Welcome to the HANZA Q3 2022 presentation. Afterwards, there will be a question and answer session. If you wish to ask a question, please press 01 on your telephone keypad. Today, I'm pleased to present CEO, Erik Stenfors, and CFO, Lars Åkerblom. Please begin your meeting.
Thank you, and thank you all for joining. I'm Erik Stenfors, the CEO of HANZA, and we do have an interesting briefing for you today. We will both review a strong quarter and a solid strategy for the future. Let's proceed to page number two, and the agenda. I will start by going through the latest development, then I will hand over to Lars Åkerblom, our CFO, who will express this in figures. We'll talk about the plan we have for the coming three years. Lars will give you the new financial targets. We end the presentation with a summary and a look at the future, and then we end the call with a Q&A session. Please, do not hesitate to ask any questions at the end of this session. Okay, we turn to page number three.
In our previous call, in the Q2 call, we said that we expect a strong performance going forward, and we are really pleased to deliver according to that outlook. If you look at the quarter, it's been a growth of 40%, this Q3 compared to the same quarter last year. We have to remember that we've been struggling with the component shortages. We still have outbreaks of COVID-19, and that means that you need to replan production. That's always difficult, but especially so during the vacation period. We are really pleased with this outcome. Also we opened new factory space in Poland, in Czech Republic, in China. This is important. That's part of our cluster concept to have a cost-efficient way to expand our facilities.
That's also why we, in October, acquired our sheet metal factory, which you can see to the right on this picture. We used to have it on a lease agreement, but we acquired it. Always good to own your building. It's lower the cost, and it's easier to do fixed installation. More than that, on the deal, we also got 11,000 sq m of land. We also previously bought land, you see to the left in the picture, our new assembly hall, the one we opened in March this year. We already acquired some land before, and this is, again, really important because we have to prepare for the future. The idea is to expand with a limited impact on the cost side, but still with a large impact on the capacity side. This is an excellent opportunity for the future.
We did an acquisition in Germany in the beginning of the quarter in July. It was a company with 10 engineers in Münster. You might recall that Münster was the place where the foreign ministers of G7 had a meeting last week. It's actually the place where there was the peace treaty for the end of Thirty Years' War. It's a city with history, and it's really close to our other cities in Germany, so we form this cluster. Together with this new acquisition, which we have renamed to HANZA Tech Solutions, and our previous entity in Remscheid close by, we now have 30 engineers helping us with product development for our customers. With that, I give the floor to Lars on page four.
Thank you, Erik. To summarize the financial development of HANZA, I will present good and strong growth with increased earnings and a really strong positive cash flow. I will come back to the cash flow. Starting with the sales, as Erik mentioned, we are up 40% compared to last year. If we exclude the acquisition and the currency, we have a growth of 26%, and we are now about SEK 3.2 billion, close to SEK 3.3 billion. A year ago, we were on rolling 12 on SEK 2.3 billion. Remember that since HANZA started, we have had an average growth of 17%. Combined with that, we have increased earnings. The earnings reached SEK 50 million. That is 34% higher than last year, of SEK 38 million. We are now on rolling 12, close to SEK 200 million, SEK 192 million in EBITA.
As Erik mentioned, we did an acquisition of Budelmann, and it has not affected the P&L or the balance sheet. It's only minor effect on the financial figures, but it's consolidated in Q3 as well. We can move to page five and go into the segments. Here we also see continuous growth of both segments. Main market is growing by 20% this year Deducting acquisitions and currency. We have a strong profitability of 7%, a little bit lower compared to last year. The reason for that is that we actually forward and re-invoice material and the cost for energy. Also we have the company that we acquired in Q4 2021 in Mönchengladbach is running at the level 0. We expect this to come back after the integration to the cluster in Germany in Q4 and contribute to the profitability in the group.
