, we are hedged at 75% in Sweden, where we have the main consumption of electricity.
60% of natural gas consumption is hedged. Sweden is, of course, very important, and you can say that if we look at our different regions, Europe is the region that has had the big increases in energy cost. Asia and North America, or the Americas, are fairly unchanged compared to the position in 2021. And in the black box at the bottom, you have our consumption rates. Metals, then finally, we distinguish between alloy surcharges on revenues and metal price effects on EBIT. There are different ways of covering the cost for the metal when we are setting our prices. For large orders, like big project orders, we normally hedge the metal content when we secure the order. And the customer has signed the order, we normally immediately go in and secure the margin on that order.
We have lots of smaller orders where the metal content is not as big or the product has less metal content, that we normally don't hedge. And then we have for about 40% of our revenues, an alloy surcharge model, which is commonly used than in our business. And there, the price is set according to official market prices. And that is normally based on the average market price in the preceding month before the invoicing takes place. We show the effect of the alloy surcharges on our revenues and on our order intake in our quarterly reports, so you can follow how they change over time there. The so to say surcharge impact might be different on the order compared to the final invoice, but that is the common method used.
Then we have metal price effects on EBIT, and that comes from the fact that under the surcharge model, there is a timing difference between setting the purchase price of the metal when we buy the metal into our inventory, and that goes into the COGS then, the cost of goods sold, and then the sales price in the alloy surcharge price business. So there's a timing difference there, and that can vary between 3-6 months. The average is 4 months. In an increasing pricing environment with the metals prices increasing, we will normally get a gain because we buy the metal at a lower price than we sell it for, and the opposite then if metal prices are going down.
We focus on this adjusted EBIT because we think that is the best measure of our performance, the underlying performance of our company and our divisions. Sometimes it's good to look back in history to understand where we are right now and the future. This graph here at the top shows the development of the metal price effect since 2007 in Alleima. The brown line shows the nickel price development, and nickel, as I said before, is the main price driver in our metal basket, in our products. And the line at the top, the blue line, shows the metal price effect from year to year in Alleima, and the dotted line shows the accumulated metal price effect.
As you can see, if you look back to 2007, a very, very steep drop in the nickel prices, going from, I think it was more than $50,000 per ton, down to close to $10,000 per ton, which of course created a large negative impact on the EBIT in Alleima or in SMT, as it was called back then. So of course, in order to understand the performance then, you need to make these adjustments. And if you look at the nickel price going up to 2015, it's been, with some bumps up and down, it's been going down. And of course, you have a fairly large accumulated negative effect in your EBIT and in your equity. And then turning again from 2015, going upwards.
Actually, looking at the whole period now, we are actually close to zero. So reported EBIT and adjusted EBIT over this full-time period would be about the same. However, if you look at the graph at the bottom, you see the sharp nickel price increases during 2022, for instance, where the nickel price on the 8th of March went through the ceiling. And that this whole upturn in the nickel price has created a positive effect, which today is around SEK 1 billion accumulated. So it's important to keep track of the metal impact in order to understand the underlying performance. This is just a summary. I'm not going to go through it in detail. I've shown it before.
I think I showed it on the previous Capital Markets Day, but when metal prices go up, it's normally positive for our EBIT, but negative for our cash flow, and vice versa. So to sum up, I think we can see that we have a very good revenue growth. We have improved our profitability and also our resilience over this period. Less swings in the adjusted EBIT. We are a strong cash flow generator, and we have a solid balance sheet, and I'm very happy for that. So thank you very much.
Thank you, Olof.
Should I stay?
Yes. You're b ut you're a good timekeeper as well. You talked about our strong balance sheet.
Yes.
Again, why is that important? And also adding to that, you talked about approximately SEK 400 million available for M&A if we were to fund with own cash flow.
Yeah.
But I guess the firepower is much larger, taking on debt. So, how can you please elaborate a bit on that?
Yeah. First question on the balance sheet, I think it is important to keep financial flexibility, especially with the metal prices that can be fairly volatile, as we have seen. And, you know, I mean, if you look back, you get a certain perspective on things, and you see that there might be times where the inventories actually require quite a lot of cash. So, and yeah, it gives us flexibility. Firepower, yes, we have firepower if we want to. The example I gave, having the SEK 1 billion, so to say, coming out post the tax and finance net, that is without taking on any debt. And of course, our financial targets would allow us to take on debt should the right target appear, so to say.
So that is a possibility, but we prefer to keep a strong balance sheet as I see it. I'm very happy about that.
Mm-hmm. All right. Thank you.
Okay. Thank you.
So now it's time for a coffee break. And for those of you in this room, we will have some coffee and refreshments outside in the lobby. And for those of you who are watching online, we will see you back here in approximately 30 minutes, so at 4 P.M. CET. So see you then. Hello, and welcome back from the break. We will now hear our President of Kanthal, Robert Stål, talk about the Kanthal division, which has two of our identified growth areas, industrial heating and medical. And, Robert, you joined Kanthal as president about a year ago, but you have been many years in Alleima Group. So, please go ahead and present Kanthal.
