What a luxury to have you all here, actually, and to speak about our favorite topic, Atlas Copco, for a full day. We will try to make it very interesting, I hope. We view a transparent view on our present strategy and also looking into the future as well. I think Atlas Copco is a little bit on the move, when it comes to being an Atlas Copco, an industrial company, to become more of an Atlas Copco technology company. You can see that it's more software, it's more advanced applications that we do, and actually less competition in the areas where we move to. Therefore, we're gonna give you deep dive into Vacuum Technique. You're gonna get your hands-on this afternoon as well, and Industrial Technique as well then.
The downside of that is that there will be very limited information about the Compressor Technique and Power Technique this time. Daniel is always available if you would like to have more questions around that. Then we will show how important we believe sustainability is for Atlas Copco's future. It's probably our biggest opportunity. We start with a performance review, where are we presently. The blue bars are revenue, and as you can see that we marching on in quite a good order. Me and my team's target is to reach 8% growth over a business cycle. Adjusted for currency, which actually takes the number down a little bit, we are right on that target for this time period. It's actually 8%.
We are proud to say that we try to protect our bottom line, and you can see that the operating margin is the red line there. Even in 2020, you can see it's quite a small drop. We are proud of the setup we have to be both agile and resilient to changes in the economy. Although, I would say that we are willing to take bigger bets on innovation and organic growth. We have increased the spend in R&D from 2.5% to 4%. That you can see as seed capital to position ourselves not only for sustainability, but also making the company future-proof. We focus every project on value creation for our customers that ends up with our shareholders at the end of the day as well.
We see that we're gonna have a high return on capital employed. That's the yellow line. You can see it's hovering around 30%, and of course, that's due to when we acquire some bigger companies as well. If we look at the recent performance, we have had three fantastic quarters this year. In Q3, we had Compressor Technique. They were up 21% organically. Industrial Technique, 21% up. Power Technique, 16% up. Very strong performance. The downside was Vacuum Technique, mainly linked to semis, and that also linked to investments in memory. I'm on the revenues. We're up 18%. It's still very difficult with the supply chains. It hasn't changed in this quarter either.
At least sequentially, you can see that we have done fairly well if you look at the bars and credit to the team that is working really hard on making this happen. Operating profit SEK 8.4 billion, which is a record for Atlas Copco. That was a margin of 22% and a 40% increase versus last year. In the middle of Q4 now, I can confirm the outlook as well as we stated up there. If you look geographically, we have worked hard over many years to be strong in all these regions to give the resilience to the group. You can see that you might see that right in the numbers: Asia, a 4% growth.
It was actually, so this is where we have the majority of our semi sales and all the other BAs was or close to double-digit growth for this quarter as well. Americas, a little bit similar, but up 16%. Where we see signs of slowdown and maybe that would be Europe, even though in the quarter it was still 10%. We are building what we call power hubs around the world right now, and it's due to that we see, even if we believe in free trade, we see protectionism, we have seen the result of corona over a number of years now. You can also see this as three power hubs. If you look at Vacuum Technique with the head office and manufacturing in U.K., they are extending their presence in Japan, Korea, and in China.
Recently, we also announced that we will build a factory in the U.S. as well to take care of all these new industries. Compressor Technique, same thing there. Have a strong presence in Asia, have strong presence in North America and in Europe, so that is good as well. Power Technique, same, well, they are in Asia, in China, in Rock Hill, in the US, and a very strong base there. Industrial Technique with the smaller tools, we have a European, but what they do instead is that they set up customer centers with very close project management. Everything surrounding the tools and automation is done more and more locally as well. You can say that we do these power hubs to protect ourselves from protectionism, principally.
It will take some time, but we are in quite a good position already today. Our targets just confirm then the 8% growth target over the business cycle, high return on capital employed, and cash dividend around 50% of the annual profit then. The non-financial targets, we have strengths in that. It is in all 18 targets, and you can read more about that in the annual report. The one thing that I wanted to elaborate a little bit more on was the science-based targets. We not only signed up for science-based targets, we created plans to meet the targets as well. I think that's a huge difference. It is easy to sign up. It is very much more difficult to deliver on those targets.
For Scope 1, Scope 2, which is our own operation, we have said that we're gonna target on 1.5 degree. That's 46% reduction. I'm 100% committed that we will make that happen. Then we have Scope 3, which is the usage of our products, and there we are giving ourselves the target to well below 2 degrees. We are committed to deliver the most energy-efficient product. We are committed to change what we have from fossil to electric. We are committed to work with the product mix that we sell, but we will not be able to do this on our own. We need to see that we get renewables in the grids around the world as well. That is not happening in the pace that we need to right now.
If you look at the trends, as we see them at least, digitalization might not be so new, but it's a fantastic driver for vacuum technologies. I normally get the question, are we at the end of this cycle of investments and so on? Of course, these investments in SEMI is a little bit up and down, which we have seen from history. I would still claim that we are in the beginning of something. It's not the end of anything when it comes to that. If you see the changes in society, the way I look at you, how you do your reports, how you gather, transport, evaluate data, it's just increasing. It's a very good spot to be in. We also use digitalization for our service businesses. More and more products are connected.
I would say that more than 200,000 compressors. Power Technique is getting up. That'll be 20,000 compressors also connected today. 100% of the electric tools in Industrial Technique is connected as well. We really use that as well, and we use it for our own operation as well. Another concept that we are exploring to see where we will end up is that the digital twin of our products has always been present in R&D, but we are trying to explore what we can do with the digital twin in the sales process. It would be extremely interesting to run a virtual compressor versus competition, for example, to be able to say, "Well, this is the efficiency.
This is how it will run in your environment." Of course, we use it as well in service then to be able to predict what will happen. For us, digitalization is very positive. The second I brought up is automation, and you can see on the wider scale, it's onshoring. Now we see it's real. It's been talked about for quite some time. With the new U.S. CHIPS Act and the Inflation Reduction Act and whatever it's called, you can see they're bringing home business. You can also see that from a labor constraints that they need to do it, automate, and also from efficiency point of view. The link for us here is a lot about the vision technologies that we can show, and we can replace then the human being, the eyes, with different vision applications.
For us, we see this as a great benefit. End-of-arm tooling, we normally talk about, that's everything that is at the end of a robot. This is a new application for Compressor Technique, for many of the grippers are actually pneumatic today. Or it could be a vacuum application. Two other business areas getting involved in the automation process. Low-carbon society, I think many believe it's a threat. We do not believe that at all. We think it's the biggest opportunity for Atlas Copco, and I will talk a little bit later about that as well. We were not sure about the wording, de-globalization, but I hope it's okay.
We believe in free trade, but we need to act according to how the world is really developing, and that's why we're building these three power hubs to be protected from protectionism. If you look at our strategy, what we do when we spend quite a lot of time on selecting segments where we like to build business organically, and also when we do acquisitions. What we're looking for is trying to find a position where we can be number one and number two. We need innovation. We need a differentiated technology. The only one that determines if we have that is the customer to say, "Well, this is value-creating for us." We really target that early on in the R&D processes as well. Then we prefer something that is critical to the customer's process.
The only reason for that is that if it's critical to their process, you talk about value. If it's a commodity, you talk about price. We are not so good talking about price. We prefer to be in a premium segment. Of course, the resilience from a leading service offer is also give that stickiness to our customer to be back and talk to them. We have five pillars for the growth rate, and we spend probably much more time on people management than you think. Cecilia is here, you can talk to her as well, but we spend a lot of time finding people that fits into a decentralized organization. We spend a lot of time on the internal job market to make people move up in the system.
We spend enormous time on education for people that has the drive and passions to move up in the organization. As you know, we have a lot of people that stay for many years in Atlas Copco. The second pillar I also think is extremely important, also people driven to find those people that has that entrepreneurial spirit and drive innovation for us. We have presence geographically to get the resilience. We have the service offer as this gap. Operational is another topic that we actually spend quite a lot of time on, and if you ever have the opportunity to visit Compressor Technique, they are expert at driving costs out of the processes.
At the same time, we like to give our customers a unique product for exactly what they need, but we try to build it in modules to make it efficient for us. That's the way we go forward. At the end of the day, we want to be diversified, agile, and resilient business model. Being resilient, one of the things we just listed the customers up there. We have a broad number of customers, probably Compressor Technique is in most of them, Vacuum Technique in, is most of them, Industrial Technique is in most of them. We can see that. We are not really dependent on one segment. You can see that Henrik in Industrial Technique then, they are in the automotive, but that's also compressors and everything else in automotive, but it's still limited to 9% of the group.
If you look at Semi, we still talk a lot about semi in every quarterly report, but the electronics there, where it is part of, it's less than also that it's a one digit on semis as well. We have a very broad base of customers to work with. We put in a lot of effort to build our service, to get that resilience, the stickiness to our customers. It's not only that, we also with every service contract, we get happier and more pleased customers. I think they secure the next order for us many times. Very much OpEx-driven, of course, and equipment CapEx-driven. We have a strong presence then in a number of segments as you can see.
The organization, I guess we are recognized for the decentralized way we are working, and we all will need to give people a real job, we say, with real accountability, but also authority to act. If you look at the four business areas, it's actually only eight people that work in the business areas. 97% of the people works in the line, which is, I think, astonishing. Every division has the highest operational responsibility. They have a full value chain to be responsible for. What we drive is not only the knowledge about our products, it's the knowledge about our customer's application, and if there is another way to do this.
You can see that we take decisions in this way, and then you might say, "Well, they don't take advantage of the synergies." We do, and then we call it council, and that goes this way in our organizations. We have a purchase council. It's not that you need to follow the recommendation there, but you get everything. These are good suppliers. This is how we work with them. If you take logistics in Belgium, we have the Vacuum Technique, Industrial Technique, and Power Technique sharing the same distribution center. We say it's not an order winner where it comes from. If it works, it works. We do take advantage of the synergies in our organization as well.
The other thing that we think it's fairly easy, if you look at Vacuum Technique, it started out as a division, big enough, and then it becomes a business size. It's very scalable model for us, so it's fairly easy to add different opportunities. Vision Technology became its own division as well, for example. We are proud to be, and we just showed in the first picture when we look at the profitability, both agile and resilient to changes in the market conditions. There are a number of things we do. First, I already showed you we have presence in many, many segments. We have a strong geographical coverage that has been tremendously beneficial many times. Service is 35% of what we do. When we manufacture, we do 25% of the components ourselves.
We do the final assembly and the quality test, but we share the responsibility of the components. Around 70%-75% of the components are actually sourced to help our balance sheet in a change like this. We work with temporary workforce. Right now we are running flat out, but in a normal condition, of course, we work with temporary, and it's normally slightly higher where we have more flexibility, like in Semi, and around 10% in other business areas. Every division is responsible to have a scenario planning, which is normally scenario 10% down, 20% down, 10% up, 20% up. Of course, it's more to be quick to act that we find important.
The other thing that we do is I added this little green dot here that out of a slowdown, many times we become a stronger company, and I think that's what you have seen the last one and a half year. Already here, when we went into the Corona, we said that, okay, we are not gonna touch strategic R&D. Let's keep that. We are not gonna touch the investments we do in digitalization. We're not gonna change the competence. Those are the three areas where we kept, and then we were really tough on all other costs. As you can see then when getting out of this, we normally have an opportunity to launch a new generation of products and have the competence that people are looking for our customers. Innovation.
Without innovation, without creating the value for customers, then we would not be successful. For us to become arrogant or anything around innovation, it's not an opportunity. We really need to drive this constantly. It's also probably the most valuable activity we can have to create value for our shareholders. We have increased from 2.5% to 4% over the years, so you can see it's quite rapid. The outcome of that is of course what you see in the sales numbers, but also that we are launching more products than we ever have in the past. When we look at the success rate of new products, it's really, really good. Why is it good? It's because we have so close links to customers today to understand the applications.
If we only understood our own products, I think we would fail from time to time. We have done in the past. It's a very close connection to the big SEMIs, the big autos, the big aerospace customer to exactly identify what and how they will build the next generation of products. This is also part of transforming the market. Sometimes I know that we are asked, "Well, how big is this market?" We'll say, "Well, normally, when you look at the market like this, which is our sales in blue then, and competing sales in gray, we are not always interested in all the gray parts.
We're trying to find the niches where we can make good money, where it's really adding value to our customers." Normally, if you go after a piece of the gray, you go up head-to-head with competition and price becomes a more important factor. We do that as well, of course, but in every product we do, we're also trying to find that leverage to transform the market to some sort of new technology. Then you're, if you go for this piece, it's normally that you're not competing as much directly versus competition, you're competing versus another process. Then you're talking value instead of price because no one had been there to set the price of that product yet.
And that could be that when we went from pneumatic to electric, 98% of what we sell to the car industry today is electric smart tools. For the value generation for us, it's huge because these tools are significantly more expensive but gives even more value. We went from diesel to electric wheel portables, so that's available as an electric product as well. More content for us, a higher price, but also the benefit of low carbon. We can go from electric to battery. We went from fixed speed compressors and fixed speed vacuum pump to variable speed products. Another thing to talk about, another process, energy efficiency. Of course, uptime in service contract is much more value than just breakdown repairs as well.
