Hi. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Hexagon's Capital Markets Day. Very happy to have you all here with us today. Thank you for coming along on this sunny day just before a bank holiday for some people, so we very much appreciate that. I'm Tom Hull, head of investor relations. Before we get into the main sessions, I'm just going to take you through some key points about today very briefly. First off, the cautionary statement. This is unchanged from the ones you've seen previously on any of our reports. I'd also like to highlight there are no planned fire alarms or drills today. If you do hear an alarm, please proceed to the nearest exit and good luck. Now to the day itself. We've grouped the day into three main parts.
In session one, you'll hear from Anders, our CEO, and our new CFO, Enrique. We're then gonna have some time for a short Q&A for around 15 minutes, some more about submitting a question in a moment, and then you'll have a break for around 15 minutes as well. Post the break, you're gonna hear from our business area Presidents, Andreas Renulf, the President of MI, and then Henning Sandfort, the President of Geosystems. We're then gonna have a further short Q&A for any questions you might have on those presentations, followed by another short break. In the final session of the day, you'll hear from Gordon Dale, our President of Autonomous Solutions, and you'll hear from Arnaud Robert, President of the Robotics division.
Anders is then gonna come up to wrap the day up with one short slide, and then we'll have a final Q&A on any area you would like to cover for about 20 minutes, half an hour. We will aim to close no later than 4:30 P.M. To ask a question today, you're gonna have two options. In the room, you can just raise your hand, and we'll bring you a mic. From the webcast, we will pause every couple of questions and make sure that we cover any questions that are coming in through there. There is a chat box on the web box where you can submit your questions. We'll then read those out in the room. We're gonna aim to address as many of your questions as possible today.
Before I hand over to Anders, I just wanna take a moment to talk about the key metrics you're gonna hear about today and highlight the new profitability metric you'll have no doubt all read about, EBITAC. The organic growth metric is completely unchanged. EBITAC, as I said, is a new metric. It takes our adjusted profitability metric, EBIT1, and subtracts capitalized R&D and adds back amortized R&D. This has the effect of charging all of the R&D in the year it's incurred, allowing us to focus more on R&D return on investment, and it is a metric closer to how we run the business today. Enrique is gonna cover this new metric in more detail later. You will have already noted we published reconciliations between EBIT1 and EBITAC in the press release issued earlier today.
The cash conversion metric remains operating cash flow before interest, tax, and nonrecurring cash flow, but it is now divided by EBITAC as it's our main measure of profitability. The definition of Scope 1 and 2 emissions is unchanged from the previous definitions. One other important thing when you're listening today is that all of the numbers quoted today, including historical, unless otherwise stated, exclude Octave and the D&E business which we sold in February this year. With that, I'm gonna pass you to Anders, who will start the main session of the day.
Thank you, Tom. Can you hear me? Great. Very nice to be here. Good afternoon. Happy to see all of you here, both live in London but also online. I know it's close to holiday season here for parts of the attendees, so really appreciate you traveling here to London to participate with us. My name is Anders Svensson. I'm the President and CEO of Hexagon. This is a great day for us here today. We have the ability and opportunity to explain who we are as the new Hexagon, created now since we are spinning off Octave and we have sold off some of our businesses. It's a great opportunity to explain to us who we are and where we are headed going forward.
Also, of course, our strong conviction to generate superior sustainable value creation for investors going forward. This is what this whole day is basically about. Let me set the scene for today a bit. What we want you to bring with you and clearly understand when you leave here is, first, who we are, a focused leader within precision measurement and positioning technologies. Secondly, that we benefit from really strong fundamentals. We are active in structurally attractive and fast-growing markets, and in those markets, we have a leadership position. To have a leadership position gives you opportunity to invest in R&D, innovation. To keep that leadership position, it also gives you the opportunity to be price setter, so you can charge a premium for your products.
Thirdly, we want you to bring with you that we have a proven operating model on how we steer and govern this company going forward, and combine that with very strong business strategies that our business area presidents will review with you today. Those are actually done on divisional level but summarized here on business area level for convenience, otherwise we would be here a very long time because we have 17 divisions. This will help us to unlock superior value going forward. The fourth thing is that we have clear and ambitious financial targets that are built on this foundation. That's basically what we want you guys to bring with you when you leave here today. Moving forward. To understand where we are going, we need to understand where we are first.
If you look back at Hexagon the last 12 months or so, you can see a quite big difference. We had what we call Hexagon now, we have Octave, and we have the D&E, or Design and Engineering, business that we have sold. We have taken decisive actions to sort of not clean, but streamline our portfolio towards precision measurement and positioning technologies. If you look at Octave, it's a completely different business. It's a great business. It's a software business, but it works with completely different cycles with customers. It's long-term enterprise procurement cycles where they work within, and the personas at the customer is completely different from the personas which Hexagon works with. There's no sort of benefits of being together, and it only makes us look not focused as a group.
The second one is our D&E business. If you follow this, you know that the electrical design automation software systems are combining with the physical ones, which our business, D&E, is the computer-aided engineering companies, and this has happened everywhere. We basically had two options: either we exit, while this is a very profitable and valuable company, or we need to invest heavily to step into that direction instead, buying one of those large companies, which would have been an opportunity, but not where we wanted to go. This is why we then exited this business and are now, since decision in AGM last week, where it was taken by the shareholders to actually spin Octave for real.
What remains is then Hexagon core, and if you look on the right-hand side of the slide, you can see that we are EUR 3.7 billion and an EBITAC margin of 22%. If you convert that back to EBIT1 margin, which you might be more used to, that would then be 26% for 2025. If you look at the total amount of employees, that's 17,000 now instead of 25+ when we had the other two businesses with us as well. We are not exiting software. Sometimes you hear that, "No, you're exiting software now." Not at all. Software is critical for us. If you look, software and services is 44% of our revenue. Recurring revenues are 28%, we are definitely not exiting software.
If you look at our development engineers, 75% of them are software engineers. We are wanting to be a company within hardware, software, and services that support each other. That's what we are targeting. We are not targeting to become a software company or a hardware company. We are targeting to become a supplier to our customers of full solutions, hardware, software, and services. Let's dive a bit deeper into our business portfolio. We consist of three business areas. Manufacturing Intelligence is the largest one, and Andreas will tell you more later. EUR 1.6 billion in size, global leader in portable and stationary metrology, but also CAM software. With Waygate being added into the organization, hopefully, later in this year, we will then also be within non-destructive testing.
Geosystems is the second-biggest one, EUR 1.4 billion, in leading in precision surveying and monitoring, also within Machine Control, Construction Software and Services, et cetera. Then we have the smallest business area, but the fastest-growing one, Autonomous Solutions, and Gordon will talk about that. EUR 0.7 billion and leads in precision positioning, of course, and operational intelligence and autonomous solutions like our road train, which is quite famous, I think. In every one of these areas, we have a market position of one to three, because within each of these, you have divisions, and those divisions are either best, second-best, or third-best within their field.
That is giving us a strength, like I mentioned in the beginning also, of being price leader, price setter of solutions and also to invest the most in innovation and R&D to make sure that we keep that position also going forward. I want to mention also separate here, which is ventures and Robotics. Those are in this, what we call ventures, it's like an incubator or greenhouse, mainly internally developed innovation ideas that we then put in this greenhouse, allow them to grow, and see if they can grow up to become a new division or even business area sometime maybe. The most known one is probably AEON, the humanoid Robotics, which you can see also here. We have other strong businesses here, like Aura.
Francesco is here as well somewhere with his team to also displaying this product over there, so you can have a look at that later if you want. It's generally technologies we think can be disruptive somehow, and we give them a chance to grow in here. If I then move forward to now when we are more focused portfolio, we also have a clear purpose and value proposition. It is basically that we measure what matters for our customers. Our customers are in all the key strategic verticals in the world, basically. We focus on providing industrial customers solutions to understand the physical environment, to convert that or digitize it into a digital reality, and then to work and operate within that digital reality, and also in the physical reality with physical AI.
All our products and solutions work to address one of the three main areas you can see here. It's either precision measurement and positioning, or it's digital twins and 3D environments, and that's replicating then the physical world into the digital environment, or it's within spatial and operational intelligence using the precision measurement and positioning together with real-time digital twins. Then through that allow assets to be able to operate safely also within the physical environment. Examples for that is, of course, AEON is the road train. To some extent you have the TS20 total station, et cetera. This is the way we see our businesses. We provide customers with a foundation to enable true autonomy in their products.
This is why we are at the core of how our customers develop going forward, and we are not at the edge, an edge supplier somehow. We have edge technology, of course, but we are not at the edge, we are at the core. If I move forward to elaborate a bit on the different solutions we have today and how we enable autonomy. If you look at our offerings, you can see them a little bit like this. It starts with manual solutions. Here we have an MI arm measurement, RA8. You have an operator who takes this arm and make precision measurements in reality. You move over to automated solutions. Here you have the MAESTRO coordinate measuring machine platform, which we released last year. It's fully automatic measuring system with fused and connected sensors.
You move into the semi-autonomous solutions. In here you have, like I mentioned, TS20 within Leica or Geosystems. You have the ATS 800 within Manufacturing Intelligence. Of course, you have the anti-collision system within mining. Those use digital twins, edge AI and perception technologies to be semi-autonomous. Of course, you have the further step is then how do we enable true autonomy? This is physical AI with real-time spatial and operational intelligence. The key point here is that we have products, technologies, and solutions that support our customers on the journey from being manual to being truly autonomous.
Within, we didn't put in here, but also within adding Waygate into MI, we will not only have, like we have here, surface measurement, precision measurement equipment, we will even be able then to measure the inside geometry of different products and components. Before turning into our strategy and markets, I want to talk about how we operate. We call it The Hexagon Way, and it's a critical enabler to deliver on our targets. This was introduced basically quite early after I joined in the end of the 3rd quarter, and we started to implement already in some businesses in the 4th quarter, but it's fully implemented from the 1st of January this year.
The Hexagon Way starts with the purpose as the core, around that, you have an operating model, you have people and culture, you have the governance system, and you have how we treat our brand. If I focus on the operating model, which is how we do business, this is how we operate with 17 fully accountable, decentralized divisions that are customer-facing. They have their own sales force. Each of them run their own strategy, they run their own resources, they run their own decision-making completely. They are empowered to take decisions as if this was a self-standing entity. They are also accountable for the outcome of those decisions and their financial performance.
The business areas then is the next layer, and business areas are more there to govern and to help steer the divisions and help with M&As. If they get off track, they will support the divisions to get back on track. We combine this decentralized organization with a strong, transparent performance management system. This is fundamental for a decentralized organization to be successful. If you don't have a strong performance management system with a clear governance, you get chaos when you decentralize. This has to go hand in hand. It's something that we implemented and that is working very well, and we have a lot of people actually in our organization that has worked with similar systems before. It has been fairly simple to implement, I must say.
If I then jump into just mentioning a bit about our recent financial performance, I will summarize from the last Capital Markets Day primarily. We can see that we basically have the same top line. It's been around EUR 3.7 billion for the past three years. We had -2.4% growth in 2024. We have +2.6% growth in 2025. It's been fairly standstill from that point of view. Of course, we have had macro environment against us. We have, due to COVID, also had a fairly slow product generation cycle of new products, if you compare to how we used to operate. This has also delayed some of the launches. Of course didn't help us with our top-line development.
If you look at what we did deliver since the last Capital Markets Day is basically a growth of in recurring revenues of four percentage points and also software and services. Actually, the quality of revenues went up. Where we have seen most of the challenges we have had has been within our profitability. We have managed to keep the gross margin at a good level. It's basically 62% straight over the period. We have not been able to control the cost as we should have done due to that we didn't have any top-line development. We have invested in SG&A cost, et cetera, which we should not have done. You can clearly see that in the development of the adjusted EBITAC margin, which has gone down.
It's gone down from the top year, which was in 2021, at 26%, and this was basically the recovery year after COVID. We had 16% organic growth, nobody traveled, and we had less people than we normally have. This was a peak year, right, from a profitability point of view. It's gone down to 22% EBITAC, and you can see the gap between amortization and capitalization has been between three percentage points, up to five, and then back to four now. In average, it's something like four percentage points difference between EBIT1 and EBITAC. You can see the trend is the same within EBIT1, that it's also going down. Clearly, this is something that we understood that we needed to act on. I don't know what happened here.
It's not me. Without this clear operating model and performance management system, it's very difficult to quickly notice where you go off track. We have scorecards which we follow on monthly basis, where we can see each business and how they are performing and when they go off track. If you don't have that, you react too late, and that is exactly what happened with us a bit in history. This is something that we now have embedded in a new discipline in how we run and govern our company going forward. Given this kind of weaker development than we historically have had within Hexagon, we are taking immediate actions to get back on track, and this is something we already did since mid-2025.
We launched this new decentralized operating model with a strong performance management system. I talked about that already. Secondly, we launched a restructuring program, and if you remember, that was EUR 110 million, including EUR 36 million Octave and EUR 74 million for Hexagon, and that we are still executing on. We have a good run rate of about EUR 50 million after the end of the first quarter. We are well on track to deliver on this. We also reviewed our R&D spend and especially what we had on the balance sheet, and we unfortunately had to impair EUR 186 million at that point in time. This was not because we wanted to improve something or that we wanted to change something in history.
This is because we had developed things that was on the balance sheet that no longer fit with customer demands and would not be possible to sell. If you keep that on the balance sheet, then people will continue to invest in that, and that's throwing good money at bad money. You need to take a decision when you're in that situation. Now with the new setup we have, we will not get back into that situation because we are reviewing this on a quarterly basis, going through all these initiatives with our businesses. What you can see is that given that we have installed this, of course, we have a positive development of organic growth. Now, we have also done a lot of good things in the past that also have a positive impact.
We have turned the table when it comes to the organic growth development. You can also see it on the EBITAC margin that it dropped down and the low point was basically middle of last year, and since then, we have seen an uptick in our performance. That gives us confidence in the targets that we're also communicating to the market today. If we look ahead, our ambition is simple: to create superior value and to do this sustainably over time. We have a strong conviction that we can deliver on this ambition. We have, like I mentioned before, compelling fundamentals, leading position in very attractive markets.
We have a proven approach to value creation with our account-driven operating model, with our Hexagon sort of DNA, very strong innovation focus, and also a clear portfolio strategy together with a business strategy in all of our businesses. Portfolio strategy, I mean buying, selling companies to clean our portfolio to make it right for us. Last but not least, we have a strong and experienced leadership team. Actually at breakfast, someone said that there is actually no one speaking today that spoke at the CMD of 2023, and I haven't thought about that until this morning, but that's actually true. There's been a lot of changes, and people have gone to Octave, and people have gone to the Hexagon side, but also a lot of new people coming in.
That's, a quite a interesting observation. Let me take you through this a bit in more detail. If we move into megatrends. We help our customers solve problems, and we have 3 megatrends that are structural, global, and durable. While they represent challenges for our customers, this is of course representing also opportunities for us as a company. Labor shortage is one which is critical going forward, and 2030, it's expected to have a labor shortage of 85 million people. That's roughly the population of Germany globally. Of course, if you go to skilled labor, that is even worse situation. Our customers can't solve this by hiring more people because there is no competence to hire. We need to go through that automation journey and automate things.