Thank you, Emelie, and welcome back, everyone. Hope you managed to get some air and energy in the break, and we will talk some more about Kanthal and the business that we are doing. We are a world-leading industrial heating solutions provider, but also medical wire component provider. We are a very strong market position when it comes to the niches and end markets where we are actively. Right now, we have four main customer segments, which is industrial heating, it is consumer, medical, and industrial. And this deep dive will be in two-thirds of those, of our total sale, which industrial heating and medical, which is also two of the targeted growth areas within the Alleima Group. We have a global footprint.
We have 17 production units around the globe, and active sales to about 60 countries. We have our headquarters and our base for industrial heating in Hallstahammar, Sweden, but we also have a focal point for our medical business, and especially when it comes to the wire forming part in Palm Coast, Florida. I would like to highlight another thing when you're looking at the map, and that is that we are a sort of, say, global we have a global footprint of our operation, and we believe that is a very important part of our strategy, not only so, say, being close to the customer in markets in terms of time and proximity, but also in a way of sort of, say, building competence and talents in the different regions, making sure that we're also successful long term with our growth ambitions.
If we look at the financial numbers right now, after Q3, 12 months rolling, we are at SEK 4.5 billion, and with an adjusted EBIT margin of 18.2%. Aggregated on a divisional level, we are fairly evenly spread between the three regions, as you can see, Europe, North America, and Asia. When it comes to the competitive landscape, we are a market leader when it comes to our products. Olof showed you the historical performance of our financial, but I would just like to go through and highlight that a bit more. And as you can see, we have seen a very good and strong development of both top line and profit over the last year. And here is also, I think, a proof that we are delivering on the structural growth that we also are aiming for.
So to say, the short explanation of why we have seen this development is that we have been successful in growing our medical business and industrial heating business, which is profitable areas. But in the same time, we have also improved profitability within our other segments, such as consumer and industrial. Looking also in the longer time period, we can also see that over a business cycle, we also have a good resilience when it comes to profit margins, despite the changes that we see in the macroeconomics around us, then. And also in this time frame, we are using and will continue to use acquisitions to fortify both capabilities and our geographical presence. So starting to talking a little bit about industrial heating and the products and where we operate.
On the upper side, you can see our different products that goes into different heating solutions. And I think a few thing worth to point out is, so to say, if you go from your left to your right in this, there's an element of value add throughout the product chain. We are an integrated supplier. We have unique experience when it comes to actually developing the resistance material needed for this application. We build on that knowledge throughout the value chain and capture value as we provide more value to our customers' applications. In the orange bubbles, you can see the maximum operating temperatures of the different products. But I think important here to point out also is actually that we are in the higher segment of heating, and usually we say that below 800 degrees, we are not interested.
And the simple reason for that, it's difficult for us to provide the value we want. So in essence, you could say just because it's heating, doesn't by definition mean that we are interested. We want to be where it's most difficult and where we can provide value. If you look on how we go to market with our products, 50% of our sales roughly goes to furnace builders or OEMs. Around 40% goes directly to end users, and around 10% goes through different distribution or distribution channels. If you look on the lower-hand side, you can see typical applications of our products, and I will talk more on that on the next slide.
But just to highlight a few, you can see with both looking at our traditional products, we have an exposure to quite interesting, long-term growth segments, such as, for example, solar industry that Göran mentioned before, but different areas of electronics, and semicon, as well as, manufacturing of lithium-ion battery production. Also, long term, we will come back to that typical segments like steel industry or other metal industries, which is a very interesting area for us. When we look at our business and try to explain this from a conceptual perspective, if we look on the, on the left-hand side, we say that traditionally, the, the industrial heating market is 75% fossil heated and 25% electrical heating.
And if we look at what is going forward, and I sort of say the, the, the main drivers for our growth, if we start by looking at the traditional 25% segments, there we have already highlighted, and you've seen a number of few of them. I mean, the shift to sustainable sources of energy, for example, solar or photovoltaic solar, where we have products which are good positions to capture on that growth, but also when it comes to sustainable transportation in general, or the use of increased use of battery electrical vehicles, and by that, the need of lithium-ion batteries, where our products are used. And last but not least, what we're seeing in the world today, digitalization and optimization require a higher level of semiconductors and electronics going, which requires our products in the manufacturing process.
On top of that, in sort of, say, a bit of a longer perspective as well, we see two other transforming and very interesting trends for us. The fourth one, which we also touched upon a bit earlier, is the industry decarbonization through electrification, meaning that many of the actors within the 75% of fossil fuel heating, they are right now looking at plans on how they can reduce their emissions. And needless to say, I mean, electrical heating is one options there. There are other options as well, but we clearly see a trend that electrical heating will take up a place in replacing that 25% to non-emitting energy sources then.