Just because we see that, this part might not be of interest to us from a profit perspective, a transformed market might be very interesting for us. We are also trying to extend the offer that we have. It could look something like this. I gave you a number of examples here. This is first time Compressor Technique. If you go filtration, we have done for many years the filters for compressor. It's very profitable. We said, well, this is a fantastic business. We acquired Walker Filtration. They are both an OEM, and they also supply to us. Suddenly, we also now have filters for the Vacuum Technique business, and we get a range of industrial filters as well.
It gives us a new platform for growth, and we can also pick where we would like to be. Then might say, "Well, what is the total market for filter?" Well, that's huge. But we have no interest in going into the auto market for filter. It's very competitive, low margins. We stay with the industrial filters where we have the access to the customers, and it's more valuable for our customers. We have temperature control or chillers is something else. We have just launched this year a couple of products from that acquisition under Atlas Copco name, still to be evaluated. Low pressure, we have been on that for a number of years. Double digit growth for many years.
It's part of the cleaning process of cleaning water. You have industrial gases, you know that most gas, you can see all these trucks driving around to deliver gas to hospitals and other industries. From a sustainability point of view, to have that logistics in cities and everywhere else is not so good. More and more people are buying oxygen, nitrogen generator themselves to manufacture their own gases. This is what you have seen also. It's developing extremely well for us in our Industrial Air. Then high pressure is the linkage to hydrogen. I can see that we have more projects in hydrogen than we thought a year ago, but of course, the commercialization of hydrogen might be a number of years ahead of us. That's a number of new platforms for us.
The cryogenic pumps is the linkage to the tool makers for semi. This is why we also sell the turbo pumps. Very good acquisition. It had a bumpy start, but now it's actually performing well above what we expected. We're getting into process diagnostics. Liquid ring pumps is kind of the base for industrial pumps and a base for transformation into something more advanced, and gas vapor delivery as well. I'm happy that Geert is here to present later on, then you can ask all the question about this. In Industrial Technique, we have done over the years a lot on different assembly technologies. We are very good at dispense technologies for the auto sector, but we have been eager to get into electronics, which is of course a growing segment as well.
Scheugenpflug was our entry point to this, and we have one or two technologies there, but there are more technologies also for electronics dispensing, and that is also performing really well. We talked about the in-line and machine vision, which is the ISRA VISION acquisition that opens up the door for automation for us. Very, very interesting. We don't build boilers or anything in steam, but we are a packager of steam, and we rent steam, you know, especially at the rental division together with oil-free machines, also become quite successful. The new area is the industrial pumps. Same here, we are not interested in a complete pump market. We are not gonna move water from one side to another.
It's gonna be some sort of critical. It's gonna be dirty water in that case, or mainly it's gonna be industrial pumps where the pumps are actually critical to the process. What they have in common is the characteristics that we spoke about before, interest in niche market, the standalone attractiveness. Is there this interesting service offer? It doesn't matter where you are in organization. This is how we evaluate if we want to enter into something new here. Combining these areas, for 2022, sales will be around SEK 11 billion for this new segment. It's quite a big addition to what we have done in the past as well. Of course, the upside on these are probably greater than some of our more traditional technologies. We have done more acquisitions this year than ever before.
You can see some of the characteristics that we're looking for. We look at this from two ways. We have dedicated people to look at the different platforms. If you see the Wangen Pumpen, Geveke, and LEWA up there, this is the industrial pump base that we now have to see how that, the start is really good there. Soft2tec is error-proofing when you do assembly technologies. It's vision technologies that help the operator to guide them to make sure that they tighten your car or refrigerator or bicycle or whatever it might be. SCD is the drain that we were sourcing before. Now we have our own technology. OXYMAT is on-site air.
These are all new platforms where we have dedicated people, and we do normally a new business line, so we can see that how we report on this, and then it could be become a division as well, of course, over time. Then we have the roll-ups, and it's risk-free almost done. We have acquired both Vacuum Technique and Compressor Technique distributors over a number of years. And you might think then, well, then they're going to a new model or more direct sales. That is actually not correct. We are actually signing up more new distributors than we are acquiring, so that is not changing the way we go to market. But what happens here in the perfect world is that we find someone competing distributor. They have a great service business.
They have a lot of competing machines out in the region. We enter into this. We have access to parts. We continue to service all competing machines. Step by step, year after year, we replace all the machines in this territory. Of course, the upside is both on the service side and on the equipment side. That model is fairly solid. If we make a mistake, it's more a people mistake than a business mistake. The success rate is extremely high here, of course, and a low risk for us. That means also then when you see, well, why do they do a small acquisition of 20 people in Canada or whatever it might be? The value creation for owner is fairly easy to calculate there. We talked about service.
We have six dedicated organizations for service. The most important might be that we get to see the customer more frequently, and we will know when they have a problem, we will know when they have a new investment coming up, so it gives us that stickiness to the customers. From a resilience point of view, it's 35%, as I mentioned before. I must say that the focus that we have, you can say, "Why don't you have one service organization?" Well, they really understand and know the customers, so really focus beats synergies. We don't mix. These are dedicated people for dedicated customers.
We do transactional Net Promoter Scores for the service contracts and all our customers, and we can see that not only is it profitable for us, it gives us the stickiness, but it also makes our customer more pleased with the product and the service they get. It's actually a win-win there as well. Here you can see that. You can see that when we benchmark them, this is not FX adjusted, that's why a little bit higher than my first number. You can see the 11% here and the KPI for own equipment is 9%, so with this period of time. You can see also that they're keeping up even though CapEx equipment sales have been fantastic over a number of years. You can see they're keeping up as well.
Remarkably enough, you remember 2020 here, when we couldn't get access to customers. For the full year, service sales was only down 3%. Switching gears a little bit, talk about sustainability. First I will show a short video, so you get to meet some of my management team here as well and see how they put in their efforts here.
The biggest motivation in looking after the climate is basically to protect the world for future generations.
I believe that sustainability is a great opportunity that we have going ahead.
We see an extraordinary potential in the battery industry.
We are pivoting towards more sustainable products. Instead of having engine-driven products, we are now switching to electrical-driven products. We have new, more efficient products also, like our energy storage systems and our solar-driven light towers.
Right now, hundreds of battery production plants are being built around the world. Here, Industrial Technique is involved in finding the best efficient production solutions in each step.
We also are involved in grid-scale battery. For instance, when you have windmills and we have wind, you can produce electricity. You can use that electricity to run a compressor. The compressor will then compress a gas that will be stored, and when you don't have wind, you can release that pressure and through an expander and a generator, you can generate electricity.
A good example of where we reduce the environmental impact is on the newest chips. We talk now about 3 nm, maybe even smaller. They use EUV technology. When you use EUV, you use a lot of hydrogen. We have now a system that we can recycle the hydrogen and reuse in the same process, where we not only save money, but also the environmental impact of not having to produce that hydrogen is enormous, so that really helps the customer.
We work with customers in mainly two ways. First, to reduce the CO2 footprint in their production, but secondly, also in helping customers making their products, could be a car or an airplane, more efficient from a CO2 perspective, reducing fuel consumption.
To develop sustainable and more efficient products is much more difficult than standard products, so therefore, there are higher barriers to entry for our competitors, and I think that gives Atlas Copco a competitive advantage.
One good example of business opportunities, it's our air lubrication system for ships, where we inject low-pressure air to reduce the friction of the boat and the water, and that can reduce up to 5% the energy consumption of a ship.
Another important thing is helping our customers to comply with local legislation. Sometimes on top of the local legislation, the customer has its own more stringent controls. We have a big North American customer who's really, really tough on the NOx exhaust, and we managed, as only vacuum supplier, to reach the level of NOx that this customer wanted. Of course, if you can do that, it's fantastic for our business and for the environment.
The energy transformation will require new gases. One good example, it's hydrogen compressors to the entire chain, hydrogen for mobility, hydrogen for the industry. There are quite a lot of opportunities there. Also, when you need to store CO2, you will require a compressor. That's why we have developed a product range already for that type of application. Another market segment is hospitals. 50% of the CO2 emitted by hospital is coming from anesthetic gases, and we developed equipment now that can recover these gases and avoid the emission to the environment.
We have already taken actions to be more sustainable in our own factories. Today, most of our factories have solar panels installed. This we wouldn't have done five years ago, but today we do it. For example, 90% of all our waste from the factories are recycled. Also, in new products, we use more and more recycled material. One of our latest products is made out of 32% recycled material.
Energy impact in the whole supply chain is very important. For example, when we build a factory, we will always make sure the supply chain is local to the factory so that you reduce the transport getting into your factory. When we take our products out of our factories, we use rail now quite often, which is a good, fast, low carbon solution.
If we create a minimum impact to the environment, I'm convinced that our shareholders will also benefit from that process.
We're investing in more sustainable products over the next few years, and I think this virtuous circle of innovation and focus on product development is what makes us successful.
You have the full circle of sustainability.
We are actually really on top of this both on our own operations as you can see on this slide then and the commitment to science-based targets. In our Scope 1 and Scope 2 you can see it's very small out of this complete CO2 footprint. We really work hard with our customers to see if we can get up to renewable energies. For this part we will have the 46% reduction then until 2030 and I'm really really sure we can make that. It's really good. Then on the other side we can work and we have given a demand to every division that they should offer the most energy efficient products out there.
We will work with our mix, so we actually sell the more energy efficient product that will be beneficial for our teams to do that, and that's really important. We really need help, and that's the renewable part of the grid, and that is lagging behind for sure. The other part, some companies say, well, they're on the journey to electrification. I would say that we are almost there. You can see 87% of our product are already electric. You can say, well, to make it easy for us, we can say, well, if you only use renewable, it would not be a problem. We don't make that shortcut. We make the challenge to ourselves as well to fix this. On the diesel part, it's the portable compressor. You actually see a small piece of it there.
What we have done there is that we went to biodiesel first for all our testing, and you can run the engines on that. Now we also offer a completely electric one. They are really coming on in demand as well this year. We can see a lot of good sales numbers for that as well. If you can make it electric, you could also think that you can do it with batteries if you want to. The other part which we will take away is the abatement system that is in semiconductors and in vacuum applications. We have fossil fuel, but we also have electric. We're now building a new range for electric as well, so we can also replace them as efficient or better than the fossil fuel ones.
The only piece that will be left here is the generators. For a logical reason, it's difficult to take away when you're actually trying to create them. The end product is electricity. It'll be a very, very small part, but maybe it's also good to remember that the company is already electrified. This is a very interesting slide because now we talked a little bit how we're gonna do that, but now go into the more of the business opportunity. A few years ago, we were a little bit what does this mean to Atlas Copco. We have many engineers, and how do we view this and what can happen and where is the potential for this and how do we take advantage of this change.
Then we asked, in this case, McKinsey, which is, t hey say, so if you use Europe as a base, what are the enabling technologies that will really bring us to climate neutrality by 2050? I'm sure you recognize a lot of them. It's first one is onshore wind, then you have solar, battery cars, heat pumps. You have battery heavy transport, and you have wind again, fossil-free steel, carbon capture, and a number of other. Biofuels is over here as well. Then we think, okay, so now we know this. This is how it will look like. This is what will be needed for the future. But how could we present that to our teams and get them engaged and understand how this society look like?
They say, "But can we not paint a picture of a society with this new..." This is our best attempt so far, how this new world would look like. Of course, in transport sector, if you start there, you can say the cars, it's approximately 13% of sales globally today. When Henrik talks later about his sales numbers, the lion's share of his auto CapEx goes into battery or hybrids today. It's really changing in that way. The other thing, the number of battery factories that we are working with today, and you have that as an example in the workstation this afternoon, it's the new engine. For us, the potential is higher with the battery car than it was with the fossil-driven car. From that perspective, it's very interesting.
If you go down further to the truck over here, then of course, you talk about battery, which we know will be the most efficient, but they also discuss hydrogen. Of course, hydrogen, then you enter into the high pressure compressors. It's also mentioning in its industrial application, but also the mobile application where you actually fill up on hydrogen. That could be of interest as well. This is probably just the precursor in between, and you can already today in Norway see battery ferries. The battery application is interesting. This is where we get a lot of business today is LNG transport, and of course, you need to compress gases, you need to take care of it when you transport it and expand gases. It's fantastic applications for Compressor Technique there as well.
Clean water, it's a scarce resource in many areas of the world, and low pressure is part of that from Compressor Technique, but also the new acquisition from Wangen Pumpen. They take care of the debris from this and into biogas applications. That's another two applications where we see interest. Solar, as you know, most of these companies are Chinese today, but we can also see with the Inflation Reduction Act, it's called IRA. I don't think it's a good name, but that's what it's called. You can see that there will be focus on this in the U.S. as well, to try to be competitive here. There you have application for vision, and you also have applications for vacuum. From this factory, we offer today heat recovery application.
Of course, it has not been so efficient, but with energy prices as they are, and they want to be CO2 neutral, of course, heat recovery application will be of great interest, and it's a compressor application. It's also carbon capture. We do carbon capture solution in gas and process today for our customers. Wind turbines. Industrial Technique is part of the assembly from an industrial point of view. This afternoon, you will also see how we engage now in actually building these towers. And then Compressor Technique helps out around the workplace here. They can put a bubble curtain to protect sea life as well. That's another application. Of course, everything on this is connected and digital, which is then very beneficial for our Vacuum Technique business.