Other markets is also growing even a little bit more, with 33%, and has increased the profitability. This is what we said and been saying for quite a while now, that we will see the two segments coming closer to each other in profitability. We are glad to see that other markets are increasing the profitability despite the fact that, as Erik mentioned, they've been growing in facilities and adding space and of course that normally lowers the profitability when you're having those kind of activities. The segment Other markets is as well affected by this re-invoicing of material and electricity and energy. We can move to page six, and coming back to the cash flow. We have a really strong cash flow in Q3. It amounted to SEK 82 million compared to SEK -19 million in Q3 a year ago.
That is still the fact that we have challenges with the material, with shortages in components. We need to still keep a quite high stock level in order to be able to deliver. What we have done in Q3 is that we have been able to get financing for the working capital from the customers. This also leads to that the net debt is decreasing by EUR 40 million in Q3. Together with the improved profitability, we see really good increase of the net debt compared to EBITDA, giving 2.3 times compared to 2.6 in Q2 in 2022. The earnings per share is also positive and increasing. It reached SEK 0.73 per share in Q3. At rolling 12, we are close to SEK 3 in earnings per share.
By that, I leave over to you, Erik.
Thank you. We can move to page number seven. Today we present not only an interim report, but a milestone. A milestone representing an end of strategy 2022, as well as the beginning of strategy 2025. We move to page eight and take a closer look. 14 years ago, we decided to take contract manufacturing to a new level, contract manufacturing 2.0, if you like. Since then, we have had a quite solid history. We stay convinced that this is due to clear plans and explicit milestones. We have built HANZA in steps, in phases. If you go back in time to 2017, we at that point finalized phase number 2.
We created HANZA in 2 development phases, we said, "Now it's time for phase number 3, an expansion phase." We put some goals that we were going to do an IPO on Nasdaq's main market, establish a brand new cluster in the largest economy of Europe, Germany, refine existing clusters, and do some strategic acquisitions. Also we had to put some financial targets. In 2017, we had about SEK 1.4 billion in sales, and an EBIT of SEK 36 million. We said it's reasonable to grow with at least 10% per year. That means that by 2022, we should be up to SEK 2 billion and should be reasonable to have an EBIT corresponding to 6%, so about EUR 120 million. We are not done just yet with 2022, but we saw the accumulated figures Lars showed.
We are already on the last 12 months, rolling 12-month months, we are well above 3 billion SEK in sales and SEK 175 million in EBIT. It's been a really good journey, even better than we expected. We are also happy to see that this strong development has had a positive impact on the HANZA share, which has tripled since we launched the targets in August 2018. In short, we are fulfilling our targets. It's time for the next step. We have done, as per usual, we have carefully evaluated our current position and done that, of course, in close dialogue with our customers. We have also taken into account that there most likely will be a recession during this period. The result is then HANZA 2025. I'd like to walk you through some conclusions and actions.
We turn to page number nine. First, we have a look at our business model. It has served us well, also through recessions. We see on the graph that we have a solid growth since we started HANZA, unlike many traditional contract manufacturers, which has been going down and up. We also saw that this business model was able to bring us to these three milestones. We have built HANZA and HANZA's business model on the idea to increase customer value. That's the whole idea. We see now for the coming years, to even further increase the customer value, we will work more to develop the service side of HANZA. HANZA is not just about manufacturing. We have our advisory services, and we have the product development. I mentioned the acquisition in Münster. We will keep the business model and further develop the service side.
We turn to page number 10. We have to have some goals, some sales goals for 2025. In order to set the goals, we have to analyze the current and the future market opportunities. We see, first of all, that we have a very strong and reliable customer base, and that's why we are growing now, and that's why we will continue to grow a good spread in different areas, such as energy sector, defense industry. We have med tech companies, mining companies, and also companies with very long forecast. We can predict already 2023. In addition to that, we have an advantage in our concept. If you're a traditional contract manufacturing, for instance, you're sending machine parts, then you turn to different companies to see if you can get a piece of the action.