To do that, you need precision measurement, otherwise you can't do that. The second one is the sustainability pressure. The cost of failure in construction in industrial processes are huge, right? Only if you look at, in construction, they spend more on correcting errors and rework and throwing away concrete which was done by mistake, et cetera. Seven times the profit in the whole industry is going to rework and waste, basically. That's massive, and the opportunities here to minimize waste, to minimize rework, and to increase safety and efficiency in construction is massive, and we have the equipment to support customers in that journey. Then of course, there's a third megatrend, and this defines where our industry is heading, and that's AI. AI needs precision data.
To be able to deliver spatial and operational intelligence, the need for really specific high-precision data is massive going forward. This is a massive opportunity for us, and if you, if you take the step which I talked about before, going from manual to fully autonomous, it requires an accurate increase of 3,000x to be able to do that. Every time in history when we have gone through more automation, the data requirements have increased, and it's the same in this journey. The requirements on precision data is increasing, and that's exactly what we help our customers doing. This is also why we see ourselves not threatened by AI, but rather as a demand driver for us going forward. Those megatrends drive growth within our serviceable, addressable market. Let's call it SAM.
You can see it's increasing from EUR 27 billion to EUR 38 billion in 2030, that's an increase of EUR 11 billion in just 5 years. It's a broad-based growth. You can see the slowest growing segment we deem is MI with 4-6% growth, Geosystems, 5-7%, then autonomous solutions with 8-10%. We are, like I said previously, positioned as 1-2 within those industries, so we have a very good opportunity to take advantage of that underlying market growth. Of course, you cannot directly translate, let's say, this number into how much we should grow because we might be stronger in Geomatics, which is a more mature business and not growing as quick.
We might be stronger in Western markets like North America and Europe that might not be growing as quick as development markets. It's a good indication about how the whole SAM is growing for us. We consider this to be very good fundamentals going forward, and we are very confident that we can utilize that. If you look at how diversified we are within the industries, we are basically in all the critical verticals in all areas. If you look at sales geography, we're also very well diversed across the globe. This gives us, of course, strength, and resilience if there is problem in any region or any industries. How do we execute on these great market opportunities and take advantage of our strong market position?
From a Hexagon Group perspective, we have four main cross-Hexagon enablers that are working together in helping to unlock profitable growth. These are the four which are across Hexagon Group. It's the operating model with accountability, strong innovation, and AI focus. It's the portfolio management and also including our DNA of very strong M&A generation. Over 200 M&As in the last sort of 25 years, and many of them have built Hexagon as it is today, right? Brown & Sharpe, Leica Geosystems, NovAtel. There's massive of M&As where we have really leveraged those companies and made them to something they were not even close to be before. This DNA we carry with us, and then of course, people and culture. We can't do anything about this if we don't have the right people with competence and capabilities and motivation.
This enables to go across all the businesses, and I will now try to cover these in the next couple of slides, but these are nothing if you don't combine it with these. This is the core of the presentation when it comes to the business areas presentations. It's the business strategies. I start with then the first enabler, which was the operating model, and as I mentioned before, we have structured this in 17 decentralized, fully accountable customer-facing divisions. Divisions control all the costs, all their resources, all the decision-making, and they are then accountable for the financial performance, both when it comes to the operational balance sheet and the profit and loss. They are reporting to the three business areas.
Which role was, as I said, mainly to govern and steer those divisions and make sure that we are on track with strategy execution. We do this through a very transparent performance management system, and a key part of that is the scorecards. The scorecards is the last three years' performance monthly for a range of financial KPIs, but also non-financial KPIs to ensure that we quickly can spot trends of deviation against our plans. Given the speed of the markets that we are in and the innovation where we are, this is critical. Being a company that takes decisions with speed is a competitive advantage, and our operating model is enabling us to do just that because it doesn't need to go up to me to take decisions.
It's done very much closer to customers, and course correction is done also very much closer to customers. Move into the next enabler, and that was the innovation. Our story about innovation is a bit like a recovery and acceleration story. We used to be very strong at innovation in terms of speed and new generation of products. When COVID came, it actually slowed down quite a bit for us. We didn't get the same innovation cycles as we had previously. Product launches were delayed. We got slower. We then invested more in R&D, and you can see that. This is the total investment. You can see that we invested more, but we didn't get the benefit of the revenue because we didn't get the products out to customers. That changed now in 2025.
Or actually from the end maybe of 2024, we started to get new products out to the market. 2025 was a fantastic year of product releases. 2026 is a similar one. Lots of new products coming out to the market, and we will see the benefit of those investments, of course, going forward. That would be a good tailwind for us when it comes to growth going forward. I think this tells a good story, or maybe not so good story, that in 2021, 10% of our revenue was actually from products being released in the last three years. If you look where it was 25, it was 6%.
You can really see that that sort of boost of releasing new products and getting that boost on your organic growth has not been there the last three years. We now see and believe that that is coming back. This is also important to know just because we release a new total station in Geosystems in October last year doesn't mean that from November we get the full revenue from that one. It takes time to ramp these up. We ramp them up in different geographies, and then we make sure that we have an update of the systems. There are software updates to make sure that the product is as efficient as possible, etc. It's a process which takes normally 18-24 months before it's fully ramped up.
That's how it works. I don't want to dwell on this slide, and I'm probably already very late. I just want to mention some of the key releases that we have had in the last sort of 18 months. Started with Leica iCON trades in Geosystems, then we have Aura product, which I spoke about already before, MAESTRO, the new CMM platform, Leica Absolute Tracker ATS800, the new laser tracker, and then the robotic total station within Geosystems. Great new products. Several of these we have not seen platform updates in over a decade within, like the CMM and the total station. These are huge development projects that we have released, and there will be new products coming on those platforms also going forward. I will jump into the second part of that enabler, which was artificial intelligence.
I already mentioned that we see AI as a mega-trend that works in our favor going forward. We also deploy AI across four dimensions in our products and solutions. Spatial intelligence, improving how our customers interact and get insights and actually manipulate 3-D models. Physical AI, this we already talked about. One example is the TS20 robotic total station. Other example is our AEON robot. We have data enhancement, it's leveraging AI to derive more insights from the precision measurements that we provide and sensor data. We have Agentic AI, that's building customer workflows on top of our data and software solutions. These are when it comes to the products, we also work, of course, with driving speed and operational excellence within our own operations. It could be software development, it could be hardware development.
It's of course in how we work within legal with Thomas. We could cut down resources and at least cost and money on external resources to be much more efficient using these kind of solutions. Madlen Nicklaus is doing the same within marketing, and we do this in all of the different support functions basically to be more efficient. We work, of course, with the best partners that we know, and you see those on the bottom of the slide there, AWS, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Anthropic. We believe that building solutions together with these, both when it comes to how we operate internally, but also in our products and solutions, is the way to go. We have very close relationships and partnerships with several of these. I move into our portfolio management. This is how we manage our existing businesses.
Every division within Hexagon, and we have 17, as I said, will get a mandate, a strategic mandate. That mandate is either stability, profitability, or growth. If you get the mandate of growth, it means that you have a stable business, you have peer-leading profitability within your industry. Your focus should be create organic growth as much as you can and then add on bolt-on acquisitions or M&As to grow even quicker. You can see 11 out of our 17 divisions are in growth mandate, which means that that's 75% of Hexagon's revenue that already is with a growth mandate. We have businesses which are with a profitability mandate, and that means you have a good business, you are not running it at peer-leading profitability. Your job is to do that, fix that first.
Before you focus on investing in growth or investing in M&As, you should fix your business and have peer-leading profitability. We have some businesses which are in stability phase. That means we have a business that for some reason is not performing. It could be that it doesn't fit within our structure or organization. We need to evaluate strategic mandate for that, for strategic long-term position for that business. It could be that it requires a turnaround of that business. It could be that that business needs to exit part of what it's doing, and then go into profitability and then go into growth. This is how we drive our businesses and the management teams of those divisions are having the exact same target and focus in their incentives. If you are here, you don't have a growth incentive.
If you're here, you have a large percentage of your incentives on growth. This is how we want to drive our businesses going forward. Of course, focused M&A to accelerate value creation. As I mentioned, we will focus more than we have done before on our core, which is precision measurement and positioning technologies. We are looking for acquisitions either to strengthen our current position. A market position. It could be geography or some technology, et cetera, or enter into some attractive adjacency to those businesses. That's the case when it comes to Waygate that Andreas will talk about more later. That's an attractive adjacency. The main focus will be on those bolt-on acquisitions. Our financial criteria are very straightforward when we look at these type of investments.
I have a bit of a headset issue here. It's okay, I think. The market needs to be attractive, and we need to be the best owner for the business, and then that business needs to be able to generate sustainable double-digit earnings growth going forward. Those are the three main criterias we look at. We remain very disciplined when it comes to valuations and when it comes to return on capital. As I mentioned previously, we also dynamically manage our own portfolio, and we look at the different businesses, and we decide if we should exit or not. D&E is one of those examples. It's a very good business, but we were not the right owner. We have decided to exit that business. Those three: market needs to be attractive, we need to be the right owner, double-digit earnings growth sustainably.
Those we look at. The people and culture enabler, and this is the last one of the enablers. Everything I described will not work, the operating model, the innovation, the M&A will not work if we don't have the people who feel accountable, who have the competence and capabilities to be able to do the job, and who are motivated to do the job. Those are key. We build our culture on the foundational principles of our Hexagon Way, and those are accountability, transparency in everything we do, and speed in actions. This is how we make decisions, how we manage performance, and how we incentivize leadership. On talent, we are investing in succession management. We really want to recruit primarily internally. We have created a new internal job market, which we did not have before.
All jobs need to go through the job market, we always want to see internal candidates. We also want to see them being challenged by candidates from outside to make sure that we have the best capabilities for each of the roles that we are putting in place. As I mentioned, previously, our leadership incentives are based on what the assignment is for the business, but it's always regarding organic growth, EBITAC, cash conversion, and ESG, but different weight depending on what's your strategic mandate. If you remember the slide, I had the four enablers, then I had the business strategies. This is the summary of the business strategies. I will not go through it. We will, touching on that quite a lot going forward with our team here.
What I want to mention here is ventures, which is our incubator, and like I mentioned, it's organically developed innovations primarily, and we play to win within these as well. These are included in our financial targets in how we report. AEON is the exception to this. That's our humanoid robotics. AEON started as a venture but has grown into a great possibility to be the humanoid robotics that is one of the winners going forward. Here we cannot sort of contain AEON with our financial metrics and our financial targets that we use for our normal businesses. Here we need to be more forward-leaning and don't expect a short return because the ticket to play is there, but the return is quite far away, so it's a different cycle.
This is the reason why we have excluded AEON from the financial targets that we are reporting. We will, of course, be extremely transparent on reporting externally how much we're investing, what's the result, et cetera, et cetera, but not included in the group targets. This is just a summary slide. I won't put too much time on this 1, but it's to explain how we work. We work within our SAM, and then we have a total addressable market, which is including adjacencies. In SAM, we work with organic developments in our divisions primarily, and we work with bolt-on acquisitions. On the business area level and on the group level, we work with our organic development into humanoid robotics, Aura, et cetera, which are organic, but it's outside our SAM today.
Then we have the acquisitions, which is outside our SAM as well, building on our SAM into our TAM. That's how we work on the different levels with growth going forward. I will move into my last slide, which represents the confidence, I think in value creation that we have. We have communicated organic growth targets of 4%-6%, 26-30. The achievement, you know, in 2025 was 2.6, and the year before was -2.4. We believe that this is a good first level to move to in terms of creating stability and getting back into a growth mode within the company. EBITAC margin last year was 22%, and we communicate 24%-26%.
This is not to be confused, of course, with EBIT1 margins because as we discussed previously, in average four percentage points difference. This would be 28-30 then, if you want to relate it to EBIT1 targets. We will of course, continue to report on a quarterly basis EBIT1 as well, but this is how we steer and govern our business going forward. I don't want anyone to capitalize R&D to get the better EBIT1 result because I take that lever away. We have the full R&D cost is in the result. We're not, we're not doing the wrong things to try to get some short-term incentives or so. I'm not saying we have done that in history, but of course, that could be tempting for smart people.
Cash conversion of EBITAC, we are targeting 90%-100%, and last year we did 109%. I think it represents a strong cash generation, but also that we keep on investing in our businesses. When it comes to ESG target, we have a Scope 1 and 2 reduction of 70% by 2030, and then a net zero in the whole value chain by 2050. If you know us since before, you know this is considerably lower target than we previously had. This is basically only taking out Octave and Design & Engineering that basically don't have anything because they are software businesses. This is just basically to taking that out. We're not trying to have easier targets on ESG going forward.
There are many targets on ESG of course, but good to see that we have progress of 33% since the base year of 2022. As I said previously, these targets are then excluding the robotics divisions, but including everything else. Enrique, then I think, I'm done for now, and I will come back to do the Q&A together with you. I leave over for you to go through in a bit more detail.
Thank you so much, Anders. You can pass the baton.
Yeah.
Thank you, Anders. Good afternoon, everyone. Great to see you all. I'm Enrique. Very proud to be here representing Hexagon and also grateful for the opportunity, and humble as well for the opportunity. I think many of you will say, "Well, isn't it a bit premature to do a capital markets day on working day 5?" That's a valid question, but I think that the reality is that I've been actually working on this and working with the management team for quite some time now. I'm also very glad for the onboarding that so many have provided. I will actually be focusing, now this, during my kind of session here, focusing on kind of providing you a bit more of the financial substance behind the targets that Anders just outlined.
I've divided this into four key questions, and these four key questions are actually the very same that I've, you know, been using when discussing actually the strategy of the business with Anders and other leadership team members. Those are: Where does the growth come from? How do we sustain our margins going forward? How do we convert that into cash? How do we remain disciplined on capital allocation? Let's work through each of those, each of those targets, or each of these questions. The conviction that we are expressing today is rooted in a straightforward logic. Yeah. We have strong assets, market leadership, an innovation engine, and deep domain expertise that has been built over decades.
We're adding value by focusing the portfolio on precision measurement, positioning, making customers front and center to the decision-making by empowering the divisional leadership, and also applying a very disciplined performance management approach here. The output that we get out of this is sustainable and superior value creation, consistent revenue growth, industry-leading profitability, and capital allocation focused on value realization and creation. I want to draw your attention to these three boxes here to the left, because when we now kick off actually with the finance leadership team, the finance leaders that are the closest to the business, actually the ones that really uncover where are we leaving money on the table, really, I mean, that's the operating model. Transparency, accountability, transparency, and speed.
That means having a deep understanding of unit economics of the business, the R&D ROI, how do we convert to cash, and so on, and driving that flywheel faster. That's the plan. Everything I say now in the coming 20 minutes or so is really the evidence behind that. Let's look at the path to enhance profitability through the lens and where we have been. Looking at our 2019 to 2024 historic average, organic growth averaged at about 3.8%. EBITAC margin 24% and cash conversion of 98%. What we achieved in 2025 was 2.6% in growth. That's below the historical rate, but with a clear recovery, as you saw from Anders, in the second half of the year.