Last but not least, that's a bit of a more long term, but it's an area where we invest quite a lot organically now to develop products and solution to capture that, and that is especially connected to the larger industries and also larger CO2 emitters. If we look at the steel and iron and steel industry, globally, the chemical and petrochemical, as well as the cement industry, they emit around 14% of the total, global CO2. And there, we want to take a place when they transmit from their, sort of say, high power, heating processes, which is fossil today, to, to electrical. So these are, so to say, both the short, I would say, short-term and long-term, perspective and, and trend drivers, for our business.
If we're looking on another dynamic of our business, that is what we would refer to more, so say, new investments, here refer to CapEx, and the other side, which is OpEx. Because our heating elements, in a sense, they are consumables. They have a limited lifetime. If you go back even further, here you can see development from 2017 to 2022, where we've also seen an average growth of 8%, in this timeframe. But what we can also see is the increase of CapEx part of our business. And why is this good then? Well, there's two reasons. One is that it's a sign that we are actually taking a part in what we're seeing now, the CapEx putting into gas to electric, but as well as the investments, for example, in solar, lithium- ion, and electronics and semicon industry.
The other part of this is that it has a limited lifetime, meaning at a certain point, this installation needs to be replaced, and that requires us with a recurring revenue opportunity. And if you look on your right-hand graph here, you could see an example of, of our, sort of say, top product groups. You know, just to give some kind of idea of what you can expect here, there's around a three-six year element lifetime on which, sort of say, a new installation would need to be replaced. This could go faster, it could go longer. It also depends on how you operate and run your furnace or your heat treatment process. But that, that gives some indication. And I think also worth to point out that this is also one of our key selling arguments, long lifetime.
So it's not necessarily that we are developing our products for a short lifetime, I would say rather the opposite, and also one of the reasons we are in here. But it gives you a feeling of, sort of say, how to convert, for say, CapEx sales into OpEx opportunities. Going back then to the last of the 5 trends that I showed you about the megawatt scale power. Here is just a breakdown of what we can see in these emissions. And as I mentioned before, iron and steel, chemical and petrochemical and cement collectively represent 14%. If we add on other heavy industry, we're up above 20% of total global CO2 emissions. And for us, this is of course an opportunity.
Not all of these CO2 emissions are related to industrial or heating processes, but a significant part is. But what is, so to say, the denominator for these industries compared to traditional technology solutions that we have been providing is the scale. We're talking a factor of 1,000 from kilowatt to megawatts in terms of solutions, and this is something we are right now investing quite a lot of R&D resources and money into developing this solution because we see that our customers are asking for it. There is no solutions available today, and we want to be a part of that as the market leader.
It's also good to be in this kind of transformational change because it's a golden opportunity to understand our customers, where they are now, and trying to capture the full value of the, so to say, the challenge in this transition. With that said, I would also like to point out that certain applications already now, we are in this area. We mentioned, for example, in our latest report, where we've secured a process gas heater for a pilot plant of a steel customer improving their process. So already today, we are seeing business coming from this area, but it's still on a low level. So it's about, so to say, making sure that we put focus on organic product development here to stay relevant long term and capture this market.
Moving on to our medical side of the business, now we need to recalibrate a little bit about products and size of things and actually what we do. But the denominator here is, of course, materials knowledge and in this specific case, wire. We have divided the product overview in two areas. It's the actual medical wire, which could come in, sort of say, a multifilar wire, which could be seen as a, sort of say, example, a micro cable setup, or more of a medical component side, where the wire itself provides a component, either as you can actually see outside here, if you haven't seen it already, the breast biopsy marker in a Nitinol or, for example, here, a retrieval basket in for kidney stone retrievals within urology.
And here we have around a 50/50% sales to the market, either through contract manufacturers or directly to the device OEMs. And those are two players we are very close to also when it comes to developing new products, making sure that we find the best solution for them to be able to provide the best solution to their customers and their markets. And we'll come back and talk a little bit about it, more about that. And just to give you a little bit more flavor then, okay, we're talking about wire, we're talking about medical applications, but where do you find these then, or medical or wire components? And here you can see an overview of a few examples of where our products goes into devices.
And just to take one example in explaining this a bit further, or maybe two, if we look at the heart failure device or actually the cardiovascular diseases and the area of cardiovascular therapy, is, for example, fractional flow reserve. That is a therapy when you're actually going in and measuring the blood flow in an artery on two different points, and by that can define what kind of clogging do you have in an artery? And by that, giving the doctor the right, so to say, data in order to have the right therapy to treat the patient. And in these applications, we supply the cabling, actually connecting the sensor going out of the body in order to sending the signal between the sensor and the receiving device, as well as the guiding part of performing that.
And this is also a trend, which I will talk more about on the next slide, which is the minimal invasive surgery. I mean, in essence, what we see as a trend when it comes to the medical or the surgery development, is that more and more is being used is the minimal invasive surgery versus open surgery. And why is that good? Well, the minimal invasive surgery uses less injury on tissue, but it also inflicts a shorter, so to say, recovery period of the patient. So it's a big benefit of both the patient being having a quicker recovery, but also fewer hours in a hospital bed, actually saving cost for the hospital then.