We are selling a concept, the clusters together with our services, and that widens our potential customer base. We are doing compasses for Silva, we're doing parts for the mining industry. That makes almost the potential unlimited. Therefore, we can also target customers which we think are appropriate for our concept. We say that actually customers should not choose HANZA. HANZA should choose its customers. Moving forward, we will focus on the existing customer portfolio. We will add some targeted new customers, and also we will handle what we can say is a tailwind in the macro perspective. We see that a lot of manufacturing is now moving to be more local, which is the core of our offer. That will also fuel our growth. If we turn to page 11.
We see that there will be no challenge to bring up sales, and it's actually not our challenge today either, but we have to increase our capacity. We have to do that in a good way, and how to do that? First, we analyze our footprint and conclude that this is appropriate to our customers' wishes. We are already located, as the map shows, in good places on the earth. We have also seen, if you look at our acquisitions, that all acquired companies inside the HANZA Group have performed better than they did before standalone. That's also something to bring into this strategy. We also have, and we're quite proud of that we have a strong company culture and also an organization chart, which is expandable. We made it in modules. You can scale it.
This together with what I mentioned earlier, that we also have in the cluster philosophy, a way of increasing capacity in a cost-efficient way. We believe that the right way forward is to further develop our existing clusters. We will focus on the six existing clusters and bring them up to next level. By that, I think it's time to go through the financial targets. I leave back to Lars. Page number 12.
Thank you, Erik. Up to the right, you see where we are today in HANZA, rolling 12-month. We haven't finalized 2022 yet, but this is where we are in the end of Q3. We have approximately 3.3 billion SEK and SEK 192 million in EBITDA. We go down to the new financial targets that we have decided on, and starting with the growth. What we have said here is that we will increase a little bit by setting the goal for 5 billion SEK in 2025. Before we had 10% revenue growth, and if we recalculate how to reach to 5 billion, it's a little bit higher than 10%. Again, remember that we have been on 17% in average. Profitability, we are increasing the margin. We are setting a target on minimum 8% of operating margin. We add a new financial target, the debt ratio.
Here we set net debt compared to EBITDA of 2.5 times. What I said a few minutes ago is that we are on 2.3. The capital structure, the equity to asset ratio, we actually leave unchanged. We think that the 30% is a good target, and we keep that. Then we also keep the dividend policy of 30% of profit after tax with consideration of the company's financial status. These are the new financial targets for 2025. With that, I'll leave it back to you, Erik, for a summary and outlook.
Thank you, Lars. We turn to page 13. To make a short summary, we see that we have had a really good quarter three and also very strong cash flow. We have presented our strategy for the coming years, where we will be widening our concept more towards services and working with our existing clusters, bringing in new targeted customers and also some selected acquisitions. We look at the future, the near future, our outlook stays the same. We have a very good order intake due to the long-term contracts of our customer portfolio and the diversified customer portfolio. We believe it will continue in a good way. We know, this is very important, we know now that we are in the midst of climate change.
Next week there is this climate conference in Egypt, and every company will have to make an effort. In our concept, we can do more than other companies. We can lower our emissions, we can lower our consumption. That's something that every factory can do, we can also lower the number of shipments. We decided also to renew our targets for our environment policy and our sustainability. We will have a new upgrade of that strategy as well by the end of this year. Really important. Next step. We are convinced that we will be able to deliver also on this phase and the financial target that was presented by Lars. We feel very good comfort in that, also we have to prepare for the next step. We have not stopped the expansion of HANZA. We will launch a seventh cluster.
We said during this phase, we will also evaluate possible next steps to put down the HANZA flag in close cooperation with our customers as per normal. By the end of this phase, we should be ready to launch where the next cluster will be located. That concludes our presentation, and now we welcome any questions. Page 14.
Thank you. If you wish to ask a question, please press zero one on your telephone keypad. Our first question comes from Niklas Elmhammer at Carlsquare. Your line is open.
Oh, yeah. Good morning. Thank you for the great presentation and the inspiring outlook. My first question is maybe something you had expected. Price increases have been a considerable factor for contract manufacturers. Is it possible for you to comment on the specific effect of price increases on organic growth and margin in this quarter?