If you recall from that chart, 2024 was actually negative growth. EBITAC margin 22% and cash conversion of 109, that was helped a lot from working capital. Our 2026-2030 targets takes each of these in the right direction from where we have been. Getting to 4%-6% growth and expanding the margins to 24%-26% and cash conversion of 90-100. On emissions, as you saw from Anders, we have had a reduction of 33% versus our base year of 2022, we're then targeting 70% by 2030. The good thing here is that we are very much on track.
Everything we do, financially, if you look at this circle here, is organized around 4 interconnected priorities: protecting the industry-leading margins, generating then strong cash, and then allocating that cash into growth avenues that protect those margins, and so on. If you plug in the midpoint of where we're kind of guiding to, you're gonna see that that adds up to about EUR 5 billion. We commit here now to deploy that in a very disciplined way with a lot of rigor behind that, and also with a clear value creation framework. That's from how we You know, it's not only kind of when you look at the total value creation or total capital allocation framework, but also within how do we deploy R&D dollars, how do we deploy M&A spend, marketing spend, and so on.
Creating transparency on leading indicators, showing that we are on the right path, is one ingredient behind that. Another one is actually the incentive structures that we create, as leadership behind the financial objectives as well as the emission objectives. One key aspect here is measuring performance, and what else can you expect from an advanced measurement company? Measuring and managing performance, and we get a bit technical now, but I want to also be very clear here in terms of how we are looking at the business and also so that you know, the way that you are looking at it is in the same way as that we are looking at it internally. EBITAC is EBIT1 adding back the R&D capitalization and subtracting the R&D amortization.
It is adjusted EBIT with the full expensing of the R&D costs in the period. I hope that that was clear. The reason for moving to this metric is straightforward. Historically, Hexagon has capitalized a significant portion of the R&D spend because it typically spends more than peers on industry-leading and disruptive innovation. In 2025, that amount was EUR 340 million. You see it on that table. We'll come back to that one in a moment. That capitalization and that subsequent amortization, that creates a timing gap, EBITAC removes that distortion. It expenses all R&D in the same period it is incurred. The result then is a much more conservative measure of profitability. Typically 4 percentage points, as you saw from Anders, versus the EBIT1 margin.
In 2025, our EBIT1 margin was 26%, while EBIT, EBITAC is, it was 22%. There are two simple reasons for why we do this. One is that we will drive much more rigor behind our R&D spend. The other one is that EBITAC is much closer to cash, and that links and that's a key driver as well behind accountability. I hope this profitability bridge that we put up on all the way to your right is clear. By taking the 2025 numbers here as a, as a case study, it starts with our reported EBIT of EUR 575. We add in the in-year adjustments of EUR 372. We land on an EBIT1 of EUR 947.
We subtract and add back the R&D capitalization amortization, and that takes us to an EBITAC of EUR 802. However, that includes the spend that we had in robotics. Removing that charge takes us to EUR 826. That's an important note because that's the EBITAC that we are guiding for today in our objectives. We will be excluding the robotics in numbers in our EBITAC guidance. I'll come back shortly for why that is the case. EBIT1 will still be reported while EBITAC will be our focus.
Here on this chart, you can actually then see the EBITAC and EBIT1 on a look-back basis back to 2020, also highlighting the point that Anders made that 2021 we had a fantastic growth of about 16% organic growth, we achieved top EBITAC margins there of 26%. That was also an exceptional period with that growth and also a period with temporarily lower cost base. That point is actually a demanding point, it's intentionally so. It also reflects the conviction that we are having in the strategies that we are presenting today. On robotics, you heard from Anders presenting on robotics today. You'll hear much more from Arnaud, I hope that you took a look at the product out there.
We're very excited about the opportunity. There is a real opportunity to build a market leader here in robotics. The pilots that we have underway are actually moving very nicely forward. It's also a venture that is kind of at the start of an S curve. Decisions here in terms of capital allocation need also to be framed in terms of long-term value creation, as opposed to more kind of short-term margin contribution when we look at our normal business. That's the main reason for why we're excluding it from group targets. Including it would distort as well how the picture in terms of how we're looking at our core business performance. Here also the incentive mechanisms are also different.
Investments in robotics will double roughly in 2026 versus 2025, so going from EUR 24 million to about EUR 50 million, and we will be transparent about this in our quarterly reports. We will also evaluate partner arrangements if we see that that's a better way to realize this opportunity. Now, I'm, as well as Anders, very strong believer in decentralization. If you do it right, you really drive empowerment, agility, and speed. As a CFO, I need two operating mechanisms to really drive this. One is strong performance management, and the other one is strong internal controls. This, in fact, actually de-risks the outcomes, and that's very important when we think about this. Scorecards is one way of driving this.
We ensure that divisional management has more pixels, more granularity in looking at the results, lays out actually capital allocation decisions in a much better way. Unit economics become much more clearly understood. We shorten the reaction time. Divisions are accountable for their assets, the execution, as well as the results. Accountability, transparency, and speed here are key words that help us to shape a culture into real operational outcomes. When a division is underperforming, we know quickly. We act quickly. This serves also as a base for the mandates that Anders was talking about with the chart with all the bubbles. In summary, it's about de-risking the outcomes. That is as well why we then have the conviction that we have on behind our targets.
Our businesses, they have clear, specific plans to accelerate organic growth profitably, and you will hear more from the, each of the divisional presidents, business area presidents talking about that. Before that, I want to address these four questions and come back to that because I think these are actually the right questions to ask from a business that has been kind of struggling a bit on growth and has had margin pressure for quite some time and now setting clearly more ambitious targets. Where does growth come from? Is 4%-6% just a restatement of the historical trend that we have had or is it a too easy target? How do margins expand sustainably?
Why should investors believe in our 24-26% margin, or is that really, do we need actually peak performance to achieve that? Looking at the cash conversion, removing Octave and D&E, how does that change the cash profile of the business? Lastly, how will we keep discipline in our capital allocation, particularly as well when we restart the M&A program, we double investments in robotics and so on. Let's get into it. Our group target here is of 4-6% organically, That is underpinned by differentiated contributions from each business area. Manufacturing Intelligence aiming at 4-6%, Geosystems 3-5%, Autonomous Solutions 10-12%. That's obviously reflecting the faster growth trajectory of the markets that Gordon has and the early stage of some of those revenue streams.
If you look at this chart here, that chart shows essentially from 2019 to 2025, we've been growing at about 4% per year, and that's a period where we had quite some turbulence. We had also a pandemic period as well here. We see now 2026 to 2030 as an acceleration, and that's achievable because of the initiatives that we are seeing in this, in these business areas around product launches, the operating model, and the market tailwinds that Anders described. What are some of those drivers that we have behind this? We have them in, actually in some different forms. Actually it's products, it's innovations, it's geographies, it's go-to-market customer-focused experiences, and so on.
In Manufacturing Intelligence, MAESTRO, the first new CMM platform in a decade, the ATS 800, I hope that you saw it out there, will drive hardware revenues. While China's role is an underexploited commercial opportunity that we have there to manufacture for more markets and outside of China. Waygate here also, is also a very interesting opportunity for the non-destructive testing market. In Geosystems, the TS20, the AI-powered total station, as well as iCON trades are also very interesting products that, you know, allow us to achieve growth. The mid-range expansion and go-to-market optimization will also expand the reach into new segments where we have also been under ex-indexing in the past.
In autonomous solution, the Mosaic-x5, that's the smallest GNSS receiver to date, you have it out there, as well as the GAgjet products also show continued technical leadership. The growth strategy here is really to continue to penetrate new and existing markets as well as to scale up that operational intelligence autonomy solutions where the market growth rates are the highest. The second question was around our growth, how do we get from 22 to that range of 24%-26%. The answer is straightforward and based on, I would say, realistic assumptions. Organic growth is the primary lever. When revenues growth over our fixed cost base, obviously that creates an operational leverage for us.
The growth margins, as you saw, have been consistently around the 62% level, and that provides a strong platform. Manufacturing Intelligence is aiming at 21%-24%, Geosystems 25%-27%, Autonomous Solutions 27%-30%. Together, they blend into the 24%-26% target. On top of that, we have two specific cost tailwinds. One is the restructuring program that we announced, the EUR 74 million run rate that we are looking to achieve now for at the end of 2026, and the other one is the more normalization of our R&D spend that has been a bit elevated coming out of the pandemic investment cycle. Our gross margins here have been actually extremely resilient, consistently around 62% since 2022. These are market-leading gross margins that we're showing here.
New products is really the key here. New products, launches allow us to come in at high gross margins versus the product that they replace. As the new launches that we have now in market, as those build in here, that revenue contribution as well help us to protect and create a tailwind for that gross margin trajectory. That's consistent across all three business areas. Here, the other element here is obviously pricing, and here I've been positively impressed with the speed and agility at Hexagon. Nevertheless, when you have a period of turbulent times, there's always more that you can do in terms of addressing that muscle. That's another lever that we will be looking at much more.
On operating costs, I want to give you a bit of a framework in terms of how we're thinking about this. First, if we start with the R&D spend, that should be in the range of 12%-15% of sales. As I mentioned before, we have been on the kind of high end, and as the post-pandemic period kind of like completes, we will be kind of coming down a bit as a % of sales. The direction is clear then. It will be 15% and gradually come down somewhat, but we see it as well as very important to protect, because that is really key to fueling our growth.
For sales, marketing, and admin, additional investments will amount to no more than 50% compared to the organic growth that we generate, and that's an important lens for how we're looking at this. We will invest in go-to-market, but we will be very disciplined. These are very important things because, I mean, when we now break this down into scorecards, it's important that all divisional leadership, they really understand operational leverage, and they follow that very closely. On the restructuring program, I think that deserves a bit particular attention. The original scope was EUR 110 million, but following the separation of Octave, we're now looking at EUR 74 million for the continuing Hexagon business, and that's the annualized cost reduction of EUR 74 million, and that's real money, real headcount, real estate, operational efficiency, and so on.
The program started in Q4 last year and runs to Q4 of this year as that run rate is building up, and that will be a very meaningful contribution to the EBITAC growth that we're seeing for this year. The decisions have been made, so the programs are in place and are in execution mode. Another thing on looking at our profitability and margins and cost structure here, that's important to understand as well as for also for the quality of our earnings going forward, is items affecting comparability. These have been a source of noise in our P&L in the past. In 2025, they were close to EUR 400 million, which is abnormally high, and a big part of that is the R&D impairment that Anders mentioned.
Going forward, we are committing to use adjusting items in very specific, narrow circumstances where there is market shock, a pandemic or similar, or large M&A or portfolio changes. We will continue with PPA and LTIP adjustments in line with standard peer practice. The direction is clear. Items affecting comparability will decrease significantly. That improves the quality of our earnings and also the comparability. The third question was around cash and how does that remain strong now when we're, you know, looking ahead here. Our target is 90%-100% as a comparison to EBITAC, to be very clear. In 2025, that was 109%, so very strong achievement, but historically, our average has been 98%.
The key mechanism here to really ensure that we are delivering on this is ensuring that our divisional management, the ones that are accountable for this, have a clear understanding of their working capital and their CapEx decisions. That's truly embedded in our scorecard model and improving also as well when we're now using EBITAC, that is much more closely linked to cash. That as well enhances that kind of perspective in terms of looking at cash becomes a much more of a reality from when we look at our performance. I want to flag one important point here as well, and that is investments in new facilities that will partially offset the positive trajectory that we have had, especially in 2025.
We are investing in operational infrastructure in key markets. This is planned and targeted and means that the cash conversion may be at the lower end of that target range in the first couple of years of 2026 and 2027. As you can imagine, cash forecasting is the most difficult of all the kind of parameters that we are dealing with here. In terms of our sustainability targets, here we only show actually a small portion of the amazing work that we do in ESG, but focusing on the emission targets that we are setting today. We're targeting a 70% reduction in Scope 1 and 2 from our 2022 baseline all the way to 2030.
In 2025, we achieved already 33%, and by next year, we will have achieved 50%. By 2050, we will be fully net zero. We get to these targets by aggressively moving our energy consumption to be fully renewable and by working with our supply chain to ensure that they are compliant and also that they also have SBTI targets as well. Critically here as well, with the products that we sell, Hexagon is already avoiding 49 million tons of CO2 annually. Our products are part of that sustainability solution. On that topic as well, I need to mention that I've been impressed with the Hexagon initiatives to drive planet resilience.
Some of our venture investments, like the ones in R-evolution, using our own technologies, it could result in meaningful business opportunities. Sustainability is not only part of our reporting or compliance at Hexagon, it's really having a very meaningful business opportunity. Capital allocation, that's the fourth question and the discipline that we are putting on this. Let me start with the financial guide rails that we're putting here. First, starting with how we're looking at structural growth coming from M&A. On average, this has been about 2%, typically from bolt-ons, periodically, we will as well consider larger acquisitions like Waygate.
The norm will be that we will be adding more bolt-ons rather than the type of Waygate, and wherever we can exploit adjacencies and synergies. Return on capital employed, we are aiming for where we should be generating 15%, and that anchors key investment decisions that we are making in the business. Net debt to EBITDA, we will stay below 2.5x. We will be at 0.8 post the Octave spin, as well as the dividend that we are just about to pay out, actually. Adding Waygate to that will take us to about 1.4, 1.5 on a pro forma basis.
You can do the math to understand how much that we do have quite some substantial firepower still, and also considering the $5 billion, EUR 5 billion of operating cash flow that we have in the plan. Dividend, the plan is to maintain 25%-35% of net earnings, and consistent with our existing policy. Before going into more details in terms of our capital allocation, just a couple of things around our currency and tax profile, also considering the Octave separation. On revenues, the U.S. dollar is our largest currency with 38% of sales, the Euro 22% and renminbi 14%. The remaining 26% is really spread out between British pounds, Japanese yen, Australian dollars.
That's a diversified currency base, so no single currency that dominates. Looking at this in terms of EBITAC, the picture is quite similar. One thing to note here is that the Swiss franc is more of a cost currency for us, and that's a natural consequence of our Swiss heritage, but also that we have a number of our head office functions located in Switzerland. A practical consequence of this mix, as well as the EU's Pillar Two directive, is that our anticipated tax rate moves up a notch from 18% in 2025 to 19%-21% going forward. As I mentioned earlier, we do have a quite a strong balance sheet, well capitalized, following this, the separation of Octave.
We have as well sufficient lines to draw from, and we target to stay within 2.5x net debt to EBITDA. Let's talk more about then capital allocation. Let me divide this into two parts: operational investments and corporate actions. If you think of our P&L at the EBITDA level and adding back all the R&D, then we're talking of about EUR 1.5 billion in profits. How do we intend to use that? About half of that goes into reinvesting into the business. These are primarily investments in R&D, and with the use of EBITAC, you will see that fully expensed.