The lower left-hand one, I think it's an area which is interesting for us. It's glucose monitoring devices as well, but I think that groups in a category of remote monitoring. That is also a trend we can see more and more, that remote monitoring is becoming a more important part of healthcare, getting health data remotely instead of going to the hospital and actually being examined. So looking a bit about the market and what we think here, I mean, to start with, medical, almost by definition, is an interesting area to be in. It has a growth that's higher than GDP. We know that from before, and we see an aging global demography, meaning we spend more money on healthcare, but also an increase in middle class is something that pushed up, so to say, the healthcare spend.
That, in general, is kind of supporting the market that we're in. Another important part we see, which is especially important right now when it comes to, for example, continuous glucose monitoring or diabetes, is the increase of insurance coverage in healthcare plans, meaning the patient will be covered by the insurance of using devices, including our products. And that is one way that we also see how we want to position ourselves, but it also creates growth opportunities for us in the current market. The third one, I've addressed it before, but it's growth in remote patient monitoring, where our wires or wire components can actually be the sensor or transmitting a signal from the sensor, enabling actually the remote monitoring part. And the fourth one is the increased use of minimally invasive surgery, as well as soft robotics.
And, and the minimally invasive surgery is becoming more and more popular because it, as I said, inflicts less harm, speeds up recovery, but also reduces the time spent in a hospital, while also improving, so to say, the cost of the whole healthcare part. The other one is soft robotics, and to kind of give some flavor of that, that is sort of say, robot-assisted surgery in soft tissue, meaning that you need to have specific materials with very specific properties that is both biocompatible, but as well able to navigate within the body performing these surgeries. And this is also to perform less harm and have a more speedy recovery.
And there, for example, materials as Nitinol plays an important role, which was one of the rationale why we performed the acquisition last year of Endosmart, which I will talk more about. But you also need wire, wires in this to actually perform the soft robotics procedures. We talked a little bit about, so to say, how we work with our customers. Usually, we are involved in a very early stage, and that is. It's two reasons. One is that our delivery into these devices is very critical, so it's important that we can design our products in relation to what the customer needs at a very early stage, but it's also for them to understand what our capability is, providing the best value to their customers.
So very often, we are involved in an early phase when it comes to the development. But looking at our part of the total device cost, it's fairly small. If we look at our medical business, we can say that more than 50% of our products that we sell is less than 1% of the device cost. And the combination, of course, of being, so to say, as I expressed, being mission critical in application, but a smaller part of the total device cost, that puts us in a good position of having price leadership, and that is a good position to be in. And the last part here, which is also important, a little bit also connecting back to the dynamics we saw in industrial heating, is that many of these products are either for one-time use or they are a consumable.
M eaning that they also provide for recurring revenues as market penetration, so to say, increases in these areas. We also have a clear, so to say, part of our growth plan is inorganic growth. And to give some more light on this area and what we're aiming for and looking for, and I think we have described before, I mean, we're not just in it for the sake of buying top line. We want to have a good strategic fit so we can leverage, so to say, the synergies of the acquisitions that we do. But to give you an overview, we're looking at, I would say, two main things. One is, so to say, value chain. We'll be looking at either fortifying our wire form and capabilities or the wire components parts of this.
And the second one is geography. We have ambition to go in certain geography, and the two European acquisition is actually an example of both of these, where we, one, established a European footprint that was not there before that, and secondly, also combining that with strengthening our wire forming and wire components capabilities, as shown here with the Accuratech acquisition and Endosmart acquisition here in Switzerland and Germany. Looking on how that this kind of fits in then, and what we want to get out of using, sort of say, acquisition as a growth tool here. I mean, if we first look at the strategic rationale of the acquisition, it was, of course, to expand our addressable market. That's one part of it, getting access to products and devices that we don't have today.
But it's also a part of supporting the forward integration into wire components, but also the competence that we actually acquire with one of these companies as well. And I think here, it's really interesting, the position they have with understanding and using Nitinol as a material. It's a super elastic material that was new to us, came into our business with this acquisition, and it provides a lot of opportunity also forward, using the unique, so to say, properties of such a material. And in these cases, I mean, very, very, so to say, tangible ways, what we see in terms of adding to other products is the retrieval baskets within urology. It's kidney stone retrieval baskets, and then breast biopsy markers.
So when you perform biopsy within oncology, you place a three-dimensional marker for the doctor to be able to go back and analyze exactly where did you take the biopsy and what were the results. So it's a traceability thing then. But looking forward here, I mean, the integration of the technology from our traditional business into Nitinol devices provides a unique and, so to say, desirable solution, meaning that we could implement sensing or stimulating parts of our traditional offering, if I put it like that, into, for example, these Nitinol devices, which is not available on the market today.