What is the full potential of this? We don't know, but we know it's significant. I asked Vagner Rego the other day because we do business review for 2023, and I said we looked at all his applications. I said, "What do you think the market for compressors will be, you know, in a few years?" Then he said, "Well, if this hydrogen really happens, if the energy storage happens, if the natural gas will happen," he said, "Well, I think the market for compressor can be twice the size as it is today." I'm not making a claim that we knew that. I'm just saying that the compressor that some people might think are old technologies is really an enabler for this type of society that we are looking for.
You will not be able to get there without compressing gases, moving gases, expanding gases. I think it's Daniel asked me before, he says, "Which is your favorite picture?" he said. I said, "Well, this is the one for my presentation, and I think it's the one to remember if you're interested in Atlas Copco's future as well." Short term, he said that there will be a little bit on the other business areas as well. This is then Compressor Technique. Really strong performance over three quarters. Very well-positioned for this carbon, as we just discussed. Steady margins, 21% growth, 24% operating margin. You can also see that even though they're extremely successful with the service business, you can see that they are keeping up.
So CAGR for service has been 8% and equipment 5%. But what is this CAGR? Well, it's actually, you can see it was very flat these first five years, and then it seems like we have found a new path here with growth. That's really linked to what we talked about earlier to invest more in R&D as well. I couldn't keep this from you. I will show you another video. I thought it would be funny to say, well, this is the, you know, the Ferrari of the compressor world. But then I realized that this product is much better than a Ferrari. It's actually, it's electric, it's not fossil fuel, it's energy efficient, it has connectivity. I don't know if Ferraris are connected or not. It's built with modularity.
So when you look at this video, this is the first or the next generation VSD compressor. It's the first one in a new range of products. Just see how clean it is and what they speak about. I think it's a fantastic product that will completely outperform competition.
Meet the new GA VSDS, developed and built for a new era, for the generation that wants it all. The GA VSDs required reimagining and reinventing every single compressor component, starting with the all-new drivetrain, controlled by the Neos Next Inverter and the Elektronikon controller. The GA VSDs comes with a new compression element, built especially by Atlas Copco for superior efficiency. For the first time ever in a compressor, the GA VSDs also features a ferrite-assisted synchronous reluctance motor. It offers market-leading IE5 efficiency and a rotor built without rare earth materials in a double win for sustainability. Next up, a revolutionary smart temperature control system to replace the traditional mechanical thermostat. The advanced synergy between the Elektronikon controller, the Neos Next, the STC valve, and the VSD fan allows for optimal oil temperature and injection based on your compressor's actual running conditions. The result, superior reliability and efficiency.
Key to this optimized performance is the Neos Next, which manages the motor, the VSD fan, and the STC system. Developed in-house, the Neos Next combines the functionality of an entire electrical cubicle in one compact component. The VSDS offers even more smart features, from the all-new intelligent drains to the boost flow mode. The smart drains prevent moisture in your air system while monitoring and minimizing the number of drain cycles. The boost flow mode allows you to temporarily exceed your compressor's maximum capacity without losing pressure. The GA VSDs meets the requirements of today's and tomorrow's connected production floor. It is fully OPC UA-enabled to seamlessly connect and communicate with your other production equipment. Our SMARTLINK platform allows you to monitor your GA VSDS from anywhere and to analyze its performance from your computer and mobile device.
All these features come in a small and silent package with a vertical, compact build and a quiet performance that ensure easy installation and a comfortable working environment. Sustainable, solid, smart, savings. It takes superior engineering to earn the superlatives of Generation S, and that is exactly what the GA VSDs delivers. To find out more about the new GA VSDS, visit atlascopco.com.
I worked 34 years in this company, and I think every year, the R&D team has said, "Well, now we are really pushing the limit for innovation. We cannot do anything more." Then they bring something like this again. It's just unbelievable. There's a lot of talent in that team. Power Technique, you can see here as well, that they have. The one thing that we've done really well is the specialty rental, not only the oil-free, but acquisition—two acquisitions were done in steam, has been extremely successful as well. That goes as a service division in our case, but that's really moving the needle, and it's also very profitable for us.
In Portables, you can see then that we did the diesel to electric, which is also coming along and there we are clearly number one in what we do. Then I think one of the more interesting part is the entry into industrial pumps with the two acquisitions and with a good start, but we are still a small niche players. But the technologies that we now control, we do really well, but there's an obvious case of course to see if we can add on more technologies to that as well. Financially, we're performing on another level right now. I'm not saying it's sustainable as we had it in the 18.9%, but it's significantly better than where we have ever been before.
One of the areas where we were struggling a little bit with profitability, I would say it is generator, but also now that is really picking up. Now we are combining generators with energy storage, which looks very interesting for construction sites as well, that many of the construction sites like to drive the CO2 levels down as well. That looks very positive as well. Then service is difficult in power because the equipment are moving around all the way, but it seems like we have found an extra gear there as well, and service is also performing really well. That is also including then the rental piece. I wanted to give a short video, just two minutes, on the industrial pump, so it gives you a little bit.
I can see the pictures will give you a view of what kind of pumps this is.
Being present everywhere in any industry is in the Atlas Copco DNA, the home of industrial ideas. Now we are facing a transformation that'll open a new segment to become first in mind, first in choice in the positive displacement pump business. With a clear differentiation in technology and application knowledge, these pumps are key in customer operations. They offer a healthy return on investment versus competitive offerings and strong market business potential. We took our first steps in the industrial flow segment with Varisco. The Italian brand became a part of the Atlas Copco Group in 2016. In April 2022, we acquired Wangen Pumpen. In September 2022, we acquired LEWA and Geveke. Individually, these brands and their innovative technologies offer many pathways for growth. Together, they cover targeted verticals in the positive displacement pump business, meeting the application needs of many versatile industries.
We will not only pursue the opportunities through our current portfolio, but we will also explore adjacent and new technologies to populate the market with the right product mix. Our journey has just started.
There is of course a huge business for this, but when we talk about the characteristics we are interested in, okay, we want to be a niche player where it's profitable, so it's not all. We also said that we like to see an interesting service business, and of course this pump is critical in the process in an industrial application. It's not so interesting if you just transport clean water or something that is very clean, then there you don't have so much service opportunities. If you have, you know, chemicals, it can be dew, it could be color, it could be a lot of different things that actually makes the service interesting, very much so in this area as well. By that, I end my first part, and welcome Peter Kinnart, our CFO to stage.
You want this, I guess?
Yes. Thank you, Mats, and welcome everybody. Thought that was a really very good overview of the Atlas Copco strategy and the Atlas Copco business model. Most of you that have been following us for quite a number of years are, of course, very familiar with our decentralized setup, the agility and resilience of our asset light operations, et cetera. Looking at this presentation, what personally pleases me, even makes me proud as an employee of this company, is the fact that through the power of innovation, our very competent and committed people, and the continuous selective growth, both organically as well as inorganically, we are able to play a real role of significance in this race to net zero. Of course, our science-based targets are the KPI that we will use to measure our progress against that.
But stepping aside a little bit from this very and new and very important KPI, I would like to zoom in together with you a little bit more on our financial KPIs. At the risk of being maybe a little bit boring, this is of course a little bit of a repeat of what Mats has been talking about already before. What is the main message I would like to bring here? Nothing has changed. We still believe that these three very important long-term KPIs are the fundamental way of keeping track of our performance in Atlas Copco. It starts, of course, with the 8% average growth per year over a business cycle, a sustained high return on our capital employed, and last but not least, a stable, growing, and predictable cash return for our shareholders of approximately 50% of our net earnings.
Now, one might argue that 8% is maybe not a high enough target, or maybe it should be something else, but we are not just looking for any kind of growth. For us, it's very important that we are able to also deliver on our capital employed. Looking at the long-term growth, we will see here a picture of how the revenues have developed over time. Of course, it fluctuates a bit from one year to the other. Overall, exactly around this particular period of time, 2012- 2021, we have reached exactly the 8% target that we are committed to deliver.
As I mentioned, it is not just any kind of growth that we are looking for, and we want to make sure that the performance that we have been delivering over the years can be repeated time after time. In other words, that the growth gives us also a sustainable and high return. Of course, our business model with a 23-division, decentralized organization, the agile setup that we have, and the resilience to our service organization is, of course, the foundation to be able to deliver this continued high return on capital employed. This, you could say, is our formula for value creation. The high return on capital employed is not only built on a lean and agile balance sheet, but also on a very solid operating profit performance.
If we look a little bit at this particular slide, showing the earnings per share over a longer period of time, then you can also see that the importance of the operating profitability performance has gradually over time taken an even more important role, growing from 72% of the earnings per share to 78% of the earnings per share. In fact, the impact of our net financial costs and the income tax on our operations is not so big. Of course, we could say that our tax and treasury team is also running a very tight ship, while the bulk of the responsibility to generate this profitability comes, of course, from our operations. They are really doing the job. Now, moving a little bit from profitability to cash generation.
This slide, for me personally, is a very important slide, but because it is almost a perfect illustration of our agile and resilient business model. First of all, it shows the impact of the growth of the business over time and the consequent profitability. Also that if at times when we are maybe not able, due to all kinds of reasons and circumstances, to increase the profitability, as we would like, and even though this has been seldom the case, we are always able to then or at least grow the cash flow. At the bottom of this scorecard, you can also see the modest investments that are required to feed the growth to produce this growing profit and the growing cash flow over time.
Even though we have been indicating over the last several quarters that we are making very significant capacity investments, and that you can see in the last gray bar at the bottom of the graph there. You can also conclude that in the bigger scheme of things, these investments are not really very heavily affecting neither the cash flow nor the profitability over time. They are extremely necessary to be able to feed the future growth, looking at all of these fantastic new applications that are opening up for all of our business areas. In this picture, you can also clearly see how we continue to be an asset-light operation. We have of course, invested heavily.
We also see that we have had some issues over the last several quarters when it comes to inventory build-up, due to all the supply chain issues that we have been facing. We have also mentioned the extensive investment programs that we are pushing out to increase the capacity to deliver all these orders on hand. If you put a little bit in perspective against the revenue development, then you can also see that over a longer perspective, it is not really a material change. As the revenues will continue to grow based on our annual growth target, there is even room for more for the future. Finally, we have, of course, the ambition to give to our shareholders a stable, growing, and predictable cash return.
I believe when we look at this particular picture, it is fair to say that we have been able to deliver on that promise as well. We have also added here in this slide the additional cash distributions to the mandatory share redemptions, as you can see. Overall, when it comes to the cash distribution, I think it is clear that we are also here demonstrating a high resilience over a longer period of time. As the dividend over this entire period has never, ever dropped, and in fact, has even grown every single year, over this period. With that, I would like to conclude a short recap of our key financial long-term targets and a review of Atlas Copco's long-term performance track record.
Before going into another deep dive into two of our business areas, I would like to hand back to Mats for a short summary.
Okay. Thank you, Peter. Final slide, we try to summarize this, what we try to give to our owners, what we are working hard for every day. It's to give a diverse business, and as we have proven in the presentation, geographically spread by segment as well to minimize risk. We talk about being a market leader. That is always important for us to be number one or number two. If you look at Compressor Technique, I believe that you can say that they are twice the size of closest competitor at this point. If you go to Vacuum Technique in semiconductors, they are clearly number one.
In industrial vacuum, we said before that we were two or three, and today, when we look at the quarter reports, we can see that we are also number one in industrial and scientific. In Industrial Technique, we are not only number one in these technologies. With our second brand, we're actually number two in the world as well. We see with the entering into flexible automation that Henrik will talk about later on, we will actually limit competition even further. In Power Technique with portable compressors, we are number one. In generators, we are probably number one in one region of the world and maybe number three in other parts of the world. There we have some work to do. Of course, we just entered into the industrial pumps.
A big commitment to innovation and sustainability from our side, which you can see in the increase that we have had in R&D and the number of products that we launch and the commitment to science-based targets. To get the resilience, to get the stickiness with customers, we should have the best service offer. As you can see, it's appreciated by customers. It's growing faster than equipment sales as well. The organization is decentralized, give people a lot of responsibility. It's really light when it comes to staff functions, and all the resources are close to customers. It's a very scalable organization, and as Peter showed them, that we are trying to be very asset light in the way we set up our operation to be able to be agile for different conditions in the marketplace.
Of course, as I showed in my favorite picture, a real enabler for a sustainable society. Thank you so much.
Thank you, Mats. Before the break, we will have one more presentation. Welcome up on stage Business Area President for Vacuum Technique, Geert Follens.
Good morning, it's a pleasure to be here and to have this opportunity to explain to you how and what we're doing in Vacuum Technique. I also look forward to later this morning and this afternoon to be able to interact with you and at least to try to answer all your questions. What I'm going to cover in this presentation is facts. Indeed, how are we doing? Talk a bit about the market and the fundamentals, which is a little bit changing today. Strategy for growth, that will be most of the time. Closing with what are we doing for or getting to a low carbon society.