This portion includes as well, robotics and ventures where we take bolder growth initiatives. When looking at the left-hand side, I think one important thing to note here compared to other businesses you may compare us with is that investments in tangible, so CapEx in property, plant, and equipment is just a small portion of our investments. Majority goes into R&D, similar to tech businesses. Looking at our, on the left-hand side here on the pie, about 20% on average, of course, because this might vary by year, goes into bolt-on M&As. Of course, we will handle that in a disciplined manner in terms of how we're looking at valuation, the M&A framework that Anders lined out.
In addition, we do have substantial firepower. The remaining piece here, and I would say the most important probably here, is that this corresponds to 25%-35% of the EPS, and that's about 30% of the total, the total pie. The key message here is that we have a number of opportunities at hand, but we will remain very disciplined in terms of how we're thinking about this. Just the fact that we do have a strong balance sheet does not mean a relaxed approach. Let me bring this together. Each business area has clear specific targets. Manufacturing Intelligence, 4%-6% organic growth with 21%-24% margin. Geosystems, 3%-5% top line, 25%, 27%.
Autonomous Solutions, with 10-12% organic growth and a stellar EBITAC margin, so 27-30% margin. Each of them have targeted plans leveraging new products, clear R&D bets, entering new segments, optimizing go-to-market, and so on. Each of them have as well pricing, cost, and cash in control. It's embedded in the setup of the divisional structure. This is all operating under strong governance and with a clear performance management framework. It means also that these targets are not only aspiration, but also quite managed in the way that we are operating. Taking this to a closing, and we have clear plans to deliver on growth, and I'm very excited to be part of this on these plans.
One, we have a clear plan for how we deliver on growth. Product launches are in market. The operating model and the accountability is live. Market tailwinds are structural. Two, the organic growth and cost controls will sustainably expand our margins. The math is straightforward. Cash generation will remain strong. We achieved 109% last year, and we're looking to be at 90-100% going forward. Lastly, we are enabling value creation through strong capital allocation, the EUR 5 billion of cumulative cash flow deployed with discipline against a clear framework. Under this leadership, Hexagon is focused, accountable, and growing, and we're very confident in terms of where we're headed. Thank you so much. I now hand over to you, Tom, to handle the Q&A session.
In the way.
Great. Thank you. I'll just wait for the seating to get put out, and then we'll kick off with the first questions.
Okay. Watch this.
Okay, Alex, just in the front here.
Appreciate it.
Thank you. Magnus here with Nordea. Going to the ROCE target of 15%, to what degree does that reflect the historical goodwill you have on the balance sheet, and what rates do you expect to invest in organically going forward?
Shall I take it?
I didn't really get the question, so please.
Yeah, yeah. Essentially, the question is on the goodwill historically and, yeah. Sorry. The return on capital employed historically and the goodwill that we have on balance sheet. I would say the 15% that we're expressing today is more of the framework when we're looking at the investments that we're looking ahead of us. We have some work to do around when we are resetting the EBITAC versus EBIT1 in terms of how we are, because we're changing that part of the equation.
I think now we have a chance actually to achieve the target which we have had basically always, right? We have a ROCE target of 15% also previously, but we were always around nine, 10 historically. Now we actually have a chance to achieve that and hopefully build on that going forward and grow our targets even further beyond 15. That's where we start. That's it.
Super. Thank you very much for the presentations. I would like to talk about the growth target, firstly, at 4%-6% organically, and to me it seems like it's, you know, compared or coming from the 2019, 2024 sort of average where we've grown to 3%. I guess that arguably the market has been fairly weak during these circumstances. If you could elaborate a bit how much of to get to the 4-6 is, you know, markets, you know, improving, or is it, you know, from the 2019, 2024 circumstances and then your own ability to drive growth? If you could just, you know, discuss that please.
Yeah. There's been some really good years in that, 19 to 25, right? We had the bounce back from COVID, which was everyone grew whatever you did, right? Supply chain was the problem. If you look after that bounce back, it's been very flat for us. Market has been tough.
We have also had troubles to get our innovation cycle to converge into new products in the market. Which means competition gets closer to you, right, if you're the leader. What we see now is that the market doesn't look very much better. It looks quite stable going forward, or maybe not stable, but at the same level, with insecurities of war, et cetera, and also difficulties within construction, agriculture. It doesn't seem to turn very quickly as examples. However, we see that we have new products coming to market, which I elaborated a bit on. There will also be new products going forward within this year. We have very disciplined, now fully accountable divisions that will invest in initiatives that will create growth and not invest in group initiatives that might yield something later.
Much more focused investments and focus from the divisions. Much more focused on customer-facing initiatives, meaning go-to-market models. Henning will talk about that, for example, within Geosystems. How we optimize our SG&A investments to pay off the best in terms of sales also going forward. If the market is as it is now, we should generate the 4% to 6% growth, we are not expecting a big tailwind to achieve that.
Great. We'll go to Andre now. Then we'll do one from online.
Can you hear me?
Yeah.
Yeah. I have a question or a couple of questions on the bubble chart, please. Can't avoid that. There was a couple there on the right-hand side, and I just wondered if any of these can be fixed just with the cost program that you're implementing. Then there was a bigger one in Geosystems right into stability, actually area. I wonder if you could comment on how that's been moving over time. Has that been moving to the left or already to the right, and what would that need to do to get itself into profitability mode?
We are not discussing in principle the name of the bubbles. We of course want them all to move to the right, where you are in a growth phase. What we do in the different management teams is to put targets and also incentive targets that pushes towards fixing the problems you have. Like I said, it's not that if you are in stability, you are not getting a growth target. You are getting a target to do a turnaround or to do a divestment of part of your business which doesn't work, et cetera. That's how we drive the progress in those different strategic mandates backed by management incentives so that everyone is incentivized on what we actually want them to do and not some general group incentive.
I think these kind of things is supporting, and our ambition is of course to drive everything up towards the right-hand side. We also intend to make acquisitions, like with Waygate Technologies, where we will get new businesses which are also across the mandate of stability, profitability, and growth. This is actually how we generate value for shareholders, right? If we bought everything up in the top right corner, we had nothing to fix. We needed to pay a lot of money, and it would be very difficult to generate a lot of value from that. We want to buy businesses that are in attractive markets that we are the right owner for, that can generate double-digit earnings on annual basis going forward.
Great. Okay, we'll take a question from online now. This might be best directed at our CTO, Burkhard, but I'll leave that up to you, Anders. Can we give some examples or proof of why AI is a demand driver for Hexagon?
Yeah. I think there are quite a lot of proofs to that, but you're right. Where's Burkhard? Oh, there he is. I leave the question to Burkhard, if you will.
Yep. Absolutely right. What our customers want from the data that they get off our sensors and workflows and software is to get insights in what they have measured. Whether it's on a construction site, you want to measure the progress, what has been done. Is it according to plan, or is my elevator shaft large enough in order to then be installed with the elevator? Basically, whether it's in the Manufacturing Intelligence environment, is this tornado line on the body in white on a car in specifications? In order to have this AI working, which we call spatial AI, up to the specifications, our customers need reliable and precise data for this.
This is normally where they use our sensor. The more resolution, the more precision, and the more accuracy, and spatial fidelity we give into the models, the better will be the results of the AI and the more trustworthy it will be. Therefore, you need high-precision sensors, and that's why we see a boost on this. In order to fully end-to-end the workflow, we also build AI in our software product that these insights can be autonomously generated.
Thanks, Burkhard.
Great. Any other questions in the room? Yep, there's extra one here, just in the middle.
Yeah. Hi. Johan, SEB. Just a question on robotics. I thought you mentioned that you would consider partnerships going forward. Is that sort of your investing now, like, a VC company, and then eventually will look for a potential buyer of parts of it? Or how should we think about the robotic business right now?
It's a business which we believe a lot in going forward. We also believe that it will not generate lots of revenues very quickly because it's a long transition, we believe. We have a lot of interested companies, and Arnaud is here, he will talk later on this, so maybe that question would be better directed to him. We are considering different strategic alternatives on how to fund this in the period until it actually is generating more revenues and earnings, because that could be, let's say, five years, seven years, I don't know. It's not a three-year plan until this is a business which is generating a lot of revenues and profits. This is also why we exclude it from the targets that Enrique was discussing.
How exactly that we'll see, we will come back to how that setup will be. Clearly, we are looking into potential partnerships to also to accelerate our development within this area, because there's lots of investments required to keep the momentum that we currently have. Until we have a solution to that, we will invest as Hexagon, invest to win. We will not take down investments in this part and lose what we have, basically. That's what I can say today, Johan.
Great. I think we've got time for one more question, just in the middle here.
Thank you. Simon Granath with ABG. Anders, you previously emphasized that you have been lagging in terms of product launches, but they are now entering the market. How about prices? Is your assessment that you have also been lagging on prices, also given your comments about being a price leader? A follow-up on that, how much should we expect in terms of tailwinds from pricing going forward, given your current targets? Thank you.
Thank you. I would say in some areas, we have been a bit slow on pricing when it comes to FX and when it comes to tariffs. I also talked about this when with the Q1 report. We have an effect of FX, I think it was 60 bips, and tariffs around 50 bips. We haven't been acting quick enough to compensate for that in the beginning of the year. At the end of the quarter, we took the initiatives that we had to take to compensate for that. The full effect of that will not be seen in Q2, it will be seen in Q3, because the implementation is 2-3 months in some of our businesses before you see the full impact.
We consider ourselves as the price leader, and we will continue to use pricing as a means to both generate reported growth, but also to generate strong gross margins going forward. That's why we will continue to do our innovation, because that solidifies our position as price leader. If there's anyone that thinks that we are slowing down investments in R&D and innovation to kind of get a better result short term, that is not a strategy which we would ever accept in any part of our company, then you need to work somewhere else.
Great. Okay. I think that's all we've got time for for now. If you all wanna take a 10-minute break, which will bring you to, just after two, and then we'll reconvene for MI and Geosystems. Obviously, Enrique and Anders will be back at the end of the day for more questions. Thank you.
Thank you.
Hello, everyone. Time for session two now. If we can ask you to please come back to the seating area.
Welcome back, everyone. My name is Andreas Renulf, and I will be, I'm the President of the Manufacturing Intelligence business area, and I will take you through the business area here for another 30 minutes or so. I'm in this position since May 2025, so it's roughly one year. Even though I've only been here for a year in this role, I've spent my whole career in industrial technology, so I'm very much at home with our customers and with the business.
I wanted to just give you two reflections from when I joined in this role a year ago. The first one is that we were organized for synergy. We called it One MI. It sort of made sense, at least in theory, because many of the customers were the same. If you look at the customer persona, they were actually not the same. We had quite limited real synergies in that setup. What I found that was that we were quite centralized, and we took a lot of decisions quite far away from the customer, and we were not fast enough in that model. What Anders have explained here with The Hexagon Way, it fits perfect for this business area.
The second one is that I have worked with China for the last 20 years, I've never seen anything coming close to the level of capability and strength that we have in China for MI. Fantastic local leadership. They have built up an offering which is good, better, and best, we are competing in the complete pyramid of the market there. We've made some acquisitions in the past, we have only used the localization to China of the technology for the Made in China, that's been good. We haven't actually tapped on the possibility to export from China with all the capabilities we have there. You will see that as one of the growth drivers that I will be presenting.
Before I get into this, just so that you get a feeling for the level of technical precision we talk about, if you pull out a hair and you look at it like this, it has a width of 75 to 85 microns. If you look at the ultra-high accuracy, which is the most accurate machine that we deliver, that one has 0.3 microns. 75 to 85 on the width of a hair and 0.3 microns. That's the level of technical differentiation we talk about here. I will give you an overview of the business area, look, talk about customers and solutions so you see where we play and how. I will go into the market drivers and, most importantly, the growth strategy, which are the ones that we control ourselves.
We made the acquisition of Waygate Technologies on April 13, you will see that spread out in this presentation as well. Let's start to look at the business area as an overview, and this is now without the D&E numbers, which was divested in February. We have a serviceable addressable market of EUR 11 billion, and that is now including Waygate Technologies, revenues of EUR 1.6 billion, and an EBITDAC of 22%. If you look at that EBITDAC of 22%, it's quite significantly higher than what our competitors are having here. I think we have been optimizing margin at the expense of growth to some extent in the past year. Cash conversion 100% last year, and we are almost 7,000 employees.
By industry, general manufacturing. That is also where we have the machine shops, where we sell the computer-aided manufacturing, the CAM software. Automotive, aerospace, roughly the same. Then electronics. It's a totally global business. We have 42% of the business in APAC, and the majority of that is actually in China. We are organized in three global businesses. We did this actually from 1st of November last year. The 1st one is stationary metrology, where we have a market-leading position. You see a CMM here. This is actually the MAESTRO that we released last year. What we mean with stationary is that the metrology's measurement solution is stationary, so you bring the part to the measurement solution. We're having coordinate measurement machine. We have vision measurement machines for electronics, metrology software, and roughly 1/3 is after-market services in this business here.
Portable metrology, we are also the market leader, and here, instead, the measurement solution is portable. We bring the measurement solution to the part, which means we can go in line or near the production line. Laser trackers, where we are quite famous. Handheld laser scanners, which is an area which is growing fast. We did an acquisition of a company called SEIJI in China 3 years ago, and we are selling those all over the world right now. Portable arms, metrology software, calibration services for the aftermarket, and then more and more of automated inspection solutions. Production software, here we are top 3, and this is about generating, manage, and optimizing the CNC tool path. Very specifically for CNC machines. This is what is called computer-aided manufacturing, CAM software.
We use this for production machining, we also use this for mold and die design and manufacturing. This is the division which maybe has gotten the least love in the last couple of years. It's the smallest of the three, and we have a lot of focus onto this business right now. Very sticky, very profitable and nice business. Some things that we are fixing here on the portfolio side during this year, so we can get into growth mode next year. I will take you through a couple of industries to show what we do in those industries and the needs they have. Let's start with aerospace. There are 16,000 airplanes on the commercial side in the order backlog end of 2025. It's all about production rates.
Here you see the fan blades of a jet engine. Behind those, there are 1,500 blades inside of that jet engine. Each and every one of them needs to be inspected during production. We inspect with CMM on the outside, but Waygate with the CT technology, computed tomography, they actually do the same inspection inside of the blades here. It's all about increasing the inspection rates, and we did release the Maestro CMM last year, where we are up to 30% faster in doing this inspection. 95% of the plants in the world are touched by Hexagon technology, so we are very much entrenched into this market. Automotive. Here, the trend and the needs are going towards having more measurements points when they are in this stage, so this is what we call body in white.
When you form the body together, it's really, really important to make sure that you have the right quality at that point in time, both for the body itself, but also for the process. Here, there are more and more measurements coming close to the line and in line, and there we are offering standardized and modular PRESTO solutions, which are these type of automation inspection areas. 95%, of course, touched by Hexagon today, so we are basically global on this business as well. The third area is within the general manufacturing, and this is now specifically machine shops. Just wanna draw your attention to the number here. We are transacting with more than 50,000 machine shops per year. These are typically less than 50 employees working in these machine shops.