But also on the other hand, I would say that learning more about close to the customer when it comes to usage of Nitinol, as well, brings us to an interesting opportunity of applying that to our current wire business. And of course, using our sales channels in a more effective way, leveraging on our global presence in that sense, making sure that we can take the products to the markets quicker than what could have been done in, so to say, existing structures. So looking a little bit about what we have done the last five years and to support the business, we've done four acquisitions within the last five years. We have done two within industrial heating.
It was the Custom Electric and Thermaltek acquisition in 2018 and 2019. We made the medical acquisitions in 2021 and 2022 in Accuratech in Switzerland, as well as Endosmart last year in Germany. We've also established a wire production facility in Tucson, Arizona, U.S., to further emphasize our, or strengthen our production capabilities within wire. But also taking steps when it comes to sales presence in design or, so in, for us, important strategic markets, as well as also working with partnership. That is also one tool we have in our box to sort of say, make our growth journey happen, in that sense.
But needless to say, I mean, if we look at the financial development we have with the growth of both top line and profit, for the most part of that is organically, and at a certain level, you can only grow so much organically, then you need to start adding capacity in order to be able to both continue and build on that. So going forward, not surprisingly, I would say, we are focusing on making that happen, putting capital into capacity expansion. Earlier this year, we announced the expansion in our German factory in Walldorf for process gas heaters and module production.
Today, we announced the increase in silicon carbide production by 40%, and here important both in Europe as well as we're taking a position in line with our strategy, closest to the customer and market, and building competence on these products as well in the North American market, which is long-term important to us. We will, of course, continue to refine and develop our, our sort of say, current industrial heating portfolio. We will work and continue to work with product development in, in interesting areas within medical, such as remote monitoring, but also expanding our capability when it comes to, to rapid prototyping. In essence, being more, more, so to say, quicker to our customers in providing them with the answer and solutions to their, their challenges.
Continue, I would say, our sort of, say, structured journey when it comes to increasing sales presence in different parts of the world and capturing those opportunities. And last but not least, in the long run, making sure that we, within industrial heating, have the right products for the market when it comes to megawatt scale heating solutions, electrical heating solutions. So, to summarize a little bit about the Kanthal division then. We see ourselves as a market leader with product offerings in very attractive niches. I mean, that meaning industrial heating and medical, for short. We have a proven financial profile with a strong profit growth. I think we've seen that in the past year, that we are able to capture the structural growth and doing that in a profitable way.
We work close with our customers, both in the development stage of new products, but also throughout the journey and staying close throughout the whole sales cycles, of course. Because we want our customers to come back, also when the first installation is done. And last but not leastly, we have a clear growth agenda, both organically and inorganically, to capture the opportunities that we see. So with that, I think that was my conclusions from the deep dive of Kanthal division, and welcome, Emelie.
Yeah. Thank you, Robert. So, you have been with the Alleima Group in the Tube division for almost ten years as we said in the beginning. But it would be interesting to hear your reflections from the first year in Kanthal.
Sure, sure. I mean, it's well, well, I think I have two reflections. I have many reflections, but I'll stick to two. I think one of them is to have the opportunity to actually go into a totally new area for me personally, being the Kanthal, but still have been spent a lot of time in the group. I think that's a value of a company like Alleima. But the other part, which I think really sticks out, is. And I know this sounds a bit of a cliché, but I honestly think it's true. I mean, Kanthal has been in heating for 90 years, and we've been in the medical area for around 15+ years.
But with that said, I don't think Kanthal has ever been this well-positioned in relation to what is happening in the market right now with the macro trends. So I think that is my, so say, main reflection of this year, that you know, been there for 90 years, but it took us 90 years for the products to catch up with the market or vice versa.
Okay, thank you. So now we will start the Q&A session. So I would like to welcome Olof and Göran back on stage. Yeah, you're here?
We're here.
Good. And as a reminder to the webcast, you can write them in the field beside the webcast, but we will start with questions from the audience here. Yeah, and I can see we have.
Thank you. I just have a question about the nuclear segment. How does it look like when it, if we talk about the capacity, if the orders will start to come in there, and should we expect that you will have to do any more CapEx investments over there, or how should we think about that looking, going forward?
That's actually a good question. Personally, I think nuclear will have a great future. If you go back, we invested in a new tube mill, started in 2012, and that was a bad year because 2011, we had the Fukushima, so we closed the old mill. And that was mothballed. If I look, it's more activities now than we. We haven't seen this many, much activity since before the Fukushima accidents. On the small modular reactor development, on the next generation, we also see- we've been pretty dependent on the Chinese market with kind of lower margins, then we see much more some planned investments in nuclear in the Western world. But some of the decisions are sort of long term. It's political decisions.
But I am positive, and most probably when I stand here next time, maybe we have nuclear on the list. So, I mean, we have the possibility to use the old unit, which we will, I think, partly do pretty soon when it comes to bending. But in the straight tube production, we need some further investments. We haven't decided on that yet. If we come to that conclusion soon, it means that we have received even more orders. Remember, with the current factor, we have a backlog into 2025, so it's not that we're missing orders, but if we need to speed up, we're gonna invest in sort of refreshing the old unit. No decisions yet, but I think they will come.