Looking at the facts, and if I go through the trends and the drivers first, as you know, the majority of our business is still semiconductor. Within semiconductor, we see this continuous trend to make smaller and smaller chips. You can say 7 nm is now the standard, 5 nm is there already, and we're working towards, or our customers are working towards 3 nm even 1.5 nm. Second trend is the machine-driven data generation, where there was a time where semiconductor was driven by personal computers, tablets, and phones. This has now changed completely into a machine-driven application. As you know, there's many more machines than people, and they all have some kind of electronics within them.
The traditional ones, 5G, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, automotive, healthcare, are growing very fast, and everything is interconnected now. Every device is talking to another device. Also very important, legislation is becoming more and more important within the semiconductor and what you can exhaust from the customers' processes. Within industrial scientific vacuum, you know, we are getting bigger and bigger in the food industry. Regulations also there are getting more stringent, so that drives our business. Batteries, we talk a lot about batteries, but in the production of the battery cells, there's four processes where you need vacuum. It's the coating, it's the drying, it's the filling, and the degassing. Batteries is a very, very important part for our industrial business.
Solar is very obvious, and space, more and more satellites out there, they all have to be tested in a vacuum environment. The common trends that are valid for both are clearly sustainability. We are working very hard to have more energy-efficient products, and where we focused in the past and still very much on total cost of ownership. Now we see that drive from all our customers and the questions towards a more sustainability, a sustainable solution. Service uptime, we are there now, so all the machines are interconnected, and it's about yields and uptime through connectivity.
For us, very important, we are kind of in the eye of the storm, is geopolitics, where there is more and more a trend for local, rather than having all the business in one part of the world. These are the trends and the drivers. If I look to the left of the graph, I'm proud to say that we had eight consecutive quarters of revenue growth. If you look on the graph, in 2019, we were at SEK 5 billion, and now we're at SEK 11 billion in revenue. In quarter three, for the first time, we passed the $1 billion mark in revenue, which is a nice milestone for us. You can see the orders, of course.
Since early 2020, orders have been much bigger than the revenue. We did not see a slowdown in 2020 because of COVID, because we had work from home that created a lot of business, mainly in the semiconductor industry. You can see the build-up of our order book during the quarters. This quarter or the last quarter three, was the first quarter where we invoiced more than we received. We start to eat slowly into the order book. From a profitability point of view, in quarter three, we were at 23%, which equals 24.6% EBITA, a bit higher than quarter one and quarter two. Profitability is influenced by problems or instability in the supply chain. Our return on capital employed, 25%.
You know we have kind of a heavy balance sheet because of the acquisitions of Edwards, Leybold, CSK, and the cryopumps, but still we achieved to do 25% on return on capital employed. Looking at our current performance, you see a lot of minus signs on there. To be fair, I must say that September 21 was the first quarter of extremely high orders. We are going down now in every continent. This is purely driven by semiconductor. Our general vacuum business or industrial scientific vacuum is growing very nicely, and our aftermarket is growing very nicely. But the two semiconductor product divisions are coming down for the moment. There is a couple of drivers there. You all know about the memory.
The inventory to billings has been going up for a while, so there is a bit of a holdback now on memory investments. There have been some delays in the construction of the new fabs. We see that in the construction of our own factories as well, and there is a general atmosphere of worsening business climate, which takes it all down a little bit. Of course, part of the big increase we've seen in the last quarters is also because our lead times were going up, and then the customer is ordering a bit earlier. Now that we start to invoice more than we receive, we will see the opposite effect. That plays some role in this.
Asia is going down more than Europe and the Americas, and that's mainly because the main memory players are in Asia. You have Micron, you have SK Hynix, and you have Samsung, and they have most of their production in Asia. That explains the stronger drop in Asia. Still, of course, we have 56% in that part of the world. The markets we operate in, I said it, 65% is electronics, yeah? Now it's all about data and interconnectivity in the machines. Every appliance you buy now has electronics. The whole digitalization process is helping us there. Another important part we're seeing is the revival of the 200 mm fabs.
There was a time that we said, "Oh, 200 mm fabs will disappear." Now that is coming back very strongly, partly because of the capacity problems in semi, but also the high-performing power electronics are often on a 200 mm fab, silicon carbide or silicon. Still, this is coming back, and for us, showing nice growth. Processes are getting harsher. When I said you go now to 5 nm-3 nm, that means it's tougher to make these chips. For us, there's much more corrosive components and rare elements being used. We all have to get that through the vacuum pumps. What we clearly saw, and I'll come back to that later, is that capacity and agility is driving share.
With the boom we have seen, if you could deliver, you could take the business, and that's an important driver for us. Within process, the second-biggest part of our business, we take increasing share. Foods, I said already, more regulations. Chemical, pharma, metallurgy, so the steel business has grown quite a lot for us as well. Foods, we're getting more and more share in the food industry with all the different applications you can see there. General manufacturing, the third part, Mats mentioned it already. We're proud to say that we are now also in our industrial area, the number one with all our brands together. We continue to drive wet-to-dry transition. It helps the sustainability, and it helps for us to create value for the customer.
Two new areas where we're focusing on now is the liquid ring pumps and the mobile vacuum. Then a few other growing segments, I must say, is solar, of course. Very much today in China, but with the IRA, also moving west. Then coating and glass coating, and also I could have mentioned the space in there as well. This is where we are, and in general, all these segments are showing nice progress. Then not to answer your questions, but to look back on how has the semiconductor business development developed over the years. This is a graph showing from 1987 to this year, to 2022, how the IC business, the semiconductor business revenue, has developed.
This is a full 35 years of 10% CAGR. This is what we're dealing with. You can see if you go further back, there were quite some big swings in there. We are in that business since 2013. We've seen a slight dip in 2015, a little bit more in 2019. But if you look at the longer trends, this is very positive. Then the right-hand picture is that the first part of the graph, up to the $600 billion is the same. The forecast is that by 2030, that business will grow to $1 trillion. You can see there is some acceleration even in the growth of the semiconductor business.
I think these are very nice, very nice picture and a very nice business to be in. What is driving that, yeah? Of course, it's AI. It's the 5G network. What we see is that the adoption of 5G has been much faster than the adoption of 4G. The other thing you see is when you have 5G, when you have a faster network, you actually use it much more because it's much more convenient to use it. 6G is now in trial stage I would say, but 5G is adopting very much. Cloud computing is driving it. You could say, is it cloud computing or is it edge computing? That's just a matter where you compute and how you transfer the data. Cloud or edge is growing very good.
Gaming is a bit down for the moment. It was very much in when COVID hit. It's now because of the general feeling of the industry it's coming down a bit. Medical is basically exploding. Work from home, again, a bit down because people are coming back to the office. Supercomputing, with Bitcoin, all the data analysis drives supercomputing. I'll talk a little bit about quantum later on, but that could be the future for supercomputing. IoT. Automotive, we're only at the beginning of the chips in the car. There are already a lot. Now we're on assisted driving. If you would go to autonomous driving, this would be an explosion of the use of chips in the car.
You have all the screens now in a car, which is driving our business as well. Then, of course, the interconnectivity of machines in industrial. These are all individual areas that drive our business. But the important thing if you think about it, is that this is all about data. Data gets produced, yeah. Data gets computed, data gets transferred, and then data gets stored in whatever order you want to take it. All of these are interconnected and it's all driving the chips industry forward. That's why we're pretty confident that this will continue. Good. That was a bit facts and the market. What are we doing now to take our share of the growth in there?
I will talk about agility and capacity and how that drives our business. Innovation, very important pillar in everything we do. The opportunities in the U.S., you certainly have read and heard about the CHIPS Act. Acquisitions, a bit of helicopter view of what we're doing in acquisitions. General vacuum, to try to explain how we gained a leadership position in there. Local for local, talk about service. Last but not least, people and culture. This is what we're doing for the moment from a capacity investment and to increase our agility. We often talk about agility downwards, but for us, actually agility upwards is even more important. It's about having the capacity to deal with increased demands.
In the past we have invested an enormous amount in Asia, and you saw from the geographical distribution that that is the biggest part. What we see now is that because of the CHIPS Act and what's going with all the geopolitical battles that are going on, that there is a lot of potential coming in America. I'll show us later on a slide later on the on the different initiatives there. We're building four factories for the moment in the U.S., still two in Korea, an extension in China, and we extend our factory, our abatement factory in the U.K. With this, of course with the supply chain that stabilizes, we will be able to take the business in an agility upwards situation. On innovation, why do we innovate?
If you look at the nine box on the left, these are the traditional themes that we always have with innovation. It's about performance. It's about, of course, efficiency. We have our own electronics software and motor and converter development. We do a lot of simulation tools and you can read what is on there. What we see now coming up very strongly is how the circular economy and sustainability is driving the innovation and what we're doing there. It's not just about energy efficiency, it's also about using more electricity instead of fuel and really develop the products for the circular economy, which you see clearly in our service business. Digital twins, it was mentioned already, it has been there in engineering for a long time, but now we adapt the twins so that they can also be used for the marketing, for the manufacturing.
That's a big topic. We often talk about controlling the processes. In the vacuum industry, organically, we develop gauges, we develop traps and control systems to be more dominant in that part through innovation. If you look at this picture, at the top we have our four product divisions and on the left we develop of course to be better in our core business. We develop products for environmental, digital to interact with.
Our customers interact with our machines, service interacts with the machines and new applications. If I take a few as an example, within industrial we drive this wet-to-dry. We try as much as possible to replace an oil-injected vacuum pump with a dry vacuum pump. We have launched a lot of new cryo pumps since we acquired the business from Brooks a couple of years ago. This is really strengthening our core position. Then from an environmental point of view, within semiconductor we focus a lot, and you will see that this afternoon on the recycling. Recovery and recycling becomes very important. All the again wet-to-dry is a very environmental one on the scroll side.
Digital to support our customers and our service business, as I mentioned. On new applications, if I take liquid ring as an example, we were very small in there. Have developed organically super efficient machines and are now taking share on that. As a last example, the quantum where when you talk quantum computers you need extreme low temperatures, you need high vacuum, and you need automation. We are working together with universities, and you will see in acquisitions later that this is a part where we are preparing to be ready when quantum is coming, to be an important supplier to that very interesting industry. I mentioned the CHIPS Act.
This is a picture of the U.S. where you see all the fabs that have been announced to be built in the United States. The CHIPS Act was approved in Congress, and you see all these investments. Some are announcements like Micron, both in Boise and in New York State. Others, like TSMC, are already there. They have some delay in construction. They are working on the pilot lines and are building it. Also, Intel in Arizona is building. Really a very dynamic picture. It says it's a matter of national security, but it's basically geopolitically that everybody wants to make the chips, because they are a strategic project in their own area. In total, this is more than $130 billion of investment in the semiconductor industry in the U.S.
By the capacity investments that you have seen, we of course want to take our share of that. As I said, the high level picture of the acquisitions. If you look at the top part, which is the semi part, we've always said we want to control the processes in semiconductor. We manage the pressure through our vacuum pumps, we manage the temperature through our chillers and cryo pumps, and we manage the environmental services through our abatement systems. If you look at the tree up there with Brooks and now Montana Instruments, Montana is again related to quantum, we go deeper into our capabilities of doing thermal management.
The middle part, the green part with Ceres and Colibri, it's really going into the recycling, the recovery of precious materials, and with Colibri actually offering solutions for foreline abatement so that we can be much more efficient in abating hazardous gases. iTrap is a pure inline on tool process control piece of equipment that we bought from ZEISS some time ago. At the bottom part we talk industrial. I mentioned that on liquid ring pump we did organically. We did develop our own products within Edwards and Atlas Copco, and now we're doing a roll-up strategy with acquisitions in China and Germany and U.S., where we really step by step get to buy channels and products to grow the liquid ring business.
Liquid ring, by the way, is an $800 million business, so it's a big part. I'll talk about applications. The three in the light blue are mainly focusing on specific applications. The last part, bottom right, is we entered into mobile vacuum. That is about $400 million. We were not present in that market, and now with the acquisition of National Vacuum Equipment, we become the leading partner already in U.S., and we will now roll that out. Good acquisition progress, also a good pipeline for more acquisitions. How did we manage to become the number one in industrial vacuum? It's all about presence, application knowledge, and having the products and the operations ready. Yeah. That's the three parts.
If you look at the market, there's actually very few people that make vacuum pumps. I said here 50, of which about 10 are now already within the Atlas Copco Group. We continue to screen and see if we can get more of the OEMs in, helping us to grow the business. Then there's hundreds of smaller companies who have a typical or a specific application knowledge, yeah? By combining the two, getting stronger and having the products, and then going into people that have the application knowledge and the contact with the customer, those two combined give us the full potential to grow in industrial vacuum, and we continue to do that. Now, maybe a slightly complicated slide. If you look at the bottom of the triangle, this is our core business.
In our core business, we continue to develop new products organically to grow the business. There we have global presence with the brands on the right, with Atlas Copco, Leybold and Edwards. This is the majority of our business which we grow organically. Organically and through acquisition, if you look at the bottom left, HHV, a producer in India, M.C. Schroeder Equipment is a distributor in the U.S. Eugen Theis is a very specific application company in Germany. Global presence with all our brands and increasing the application and the channel with the acquisitions. Moving one level up, we come to liquid ring pumps. Was new for us. We were small. We had the global presence with Atlas Copco and Edwards.