They are machining very, very critical components, they can be level, you know, tier 4, tier 3, tier 2 in the supply chain. One of the biggest demands and needs here is to simplify the programming of these CNC machines, because there is a skill gap, and it's hard to attract good engineers into this market. We have launched a solution which we call Hexagon ProPlanAI, which helps the programmer to optimize the path based on the CAD drawing. You, of course, also need to know exactly how is my CNC machine working. You need the digital twin of that CNC machine, and that is the data and the knowledge that we sit on. If we look at combining of these market growth drivers, on the automotive side is a shift to electrical vehicle. That brings some new inspection requirements for batteries.
There's also much more use of alumina, which is a material which is much less forgiving. Automation, near line and in line, that means that we basically increase the density of the sensors that are required. On the aerospace side, it's very much the inspection rate to work out of that backlog, but it's also the analysis of airplanes and jet engines that are actually in operation, and that is the remote vision inspection part in Waygate, which is coming into that part. In general industry, the demand for high-precision manufacturing is increasing, and on the electronic side, it's very much about faster new product innovation. You need faster loops and quality checks during product introductions. AI is creating also a search and demand for very high-precision chips and high-performance chips, and they need the level of accuracy that we can offer here.
I will conclude on this part of the presentation by giving you an example from BYD. You probably know BYD, the largest electrical vehicle company in the world. They delivered 4.6 million cars last year, headquartered in Shenzhen in China. We've had a partnership with BYD for more than 15 years in China. BYD, they are a little bit special. They have verticalized on the electronic side. We are basically offering them the whole palette of the products that we have in Hexagon. They are our largest automotive account globally, which is quite rare for an international company like Hexagon to have the largest customer being in China. When BYD is now expanding globally, they have put up a big plant in Hungary, for instance.
They bring that equipment from China with them. That is one of the inputs that got us to the idea here that we have to leverage our strength in China much, much more. With that, we will switch gears and talk a little bit about Waygate. Waygate Technologies, we had the signing or we announced this on the 13th of April, transaction value of $1.45 billion U.S. dollars. We expect to close in the end of the year or late H2. EUR 630 million in 2025, 10% EBIT1 margins. This is a carve-out from a company called Baker Hughes. The customer persona are two different types.
One is the one which is very similar to what we have in metrology, which is the head of quality ultimately, and the other one is the maintenance, repair, and operations department, MRO. That is for non-destructive technologies that go into the asset integrity when the assets are in use as opposed to the manufacturing part. Why did we buy Waygate Technologies? The simplest reason is because it became available. This asset has not been available for the last 20 years because GE Inspection Technologies brought together four different companies. It is not often that a market leader in a space which is very attractive from a growth perspective is coming into the market. It gives us access to the NDT marketplace. It completes the measurement chain where we have been on the surface, and Waygate is on the inside of objects.
We did an acquisition already in 2019 of a company called Volume Graphics, and that is the de facto standard for software for CT hardware. It's basically a perfect fit to complete that now. It also diversify and give us a new SAM to work in when it comes to the maintenance, repair, and operations market, and that's for asset integrity. That is a recurring growing market, and it has different characteristics there when it comes to the CapEx cycles compared to the manufacturing side, which we're used to. How do we then create value? We have a clear path here on the margin expansion, and we are looking to extract value from this acquisition over a long period of time. We have the China manufacturing localization, and you will see more about the strength we have in China later on.
That will drive some margin expansion on the radiography division. We will be able to cross-sell between metrology and the CT business. This is something where our competitor Zeiss has had this combination in the past, and they have been successful with that. Now we have it, and we will be able to put that into work. We will evaluate strategies to improve the performance of the imaging solution and the ultrasonic testing part. When we get to the close, which will be later or end of the year here, we will look at different ways to improve the performance here, which could be to make acquisitions to get to a number one position in certain areas or look for other ways to improve margin. This is really not one NDT company.
These are four different portfolios, and that's also how we will bring it into our company. If we start with remote visual inspection, this is here. Waygate is the market leader. They have a very good profit here of close to 30%. Revenue was EUR 148 million in 2025. It's the market leader in video borescopes, and a lot of this market is about testing the integrity of the blades in a jet engine. Here is a very clear mandate to grow. This is an anchor for us for the NDT market for MRO. We have the radiography, where there's a market position of one or two in the world. Revenue is EUR 25 of EUR 183 million.
This is where you get into what is called the computed tomography, the CT part, and this is primarily used during manufacturing, which is where we have the natural synergies, and this is a very close adjacency to the metrology business that we have. This integrates directly with our Hexagon Volume Graphics software. It's the cross-sell of the CMM part, and it's also the use of China for the synergy case. The mandate there is profitability to be able to execute on these synergies to get the profit up. Then we have imaging solutions, and this is industrial X-ray, and a large part of this market is about X-ray film that go out into the asset integrity for MRO departments, checking valves in pipelines and things like this.
There is a slow but sure shift from analog film to digital, and at the same time, this is a good business. It's a little bit unusual to Hexagon in the way that it's more of a reselling business from AGFA Films compared to what we are, what we're used to, where we technically differentiate more. This is one of the businesses that we will have a look at when we get to the close and see how we can improve the performance. We have ultrasonic testing, which is a very interesting and important technology, and it's one that has a good future in the NDT space. Here we have revenue of EUR 93 million, and it's actually two different businesses.
One is for testing machines, which is more of like a system integration business, and the other one is for handheld ultrasonic testing machines. Here the profitability is not at the level where we want it to be. When we get this into the company, we will look at ways to improve that performance. If we look at the market, overall, we have a TAM, Total Addressable Market, of EUR 16 billion, SAM of EUR 11 billion. As I said before, by including non-destructive technologies into the SAM, we increase that with EUR 3 billion. If we look at the different divisions, stationary metrology, where we have a market position 1, is growing slightly slower than the market, and that is because part of that growth is taken by portable metrology. Customers want to get closer and closer to the production lines.
One other part of that growth is actually being taken by computed tomography, and that's another reason why we acquired Waygate because if you, for instance, are into castings, you wanna do one measurement, and then you wanna measure the surface and the inside at the same time. Portable metrology, 4%-6%, we are number one there. Production software, 5%-7%, we're top three. Very nice, sticky business. NDT with Waygate, 4%-6%, and a little bit depending, as you saw before, on the modalities, we're top two. Financial performance. If we look at the graph on the right-hand side, you will see that we were operating at very high organic growth in 2023, and we have been since COVID.
In 2024, we had a drop, and in 2024 we actually were -1, sorry, 0, and in 2025, we were +1 only. That is not how you can run this business. We really need to have growth. We are seeing a trend now that we stabilize ourselves on the organic growth side. We had a good first quarter at 9%, but we see a stable trend going forward here. We have been able to defend the EBITAC margins relatively well, given 0 growth and some currency headwinds, especially in 2025. There is also an element in the OpEx here which there's a variable component. It helps us a little bit in tough times, and you don't get the full leverage in good times.
Looking at the recurring revenues, we have gone from 21% to 23%. Software services, same as 48%, and gross margin staying at 58%. Coming over to how we win, and these are more foundational pillars for us. We have some technology. What you see here is a picture of an angular encoder, and this is technology that we share with our sister business areas. It's patented, and we use that a lot, especially on the tracker side in our case. We also have the six degrees of freedom technology, which is another one that we're using frequently within our different business areas. The entrenched market leadership, being number one in metrology, it gives you a possibility to get the customer awareness, the pricing power, and also the economies of scale for production. We have production in the U.S., Europe, and in China.
Complementary software portfolio, everything we do is a combination of software, hardware, and services. We are actually over-represented on the software side still today. We have some businesses, Geomagic, for instance, SpatialAnalyzer, where we are selling software which is agnostic to the hardware. The most of what we do, it's solutions to be able to make sure that we solve the problem that the customer has in his application. This is an area which is very, very important for the future. This is where if you look at competition coming from China, they tend to be more skilled on the hardware side than to be able to make the software to fit the application of the customer here. Now we get to the most important part. How do we drive growth and performance, and which are our growth drivers?
I will go through four of them. Next-generation innovative products, increased customer focus through the decentralized operating model, China as a global growth engine, and performance improvements in Waygate. We start with MAESTRO, which is the product that you see here. It's a CMM, and it's 20 years since there was a new generation of CMMs coming. This is a platform, and it takes in the area of 2-3 years before we have all the sizes for all the objects to go in because these can be huge. You can put a whole truck in one of these. It takes some time before we have all the sizes, all the probes, and the feature there. This is something that gives us a good opportunity to grow the market in the future and take some market share as well.
It's all about the 30% higher throughput which the customers are looking for. Leica Absolute Tracker ATS800, so this is another member of the family of the trackers, and we have it on display today. Absolutely amazing. It scans down to level of microns from 40 meters away. You can have it here, and you can scan over on a airplane body which is 40 meters away. It increases the productivity for the customers, and we have very limited competition when we get to this level here. This is one which you will see coming into the numbers much faster. The operating model. I touched upon this in the first reflection, and we were organized towards One MI with Design & Engineering, production software, stationary and portable metrology together.
I have a lot of background in decentralized operating model, and I've seen what that focus can do. The issue is when you have global product lines and you have your primary P&L in different regions, it's very difficult to make sure that you actually develop the things that the customers really need there because your drive is coming from different needs in different regions. Splitting out this EUR 1.6 billion into three global divisions that are taking the decisions much, much closer is what we have done. I think already in Q1, we see some effects of this in the organic growth because there is a completely different focus right now.
What we do on a quarterly basis is that in each of these divisions, they check every R&D project to make sure that they are fulfilling the needs of the customer for that project. We have already started to make some pruning into the portfolio because that comes very naturally with the division presidents owning their business, having the transparency to see, where am I making money? Where can I make more money? You also get into a little bit of cleaning up in your portfolio, which is happening right now, and then you get the speed. The third area, which to me is very amazing the level of strength and capability that we have in China. For us, this is a unique differentiator because our customer competitors cannot do this.
We have a position in China where we believe we have 50% market share. As I said before, this has been built up by fantastic management over the last 20 years plus. It's always under good, better, and best through a product portfolio, making sure you cover the whole pyramid there. Many international companies end up only playing in the best category in the market, and that is difficult because then it's easy that you get disrupted from the bottom. They have done this really, really well. We have been successful in the technology localization to China, but we have stopped there. In the meantime, we have built up the right cost level, the right infrastructure to manufacture, and also the right technical skills.
We plan to address new market segments in what we call the Global South, and we start with Southeast Asia. That's a given. From there, we go into Europe and North America, and we do that with the good and the better products, not the best products. Those we already have local production in those regions. With this, we will also be able to optimize the manufacturing cost by sourcing more from China, both in components and in products. I know that some of you have been in Qingdao in China and seen our facility there, for those who have not, I just wanted to take you through a quick fly-through. This is from the demo area, which is huge, everything you see here is presented in how our solutions are helping the customer with his or her application.
Here, for instance, you see aerospace with the trackers. It is all put into the application context of the customer. Here we are into the manufacturing space. You see that it is large. It has a lot of capacity. It is very modern. We have AGVs moving around these CMMs and so on. It can take a lot more capacity in here without any additional investments. This is really exciting from my perspective. Another exciting one are the performance drivers from Waygate. This is the fourth growth driver for us. It completes the measurement chain, which we discussed. We measure on the outside, Waygate measures on the inside or inspects on the inside. Customers in aerospace, automotive, battery, they would prefer to get these measurements from one player. Now we have that solution.
From a software integration perspective, we already have Volume Graphics, so it's a very natural connection to combine these two, and there is a good cross-sell opportunity with the metrology business that we are in today. I think in all honesty, we are the market leaders in the markets we have been now for many years, and we need areas to work in where we can do more add-on acquisitions as well. This is a perfect opportunity for us to enter into the asset integrity to the maintenance, repair, and operations market, which is growing in a very, very attractive marketplace. This is driven by utilization. It's decoupled from the CapEx cycles that you have in manufacturing, and we believe that we will be able to grow in these markets going forward.
The value creation opportunities, we have very clear opportunities to improve Waygate's performance significantly and primarily on the synergy side within the CT business on the radiography, especially with China as well. That takes us to the targets. Let's start on the right-hand side. You see the number 22%. That's the EBITAC excluding D&E for 2025. What we do is that we adjust for the Waygate acquisition pro forma. 2025, including Waygate, would have been at 19% EBITAC. From there, we have a number of growth initiatives that will take us up to 21%-24% and be in that area. We plan to grow in line with the market, 4%-6%.
In some areas, as you saw on stationary, that means we will actually try to grow that a little bit faster than what the market is doing with some synergies and new products and so on. We have the volume pricing inflation here, the next generation offerings, MAESTRO and ATS800. We have the operating model, we have China as a global growth, we have the performance improvements from Waygate Technologies as the last bucket there. These are our growth drivers and focus for the next couple of years. To summarize, we are pretty confident with the business strength. We're having a great position in the market. It's a innovative new product coming to market. We have a good mix of software and hardware, which is really important to make sure we keep that edge on the software side.
We have a new operating model which will drive accountability and speed. China as this global growth engine, where we are quite unique compared to our competitors, that do not have such a position there, and we will really try to leverage as much as we can on that. Returning to growth, we see that we are on stable grounds right now, and this business, it should naturally grow. That will lead to the margin conversion and cash flow generation. Finally, Waygate value creation. The performance improvement opportunities across the Waygate portfolio, that is something that we are pretty clear on how we will execute on that. That's what I wanted to share with you. I thank you very much for your attention, and I will hand over to Henning, who will take you through Business Area Geosystems.
Welcome, welcome to Geosystems. Every infrastructure decision, whether you lay train tracks or you renovate a building or you build a tunnel, starts with one thing, which is knowing exactly where you are, knowing context. We are in the business of bringing certainty with geospatial intelligence as a foundational layer to all infrastructure work. From a young age, I've personally been very fascinated by how the world runs, and today I bring 25 years of experience in industrial technology businesses and over 10 years in P&L roles. At Siemens, I led portfolio management and factory automation, then since 2018, ran as a Global CEO of the Product Business and Building Technologies, leading a quite significant technological and organizational transformation. My name is Henning Sandfort, and since early last year, I'm President of the Geosystems business area.
You might ask now, why joining Hexagon? Well, because I strongly believe in the opportunity of that business, a business which is highly relevant and one which is architected for healthy growth in the years to come. Today, this is what I will elaborate on, walking you through our business, the value we provide to customers, taking stock of our performance to date, and even more importantly, why I'm confident on future value creation and what we'll do to change that. Let's dive into the business of Geosystems. This business was built by pioneering leaders, people who more than 100 years ago did not only start a company, but they inspired a whole industry. Ever since, we have built and expanded leading positions when it comes, for instance, to precision surveying and reality capture.
Leading positions that also build on the core capabilities that we share across Hexagon. I'll start with a short overview of who we are and what we do. From there, because we heard it's sometimes complicated to understand what is it really that we do in Geo, I'll walk you through some of our customer examples, where we play, what we solve, and why it all matters. Then I'll walk you through our financial performance to date, our midterm targets that we're committing to as part of the group's updated ambition. I close with a growth strategy, the specific levers we will pull to deliver on those targets. Coming back to why I was excited to join Hexagon. It starts here with who we are in Geo.