Yeah, Viktor, here in front.
So sticking to the medical segment, thank you for a very interesting presentation. Thank you so much. You showed that the addressable market today is roughly SEK 12 billion. So I guess that you have a market share of, you know, around 5%. I think, Göran, you showed that you are currently number two in the medical market. Just thinking around, what would you need to become number one, and perhaps, you know, or in relation to acquisition potential, et cetera?
I think one part of that question is if you look at what the companies that we have acquired is not that we have restricted ourselves to buy sort of SEK 100 million companies. It's a big number of small actors, so there are not so many of the big ones. I view the only 5% as a good potential for growth, of course. I mean, I know who's number one, but I should not stand here and speculate, and I think that would be very expensive acquisition. But I think it's more to pick some more of the smaller ones.
Okay, that's, that's clear. And then on the targeted segments that you showed us today, at 32% today of the group, expected to be 45%. Could you perhaps, you know, give us some indication of what those were 2015? I guess we can back it out from some of the material you showed, but if you have any ballpark.
I don't have that number. We can give you that after. But I mean, hydro and renewable, we didn't even know it existed. You saw the medical part, I mean, the medical business was mainly in Kanthal, and it's been around I mean, it was below 300 if you go back a number of years. Chemical and petrochemical, I mean, we doubled that in a eight-10 year period. So if you use those number, I think you could do the math. Yeah.
Yeah. No, that's super. And just on the Kanthal margin, if you could help us, and perhaps just start off, you know, are you surprised about the development of the margin in Kanthal? And can you perhaps tell us, you know, the main drivers of that obviously fantastic journey in just the last five years?
Was that a question to me?
Yeah, the one who feels.
I can give it a shot.
I'm not surprised.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. No, neither am I. No, no, no, I think I mean, what we have done and what is sort of say supporting the margin development that we have seen is that we have sort of say A grown in the areas where we know we are profitable. Also not focusing on growth in the other two segments, which is pretty much industrial and consumer business. And there we have been successful in delivering on that structural growth. The other part is that we have also worked a lot on the two other, I would say, less financially performing segments, the consumer and industrial side.
To make that simple and answer, sort of say, what is giving the positive leverage also from there, is the fact that I think we behind have been very much more better the last years when it comes to price management than we have been for a very, very long time. Not only compensating for the inflationary pressure that we've seen, but also having, sort of say, positive net price effects, and capturing the value we're actually delivering. The other one is that we have also seen an improvement when it comes to operational excellence. We're performing better in our larger manufacturing footprints, also there on a level that we have not really seen in the past as well. So, that combination of those two is providing for the development we've seen on the margin.
And so with that said, I am not surprised, y eah.
If I can help on that, I mean, all the things that were set out to be done is actually a check, and that is the way it should be. But it's not always the case that that happens, of course, but everything turned out well.
Yeah. And I'm not gonna burden you with any questions about financial targets and such. But you showed that, you know, tube division has had an average margin of 9.5% in the last five years. Kanthal is now at, you know, 18% versus perhaps twelve percent historically. So would it be fair to say that the target, the margin target of about nine percent over a cycle is rather on the bottom of the cycle? I guess it's just, you know, difficult to get the math.
I thought you said you should not ask. No, I cannot. I should not speculate. I think, I don't like trough margins, because when you do your plans on what should be the trough margin, there is always a case that is worse. And maybe we should not speculate. I think it's important that you have the actions in place. How do you handle when you have a downturn? I think what we achieved in 2021 was really good. And if you look at the graph Olof showed with oil and gas downturn in 2015, 2016, 2017, and then the pandemic, we lost much more of the oil and gas business in the pandemic downturn, and still the margins were higher.
So, trough is a difficult one. I mean, what we showed here today, and we will not give numbers unless there is something really bad happening, of course, we're gonna deliver on our target. And with the plans we have, I guess the next target will be higher.
That's clear. Thank you very much.
Yeah, Marcus.
Thanks. Hi. If I can start with the business mix, the graph you gave about 32% going to 45%, et cetera. If I can just ask about the underlying assumptions on that. So you have industrial going from 25 to 15. Is it the growth assumptions in this, is it in line with the market, or is it for industrial, for instance, and then are you growing faster than the market in, in targeted segments, et cetera?
I think in industrial, it's somewhat lower than average. So it's both that the others is growing more, in industrial, we're growing less than the market.
But when you say in the slide about that industrial is growing by 6%, is that kind of the assumption we should use, that you're growing in line with that?
I think we're growing less than the six in the industrial.
Okay. Then my second question is about the contribution segment, or contribution business. If you can just talk a little bit about what you've done with the contribution business in the past, and how that ties together with the trough margins, and then also, what are your thoughts about that going forward? And can you keep replacing that business with other business, which is more stable? Just talk a little bit about your view on that.