From the acquisition of Edwards, I said that we do the roll-up in here by acquiring more companies for product and for channels. Very soon we will be a strong player in this one as well. The mobile vacuum. We don't do that yet as Atlas Copco, Edwards, or Leybold. We have acquired NVE. We get into the application and the understanding now, and then we will globalize that business by using the other brands. Similar to the side channel blower, the top part of the triangle, where we now are starting with a factored product through Edwards and Leybold. Then again, the next steps will be to acquire our own products and to roll it out with the brands that we have. On the left, you could say is the acquisition activity.
On the right is then using our global presence and the strengths of our brands within vacuum. Slightly different picture for scientific vacuum. There and then we used to be a pump provider. We were making scrolls and Roots and turbo vacuum pumps, yeah. Then we move on. I showed that in the development to having more accessories, the controls, the gauges to add to the pumps. Then we have developed now a very strong systems business. The picture you see there is a space testing chamber. Huge thing, but full of scientific vacuum equipment, where we test the engines of the satellites and the operation of the satellites. We're moving very quickly towards kind of a platform supplier, where we give our products, including the controls, to the customer.
The customer can really easily connect to its own platform, and then you don't have to worry about it anymore. You can control it on your tablet, on your phone, and you manage the whole vacuum system within the customer's application. That's the steps we're going through for scientific vacuum. This is our presence. The blinking parts is where we're building new factories. So in Qingdao, in Korea, and then a lot in the States, one in Europe. We are already very well represented, but we continue to work on that with new capacity in the right regions. This is the same picture, but now highlighting the service technology centers.
Part of our service, and I'll come to that, is that we follow our big customers and build a service hub next to the big customers. Now we have built a new one in Dublin and in Arizona for all the semiconductor investments. We built a new one in China, in Langfang, and extended Taiwan and Singapore and our hub in Israel. Really following the customer and make sure we are the supplier of choice. Coming to service, this is our performance in service. We have grown our service business over the years since we are in vacuum, since 2014, with 20%. Really we put very high focus and drive our service business.
It's still only around 25% of our business, which is a bit lower compared to the figures you've seen for the group. Of course, our growth in equipment has been very steep as well. I think to stay at 25% is a fantastic performance. How are we doing that? You know, we have two service divisions. This is the Vacuum Technique Service, which is our mobile vacuum solution, very much comparable with the Compressor Technique. Vacuum here, we have invested in direct sales. We used to have a mix of equipment sales and service sales. That is now really bearing fruits. Focus on customer satisfaction. Before we acquired, there was a lot of third parties giving service. We now go really directly with the superior service to the customers.
We changed the business model. We talked a lot about SMARTLINK and what is Vacuum doing. We have it now. I'll show you on the next slide. We have connectivity. Every machine that leaves the factory has the connectivity built in. We have the platforms for our customer and for our service people, so we actually do exactly the same as Compressor Technique. Consolidation. What we do now is we deliver a Vacuum Technique service, which means that our service engineers can service the Atlas Copco, the Leybold, or the Edwards products, which is much more efficient for us and much better for the customer. We've only done that now because we needed some time to develop new product in a modular way. Basically, the core of the vacuum system is the same, whatever brand you go to.
Our service technicians are now trained to do Vacuum Technique service, which gives us a lot of efficiency. This is the GENIUS. We call it GENIUS. Compressor Technique is calling it SMARTLINK. As I said, every machine has it, and we also have a retrofit. When we do a service standard, we will put our GENIUS in there, and we have the full connectivity of the vacuum machines with our service and for the customer. What are we doing in semiconductor? There was for a very long time this culture in semiconductor where they were running to crash. They were running the pump until it died, and then we had to replace it and refurbish it. We still do that.
We have been since actually earlier, but here the graph shows since 2021, going to the customer, try to convince the customer that it's much more efficient and much more lower cost for the customer to do preventive maintenance. Now we start to get the real success in that. More and more fabs are coming to us, and we develop together a preventative maintenance scheme. You see on the left how this is growing, how it is improving our profitability, while at the same time we're lowering the cost for the fab owners.
Then I took one specific contract on the right where you could see even up to June it was all run to crash, and then we came in, and up to now, most of the interventions are preventative, which saves the customer a lot of wafers. As I said, last but not least, people. When you talk capacity, it's about people, it's about installed capacity, and it's about supply chain. In some areas, we were struggling to recruit because of the enormous growth that we have. We focus really very much on attracting and developing our talent.
We have the rule now in Vacuum Technique that minimum 5% of our people have to be young people that come in as graduates, as year in industry apprentices, so that we really build the talent from within. The same with leadership. We want to create that behavior for performance into our leaders, and again, grow the leaders from within. Culture first, we want to create that passion for vacuum. We focus very much on wellbeing. We focus on D&I, diversity and inclusion, to create that culture of being an attractive employer within the vacuum industry. What are we doing to go into a low-carbon society? First of all, we try to avoid to use fossil fuels.
It was mentioned in some of the materials before, all our factories have solar now to power the premises. Where we can, we avoid using any form of fossil fuels. The second one, we replace. When we are using fossil fuels, we are replacing it by a cleaner form of energy. A typical example, and you'll see that this afternoon, is our electric abatement. The majority is still fuel-based. We move to electric abatement. We recover the waste heat that is generated in our vacuum pumps. Of course, reduce. I mean, every project we have in engineering has a very tough target on reducing the energy consumption, so that is driving in there. Again, you will see an example. Very important now is the recovery and the recycling. This is the circular economy.
If you can take some of the products used in the process, you can recycle, purify, and then feed back in the process. You save an enormous amount of money for the customer. Only at the end, if all the steps from one to four have been done, then we abate what is the remainder product to comply with legislation. These are the steps, the five steps we go through, in every process. As a summary, we will continue to develop our channels and grow organically. We expand our core business with new products and better products by continuous innovation. I hope I convinced you we're building a lot of extra capacity to deal with future growth. We go local for local. Connectivity is now the standard. It's all about data. Okay.
We look after our people, and we contribute to a low-carbon society. I think that's the summary for Vacuum Technique.
Thank you, Geert. We will now have a short break, 20 minutes. Please be back in this room 10:50 AM. 10:50 AM to listen to the next presentation. Thank you. Welcome back. It was a really short break, but now it's time for the last presentation before the Q&A. Join me on stage, Henrik, Business Area President for Industrial Technique.
Perfect. Thank you, Daniel. Good morning, everybody. It's really my pleasure to give you an update on Industrial Technique. I think we have a lot of exciting things happening in our industry. We have worked on some new things regarding our strategic direction for a while, and I think we see that starting to pay off now also in 2022, great timing for an update. On the agenda, similar to previously here, I will start with some facts and basics around the business area, but then spend most of the time on the trends that we see and also the main, let's say, strategic focus areas that we are working on in order to position us for the future.
At the end, how do we contribute also to a low carbon society? Let's start with some of the basics here. Industrial Technique, it's a quite general name. What do we do? Actually, we serve quite a lot of different customers. A bit more than half is related to automotive. In the automotive industry, we work across the value chain, but we supply both automated and manual or handheld assembly solutions. But now also since a couple of years, vision systems or machine vision for different type of applications. The second and third-biggest industry for us is electronics and aerospace, where we also focus on assembly solutions, also drilling in aerospace. We serve a lot of other customers here, big, small, medium-sized in different industries, so quite a diverse business in that sense.
Here you see our development during the last years. As you can see, we have had a strong development on orders in 2022. Also revenues picking up, especially here in the last couple of quarters. What is driving this? In general, you can say that our business is very much driven by CapEx investments from our customers. It's very much about new production lines, new capacity, but also new models like we see now in the car industry, a lot of new models. But the customers also invest in more efficient production, more automation, more quality on the production line. Here also we have solutions, and that is also one part of it.
Deglobalization, we see many global customers that also have a more regional setup, having more, let's say, a broader footprint in their production. The service business is more linked to industrial production in general and production volumes. It's of course linked more to how much our equipment is used, but that is more the smaller part. If we go into the regional split here, this has also changed a bit over the last couple of years. Right now, 36% of our business is from Americas, 31% Europe, Middle East, and Africa, 33% in Asia. In 2018, we had about 28% from Asia, now it's 33%, and Europe has also declined in terms of relative share.
Most of the big or all the big regions here have been growing with the strongest growth in Asia, also driven much by China. Let's take a look a little bit at what we do. I would summarize it as a Smart manufacturing solution. Here you have a bit of a matrix. You have automotive-related business and then general industry, which is how we name all other industries. It's aerospace, electronics, but many other customers. We have over the years broadened in automotive more assembly solutions. Also in general industry, we have added in during the years. In the last couple of years, the two main additions to our portfolio is in the light green at the bottom here, dispensing in electronics, a company called Scheugenpflug, protecting electronics by dispensing different type of materials.
That is going very well, growing, and also diversifying the portfolio. To the right, we have three acquisitions, ISRA VISION, Perceptron, QuISS, creating also a new division in machine vision, both focusing on automotive and what we call Surface Vision that I will come back to. The customers' industries, it's very broad. We have, as I said, a lot in automotive, but it's also very diverse in many other customer segments. It's about white goods, it's wind turbines, solar cells, etc., etc. We really help these customers to produce their products on the production line in a sustainable, efficient way. If there is one common denominator in terms of our value proposition, it's often about quality.
We help these customers to produce the product to the right quality, of course, in a sustainable way. That is very much what's driving our offer. Of course, many other things as well. Let's talk a bit about the trends that we see here. Here I focus only on technology trends that we are exposed to and really impacting our business. If we start from the left here, the battery electric powertrains that we see in the automotive, but also in other industries, it's huge for us, and I will come back to that. Going down from there, you see more sensors and electronics in all products.
It's of course more intelligent products, but for us, it means also more electronics needs to be assembled on the production line, and it also means business for Scheugenpflug when it comes to protecting that electronics that helps our business. You have three more production technology-related trends, inline quality control, flexible automation, data-driven solution. Our customers wants to check the quality in every step on the production line to avoid any errors. They want to automate it. As we've heard here today, it's tough to find labor, and the more you can automate, the better often. There we have also a new, let's say, focus area for us. Then it's about data, and I will come back to that as well.
We have one area of lightweighting, the fact that the automotive industry especially, but also in aerospace, use more lighter material like aluminum. That drives the need for more sophisticated or advanced joining methods, assembly solutions, and that has been one of the drivers for our expansion in automotive. That has gone a little bit back and forth, but right now, with the batteries being so heavy in the cars, we see actually an increased focus on more lighter material in the cars again. Sustainability is really a key, very integrated in our also value proposition. I will come back to that. Let's start then with the battery electric vehicles. What does it mean for us? Well, first some basic statistics here. Today, 2022, 13% of the sales is electric vehicles, including hybrids.
2030, the expectation is it could be 45% of the sales. The message here is really it's just beginning, right? This is really driving a lot of new models and investments. On the total volume of cars, it's +2% is this prediction. It's less impressive, but it's also less of the driver for our business. It's more the investment in CapEx related to the new models. What are then the challenges for battery electric vehicle manufacturers where we also are coming in with our solutions? I mean, first of all, it's a race really going on, time to market, and at the same time, it's so much new technology in these cars. So our customers want to work earlier with suppliers, partners in order to develop these solutions.
We see that we are already involved in working with the leading customers here to find the best production solutions to put this battery together, and it's moving a lot. Of course, the new thing is really the core of the car. The battery is really about capacity, performance, and very, very strategic for customers. At the same time, you know, nothing can go wrong. If you have defects, recalls, reputational risk, it's more and more critical to have a trusted partner to really make sure that the process is done correctly at the right quality. And then sustainability, if you drive it on green electricity, that is good, but at the same time, it's a heavier car, a lot of material needs to be recyclable.
The increased focus is more on the material and the production of the car itself than when it's used. That is also a very important driver. So we started many years ago in developing with the leading, you can say, companies in this field to develop the new solutions. Here you see 11 steps in the value chain where we have solutions, and it starts from actually now with machine vision, checking the battery film that goes into the cell, and it ends up with the full battery pack here at the end. The message is it's a lot of different applications. This is for prismatic cells. You have also the round cylindrical cells, and then the steps are very different, and you have approximately 11 other applications.
You will also see some of this afternoon, but it's a lot of different applications that we are working on here. How do we then work with the customers? A key is our innovation center setup. It's we have them around the world. One of our biggest ones is in Germany. This is where customers are coming to us with their parts early on to actually develop these production solutions to make sure it can be also assembled in the end. We are almost, you can say, fully booked here with, and it's almost entirely about the battery production. I will show a video here from our innovation center in Germany.
The segment of battery production is growing faster and faster. Now we see a lot of new processes, for example, around fire protection concepts of EV batteries. There will be a gap in the future, and the gap is confidence to join. We need to speed up. Our innovation center is a very unique place. We have globally high-level experts who work closely with our customers and their processes. The variety of our joining technologies and Integrated Vision solutions enables us to adapt to customers' specific challenges. Together, we develop new technologies and innovate to improve your production processes. Welcome to our innovation center.