As a EUR 1.4 billion business, we are a large business, market leader in key segments where we play, which is a EUR 10 billion serviceable market of technologies that are used to capture, measure, visualize, and analyze the physical world. We're very profitable and maintained 23% EBITA, despite the headwinds that we experienced in the last two years. We are very well-diversified across industries and geographies with focus on surveying buildings and infrastructure, as well as a strong footprint in EMEA and the Americas. This is truly a fantastic business. Let me be transparent. I'm clearly not satisfied with the negative organic growth that we experienced recently, which we will change. I will share in this presentation how my team and I are currently acting on that.
As of January this year, we reorganized into six vertically integrated divisions, each with full P&L. This replaced a matrix structure that had become significantly too complex and was getting in the way of speed, customer focus, and effective capital allocation. When I joined last year, that need was immediately apparent. Given the breadth of portfolio, I wanted to sharpen our ability to innovate and sell end to end along our product lines. This approach is now embedded in how we operate as the Hexagon Way. We asked those questions like, "Where is demand distinct? Where is ownership blurred today?" Those answers shaped six divisions that own their results, the strategy, portfolio, and route to market. The structure is simple, and the accountability is real, as you heard also from my colleagues.
These are our six divisions: Geomatics, Construction Trade Solutions, Machine Control, Radar Monitoring, Scanning and Mapping, and Construction Software and Services. Before I dive deeper into those, let us first look at the reality of our customers. Our customer base is quite broad. We are serving professionals, construction engineering companies, infrastructure owners and operators, mining companies, and much more. They experience many shared challenges. Shortage of skilled labor, both in construction crafts and also in technology. Rework and productivity loss. Still a very high level of fatal accidents. Roadblocks to effective collaboration, things as simple as sharing data on the same project. All struggle to integrate all the digital tools due to the industry's strong fragmentation. Our technologies are and will become even more relevant to address these challenges. We deliver highest precision reliably and efficiently to significantly reduce waste and rework.
We build advanced features, still easy to use and easy to deploy. We build our solutions such that data can be connected and then also shared. With our broad and world-class service network, we help our customers to take best use of our portfolio throughout the whole life cycle. Most importantly, we help our customers to gain an edge, to be more innovative and more productive. Let me bring this to life with a real example. A rail project, one that basically represents any project. Say you wanna build a new rail. What do you do? Well, first, it's essential to understand the exact topography of the rail corridor. Our customers can take our highest precision sensors to create an accurate model by measuring it from the air, from the ground, and even detect what is underground.
This is the basis for everything that will follow, what's being designed, planned, and built. Second, we can accurately estimate how much dirt to move, how and where in the most cost-efficient way. We use our robotic total stations, one that's back in our demo area, to accurately install all relevant components from foundations to bridges to tracks. We move from plan to action. Excavation plans feed into our Machine Control systems, and based on that data, automation can then deliver productivity in the field. Fifth, we have solutions that can then help track progress and assess the quality of work in the field. Dirt moved, structures built, and rails installed. To conclude the construction phase, asset operation relies on an accurate as-built documentation.
We have those capabilities, including 360 photos and as-built 3D models, which serve then as a definite digital record for any rail operator. During operations, our systems are used to monitor the health of rail structures. Robotic total stations and radar systems measure life, the movement of structures, reducing the risk of failure and ultimately potential loss of life. Reality capture sensors regularly scan the corridor, like tunnels, vegetation above tracks, and others to aid in maintenance work. We don't do that alone. We work with technology partners globally to complement our solutions. The benefits our customers get from using our solutions are very significant. You see here a number of examples. Let me highlight two application examples for our total stations. First, reducing the risk of rework.
Tens of thousands of kilometers of high-speed rail in China have been built using our half-second accuracy total stations. Do you know what half-second accuracy precision is? Basically, it means you can measure the thickness of a coin in one-kilometer distance. Basically putting it down the Tower Bridge, and that's the device that you see in the back. Second, extending the lifetime of assets, fundamentally improving return on invest. Our robotic total stations can detect critical structural movements that need repair, and therefore reducing the risk of failure by 40% to 50%. With all of this in mind, let me share some more insights into our six divisions. Geomatics focuses on accurate measurement across a wide range of distances, complemented by a strong position portfolio, addressing surveying, construction, monitoring, and basically across all major industries.
Construction Trade Solutions focus on measuring accurate points at shorter distance and therefore more prone to interior finishing and layout in the building vertical, supported by a distinctive portfolio of laser distance and leveling solutions. Machine Control focus on earthmoving, paving, and drilling applications with features that drastically also improve safety, both for humans as well as other equipment. Radar Monitoring focus on measuring and monitoring changes in large surfaces at long and short distances, serving 90% of the world's largest open-pit mine operators, as well as ground-penetrating radars to detect utility infrastructure and pipes. Scanning and Mapping.
Scanning and Mapping is focused on reality capture, terrestrial, handheld, and airborne, as well as software and mapping and processing services for customers in building infrastructure, surveying, and also public markets. Then last but not least, Construction Software and Services focus on three main areas: estimating construction insights and virtual design services with a strong focus on the North American markets. Similarly to MI, it's a hardware, software, services mix. These solutions all come with a distinct software layer for data pull, processing, and upload, as well as various workflows for productivity in the field. We offer hardware-agnostic solutions and services which support with data integration, visualization, and analytics. Markets like infrastructure are addressed by every division, and some are more distinct, like mining, for instance, and Radar Monitoring, or public customers in Geomatics and Scanning and Mapping. Don't just take our word for it.
Let's look at three projects that bring all of this to life. Let's start with ANCFCC in Morocco. For many applications, standard satellite positioning is simply not accurate enough. You would be off by meters, and that doesn't work when you wanna define property boundaries or plan infrastructure. This is where reference networks come in that continuously correct satellite signals, enabling centimeter-level accuracy in real time. In Morocco, our technology was used to build Africa's largest single-country GNSS reference network, delivering that level of positioning across the entire country. That builds reliable land records and consistent urban planning. Such a trusted reference networks becomes a critical infrastructure, a foundational layer of how you measure and manage a country over the long term. Second example, Officina del Design is an Italian artisanal metal carpentry business producing very unique designs for complex locations.
As you can imagine, to fulfill these high demands for their clients, they need precise measurements to tailor to this job. With our Leica iCON trades solution, which is the first to market, also based on technology from our MI friends, they gain more than 80% efficiency by speeding up every step of the job. This solution dramatically reduces losses generated by mistakes, which can be detrimental for trade contractors working with very costly materials. Precision is truly not a nice-to-have, it is our customer's profit margin. Then Ben c k in the U.S. How do you know that you built what you planned? Tracking progress and quality on a project with multiple contractors using different tools and data is quite difficult. Ben c k uses our software and services, as well as our reality capture sensors on one of the largest U.S. pharma projects.
They track progress and check against the design model. Issues are flagged live, not weeks down the line when they cause extra work, extra cost, and serious delays. That means better alignment across teams and stronger control over schedule, quality, and ultimately project execution. Now, all our divisions continue to push the boundaries of what's possible with innovation. If we reflect on our past, many of the segments we're leaders in today were new segments that we created or scaled. Today, I wanna share three examples with you of how we maintain market leadership and wanna grow market share. First, high-end surveying. This is our absolute stronghold and will remain so in the years to come. Last year's launch of the Leica TS20 was yet another very important milestone for us, but also for the industry. The TS20 is not just an update.
It marks a step change built on a completely new technology platform. It delivers significant double-digit productivity in the field, it brings AI into the field that supports operators in the moment where speed, and especially reliability, matters most. Second, structural health monitoring. A recent study by McKinsey highlighted that 43% of roads are in poor condition. Even more concerning, 7.5% of bridges are structurally deficient. Our customers need solutions to safely monitor, maintain, and operate these assets. To open up this market for us, we launched MyMo, the world's first portable, non-contact structural health monitoring solution. It can be deployed anywhere by just one operator for live monitoring of bridges, dams, or other civil infrastructure. Third, with Hexagon Multivista, we bring AI-driven deviation analysis into construction workflows. We automatically compare millimeter-accurate scans to 2D and 3D models.
This allows for fully automated verification instead of manual spot checks, and deviations are identified early because before they turn into expensive rework, delays, and cost. Especially on large projects, you can imagine that this impact is quite material. Now let's zoom out. Let me share with you some key market trends that will sustain and drive our growth. The industries and customers we serve will continue to grow due to some of these irreversible macro trends. Ongoing urbanization, digitization of cities. Strained and aging infrastructure needs to be maintained and monitored. Shortages of skilled labor require productivity improvement that you can only deliver with technology. AI has started to reshape our field. The examples I showed are just the beginning of truly purposeful use. Growing energy and critical mineral needs drive construction and mining.
Within those macro trends, there are structural growth drivers for the next three to five years. First, the built world will continue to expand. Growth in infrastructure, energy, urbanization is real and will provide the basic layer of growth. Digitalization in construction gains traction and will never get back. Digitalized assets can drive 20%-30% less cost over its life cycle. Second, we see an acceleration in automation to improve productivity, safety, and quality. This elevates growth beyond the construction GDP. Our technology is a critical enabler in that field, so reality capture solutions, for instance, can reduce rework by 5%-25%. The third layer of growth is data-driven outcomes fueled by digitalization and AI. It's not only about creating more trusted data. It is about increasing flow and use of that data.
Use cases like automated progress tracking and structural health monitoring deliver real commercial value. This is how our customers today differentiate and compete. After a thorough review of our business, it became clear that there's a lot of opportunity for us to grow by staying focused and execute with excellence in our core. Adjacent solutions, such as CAD and project management software, are now spinning off with Octave. Our total addressable market is around EUR 14 billion, and the serviceable market is two-thirds, so roughly EUR 10 billion. Here's where we have strong leadership positions but also plenty of opportunities to grow. We believe our core markets will grow, ranging from about 4%-5% in the core surveying up to 10% in segments in Construction Software and Services.
In the last three years since the last Capital Market Day, we made meaningful progress. We increased recurring revenues to 33% and the share of software and services to 41. We kept our strong gross margin performance at 64%, only negatively impacted by FX headwinds. As I said in the beginning, I'm not satisfied with our organic growth. As you can see on the graph, we experienced a decline in growth from 2023 through 2024. Now in 2025, we took a few critical steps. We cut OpEx and headcount to reflect the lower top line and also FX pressures. As you're aware, we took the proactive decision to also destock our dealer channels by around EUR 30 million. We reviewed our product portfolio and impaired part of our capitalized R&D, as was presented earlier. We optimized our innovation invest, focusing on high-success initiatives.
Our actions resulted in stopping the negative momentum and stabilizing revenue, returning to growth in quarter three for the first time in almost two years. Growth continued in quarter four if you take out the impact of destocking. With our new operating model and renewed focus, I am very confident that 2026 will now be the year where the momentum is changing to consistent positive organic growth. In quarter one, we achieved 2% organic growth, the highest since 10 quarters, and still impacted by destocking, which is now concluded. This is where we will take it from here. We target an organic growth of 3%-5% and an increase of EBITDAC margins in the range of 25%-27%. We will deliver on that ambition through market-leading next-generation products, a deeper share in our core, and disciplined expansion into some high-potential new segments.
Our divisions own their targets with clear accountabilities and a direct line between customer insight, product development, and also capital allocation. We have clear levers, structural productivity gains, and pricing discipline to fully offset inflation headwinds. What makes us confident that we can deliver, especially on sustainably reigniting growth? It's a set of competitive advantages and concrete growth levers that I wanna guide you through now. I personally have spent the last year not only refining how we operate and where we're headed, but I had this opportunity to talk to a lot of our global customers, partners, and also team members, understanding the market as well as the fabric of Geosystems. First, this organization clearly lives and breathes with a world-class mix of passionate experts across all functions. Our products are the most robust and deliver highest precision from the desert to the Arctic.
This builds not only on our innovation strength but equally on our superior process engineering, our in-house assembly and testing facilities consistent across our factory network. This tested know-how is hard to transfer or replicate. During the equipment life cycle, customers can rely on experts in more than 250 service locations worldwide, all trained in our Leica Competence Center in Switzerland, being it internal staff or from our partners. Second, we own and advance the foundational technologies in our products, such as high-volume core components like angle encoders or electronic distance measurement chips for multi-million product cost savings, Proprietary algorithm libraries for superior image processing, SLAM, or sensor fusion. We have a strong network of equally innovative partners who support us, which makes it even harder to replicate. Our teams know how to innovate.
We created a lot of the world's first, especially at the intersection between surveying and reality capture and advanced radar technology or combining imaging and LiDAR in an airborne sensor. Third, we're trusted, we're trusted for high-stakes tasks. When it has to be right, for us, it's more than just a marketing tagline. It's who we are and what we do when safety, productivity, and economic values are at stake. It's our commitment that creates repeat business and high customer retention. Now these are the main levers why I'm very confident we will return to growth. In dark blue are the divisions where the lever is most impactful. First and foremost, we're renewing all core portfolios with next-gen product as part of our regular innovation cycles.
Example, examples here include our new TS20, our new radar system, HAlkStar NEO, new airborne sensors such as CityMapper, and a lot more to come in the next quarters this year. These releases create growth cycles and drive market share growth. Our radar innovations are ahead of their business plan, and since the release of TS20, which was only a few months ago, our overall sales of high-end robotic total stations grew by more than 20% year-on-year, and it added 10% new customers, which is a strong early indicator for market share growth. Second, we are strengthening our offering in mid-range segments, enlarging our reach in those segments that typically grow faster than the high end. Our brand promise is when it has to be right, but right can mean a lot of different things across customer needs and applications.
What we will do is we will combine off-the-shelf components with differentiating capabilities of Leica technology and service. For example, we will expand our GNSS portfolio with cost-competitive sensors, intuitive service software, and then mid-range robotic total stations, shifting the battle from just features to productivity and all built on our latest technology platform. Similarly, we'll expand our slope monitoring offering to address more cost-sensitive applications. Third, we're expanding in construction, which we expect to grow significantly above our business average starting 2027. Our priorities are to continue to adapt and strengthen portfolio for those users in construction, for instance, with our iCON GNSS and robotic total stations, integrate workflows relevant for those construction personas which are different from the core surveying, and we will invest more in the dedicated sales channels aimed at those construction contractors. Our fourth growth engine is digital offering and services.
We believe in the power of connected data between the field and the office and between different office solutions and the cloud. As an example, coming again back to our new Leica TS20 platform, we released an optional feature that allows customers to connect the sensor to the cloud for data sharing, firmware updates or also some future AI upgrades. Although it's optional, more than 80% of our customers bought it. This is not only great news commercially, but it's also a early customer validation of our digital services approach. Last year, I also had the opportunity to visit one of the largest European infrastructure projects, and our customer was struggling to connect the more than 100 digital solutions on this project. This is just one example of how painful data integration is in our industry.