I'll try with the risk of that, the things I say actually does not really fit. We need the contribution business, and it's the planned contribution business to keep scale and high utilization in our backend system. But the world is not binary. So when you come to a downturn, I think historically, we use that even more to compensate from downturn in different parts of the business. If I look at the pandemic, that we didn't do, of course, we tried to sell, but I think what we've changed a lot is we need to be price leaders only in downturns. I think historically, we maybe panic too much to fill the mill. That we are not doing anymore.
So I think one of the things that we have improved is also in that part, also in the commodity business, try to, to, be price leaders, try to optimize mix, don't fill the mill with the sort of lousy orders. And also in the commodity, the business is actually a mix shift ongoing from less advanced materials to more advanced materials. For instance, when this is, it's the bars, the billets, it's the hollow bar and some of the tube and pipe. And we can see really nice profits in the long products when it comes to high nickel bars, for instance. So that is also ongoing.
But if I look at the strategic business, is it possible to move some of the, what you have to kind of shift from those products to other business, which is more t hat grows?
That is what's happening. And we want to grow the high-margin business. And at some point when that happened, we start to be restricted in volumes in the backend system. And of course, what we do then is sell less of the contribution business. That doesn't happen in an afternoon, but that's the sort of the long-term movement. Because as I said in my presentation, the largest capacity potential we have, that is to sell less contribution business.
Mm-hmm. Then finally, if I just may also, it's, if I look at the four, the graph where you had the growth and the profitability in the different segment, since oil and gas is still quite large, can you just, If you would put that on the same kind of graph, where would it be into the growth and profitability?
Growth is a little bit difficult. I think right now it's high because it, it's a rebound from low levels. Long term, of course, we have a more, more conservative view. At some point, it need to go down, but right now it's high. If you look at profit levels, it, it's to the right of, chemical and petrochemical, more close to industrial heating.
Okay, thank you.
Thank you. Do we have any other questions from the audience? Yeah, you can go ahead again, Viktor.
Perhaps if I may b ut just on the capital allocation side, you basically say that, you know, all investments needed will be covered by, you know, own cash flows, I suppose. I completely understand, you know, the flexibility needed in the balance sheet, but can you give some indication how much of flexibility? I mean, we, we discussed all of that, but, you know, you said that you're targeting 30% net working capital to sales. That's another, let's say, SEK 1 billion in cash flow. That would put, you know, net cash at SEK 1.5 billion. Do you say need to have net cash, I guess, is the question?
Yes, I think that, I mean, looking at, for instance, 2022, obviously to get to the 30%, this obviously assumes that we have some stability in the metal prices, and things can change fairly quickly as we see it, as you saw in 2022, not only for nickel but also for other metals, of course. So I prefer to have some financial flexibility and so, yeah. Of course, I have an undrawn committed credit facility as well, which I can use, but I prefer to have some cash. It can go quickly.
Okay. Thank you.
We have one question from the webcast, and I don't think it's working, but I have one. So, so medical, what multiples are you typically buying companies at?
I can give an answer to that. I think firstly, to understand so to say, what kind of companies are we looking for in this? I mean, we, we are not buying med tech companies per se. We are looking at company to fortify our either wire forming or wire component side. So it's, it's sort of say, maybe closer to a wire company than a med tech company. But to give some kind of guidance on, on, sort of say, multiples, I mean, we, we are around 1-3x EV to sales. That, those are the kind of multiples we are looking at, but we have been closer to 2 in actual closings, I would say.
Mm-hmm. Martin?
Hi, sometimes you mention the short cycle business in your reports. Can you give an estimate of how big that share is of the total revenues?
Oh, maybe you know better than me, Emelie.
Say again, please, sorry.
The share of total revenues that comes from short cycle businesses.
Maybe half, y eah. Little less than half, yeah. Mm.
Yeah. Perhaps it would be helpful if you could just go through the different 10 different segments and.
Because the industrial is mostly or only short cycle. Energy, both oil and gas, and nuclear is not at all short cycle. Consumer is short cycle. Medical, yeah, some of that is short cycle, but, but, but as, as, Robert has described, the, how close we work with the product development, with the customer, we don't view it as short cycle, even if it's not always so long between, sort of order and delivery. Chemical and petrochemical. A little bit of both. The part of that is actually stocked items, like in hydraulic instrumentation, too, but, but heat exchange area is, is not short cycle. Transportation, I think it's I don't view that basic as a short cycle. So who, which one have I forgotten now?
Hydrogen and renewable, that's a small part, and we are learning. So what did that end up on? SEK 4 billion or SEK 5 billion.
Nuclear.
Nuclear , I'd said that. That, that's not short cycle.
Okay.
That's the longest cycle.
Yeah. Okay. Any other questions from the audience? Yeah, Igor.
I'll go back to the nuclear. How long would you say are a typical lead time for the nuclear segment?
I'm not sure there is a typical, but I would say maybe a year. But we have orders now that are gonna be delivered 2025, and some of them were booked earlier. So it could be one, it could be two, it could be three years. Sometimes we get sort of really big orders where the first set's gonna be supplied one year, the second set the next year, et cetera. So it depends a little bit. But of course, they do the purchase much pretty early, if you look upon the total what time it takes to build a nuclear plant.