Great. I think one area that has made us quite unique in this space is really that we have this broad portfolio of several assembly technologies, also machine vision, which works very well when we want to find these new solutions. What does it then mean for us in total from Industrial Technique? Here we have checked facts. We've taken, you know, two similar car models, one combustion engine model from 2018 and one of the latest battery EV models from 2022, at a, you know, similar level, let's say. Then we have compared across the value chain and also for the two main parts of our offer, do we have more or less content per car, if we look at it?
If we take the tier side, it's mainly then the powertrain, so either the combustion engine or the battery and electric motor, et cetera, and then it's body shop, paint shop, and at the end, the final assembly. We see then a completely new business, and it's quite big around dispensing. There was very little in combustion engine, close to zero, but here, it's a big new business. But also on tightening nuts and bolts, we actually see about the same amount of business for us. Body shop, paint shop, relatively unchanged. In final assembly, we also see more critical steps. This is partly linked to the battery application, but also a lot of more electronics sensors in these cars. It's not driven only by the battery part, but it's also increasing for tightening.
A good upside for us. Then I will move into our second area. It's machine vision to give an update on the progress here. We decided a couple of years ago to go into machine vision. We see it as an attractive growing market and we also see that it fits very well into the Atlas Copco business model and DNA. Also we see clear synergies with the other divisions in Industrial Technique. It's really about two things, flexible automation and in-line quality control. The customers want to, in this flow of production, automate with robots. They need eyes to do the work properly, and it's about checking the quality. It can be to check the paint of a car, or it can be to check that parts are present.
Here we have a couple of example of applications, in-line gauging, where you measure something to make sure it's in the right dimensions, robot guidance, and then quality inspection. It's really our focus here on the production line with machine vision. But also with ISRA, we have a very attractive business in other industries that we call Surface Vision. This is the continuous production of materials, can be glass, metal, paper, but also solar cells, et cetera, that is produced in a running flow like this. A big part of the ISRA business is how to check the surfaces here and detect any defects, classify them to help also the process control of these different materials.
There is one new thing that we have, let's say, front-loaded on, invested in that is starting to grow now, and that is what we call Integrated Vision. We combine assembly technologies with vision, and this is one example where you want to automate a wheel assembly process. This is normally done manually today, but now by combining vision and assembly technologies, we can build these type of solutions. Here you see the end-of-arm tooling includes both vision, mechanics, also assembly technologies in order to assemble this wheel automatically. You can find those type of applications throughout the automotive production. If we summarize then our go-to-market strategy, we have machine vision solution as a standalone division to the right here. Two business lines, approximately the same size.
Yeah, one is Surface Vision, doing this, quality control of continuously produced materials. We have Smart Factory Automation, more discrete production, where you do robot guidance, quality control, et cetera. We also have the integrated solutions that go through the other product divisions of Industrial Technique, and it becomes a component, intelligent part of the solutions that we sell through the other divisions. It can be also for handheld tools, but here you see quality control of dispensing and wheel assembly application that are typically that I showed before. This is really key, and we focus on application-specific products. It's not about standard smart cameras that can be generically used. It's more optimized solutions that are still standardized but built for certain applications.
If we summarize machine vision, we will continue to innovate in these application-specific products, develop Integrated Vision. At the same time, we are investing, I would say front-loading in building the platform for growth, presence globally, but also operational excellence, people management and development, and also the proactive service business is really a good fit for machine vision. Of course, to continue also inorganically to add to the portfolio. We'll move over to General Industry. We have dedicated divisions that focus also on the other segment, when it comes to, for example, tightening, but also other tools. Here we have also invested quite a lot. We have done quite well over the years, but we still feel that this market is even bigger. There is more to do.
If we then look at what is this really again, let's take a look at the typical society here. Again, if we talk about tightening, it's very much about the off-highway type of equipment that one of the challenges with these segments, and here I've taken three. Let's take wind turbines, electronics, and aerospace. One of the challenges is that the needs are quite different. A lot of the technology from automotive is still applicable, but it needs to be adapted and optimized for, as you can see here, obviously quite different production environments. Some years back, we started also to increase the relative R&D investments into some of these areas, and absolute as well, in order to make sure that we have good portfolios.
Here we have three of our biggest segments which are growing and, actually then, now I feel we have really strong complete portfolios, both, for example, for wind turbines, electronics, and aerospace. In that way, I strongly believe we can also accelerate the growth. It is not only if you see the tools here, it's not only about the tools. If we think about transformation, how can we sell more to the same customers? We have this slightly complex illustration here with two transformation ladders. One to the left is for manual handheld applications, and on the right side, you have the automated solutions where our equipment ends up on the robot, which happens more and more.
And the factor five here is if you transform from a more traditional tool into a smart tool, the value we can provide to customers can multiply by five typically. It's quite a big step, but it's also a completely different level of performance and quality that we provide, and the same applies for automated tools. We have the next level, and it's really on the left side about a workstation. Here it's about operator guidance, software, machine vision to help the operator do a more productive job but also make sure there are no errors whatsoever in the process. We see a typical, let's say, average upside of multiplying by another three in terms of the value we provide. If you take the automated solution, also applicable in automotive, it can be a factor of 10.
We invest quite a lot in these other bricks around the core equipment, and that really creates more value for the customer. It's also differentiating us quite well from competition because this needs some investments, and it's a lot about competence. Here we're now also looking at 2022, start to see real traction in many areas. Then our service business, it's one of the core differentiators for Industrial Technique. It's the reason why we win the second order, take care of the customer, and it's sometimes, you know, the major differentiator compared to competition. We have over the years built up a strong service portfolio. Here we have also included consumables in these numbers.
We are at 27% as a ratio, with a high growth on equipment and also the limited limitations on car production. It's been a little bit flat later, but we continue to see this as a big upside going forward. What is then the focus for service? In manufacturing, most equipment today, also ours, is connected. Our power tools, but also dispensing systems, et cetera. It's really connected. There's a lot of data collected, but there is very little done with the data, at least proactively. If there is a problem, you go back and check, but there is so much potential value in working with the data in order to optimize both production and quality. Let me then take one example. One of our most popular service products we call Tool Management Center.
This is when we have an on-site workshop with big customers, between one and 30 people, that work inside the customer's plant next to the line. Now we see great opportunity to use the data around our equipment and the processes we provide, and we also use our service technicians to, together with data, to help them improve quality and production. Here you can think about Atlas Copco service technician seeing the overview of the line, working with the customers. There is a warning, and you go out on the line, and you actually together with the customer, and you hopefully avoid a problem that would have occurred otherwise. We also invest a lot in the data analytics and also cloud-based solutions.
This also applies, by the way, for machine vision, where you can do much more scalable analysis and be even more efficient in fixing problems or avoiding problems for the customer. I should also say that these 270 Tool Management Center, I checked in 2018, we had 200 of those, so we are adding around 20 of those Tool Management Center every year if you look historically. Really good progress there. Let's have a look at how we contribute to more, let's say, low carbon or sustainable society. As you heard, we have committed to the science-based targets and are fully committed on our product side, but also our own operation. Our customers have done that.
It's about 4,000 companies now that have joined science-based targets, but also quite a big share of them have challenges to reach those commitments. This is really a great opportunity for us when it comes to the assembly lines out there. Of course, it's about cost saving, productivity improvements, but it's also about reducing carbon footprint for the customer. This is very high on the decision criteria today for the customers compared to just a few years back. We have a very structured hands-on process where we actually walk the line, station by station with the customer to identify and see where are the opportunities here where you can reduce the carbon footprint in the production.
That is Scope 1 and 2, but also on Scope 3, how can we help customers make even more sustainable products and have less Scope 3 footprint from their perspective? At the end, it's very much about transparency, working with the customers, prioritizing the investments, and also of course here, if you take Scope 1 and 3, we invest in more energy-efficient tools and also tools that have an embedded controller. You can also take away quite a lot of hardware. On the Scope 3, it's a little bit more longer investments, bigger changes since it's involving the customer's product. Here we have one solution that is called Smart Adjust, that I just wanted to exemplify, but this is a great opportunity in the battery applications.
So if we look at this picture up there, it's about when you put the battery modules into the battery tray, you need this blue material called gap filler to make sure that the battery is connected to the frame, and in that way, it's cooled properly. If you have too little of that material, the battery can overheat. Most car manufacturers put an average of and a little bit extra of that material in to make sure that you have enough so that the batteries are cooled. When you optimize this, you can actually reduce quite a lot of material.
So what we do, both ISRA and Dispensing together, is that we actually then pick up the battery modules, and we measure on each individual battery the shape of the battery to know how much gap there will be when you put it into the tray. We also measure the shape of the tray that also varies piece by piece. We then optimize the amount of that blue material that is needed, so you have just enough to actually make sure the battery is cooled properly, but you don't have too much. This as an example, reduces the weight of a car 2 kg, and it's a lot of money, but also from a sustainability perspective, a great benefit for our customers. That is an example of sustainability. Then a little bit about our people strategy in Industrial Technique.
I mean, we have really a fantastic team in Industrial Technique, and we get to work with so many exciting industries and companies, you know, across different segments and globally. There is a lot of opportunities out there. We have focused a lot now also on that full potential. How can we really realize that full potential with all these changes going on in the industry? One of the concrete examples is what we call customer center of the future. As you have seen, a lot of the potential for us is to sell more advanced solutions, more complex sales process, and we see that we can help our sales teams to free up time from other tasks to spend even more, a higher share of their time on selling these complex solutions, transforming the customers.
We have to make us future-proof and to realize this, invested a lot in digitalization also in sales and marketing, and this really changes the way we work in a customer-centric. The target is really more sales per salesperson. It's so much about competence and application knowledge for us in terms of developing the business. We have the target of at least 40 hours per year training for every employee, but we also have a quite diverse market, many opportunities, so we work with these agile cross-functional small teams to go after and test new things when it comes to all these new applications. We really believe in this decentralized model to be fast in realizing this.
To attract and develop people, I mean, inclusive culture, diversity is key to stay innovative, and we are doing quite a lot here. One of our successful examples here is we have introduced for Industrial Technique a global industrial internship program. What we do is that we bring in students from all around the world to work, before they graduate, to work on certain projects within Industrial Technique, real problems, and they also get to work and interact in a global environment. At the end of the project, they present it to Industrial Technique management, including myself. It's been a really good feedback on that, and it also puts us very much on the map with the key universities.
Great, t hat was a short overview of Industrial Technique. Very quick summary. I think we see a lot of technology and global trends. We feel that we are really well-positioned here. It's both about the customer's product, for example, battery vehicles, but it's also about production technology and automation is very big for us. Big step and good start around machine vision. We have a clear, let's say, positioning in that quite broad market space with application-specific products, but also these Integrated Vision solutions that also goes through the other divisions. Of course, sustainability more as an integral part of how we actually drive our business now, of course, making our own commitments as well, but it's really a good fit for our often more optimized solutions. Very good. Thank you so much for that.
Thank you, Henrik. Please stay on stage. We're gonna have the Q&A session. Welcome up. Join us, Geert, Peter, and Mats. We will now run this session in this room, and I'm sure there are plenty of questions out there. Please limit your questions to one at a time, and then you will fall back in the line. For those of you joining us through the web, you can now in the player write in your questions. We will pick them up and try to respond. The questions that we will not have time to pick up during this session, we will take care of after the event and respond to you. I think we have the first question here in the front. I'm sure Klas is eager to ask.
Thank you. Klas. Yeah. My first question for you, Geert, so growth has been 20% in service along with equipment share is still 25%, you talk about service engineers can now service all brands which is a new thing, you also say that on service side you don't have customers running for a crash at the moment. And we always had this, not the issue but the effect of this less spare parts in vacuum relative to CT. We ll also didn't have as many service technician on site. Do you think this preventative maintenance-driven business model can increase that share from 25% to a time or is still limiting around this level? That's my first one. Thanks.
It's a very good question, Klas. The fact that we hang at 25% as I showed is mainly because the equipment sales has grown enormously. I think 20% growth in service is a very good performance. If we can continue to do that, I would think over time that that percentage will grow. It will probably never reach the Compressor Technique percentage as you mentioned. There's less consumables in a vacuum process than there is in a compressor process, but I'm sure the percentage as relative to revenues will continue to grow.
Partly because we take share back from the third parties, but also because we sell more uptime rather than a pure refurbishment of a company which decreases the cost for the company, increases the value for us. All these parameters drive towards a higher service business and more resilience for our business.
I think we have the next question here, Anders.
Yeah. Thank you. Anders Hillerborg from ABG. This one is for Geert as well. On the health of the semi customers in China, given the export restrictions, et cetera, it's pretty hard to follow from the outside. I see you're expanding capacity there. But what is the view on the ground there? I mean, what are the direct effects on your customers and their ability to expand capacity and the indirect effects on you?
Yeah. What we see happening in China for the moment is there is amongst the Chinese producers, there's a level of uncertainty with the new restrictions. They're all applying now for licenses to continue to get the equipment they need. That's for the Chinese producers. What you see is the foreign producers like Samsung, TSMC, they have already obtained the licenses. If we look at the Chinese market today, it's the Chinese players make the chips which are somewhat lower in performance. The foreign players make the high-end chips. There is hesitation and some turbulence, but in the end, it will continue to grow. I expect within a quarter we will have stability again, and then the Chinese will continue to grow.
I think we also.
Yeah
may want to add, in terms of our sales to these customers-
Yeah.