To address those customer pain points, we continue to connect critical field data as one source of truth and share it consistently between users. As an example, last week we announced the integration of our two major cloud platforms for surveying and for scan data into one platform, which is Hexagon GeoCloud. In parallel, we also continue to connect to third-party software such as design authoring tools or construction management. Fifth, and this applies to all divisions, each division has now dedicated sales teams with a clear and aligned focus, delivering market feedback directly back to product management. In parallel, we streamline our go-to-market processes, elevate how we work with partners, and apply best practices much more swiftly across divisions. This will improve speed and cost productivity in our sales and service. Finally, inorganic growth.
Here we focus especially on Radar Monitoring, Scanning and Mapping, and Construction Software and Services. We have our eyes on a number of targets, some of which we already have worked with in the past. Broadly, there are several themes that will accelerate our growth to name a few, geospatial AI as a basis for more data outcomes, autonomous field data capture technologies, and more and more digital services. In parallel, we expect further traction in the infrastructure, health, energy, and data center segments. Let me close with something that reflects everything that we talked about. Infrastructure is one of the defining themes of our era. $106 trillion U.S. dollars required globally through 2040. The nature of infrastructure is changing. It's no longer just steel and concrete. It's data, software, and intelligence layered across the entire life cycle of assets.
Labor shortages, aging infrastructure, and the accelerated digitalization, these forces are shifting value towards more integrated life cycle solutions, services, and software. Geospatial intelligence is the connective tissue running through all of that, and we always have been that layer. For over 100 years, we have built technologies that measure, capture, and interpret the built world, from surveying land before the first foundation is laid to monitoring assets in operation. Today, we're giving that ambition a name that matches that scale. Our business will be known as Hexagon Infrastructure & Geospatial, a name that honors where we come from and defines where we're going. What we do matters. We help measure, build, and maintain the infrastructure that the world depends on, and we are the company that people turn to when stakes are high and when it has to be right.
We are expanding on a very profitable core in a large and growing market with structural demand for precision, automation, and digitalization of the physical world. We have a clear path forward with our new operating model to deliver with discipline on a return to consistent growth, continued high margins, and strong cash generation. Thank you. With that, back to you.
Thank you very much.
Yep.
Great. Thank you very much. Do we have any questions in the room for either Henning or Andreas? Yep. Helena, just at the front here. Sorry.
Thank you very much. Just a thought on China, which in MI is such a, an important, you know, driver, both, you know, for the cross-selling opportunity and all of that. Just how dependent are you on personnel versus, you know, how much is in the actual platform, so to speak? Just to hear your thought because you obviously have a very, you know, impressive management.
Yeah
In place
Just to understand the dependence on personnel.
Absolutely. I think we've had a great management for 25 years, what that does is that it basically gives you a fantastic culture in the whole organization. We have, you know, more than 2,000 people in MI China today. It is a fantastic organization that collaborates very well globally as well. I would say that we are not at all dependent from that perspective on the people. We even do it like this in China that we try to take people straight out of university, and we form them. Many of the people that we have have never worked in another company. That's one of the recipes why we are so strong compared to competition in China.
Great. Any other questions in the room? Yep, [Magnus] .
Thank you. Magnus in.
Yeah.
A question on Waygate with respect to the margin upside you expect in that business for the next couple of years. Is that margin improvement contingent on all businesses performing better operationally, or is there if some of them won't perform to the linear expectation, would you consider divesting them?
Yeah. If we split them up into the remote vision inspection to start with, that one is performing at good profit levels. It's growing well. It has the right tailwinds from a market perspective. That one will create value by just continuing. If you look on the radiography side, the CT side, there we have a lot of different synergies, which I went through before. There we see good growth, both organically but also especially on the profit side. When we talk about the other two businesses, they are operating at levels today where we see that we should be able to improve that. I have to say that we have taken mainly into account the profitable growth journey on the first two when we have made those assessments .
[audio distortion]
We can hear you, but I'm not sure.
Yeah, you can hear me?
[ crosstalk]
Okay, now you can hear me. Simon Granath with ABG again. Both of you have made progress when it comes to recurring revenue in recent years. I don't hear you emphasizing that too much today. Perhaps I'm mistaken. How should we think about the trajectory in terms of recurring revenue going forward, or do you feel like this is the sufficient level?
Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, first of all, for us, our intent is not only to sell a one-off center but to accompany our customer throughout the life cycle with software, with services, and in many ways, you deliver that value with a recurring business. Looking at all the product launches that we have, like on the center side, we don't optimize singly on just that KPI of recurring revenue. It will be inherent, looking at the innovation cycles, I would not expect the trajectory to grow as it did in the recent years. It will continue to be a very instrumental part of how we also differentiate in the marketplace.
I can just add to that I think recurring revenue, I think there was a time in the past when we maybe paid a little bit too much attention to that, because I think it's a good KPI to keep track on. In the type of business where we are, where we offer complete solutions to solve the application issues of the customer, we have to look at the totality. We are not intending to go down in recurring revenue, but it's maybe not the most important KPI for the future.
Hi, it's Andre from UBS again. I've got the same question for both of you. Your both businesses are launching a lot of new products that offer more functionality, customer productivity improvement. How do you monetize that? Is that through higher ASP of those products? Do you intend to gain share with them? Also, I guess, do they come with higher gross margin than what you report for your individual divisions? Thinking about TS20 and MAESTRO, things like this. Thank you.
It's actually both. We position these products with higher value than predecessor, as you can also experience in the demo. That allows us to also reach a different price point in the market and also at stronger gross profit. Similar to the question that we just answered, there's also opportunities to add digital services throughout the life cycle. For instance, with the cloud connectivity that we provide, which adds revenue streams on top of the pure sensor sale. Yes, it does, and this is also what I've shared in terms of margin progression. The next generation offerings will drive also margin progression.
Yeah. I think you can look at it in a way that when you are the market leader, you have to continue to innovate to stay the market leader. Part of what we are doing in terms of new platform comes to market is that. Of course, when we do that, we should always make sure that we get a lower cost. The price, to me, it's basically a reflection of the value that this gives to the customer. Clearly when we are innovating, we are offering a higher value to the customer, so the price tag should be higher. Have we always been great at especially keeping the cost at the right level when you can innovate all these new things?
Maybe not always, that is one of the things that we put a little bit more discipline in now to make sure that we get to the right cost improvement, and we make sure that we have the value which should be seen at the price.
Maybe to add to that, for Geosystems, it's also decisive that we look more, as I shared, into mid-range markets, which is not about taking the same product and just price it lower to fight, but it's about addressing a different demand in the market with a different product concept that, again, is competitive in that specific segment. We cannot just elevate the value curve upwards. We also need to acknowledge that there's different dynamics in the market, different sources of growth, which we need to tap into more.
And if I may, Just one more, on Geosystems specifically. You mentioned acquisitions. How is the pipeline? Are you ready to make deals already this year?
Short answer would be yes, the pipeline is good. We look into targets as we speak, and it follows basically the financial guardrails of what the group has shared earlier. Mostly it will be bolt-on acquisitions in our core segments.
Great
With the focus that I also shared.
We've got time for one more. Just to the front from Mikael there.
Hi. Thanks for taking my question. Mikael Lassen, DNB Carnegie. I have a question for MI, and I was curious about the services part of the business, if you can talk a bit more about that, how you operate, what is growing, revenue model, your touch rate, and so on. I mean, the visibility you have in that part of the business.
Yeah. If we take it division by division, this could take an hour, but we'll do it in 30 seconds. If you take stationary metrology, that's where we have roughly 1/3 being on the aftermarket. It's of course extremely important that, you know, this is, this is used for production and for checking the measurements while you're producing. This is quite critical for many of our customers. And as the name say, stationary means you cannot actually send it in, so we have to get out there. We are selling different types of maintenance agreements with different levels. I would say that the attach rate is very, very high on that. We are getting that up also in Southeast Asia and China now.
That has been a little bit of an issue in the past, but we're getting that up now. This is an area where we are growing nicely, especially in the U.S., and we are starting to see a little bit more of growth also in Europe. If we talk about the portable side, it is portable, so that means you can actually send it into us. There we have calibration centers that calibrate the equipment for the customer. There is much less of us being out at the customer site, and of course, with that, we can optimize that pretty well. You have the computer-aided manufacturing, which is more of a software model there. Very quickly that's. It's a quite high attach rate, and it's one of those KPIs we really pay attention to there.
Okay, fantastic. Now we're gonna hand over to Gordon, who's gonna talk you through the Autonomous Solutions business area.
Hello. My name is Gordon Dale, and I'm the President of the Autonomous Solutions business area. Clicker's not working. Oh, there we go. Autonomous Solutions is the global leader in precise positioning, operational intelligence, and autonomy solutions. I'd like to start my presentation with a short reflection on why autonomy is so important to me. I joined Hexagon in 2008 through the NovAtel division after beginning my career in telecommunications. My personal autonomy journey started a few years earlier. When I was living in Europe in 2004, my wife and I fell in love with GPS technology. The shift from paper maps to reliable satellite-based navigation was truly astonishing.
No longer did one of us have to drive through the new streets of Paris looking for street signs and the other one sat in the passenger side with a map on their lap trying to help navigate, usually long after we missed our turn. My wife and I joke that that first GPS system probably saved our marriage. Why do I work at Hexagon? Autonomous technologies such as GPS positioning are truly making the world a safer place while improving productivity in vital industries, addressing critical labor shortages while solving the sustainability challenges of our planet. I find this work incredibly meaningful, and I'm really excited to share with you today the autonomy journey that we are on. Here's the outline of what I will cover today.
First, I'll provide you with an overview of the Autonomous Solutions business area so that you can understand our scope and what mission-critical customer problems we're solving. I'll walk you through our value propositions, what truly differentiates us from the competition, and why our technology, our team, and our financial model create durable advantages. I'll explain our growth strategies and how we will continue our success in each of our divisions. I will review our targets. As you can see on this summary chart, Autonomous Solutions is a high-growth, high-margin business, providing mission-critical autonomy platforms and components across a wide variety of industries. Our addressable markets are significant in size with attractive growth rates. In 2025, we delivered almost EUR 700 million of revenue at 26% EBITAC.
Coupled with a five-year CAGR of more than 26%, we clearly demonstrate the capital-efficient growth profile expected from top-tier technology businesses. Mining, Aerospace and Defense, and agriculture are our largest verticals, and the Americas is our largest region, followed by APAC and then EMEIA. As you can see, we are structured into six divisions with clear accountability. We had already organized ourselves this way, the transition to The Hexagon Way was pretty straightforward for my business area. Mining provides OEM-agnostic solutions across workflows of the entire mining value stream. Septentrio provides the industry's best GNSS standard positioning products. NovAtel provides customized positioning for specific customer problems. Agriculture provides centimeter-level positioning of the highest quality and reliability tailored for agricultural applications. Aerospace and Defense provides assured, resilient positioning in very difficult environments. Core Autonomy is focused on large, transformative, autonomous haulage applications.
Now let's look at our historical financial performance. We provide significant value to our customers, and that's why we have progressed significantly since the last Capital Markets Day, delivering double-digit revenue growth while maintaining stable margins. As you can see, the organic growth was exceptionally high in the 2023 timeline with 22%. This was driven by large defense program sales as well as strong mining and agriculture sales. All cylinders were firing that year. Organic growth in 2024 declined as was impacted by the overall ag global recession, plus some really tough comparables for mining and defense. 2025 saw strong growth in defense and good performance for mining, giving us a 14% overall organic revenue growth for the year. Recurring revenue and gross margins remained stable over this time period.
As you can see in this diagram, our business is anchored in three pillars: positioning and perception, operational intelligence, and vehicle autonomy. Together, they form a resilient, synergistic portfolio that addresses some of the most challenging operational needs in the world. I'm gonna use these three pillars as guideposts as we go through the presentation. One of the most important parts of my role is engaging directly with customers to understand the real-world problems that they're facing and where our technology provides irreplaceable value. For example, in mining, our customer, Modern, has emphasized the critical need to protect employees working in high-risk environments. Their commitment to fully deploying our safety systems reflects both the severity of the challenges they face, plus the trust they place in our technology.
When I met with a major mining customer in Western Australia, I saw firsthand the operational challenges they face in the Pilbara. Getting truck drivers to these remote locations is extremely difficult, and the average age of a haul truck operator in Australia is approaching 60. Our Ukrainian customers deploying our precision positioning products describe an incredibly challenging environment characterized by interference and jamming. In these conditions, resilience isn't a feature, it's a lifeline. This diagram shows a simplified model for any autonomous system and the key customer problems that we solve. It also provides you with a high-level understanding of the components, products, and solutions we provide to solve our customers' toughest challenges. Positioning is the foundation of all autonomous systems. Positioning answers the customer's question, where am I? In complex, difficult environments, that's not always an easy question to answer.
After you know where you are, you must understand what's around you. That is called perception or spatial intelligence. The vehicle autonomy section has three components. Autonomy software is the brain that tells the machine where to go. Since there's no human, the Machine Control components physically drive the vehicle. Safety is a foundational element of autonomy. Some studies have suggested that an autonomous vehicle needs to be 10 times safer than a manually driven vehicle for society to accept it. These three elements address the customer problem: how do I operate autonomously and safely? Finally, autonomous systems operate with multiple machines, and there needs to be site orchestration, fleet management systems that optimize the overall operation of the customer's application. This is an example of operational intelligence. I'm gonna step through now how our solutions deliver each element, starting with the core foundation of positioning.
As you might know, much of what we do is GNSS-based positioning. Note that the terms GNSS and GPS are often used interchangeably. GPS refers to the U.S. based constellation, whereas GNSS refers to using all four global constellations plus various regional systems. Let me quickly explain at a high level how this works. The satellites orbit above us at 20,000 km, going 14,000 km an hour. If you can receive information from four satellites, you can calculate where you are anywhere on the planet. Many companies can do basic GNSS positioning now when the conditions are easy and you'll need a few meters of accuracy. Our customers need greater accuracy and face much more challenging conditions. As these GNSS radio signals travel from space to Earth, they can be distorted by the ionosphere. Think northern lights or solar flares or aurora borealis.
To provide centimeter-level positioning, we use a global network of reference stations to provide subscription-based correction services to mitigate these distortions. It's similar to the example that Henning gave on Morocco. It's the same principle there that we're using. Our technology can also protect against intentional and unintentional jamming. The satellites broadcast these signals with the power of only a light bulb. As you can imagine, when they complete their 20,000-kilometer journey, it's pretty faint. They can easily be impacted by radio interference, and that's also called jamming. Let's look at the next chart why anti-jamming is such a competitive advantage for us. Hopefully, some of you saw this video at the display at the back of the room.
Let's imagine there is a 1-kilowatt jammer, like the one shown on the picture on the left, that somebody had located at the Tower of London. If it was turned on, it would block the operation of all GPS systems operating within a 300-km radius. No navigation, no positioning, no timing possible in that region. If you are using our competitors' products, the GPS denied region shrinks down to 2,000 m, which is still much of London. If you use our anti-jamming technologies, that GPS denied region shrinks down to an amazingly small region, just the Tower of London grounds themselves, a 100-m radius. I'd like to explain our next positioning-related competitive advantage, sensor fusion. GNSS provides absolute positioning, exactly where you are on the planet.