Mm. Yeah, one more.
Yeah. Thank you very much, and sorry, more philosophical. But just I think you mentioned, you know, on your input sourcing strategy to the back-end side of the business, you use, you know, of course, mainly scrap. Did you say that you were 85% self-sufficient on scrap? I'm just thinking as you f ull.
No, sorry. We sell I mean, we say that important part of us is the integrated value chain, and roughly 85% of what we sell has gone through our own steel plants.
Okay.
That differs a little bit. I think tube is roughly 95%, but I think Kanthal is the lowest. But part of the industrial heating business, sort of I mean, if you look at the things, they're not coming through a steel plant, and the medical wire is not going through the steel plants.
And as you know, the full European steel industries, you know, transforming to electric arc furnaces, everyone will be starting looking at scrap in some point. I'm just, you know, thinking if that is something that sort of concerns you in terms of securing scrap supply or, or pricing, or?
I'm not saying it scares us, but I think we have it on, on sort of the strategic list. It has never happened that we couldn't supply. We are a small player when it comes to volume, so of course, we're not setting all the demands in that sector. But we have it on the map. There could be risk of some less carbon steel scrap. But on the other hand, if that happens, there will be more fossil-free iron that you also could acquire then.
And then on returns, if you could maybe perhaps help us with some of the latest investments that you made. You know, if we just try to look on paybacks or return on investment on the petrochem common petrochem investment or the silicon element investment now, it seems to be, you know, quite short, paybacks, if I put it like that. But, but any indication if.
But I think it depends. I think large industry investment, it takes some years. I think the tube, I would in China, five-seven years is my assumption. I think the silicon carbide, a little bit shorter, maybe three, four years, five maybe.
And the ability to, you know, sort of employ capital in terms of CapEx, you're at SEK 800 million now. You know, I guess that, for example, within Kanthal, significantly less capital intensive. You know, how much room is it to just, you know, employ a lot of cash? Is SEK 800 million a sort of a run rate level or, you know, where could that end up?
I think we guide for SEK 800. With our growth targets and ambitions, it would not be strange if CapEx will be a little bit higher in the future, but then in relation to sales, in sales, maybe on the same level. But that does not happen fast. And I think it's if we have a good case where we have good growth targets, and we can invest and increase our capacity, we will of course do that.
Mm-hmm. And then perhaps final on my side, I think you have, you know, built a strong case today around, you know, the mix journey of the company already, what you have done and what you're going to do. Just in Tube, we, you know, of course, also have seen a mix shift, and perhaps if you could just help us. I mean, the last, you know, peak margin was 11.2%, something like that, in 2019. How much of a super year do you think that was in relation to where that division stands today?
Hmm. That's actually a good question. I think, at the time, we thought it was a really good year. But I think It's not that many years since 2019. I think tube is stronger now, with more opportunities in other segments. That was highly impacted by really good sales in actually in the umbilicals. So from an umbilical point of view, a really good year. But I think other parts of the tube could have even better years in front of us.
And, 2024 could be a good umbilical year also, I suppose?
I'm pretty sure.
Yeah. Super. So thank you very much.
Thank you. I think that was today's final question, so thank you, Robert, and thank you, Olof. So we are approaching the end of today's Capital Markets Day. So, yeah, please go ahead and summarize the day.
Thank you, Emily. Thanks for really good questions. I mean, if I should summarize, I think the ambition today was to show our clear agenda for profitable growth and to describe why we see this as sort of we have a lot of possibilities, and even if the history was not growing, we're pretty sure we could do this. I think we focus on targeted segments and where we have very good tailwind from the global trends: energy, electrification, medical, Asia, et cetera. We will continue to put a lot of efforts into R&D and business development. This is sort of our origin. This is where we have our main knowledge, the materials knowledge and how to process our materials. That's the basis, and that we continue to invest in.
What is so nice to see now that some of the growth, and this is w ell, the CapEx investments are mainly in the downstream upstream segment or part of our production, not back-end. And now we start to see that we need to add capacity, and of course, that means that we're growing well, and we will continue to do that. And on top of that, we tried to describe today what is our view in acquisitions. We want to continue to do acquisition, and once again, where they make sense, where they really bring tangible synergies from more capabilities, new products, or geographical position. And when we deliver on this, we will grow Alleima, and we will even improve our market position.
This will, as many of the questions come, that will increase our profits and will reduce our cyclicality. And once again, then also it will improve our capital efficiency.
Thank you, Göran, and thank you all for watching this event and for being with us here today. For those of you in Stockholm, we have some refreshments outside in the lobby. And the whole program has been recorded and will be published and available tomorrow around lunchtime. So, with that, thank you again, and have a nice evening.
I also want to say thank you. Thank you to all who came to visit us here in Stockholm, listening. Thanks for good question, and also you who watched us digitally. Thank you for participating.