The direct impact to us is very limited.
It is minimal. We have our American products with Cryo, which of course is directly impacted. Our vacuum pumps and abatement systems don't have American content, so there's no restrictions at all for us. The direct impact is minimal. The indirect impact, as I said, will depend on how many licenses they get. The direct impact we don't see at all basically for the moment. Yeah.
It's of course that the American tool makers needs to get their licenses.
Yeah.
If we're gonna be successful this time.
Mm.
It will increase speed among the local tool makers.
Yeah, exactly. Absolutely.
I think we have next question here to the right.
Thank you. Mattias Holmberg from DNB. Question for Henrik. I was interested by the transformation potentially talked about when going from sort of a basic tool to an automatic tool or a smart tool being some 3x-10x higher. Just to be clear, is that the total value of the product over its entire life cycle we were talking about, or was this sort of some other metric?
Yeah.
Also to better understand the potential, how far have you come in terms of penetration with these type of more advanced tools compared to the basic ones?
No, if we take the lower level, that transformation into smart tools, it excludes also the service business. That would be on top, so to say. If we take now the next level, which was more automated solutions and also with Integrated Vision, we have started to launch a few products and it starts to have, let's say, a significant impact on our numbers as well in terms of growth. It's a very good start, but there is a lot of other applications we can do.
Would you want to say if it's sort of a low single-digit penetration rate or talking double digits on the order that you're taking now?
In terms of how much of the potential or?
How much that is on the smart side compared to the basic one?
If you take automotive, most of the tool transformation has already happened. It's all transformed, I would say 80%-90%. The big step there is to take the next step into workstations or automated solution. On the general industry side, it's well ahead, but there is still maybe half to be done on the smart tool side. We have again the next level with workstation and automation. I think the limitation is more on us how to transform the market.
Thank you.
Next question, Daniela Costa.
Hi, good morning. My question relates back to the first presentation. I think Mats has a slide which had the new areas of opportunity, and you said it was SEK 11 billion, if I got it correct. That was the sales for Atlas, I imagine. Can you talk about, like, the addressable market opportunity compared to your current segments, and maybe link that up with the target of the 8%? Should we think about the 8% given these new opportunities more like a bit more M&A going forward rather than organic compared to the past?
No, I think two ways. We're gonna need both to invest in organic development, and some of these projects are very organic, like we see in hydrogen and low pressure, for example. We also need to speed up the number of acquisitions. Why I wanted to show this was exactly what you say, how do we, you know, back up the 8% in the coming years? This was around SEK 11 billion this year for these segments. Since we are not always interested in the total addressable market, just the more profitable part, so it's not always that we know ourselves exactly.
Mm-hmm.
Some of these are of course very dependent on what will happen with hydrogen. Will we see subsidies like we will see in the U.S. now to accelerate hydrogen? What will happen to that market? Biogas, as we know, it's not an efficient way without subsidies, but will that happen as well? For us, it's more entering into to be ready, but it's not like we know exactly how the total market looks like. In many of these cases, I would say that probably 15x you can take these numbers that we have there, if you would go for all these segments, that can be a definition maybe. I think you did that calculation for me. Good.
We have another question here to Sebastian.
Yeah, Sebastian Kuenne, RBC. Question for Henrik. You talk a lot about products for, you know, new EV cars, and most of the investments that we've seen in the last two years was on EV. I get the feeling that there's a lot of pent-up demand now created in the conventional car market. Do you see there are more projects coming or, because 80% of cars are still-
Mm.
conventional IC cars.
Conventional cars, you mean combustion engine cars or?
Combustion, yeah.
I would say a lot of the new projects driven by, let's say, new production lines, new models, and that is what is driving our business, is linked to EV. It's relatively little that for us is conventional cars. There is still some productivity improvement, some business going on, but the bigger projects is very much linked to the EV, or plug-in hybrid trend.
What do you see in five years time when still half of the cars?
Sorry?
What do you see in five years time when still half of the cars are, ICE cars? That business has collapsed, so I was wondering whether you think this is coming back.
Yeah. I think
Around-
If this trend is followed, I mean it needs to come back a little bit, but because of at some time. Also these production lines needs to be upgraded. But still, I foresee most of the business around the EVs in the next couple of years.
Maybe, Henrik, you can say that maybe some of the traditional cars, they are more driven by OpEx.
Mm.
It's a service industry.
Yes
... backup tools, smaller shifters in models, but new engine programs is extremely limited, of course. Of course, most of the CapEx goes into EVs or hybrids. Is that correct?
Absolutely. The OpEx and service is linked to more of the current production volumes.
Good. We have Gustaf.
Yes. Thank you. Gustaf Schwerin, Handelsbanken. Also on industrial and the auto side. The slide you showed there on the content per vehicle, difference between EVs and combustion engines. Do you want to give a rough number on how much bigger the content is?
I mean, it varies quite a lot, model by model, and here we've taken one example. I think it's. I don't want to give a number, but I would say it's significant, you know, but we don't talk about multiplying or anything, but it's significant, I would say. Yeah.
I think Max has a question.
Hi. It's Max from Morgan Stanley. This is for Geert. Could you talk a little bit about capital intensity? Sorry, or vacuum intensity. If we think about kind of going forward some of these new processes, are you able to give us a feel for kind of how much more? I mean, it's a similar question to the one before, but for you.
Yeah.
Vacuum content kind of we might see going forward.
Yeah. What you clearly see, we talk about miniaturization. If you go from 7 nm to 5 nm to 3 nm, you have more process steps to get there. Each process step, or most of the process steps, you use vacuum. Smaller chips is more steps, is more vacuum pumps, basically. That's the simple equation. Another important, because we I mentioned miniaturization, but there is a limit to what you can do in one plane. Now both in memory for NAND and in logic, you go three-dimensional, yeah, with FinFET and gate- all- around. Going three-dimensional again means more vacuum and different processes like ALD, where you need to connect the layers and have very thin holes on the chips.
Miniaturization is more process steps, but also going vertical is more process steps. That all increases the use of vacuum. There was two, three years ago saying, "Oh, EUV will reduce the number of vacuum steps because you can do so much more with an EUV machine." We actually see the opposite, because EUV is often put on a bottleneck process, but around that you have many more processes as well. Vacuum intensity is there to become more important. To deal with all the challenges to make the chips, you need more hazardous materials.
While the vacuum intensity increases in the process, you have a much bigger challenge in burning off or recovering, as you will see this afternoon, of the materials that are used in the process. It's on the vacuum side and on the abatement side that the new trends create more intensity.
Thank you, Geert. We have another question back here to the right.
Yes. Hi, it's Rizk Maidi from Jefferies. Still on Vacuum Technique, can we please have an update on the progress you made on the pricing in that business where I think the last few quarters you talked about price resistance? Also your views just on, you know, on the price elasticity when volumes are coming down. Thanks.
Yeah, for us, we have increased prices, and I'm extremely happy with what we have done in the discrete market. In industrial vacuum and part of scientific vacuum and in service, we have really good price development. The situation is slightly different in the big OEMs in scientific vacuum and in semiconductor, because there, I mean, these are huge contracts, long-term contracts, so it's somewhat more difficult. There we work more with surcharges that we can apply because of certain special circumstances. There is a different model. Of course, as with the big OEMs, the effect is somewhat smaller than in the discrete market. On price elasticity, I think the last two years, this market has been driven by availability.
I mean, it's not because you increase your prices a little bit that your volume will drop, because the customers need the product. We haven't seen that elasticity in recent years.
Okay. I think Johan?
Yes. Hello, Johan from Kepler Cheuvreux. Question for you, Peter. If you could talk a little bit about the operational leverage, how you see that, the progressing going forward, and also just give an update how you see if there's any change to your long-term target or goal or for that.
Talking about drop-through.
Yes
For our operations, of course, in 2022, over the last three quarters, that has been a bit more challenging. I think the current status has been that with the efforts from all the different business areas on pricing, we feel that we have been able to mitigate most of the structural cost increases that are most likely going to be in place also going forward. We have not, let's say, pushed the envelope to the level that we would also compensate for other type of impact that we have seen. We have seen high increases of logistics costs at a certain point in time, which is maybe now a little bit improving.
Let's say the spot market buying that we typically have engaged in in order to secure chips so that we could actually push out the products that our customers so desperately needed. From that point of view, of course, it has been quite challenging. The supply chain, from what we hear from all the different business areas, is not really improving substantially at this particular point in time. I think it will continue to remain a bit of a struggle to see how we can improve that situation.
Ultimately, of course, with the orders on hand that we have and the increase in capacity that we foresee, and maybe also due to some economic downturn or at least a softer economic environment, the supply chains might, of course, ease up a little bit more, and that would allow us to produce more, and that should, of course, result in a better drop-through gradually over time.
Are you still targeting between 30% and 40%? Is that your guidance or?
Well, that's of course a long-term average that we generally tend to refer to. At times, it has been significantly higher than that, and at times, currently, unfortunately, it is of course significantly lower than that or even negative. Whether we will be able to reach that in the next quarter or the first quarter next year, that is very difficult to predict, depending on the exact environment that we are operating in. Ultimately, the long term, of course, is that we are able to deliver on that kind of range of drop-through.
Perfect. Thank you.
Thank you, Peter. We have another question here in the middle.
Hi there. It's Gael de-Bray from Berenberg. I've actually got a question on machine vision. I was just wondering sort of with all the M&A that you've done in the last few years, where are you on the journey with machine vision? Do you now consider yourself to be a market leader in the machine vision space? Is there more M&A that you can do in machine vision? And then if so, what sort of things would you be looking at?
Mm-hmm.
I think machine vision is a very big market, quite fragmented, many applications, and it's growing. Right now we are really focusing on this business model application-specific products, but also within that space, there are also good opportunities to do roll-up acquisitions. Right now we're also building and stabilizing the platform in line with what I presented before. The short answer, yes, there is good opportunities to continue to grow it also inorganically.
We do have a question in the very back.
Hey, thank you. Magnus here from UBS. I was also intrigued by the transformation potential you talked about in certain applications in IT. If we take that a step further and look at the whole group, how much, shall we say, incremental productivity or efficiency do you believe you generate for your customer base across the group every year? I realize it's a difficult question, but maybe you can also talk about the sort of new compressor Ferrari that you talked about earlier in the presentation. How much extra efficiency or productivity do you think you get from each product generation? Thank you.
The question was more on the level going to workstations and automated solutions or from a more traditional to a more smart tool?
Well, both.
Both. Yeah.
More about as a whole group level.
No, but I think the feedback and so far we see that we generate really good value for the customers by bundling, combining these different technologies into one solution, both when it comes to a manual workstation and automated solution. The reason is that if you're a customer and you buy this station, you buy a lot of different things, different software, different interfaces. It doesn't work so well together. It's a lot of work to make it integrated. If we can combine certain things in that space and make sure it fits together, one user interface, it's very easy both for the companies building the production line, but our customers.
I don't have a number on it, but it's very good feedback from customers on the value we create with that business model.
Sometimes, Henrik, you refer to what are the mistakes they do online. Maybe you can elaborate on that, if it's the operator process part.
Yes, if you take a tool, a handheld tool and we sell a smart tool, of course, you can control certain things like that there is nothing wrong in the actual joint, nut, and bolt, but you do not know if you are on the right bolt. You could potentially be tightening a bolt on the wrong car, be too early on the production line or too late. With also vision technology, you will see it this afternoon, you also know exactly where the operator is with the tool so that you know you're on the right place. You have excluded even more errors or potential quality errors that could occur in the. That is a lot of value in some applications.
Thank you. Now we have a question from the web. It's Jonathan at HSBC. I think it's to you, Geert. Could you please talk more about the hydrogen opportunity in vacuum, where things stand today, and whether you feel interest in hydrogen is stalling or accelerating? Thank you.
This is very much related to the EUV product, where they use an enormous amount of hydrogen. What we've done in the past is we take that hydrogen through the pump, it goes in our abatement system, and it's burned off, w hich is pretty inefficient, and you have to produce it, and then you just burn it off. The product we have already commercialized now is a hydrogen dilution system, where basically you can dilute the hydrogen and just release it to the atmosphere. That is now what we do. The next one, which you will see this afternoon, is a hydrogen recycling system, where you take the hydrogen out before abatement, then you're purifying the hydrogen and you're feeding it back into the tool.
Basically you have a closed loop in the hydrogen. In that, we produce the prototypes. The prototypes have been tested. We've proven that we can reach the number of nines, so 99.999999% purity of the hydrogen. Now we see an enormous traction with all the end customers that use EUV to see how they can implement that into their production or relate it to the EUV tools. Just to show how big the confidence is in that, when we sell an EUV system to TSMC, there are two empty slots in that big system which are ready actually to slide in a hydrogen recovery system. They are really wanting that to happen because for their cost of ownership, this is enormous. For the environment, this is fantastic.
Very interesting. Thank you. We have one question in the back.
Hi. Oliver from HSBC Asset Management. At the group level, you've described many of these interesting circular economy and climate-relevant products you're innovating. But I noticed in the annual report, the EU-aligned green revenues is around 28%, OpEx is 22%, and then CapEx is 5%. I notice you say that's conservative estimates, but I just wonder, in the future, can we expect those numbers to grow quite significantly? And is there a particular reason for the gap between the 5% and the other numbers which are in the 20s? Thank you.
