Hi, everyone, and welcome to this Bawat Q3 webcast hosted by Arctic Securities. My name is Ivar Ryttrol. I'm the equity analyst here at Arctic, covering Bawat, and will moderate this session. With me today, I have the management team of Bawat, who will soon take you through the presentation before we kick off with some Q&A towards the end. With that, I think we are ready to begin, and I'll leave the word to you, Marcus.
Thank you, Ivar, for this presentation, and welcome to the audience. As Ivar told, my name is Marcus Hummer, I'm the CEO of Bawat, and I'll take you through the Q3 update here, as a recent events update for where we are today. So I think the main and key point that we wanna communicate today is that we have guided throughout the year on an order intake between SEK 40 million and SEK 60 million. And this guidance, we are now narrowing the target down to SEK 40 million-SEK 50 million range for the remainder of the year. We are doing that based on post-quarter events, where we have signed orders for primarily mobile system, but also for ship solutions. And with that, we have confidence that we will end up in the range between 40 and 50.
It's still a range because we are, at this point in time, still negotiating, especially service contracts for our Bawat systems, but we are also in open and final negotiations for more ship solutions for the remainder of the year, and that's why we are keeping the range between 40 and 50. By doing so, we are actually more than doubling our order intake from last year, and, we are very proud of that in the team. Another significant part for the quarter is the rise in our gross profit. The quarter was reported to more than 38%, giving a nine-month gross profit of more than 33%, which is actually in line and also overshooting our long-term, gross profit projection, where we have said that we would reach 30% based on product mix.
So we are now overshooting that, and this is primarily because the product mix is leaning towards mobile systems, where we have a significant better gross margin than we have on the ship solution, and this is related primarily to the competitive situations. Where we have a very technical, competitive solutions on the ship market, there are also many competitors, whereas our solution for the mobile systems is a market where we are, today, I would say only one, two, or maybe three competitors in the market. And the biggest competitor we've actually had has been from the Damen Shipyards Group. And this brings me actually to the third point, which is a post-quarter event, because on the ninth of November, we signed, as we had also reported in Q2, where we had a term sheet signature with the Damen Shipyards Group.
But on the ninth of November, we signed our final joint venture agreement with Damen on mobile systems. The joint venture has two focus points. It is a combined sales organizations between the sales network from Damen Group and the Bawat sales network, and it's focusing on selling mobile systems. The second part of the joint venture is that Damen is putting its manufacturing capability globally into this joint venture. So we now have, in Bawat, a very significant global manufacturing partner, in order for us to scale up our manufacturing and delivery of mobile systems. Damen is, at the same time, putting down its own mobile systems, a program called InvaSave, as they have, together with us, realized that the Bawat technology is fast-performing and is basically a better technology for this type of market.
So a very significant signature for Bawat, which now means that globally, we can increase our sales network for the mobile systems, and we have a very credible partner in terms of manufacturing and scale-up. This leads us to, I would say, the fourth significant point for the quarter, where we have hired people in both in Europe and in the U.S., post-quarter signatures for our BaaS, meaning our ballast-as-a-service system or setup. We have, in Bawat, three legs that we stand on from a business. One is installations for the vessels, for the ships, another is selling of the mobile systems, where we now have a joint venture on selling and manufacturing with Damen, and the last one is BaaS, ballast-as-a-service, where we are selling the service of treating ballast water or delivering treated ballast water to vessel owners in ports and yards.
That we are scaling up, and as I said earlier in my comments, one of the still outstanding signatures on contracts is actually for a larger BaaS job here in Europe. So we are seeing. As we also said in Q2, we are seeing a, an increased attention to this type of possibilities. We are, you know, almost first movers and early in the market, but we can see a heavy increase in requests for quotations and actually also jobs being performed. So we are now having in manufacturing also equipment that will go into our BaaS service company in order to deliver this going into 2024. So overall, I would say the quarter have been focused and characterized on delivering and building on our order book, and building and preparing 2024 on a more intense delivering on service.
Last but not least, you know, signing off and starting up our joint venture with Damen in order to make sure that we can scale up on mobile solutions. Some uncertainty is still on the exact number on where we are on the guidance, but overall, we expect and are confident with what we have on hand now, that we will more than double our order intake based off last year. Thank you very much.
Thanks for the presentation, Marcus. I think we can move over to the Q&A session. Maybe you can start with adding some comments around the recent quoting activity that you see.
I think, I think quoting activity relates. You know, it, it's across the board. It's both for, for vessels. We see and let's say, an increase in quoting for new buildings, as we are now nine months away for the final implementation of the IMO Ballast Water Convention implementation. So the amount of retrofit quotes are, you know, steadily declining, even though they are still at a high level. There are quite a few ship owners that still has not taking a decision, and there are a lot of specialty vessels, barges, et cetera, offshore vessels, that also have not taken a decision. And they are now facing that nine months away, they need to live up to the convention. So they are looking very much at retrofit, but they're also looking at service.
And then we are also seeing, actually, customers asking for quotes on retrofit, where they already have installed equipment that is not living up to their satisfaction. So we see, and this is also what we have said all along, that we see a new building market going forward, but we also see a retrofit on old equipment installed that's not really working according to the specifications. The key point on the Bawat deliverable relative to other system is, of course, that we have cracked the nut of not having a filter installed in our systems. And this is the primary, you know, dysfunctioning part of the competitive environment. So not having a filter, working in all water types, that's what makes our system attractive.
We are seeing also a large increase in quoting on mobile systems for vessels that don't have any infrastructure, and also for mobile systems into the service part, either by our service companies or by larger ship vessel owners that wants to operate them themselves. So we are seeing a very active market, and I think we are looking positively into 2024. We will come out with our guidance for 2024 early in the year. Right now, we are closing our budget round with our board, and once that is in place, we will come out with our expectations and guidance for the next year. But right now, it looks positive.
Good. Over to the next one, "How should we think about working capital build going forward? Do you usually get paid before you order the equipment for the treatment systems?
Our model, as we don't have any own manufacturing, so we are in principle an engineering company. So when we have a signature on a contract from a customer, we get a down payment, and then we get either success payments as we order the equipment or when the equipment is ready to be picked up by the customer. So on all our projects, we actually have a positive working capital, meaning that we don't in our growth. That's one of the advantages of our company, we can grow without actually tying up capital. We don't have any manufacturing, we don't have any warehouses, we don't have any buildings. So that working capital will leave with our sub-suppliers.
For the manufacturing of the mobile systems, where we deliver a full scope, of course, there we have a net zero or net positive working capital on those projects .
Good. I think we have covered the incoming questions. So, thanks for watching. I don't know if you have some closing remarks, Marcus.
No, I just like to thank everybody that has listened in and is following us. Thank you for Arctic, for setting this platform available and distributing the news. Thank you very much. Have a nice day.