I think I'll leave that to you, Lars.
No, it's not really possible. We are not disclosing those figures. It's really hard with the wide variety of different customers, different products that are changing and really say how much is the material part of the growth. It's not the majority of the growth, not at all. It's a minor part of the organic growth is due to material.
I can add to that. Hello, Niklas. Thank you for your question. Also, it's important to remember that we are a concept company, the material which prices have been increasing mainly on the electronic side and not on the raw material side. I think we have a lower impact than if you compare, for instance, for an EMS company.
Okay. Do you expect any significant changes in the pricing environment in the short term, or?
Well that's a hard question. There are many things going on now. You see the different prices of electronic components. You see different currency effects. You see energy. We are glad that we use this open-book accounting system so that we are transparent with the costs to our customers, so they know that that's part of the deal, that they pay for that, and then we have our secure margin. In order to tell the future, my guess is as good as anyone else. We were expecting the good component situation by next year. It very much depends on this forecasted downturn in the economy. That will help. I cannot give any clear answer on that, unfortunately.
Okay. On the outlook, you touched upon that. It seems quite encouraging. We see at the same time, industrial companies reporting strong sales and order backlog. However, new orders are sort of flattening out. Do you see a similar or a better picture?
We see no signs of downturn at all. Again, I think that's due to our customer portfolio, that we have very long contracts in this portfolio and also the spread we have. Having said that, of course, we will be affected like anybody else if the big recession comes. Only that I think we will perform a little bit better.
Okay. You still see orders growing?
Yes. We have a higher order intake than we have ability to deliver due to the component situation. Still, our limitation in sales is not our capacity, but the material situation.
Okay. If possible, if you could comment on the German cluster units, on the performance in terms of growth and profitability compared to the rest of the main markets.
Yes. Good question. Thank you. It's a fantastic country, Germany. They have so many of these Mittelstand product-owning companies, which really need some help. We have been also making Germany step by step. We entered in 2019, and then came the pandemic. We had to wait. We reopened last summer again, and then we did an acquisition. We are following the plan. The plan we announced in October last year was that by the end of this year, we will be ready with the cluster, and that's also why we can announce the next strategy, because we will be ready with a set-up in the German cluster this year. That of course, being ready means also that there are new opportunities, that we are not in the build-up phase, but rather in the expansion phase. We are quite positive about the German market.
It's fairly unlimited. Recession or not, we will have orders.
Okay. Do you still expect good profitability from German cluster beginning of next year, or that target moved a bit?
No. It stayed the same since last year, that when we are financing cluster, because everything we do, we cannot activate any costs. We take it directly on the P&L sheet. When we are done, ends the cost. Of course, that is like a balloon going a bit up. We said we will be ready by this year, and we will be ready by this year. That will be an increased profitability in the German cluster.
Okay. I'll step back in the queue for now. Thank you.
Thank you, Niklas. Our next question comes from Fredrik Nilsson at Redeye. Your line is open.
Hi. Thank you. I want to start with what you called next step. What geographical locations are you looking at for a potential new cluster? Also, just to clarify, at the end of the period, is that the 2025 period, or what period are you talking about there?
Hello, Fredrik. The latter part of the question first. Yes, it's the end of this period. By 2025, we should be ready to launch the next cluster somewhere in the world. Of course, I don't think you expect me to tell you where right now. In fact, I don't know that. It's still in the investigation phase. Of course, it's like a product development company. You always have to think about the next product, and that's what we're doing also in HANZA.
Okay. I see. Are there a few areas you could name that you are investigating at least so we could get some kind of indication on what areas that possibly could be interesting?
I can tell you something about the trends, but it doesn't mean that we will go in that direction. The current trend is very strong, and that is that there's a detachment between Europe and Asia and an attachment between Europe and the U.S. because of the political situation. There are companies who would like to remove their manufacturing from Asia and maybe even be in U.S. No war in U.S. is more solid energy situation. That's the trend right now. If that will be valid by the end of 2025, I cannot tell you.