If we're referring to the EU Taxonomy reporting and, in fact, the eligible portion of that, because we have not reported on aligned yet, for 2021 in that case. Of course, the Taxonomy is a very complicated issue. There's an enormous amount of text that is very difficult to really interpret and understand. Even if you go to the legislators, it's not getting much clearer very often. I think everybody is pretty much on a journey towards understanding those criteria in a good way. Of course, for the first time when we reported, we had done a lot of structural work across all the business areas, working very closely together to exchange our processes and understand how we need to measure this.
We, of course, tried to take a bit of a conservative approach to it because the last thing we want to be put into is a corner of greenwashing. We adopted a very cautious approach. It's very likely that as this area continues to develop, these numbers will change over time as we understand better and as we get a better benchmarking also across all the different companies that are, of course, facing this new challenge. I would say the number is maybe relatively low still, but we definitely wanted to try to be cautious in our approach. We are seeing now that from an eligibility point of view, it is likely that that number is probably higher.
If we listen to all of these different topics that Mats has presented across the different business areas when it comes to potential for sustainability in many of our customers' applications, it seems likely that number is going to grow. On the aligned, it is very likely there that the number will be probably very low at the beginning. Not so much because we do not believe that we don't have the aligned technologies, but more because the kind of l et's say, evidence that we need to provide, particularly the ISO certified certification of the products and applications.
As that, of course, is quite a long process, given the enormous portfolio of products and applications that we need to manage. We will do this step by step as we are able to manage or to measure these different products. Then gradually that number will also probably increase over time. That is a bit of background on the taxonomy. A bit of early stage to get really solid, mature numbers, I would say. At the same time, of course, a cautious approach on our behalf, which is maybe a little bit of a trademark of the house as well and t hat we rather want to be modest but certain about what we show than to be too bold and, maybe complacent.
Max Yates.
Yeah. Could I just ask a quick question? You showed that slide where you showed all of the fabs being built out through the U.S., and I think you talked about it being $130 billion of CapEx. I just wanted to understand kind of a little bit about early ordering and maybe kinda how much of that spend has now already translated into orders for you.
Mm-hmm.
How early when these fabs are being built, are they putting in orders? Is there any way to quantify if we look at the sort of 2021 orders, how you would think about kind of normal ordering and what would be pre-ordering? Is that impossible to quantify, or can you have a go?
Yeah. What they typically do is when they build the fab, first they will build the shell, as we call it, so the fab itself. Then they go into installing all the utilities, yeah? Then basically the fab is ready to produce. In the past, you had customers that had empty shells waiting for the boom. Now this is less relevant. If you look at that map in the U.S., from Intel and TSMC, Samsung will be the next one. They have the fabs. They are now running pilot lines, and they will then equip the whole fab. From an early ordering point of view, we don't get orders when they're in that first phase.
We only start to get orders when they run pilots, and then, of course, when they decide this is a stable line, then we see the rest of the orders. This can be a month, this can be weeks, this can be very close to starting up the fab. From a pre-ordering point of view, I think there is hardly anything in our order book that relates to all the fabs that I've shown in America, except for TSMC and Intel, where they are already equipping the fab. There's no relation between the map and pre-ordering at all, I would say. Yeah.
Can I just squeeze in one more? Is that Daniel?. Just on the competitive landscape, I'm just curious whether you've seen. Obviously, it's a super attractive kind of area market. Have you seen anyone kind of moving in any new competitive developments in terms of whether it's in Asia or India?
No. I think in the high-end processes, I would say it's still the same players as before. What we did see in the easier applications, say related to load lock or to solar, you have some Chinese or particularly one Chinese and one Taiwanese competitor coming in, but we don't see them at all in the high-end harsh semiconductor processes. There, the competitive landscape has not changed. We fight the same people on the dry pumps, on the turbos, on the cryo.
The first question there, and then you, Sebastian, have one other.
Thank you. It's Brodie from Brown Advisory. Geert, could you talk a bit about, given the investments you're making, are you able to quantify the set amount that you're putting into those investments, and then also the timeline you're expecting to finish over, please?
We have that very simple rule when we see an investment in a new fab. It's typically around 2% of that investment amount you have seen on the map is vacuum equipment, vacuum and abatement equipment. That's basically what we do. I would say don't take the $130 billion now and take 2% of that and add it in one year, because that's of course over time that business will come in. A bit higher than 2% is a good measure from the CapEx related to vacuum equipment.
You expect majority within five years, say?
The map we have shown was 2023, 2025, 2026, so that's what they are doing. Yeah.
Sebastian.
Yeah. I have a question also on vacuum again. The order book is now probably 6-7 months lead time, so really full. We now see the problems on the memory side, memory investments, but we also read that TSMC is running some of its 7 nm plants at 50% capacity, and they have already put questions on, you know, building out the, you know, the logic, CapEx. Yes, your order book is full, but given the news now, do you see a risk of, you know, revision on revenues for next year, that you cannot even deliver those orders that you had actually planned to deliver? Or do you, are you happy, or will you produce at capacity next year as well?
Yeah. What we see, of course, we follow that almost on a daily basis. What we see is that there is always a bit of churn in the order book. Some people reshuffle a bit the planning that they have, so you have new orders, cancellations. The cancellations we see today are actually not material to the size of the order book. That is not happening. You could say because of our long lead time, people wouldn't cancel now, but anyway, cancellations are not material. The other thing we look at is of course the fab utilization. We have very detailed reports of what fab is running at what utilization, and if you take the global average of that, they're still above 90% utilization.
There will be a fab where they struggle with yields or where they have a specific process to, say, the Apple 14 or something, somewhat lower sales that you see fluctuations, but the global average is above 90%. We don't see that except for memory. In memory, we have seen reductions in CapEx from Micron, from SK Hynix. Samsung is a bit more difficult because they do both logic and memory, so they shift a bit. Except for memory, nothing major and cancellation's not material. We are confident that order book that we have will take us a long way into next year.
Thank you, Geert. Before Claes, there's a lot of vacuum questions here now, so I thought we should broaden the space a bit. This is from Niranjan at JP Morgan, and he writes like this: "In terms of new products and innovation, you mentioned how Atlas was at the forefront during the transition from pneumatic to electric tools, diesel to electric portable tools, and fixed speed, variable speed compressors and vacuum pumps. What are the breakthrough products innovation you foresee and are working on in the future across the businesses?" I think you can start, Mats, right?
I'm not so sure I want to talk about the future, but no, what I think is related to many of the things that we're working on is related to energy efficiency for two reasons. One is cost and payback. Energy price is going up, so that's a lot of bang for your buck if you can bring that to the customer. Customers have completely, over the last two years, changed in terms of the seriousness of the CO2 footprint that they have. This is part of all our big companies that we are dealing with today, that is part of the quotation, how we're gonna handle that and how we can help them with that. There I'm confident that we will do a fantastic job.
A lot of innovation around that. If I can use an example, when we entered into the vacuum, industrial vacuum space, and at the time we didn't see a lot of innovation. It seemed like even from ourselves, as I said, it was the old pumps being sold over and over and again. Of course, now we have variable speed, we have changed the packaging on products and in a fairly short period of time, and we have managed to be from number two, number three to number one in this. Of course, when I had this map on different technologies, one of these areas is also the industrial pumps, where we can see that there's not much going on in terms of innovation.
Of course we are at beginnings, we have respect for that, but it's one of those areas where you can see that we can bring both connectivity and other parts to that as well. In Henrik's space, I think it's extremely interesting and also challenging for Henrik to go from a standard product to the flexible automation. Because if you do it, if you go to a customer, you say, well, normally you say that you should always listen to your customers, and you say, "Mr. Customer, Mrs. Customer, what would you like to have?" And then you're gonna get, "Well, I want this like this, and I want this green button to here, and this should come in from this way, and the logistics should work this way, and you need to adapt your software to work like this." So
You're gonna have a business that will not be so profitable. The trick here for us is to work with modularization to making sure that we can go to the customer to say, "Okay, this is the end result, and we suggest this box together with this box and work with this box, and then we do a little bit fine-tuning in terms with what you want." That is a challenge to go into this field of course, as we don't build a new product every time. That we're working quite a lot on. Recycling, I think it was mentioned by you. It's a new area for us and it's hydrogen, but there are a lot of other materials that you could recycle in those processes, so we are looking into that as well.
I mentioned it already that we like to get away from the diesel in many other applications. We are at electric and of course you can do battery as well. Henrik has gone from pneumatic to electric to battery. I think a lot of the tools, Henrik, are battery driven today. Those are some of the areas that we focus on. I don't know if maybe this gentleman can add on what they focus on.
Yeah. What we see very much is that in the semiconductor industry, I mentioned it in the presentation, processes are getting harsher, which means basically two things. You have more nasty material that has to go through the pump, and they are running at much higher temperatures. While you manage those two, you still have to continue to do the dust handling of particles that come through the pump. We made a lot of progress on increasing the temperature, improving the dust handling while we reduce the energy consumption. Then on the abatement, I mean, most of our customers are really challenging us to limit, and I mentioned NOx, but anything now because they want to be seen as a clean chips producer, and therefore you need to innovate constantly.
I would say dust handling and harsh processes and constant new regulations from an exhaust point of view drive the innovation for Vacuum Technique.
Good. Sounds exciting. Klas?
Thank you. Question for you, Henrik. Just a couple of final follow-ups. The competitive position in automotive through battery electric, it really feels like that has strengthened. I mean, if I look at some of the Asian players, Japanese, they don't have the kind of offering that you have. Would you say that in automotive through battery electric, that your market share really has gone up? It looks like it, at least when I listen to you around the competitive positioning.
I would agree. I say we have started early, working with the leaders here. At the same time, we've had the pandemic, so to have these strong local teams close to customers in Korea, U.S., and other markets, I think has really helped. I would say it depends of course per technology. We have a broad portfolio, but I would say the same or higher market share, if you compare with the combustion engine vehicles, yes.
I mean, you literally have access to all assembly lines out there. You want to expand the TAM further. On the vision side, you say new growth verticals, that is in glass and solar. There are opportunities in inspection around painting, assembly side geared to decarbonization, traceable fasteners and wind. There are so much growth opportunities organically, and we listen obviously on the industrial pump side, there is on the side in VT, on the industrial side, there is more M&A. You haven't talked that much about M&A. I mean, this is really about growing off the ISRA VISION, Perceptron platform, or do you have a specific M&A agenda as well? That's really my question.
All the divisions also in Industrial Technique have on their mission to also drive M&A. Of course, with what we have now with machine vision and the things I showed, there is a very, you know, I think good opportunity on the organic side, but it's both.
We have our next question.
Yeah. Thank you. Lucie Carrier from JP Morgan Asset Management. I was hoping you could maybe elaborate a little bit on the concept of modularization that you just mentioned. Perhaps explain to us in kind of which specific area you are working on that concept. What is currently, you know, the percentage of your lines or product lines which are operating at that level? And in terms of the productivity or perhaps throughput in terms of new product coming to the market, how much do you expect that modularization kind of process to improve that?
Okay. I think the leaders for us is the division for Industrial Air. They have been really both just in time, which they are penalized for right now, but also building module system. To build up the just in time, they have had to drive themselves through modularization. You've been there more than me, but I would say that is modules that they assemble all the time. In Henrik's case, the tools are also very modular, the heads and the pieces, and that has been the structure in place for over 10 years, I think. A lot of that, I would say, is 100% modularization. Maybe you can comment yourself on yours.
Yeah. What we do, if I take first the industrial side, w e have the three main brands, which is Atlas Copco, Edwards, Leybold. Before the acquisitions, of course, they developed all their own products. Now that we own the three brands, we kind of streamline the innovation. We use as many modular parts or core parts which are the same, and then we tune the machine for a specific application. That's where I refer to the service. Basically, the core of the machine is developed once and is then used for the three brands. That's how we work in industrial. In semiconductor, it's slightly different. We have standard components, but depending on the customer's process, say they go from logic to memory, if you would take a Korean customer here, we have to change modules.
You have a primary pump, secondary pump abatement. What we have developed our systems now so that we have standard interfaces. If the customer decides to change the process, you can do it within the same system, but maybe change one or two of the modules in the whole vacuum system. That creates enormous flexibility for the customer and gives us the opportunity to really add value for the customer in that way. Yeah.
I don't have a number in terms of where we really are, but that is significant potential still to continue to work with the modularization. With talking modularization, it's not a standard for the customer. We'd really like to give the customer a lot of different options for what they want. But to be able to do that and drive profitability, you need to find ways or modularize how we make our setup. I think you mentioned another example, Geert, during your presentation when you talked about the serviceability of products, that some of the cores are similar, and then the division make them unique then for their specific brands. That's another way for us to be efficient.
I should also say that we also, we back out of businesses that are more product-based, more labor, more steel. We say customers want us to provide a lot more than we do, but we are gladly handing that over to someone else. It's very low margins on a lot of this and a lot of risk. For example, with the car line builders type of industry, we are not gonna get into that. That's a lot of specials there.
Okay. I think that concludes the Q&A session. Thank you, Mats. Thank you, Peter, Geert, and Henrik.