Okay. I see. On the targets, the new targets, 5 billion SEK in 2025 would imply quite a high growth. There is also quite a big difference if you manage to achieve that with the current number of shares, or if you expect to increase the number of shares in order to reach 5 billion SEK in 2025. Could you elaborate a bit on that target? Do you believe you need to acquire with shares in order to reach that, or should we be possible to reach it without that?
Specific questions, I don't know if you would like to comment on that, Lars.
Acquisitions is part of the business plan, and I think we can expect some acquisitions. We have historically done one acquisition per year or so. If we at that time need to or decide to also increase the number of shares through a share issue, that is hard to, we cannot really tell. It cannot be said that it won't happen either. On the other hand, if we make an acquisition and increase the number of shares, we still need to focus on the earnings per share and increase the profitability per share. The target of 5 billion SEK can, of course, also be. We can reach higher than that if we do some big acquisitions. It really depends on the size of the acquisitions.
I think also that. Sorry, if I may add, just that we would like, and we have many of our colleagues as shareholders, and we like that. Sometimes we do acquisition with shares to make sure that people stay on board. Like Lars said, EPS, of course, we must increase the earnings per share. It must be shareholder value when we do an acquisition. We cannot be more precise than that. Sorry about that.
Okay, I see. Thank you. One last question from me. As you mentioned, you have a diversified customer base, and overall you see a strong order intake. Could you tell us anything about differences in demand between different segments, just to get a better understanding about where we're heading in the economy, considering your wide exposure? It would be interesting to hear your view.
I cannot comment on my specific customers, but I can comment in general that we see, of course, that heat pumps, for instance, is a booming market. Recycling machines is a booming market. Defense industry is a booming market. Mining is still going really strong. Medtech, the areas where we are, still strong. I cannot be more precise with the specific customers, of course, but we see strong demands from most sectors.
Okay, that's all from me. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question, please press 01 on your telephone keypad. We're going to have a brief pause while questions are being added to the queue. Our next question comes from Anders Roslund at Pareto Securities.
Yes, hello. I had just one question. If you're looking at your new target of SEK 5 billion by 2025, that implies some 12%-14% CAGR up to then. That's a little bit more than the 10% growth target you had before. Is that mainly organic, or is it also some acquisitions?
Hello, Anders. Two comments. First, 2022 is not closed yet, we don't know the outcome of that, if we're going to do the increase. Secondly, yes, we have targeted some acquisitions in this moving forward. Then we have said we target acquisitions in our current geography to increase capacity. That would be the goal. Maybe just a third comment that we have in our history since we started HANZA, we have been running at 17%.
Okay. Yeah. That's true. Also the 8% margin, is that something which you will reach by 2025, or do you have a more aggressive time schedule for that target level?
The sooner, the better, of course. Maybe Lars would like to comment on this. It is very much connected to the general economy also, of course.
I say as you say, the sooner, the better. What we can say, and we got a question from the audience saying that how we will reach that margin. In many of the factories and many of the clusters, we are on this level already. The clusters are at different stage in development. What they have said is that we see no difference in the possibility to have a high profitability in the different clusters. It does not matter if the clusters belong to other market or main markets. We cannot say when we can reach 8%, but what I can say is that we are above 8% in a large part of HANZA, and we know well the reason for the other clusters that have not yet reached 8%, the reason why they are not making 8%.
Anders, I think we also announced previously that our oldest clusters are well above 10%. That is not going to be an easy ride, but we feel extremely confident because there is a function of scale. When we increase the clusters, the margin comes because we have the opportunity to share resources and all that. It is not a complicated function to do this, merely that we have to make all these clusters mature before we take the next step.
Okay. Yeah, that was all questions for me. Thank you.
Thank you.
We have no further questions on the phone line, so I'll hand back to Erik and Lars.
Okay. Thank you. Unless there are no more questions, I'd like to thank everyone for joining this call today, and we can turn to page 15 and conclude that all you need is one. Thank you very much for listening.