Everyone has experienced if you're in a difficult environment, like a city downtown, you can easily get false readings or even no readings at all, as the signals are blocked by the buildings. Inertial navigation systems are an alternate positioning technology that provide relative positioning based on accelerometers and gyroscopes. INS systems unfortunately drift over time, the position accuracy degrades and solutions diverge from the true path. Combining these two technologies is called sensor fusion. You still get the absolute positioning of GPS, when you have bad GNSS coverage, the INS solution bridges the gap, providing continuous operation. The underlying technology of integrating different positioning sensors into one overall solution is actually very sophisticated, that's one of our major competitive advantages. The spectrum of positioning challenges is illustrated on this diagram provides a clear view of where real value and real differentiation are created.
Starting on the left, environment 1 is open sky, where GNSS performance is consistent and predictable. This is the part of the market that has largely become commoditized. Environments 2 and 3 require significantly more sophistication. This is where our competitive advantage of sensor fusion becomes essential. Environment 4 introduces another level of complexity, intentional interference, like the jammer we imagined down at the Tower of London. What began as a challenge in the defense sector, jamming has now become increasingly common in civilian markets as well. Environment 5 represents the most challenging environment, situations with no GNSS availability at all, such as an underground mine. In these cases, alternate sensors and proprietary techniques must be used to maintain reliable positioning. The highest value opportunities sit firmly on the right side of this chart, and that's where we play.
We're leading in the hardest part of the market, mission-critical applications where our technology advantage directly converts into market share, recurring revenue, and superior margins. Many of you have probably heard the expression, "It's not rocket science." Well, in our business area, it is. Blue Origin successfully landed the first stage booster of its New Glenn rocket for the first time November 2025. Hexagon GNSS receivers and antennas are a key part of the navigation and autonomy stack on this incredibly demanding environment. There's another example of when it has to be right, it has to be Hexagon. Our products support every critical phase of operation, allowing for safe booster recovery. This allows for 25 times reuse, cutting the booster cost by launch by an astonishing 96%. Now let's shift to the second pillar, operational intelligence, using mining as an example.
You can see in the bottom of the chart all the high-level steps in the mining value stream, which all obviously operate in the real world. Hexagon has the most comprehensive set of OEM-agnostic products and solutions in the industry, and we truly understand our customers' workflows. This gives us an end-to-end digital nervous system that provides context and insights that we can use in the digital world to improve our customers' experience. As mining customers move toward integrated data and analytics platforms, our technology stack becomes a major competitive advantage. For example, the safety data will feed the fleet data. Fleet data feeds planning and analytics, and analytics powers automation. This creates a powerful data flywheel. More sensors give you more operational insights, which leads to more automation, which increases value. Every additional module a customer deploys increases the value of the next one.
I'd like to highlight an example of how operational intelligence comes to life in our mining safety portfolio. As you can see, we have three main product lines: operator alertness, collision avoidance, and vehicle intervention. Our operator alert systems that monitor driver fatigue are widely deployed and industry-leading. For example, our customer MMG reported an 81% reduction in severe fatigue events after they deployed this system at their mine in Tasmania. Our collision avoidance are deployed in over 50 countries. We have more than 65,000 systems protecting over 200 mines in the world. The video I'm gonna show will demonstrate the value from the world's first integration of these operator alert system with the collision avoidance systems, it really shows the effect of this data flywheel. First, you can see a typical haul truck that we provide safety solutions for.
Inside the cab, you can see the display for the collision avoidance system, the operator monitoring camera, and the front-facing camera. We can see the value of integrating these two systems together by showing the front camera synchronized with the cabin camera when there's a fatigue event. The vehicle almost veers off the road when the operator starts falling asleep. Fortunately, our alert systems vibrate the seat and set off alarms, the driver was able to recover and avoid a very dangerous accident. Combining operator alert systems and collision avoidance systems provides more context to collision alarms by recording operator alertness at the time of the alarm. These are examples of driver assist functionality. We can move further up the autonomy stack as well by doing vehicle intervention systems that automatically stop the vehicle if there's a risk of a collision.
In this case, we're not just warning drivers, we're taking control to save lives. I think the global trend is unmistakable. Industries across the world are accelerating towards higher level of autonomy to boost productivity, improve safety, and offset chronic labor shortages, especially in remote and hazardous environments. This chart shows autonomous use cases in the various industry verticals that we serve. Examples include ensuring autonomous machines operate safely and efficiently in mining. Leader-follower applications in defense, where convoys have one driver and multiple vehicles follow this vehicle autonomously. Agriculture, where fully autonomous tractors are being developed to complete all activities related to planting, spraying, and harvesting. Autonomous Solutions is positioned to lead this shift by building profitable, scalable solutions for autonomous operations. These capabilities extend far beyond any single application. They pave the way for autonomy across multiple industries and machine types.
Autonomy is not a single leap, it's a journey. Importantly, customers don't have to wait for full autonomy to realize value. Every step along the way can be deployed today, retrofitted onto existing fleets, and monetized as customers advance at their own pace. The 5-level model, autonomy model you see here is familiar from the automotive sector, but it's now playing out across mining, agriculture, and other industries. Level 1 assistance technologies, like lane keeping in automotive, are already mainstream. In complex industrial environments, higher levels of autonomy depend on our first pillar: precision positioning and resilient perception. Moving large, heavy machines safely, whether it's a haul truck, a road train, or a tractor, is impossible without high-integrity positioning. In mining, our portfolio spans from geological modeling to fleet optimization to fully autonomous haulage, the widest stack in the sector.
In agriculture, customers are progressing from GNSS-based guidance to vision navigation, and ultimately towards fully autonomous tractors. Across every major vertical, our core technologies sit at the foundation, enabling each step toward autonomy while strengthening customer adoption. Autonomous road trains for moving iron ore more than 100 km from pit to port is a marquee example of our unmatched capabilities to bring autonomy to complex and dynamic environments. The positioning challenges are immense. The vehicles pass each other at 80 km per hour with only 2 meters to spare. Turning the steering wheel 1 inch on these vehicles will swing the 3rd trailer out 1 meter. The trucks have to travel through tunnels and overpasses, losing connection with GNSS.
You can see on the diagram the significant number of on-vehicle autonomy and safety components that must be deployed to manage a vehicle of this size and complex dynamics. This is our third pillar of focus: vehicle autonomy. Once deployed, the system becomes indispensable, generating sticky and predictable one-time and recurring revenue. We have the unique ability to bring all these pieces together. Very few companies could even attempt this. I'm summarizing for you our growth strategy on this chart. We are addressing the most challenging problems that customers must solve in their autonomy journey. This journey is accelerated by our macro forces and mega trends. We target our investments in the most attractive markets to optimize our overall growth. Our divisions are accountable for maintaining and expanding their core competencies to provide clear competitive differentiation and drive their own growth.
Looking at the mega trends, across all the markets we serve, the global pressures are the same. Acute labor shortages, accelerating sustainability demands, and increased operational complexity needing more precision. In mining, 70% of mining leaders report that finding labor is preventing them from hitting their production targets. It's not just finding workers, it's finding skilled workers. Our operator assist and AI-enabled drilling automation solutions help close that skill set gap immediately. Labor shortages are not restricted to mining. Agriculture faces similar constraints. According to the 2024 Voice of the Farmer survey, farmers are unable to hire 21% of the labor that they need. Sustainability is the second mega trend that is making our customers' problems even harder to solve. Our advanced positioning and guidance technologies in agriculture directly address this challenge through higher productivity, reduced chemical use, and improved sustainability.
At the same time, operational environments are becoming more complex. For example, I remember back in 2011 when we launched our first GPS anti-jamming product, interference and jamming and spoofing events were actually quite rare. You fast-forward to 2026, and today pilots, commercial pilots are reporting over 1,000 jamming and spoofing attempts every single day. It's amazing. This is our advantage. We apply our technical know-how and horizontal platforms across multiple industries, generating data that can be used to further improve our solutions. Hexagon's culture of innovation, particularly in autonomy and resilient positioning, ensures we remain ahead of the curve as the world becomes more complex. Looking at the markets now, our overall total addressable market is EUR 13 billion, and the serviceable addressable market is EUR 6 billion, growing by 8%-10% over the next 5 years.
In positioning, we focus on the high-accuracy assured GNSS, which is a EUR 2 billion serviceable market with 10% growth. We're not exposed to commoditized standard GNSS. Our growth driver is the need for resiliency, what we call assured PNT. Increased defense spending, more requirements for anti-jamming technologies, and the increasing adoption of UAVs and drones will fuel the growth of the precision positioning segment. The mining serviceable market is EUR 3.5 billion, growing at 8%. Hexagon differentiates as the only player offering a full end-to-end digital mining stack across mixed fleets. Mining growth drivers will include safety, analytics, and underground. Fully autonomous industrial systems like road trains is a smaller market today, but is expected to grow more quickly. I'd like to summarize for you now our growth strategies for each division.
For positioning, combining Septentrio's optimal GNSS platforms, the best size, weight, and power, with NovAtel's sensor fusion expertise and market customization expertise will create an incredible competitive moat. We will integrate all this combined expertise into our next-generation positioning platform. For aerospace and defense, I spoke earlier about our industry-leading anti-jamming products, but we also have a strong footprint in many areas of aerospace as well, as you saw with the Blue Origin case study. Obviously, our defense market is structurally protected from many of our traditional low-cost competitors. We will grow the aerospace and defense division by continued investment in our leading anti-jamming products and technologies, including releasing more value-based products to expand from our high-end market dominance, the good, better, best strategy that Andreas talked about.
Our latest acquisition, Inertial Sense, will enable increased growth in the higher volume segments of this market. Moving to agriculture now, everyone in this room understands the agriculture industry has been in a global recession. We are also seeing some OEMs verticalizing this positioning technology and increased price pressure from Chinese suppliers. However, our superior quality and performance has enabled us to maintain our large overall footprint. In response to these industry dynamics, we will leverage our next-generation products to provide optimized solutions to protect our margin. In addition, we will develop camera-based positioning systems for level 3, 4 autonomous applications in agriculture, such as row guidance in vineyards and orchards, where GNSS-only positioning is not sufficient.
One major competitive advantage we have in our largest division, mining, is that we have the most extensive OEM-agnostic suite of solutions across all workflows in the mining value stream. As you saw earlier in the presentation, our industry-leading safety portfolio and the more stringent industry safety regulations that are coming up around the world, plus our large installed base, will enable us to continue growing this portfolio. The data flywheel I described earlier is an extremely exciting growth opportunity. Hexagon is uniquely positioned to leverage all available data in the mine to improve our customers' productivity and NPV. Finally, in core autonomy, the value creation curve reflects the transition from investment to scale. Road train milestones in 2026 build continued credibility and unlock follow-on sites.
As you can see, we are targeting 10%-12% organic growth per year, supported by a mix of volume expansion, deeper penetration in our core markets, and continued growth in the high-margin software and services that help us offset any inflationary pressures. At the same time, we're targeting to improve our EBITAC to the range of 27%-30%, driven by our portfolio modernization, the scale benefits we receive from our platform strategy, our disciplined cost management, and our AI-enabled operations. This combination of divisional accountability, platform leverage, and disciplined capital allocation is what will enable us to deliver a durable high-margin growth profile. I hope that you now more clearly understand the Autonomous Solutions business area scope, what makes us unique, and our growth strategies. The value creation plan for Autonomous Solutions can be summarized as follows.
First, we choose to operate in large, attractive markets with strong structural tailwinds. Second, we solve our customers' mission-critical problems. We help them overcome the real challenges they face with productivity, access to labor, safety, and sustainability. Third, we are a technical leader with mission-critical reliability, deep domain expertise, proven M&A integration capability, and the uniquely OEM architecture that customers can trust across mixed fleets and harsh environments. These elements create durable, defensible moats. Finally, our operating governance ensures that each division is accountable and successful, and that we allocate our capital in the most optimal fashion to continue our long-term growth profile.This combination, unmatched technical depth, and direct alignment with high-value customer pain points, gives us a clear multi-engine growth path to well beyond EUR 1 billion in revenue. Thank you very much. Now, I'll turn it over to my fellow Canadian, Arnaud.
Thank you very much. All right, moving on to robotics. Thank you for the introduction this morning, Anders. Give me a bit of background myself. I have a PhD in computer science, did a post-doc in neural networks before it was called AI. It used to be called neural networks. Then I had a chance to work for Microsoft in technology, and then I did some big product launches for Nike and Disney. Then I built and scaled businesses for Viking Therapeutics and Sanofi, and now I have the opportunity for the last 15 months to join Hexagon Robotics, where I can do all three: technology, product, and business. To start off, if we really wanted to save time, we could stop at that slide, Tom Hull, if you really wanted to. What are the key takeaways?
First, humanoids is a massive market, and very importantly, the industry segment will be the largest in the next few years, 5-7 years. Two, Hexagon is uniquely positioned to capture its fair market share. Why? Very simple. Access to customers. You've seen all the customers we have across different industries. We understand their pain points. We understand how they're moving from automation to autonomy. Two, I think we have unique expertise in sensors, sensor fusion that Gordon just mentioned, but also spatial intelligence. Three, which you'll see is the theme of the topic of the day, we have a multipurpose autonomous humanoid. A lot of humanoids out there are actually teleoperated. Ours is autonomous, and ours is multipurpose and doesn't do just manipulation. It can do many other things that you'll discover in the next few minutes. So far, so good.
At 4:00 P.M., we're good. We got energy. Excellent. Agenda, we'll unpack what we just talked about. Context, always good to see the size of the market and how we're looking at it. To AEON, our first product, that Sarah and Nick in the back were nice to, they gave demos to. You could go back if you missed it. Then how do we commercialize this product? We talked about this automation to autonomy all day, but I want to give you the robotics lens of what that means. On the left side, all manual. Then we had fixed task, fixed geography. Then we moved to AMRs, unique task, but now we can be mobile. Now we're moving to humanoids, multiple tasks, mobile. That's gonna be very critical. That transition is critical for many different industries, manufacturing, logistics, automotive, aerospace, and so on.
Strong history of robotics at Hexagon. Why do we show this slide, is that we're not starting from scratch in robotics. In addition to all the right elements that you just talked about, in the last few hours, actually, especially Gordon on the autonomy and the sensor fusion and everything else, we also know what it means to deploy robots in production at customers. You all have heard that statistics, 50% of those solutions is the robot, and 50% of the solution is integration within workflows, within different systems, and so on and so on. We understand that complexity. I'm still doing this slide, but I'm hoping it's the last time I have to do it. Why humanoids and not why other types of robots? Well, three things.
We talked about workforce shortage, but especially for skilled workers, and that's very important when you think about humanoids. Two, all industries are going to last-mile automation. A lot of automation in the factory, but still you have people taking one part and then feeding it into the next factory line, as an example. Three, we're talking more and more, especially in automotive, a little bit in aerospace, mostly automotive and manufacturing, lights out factories, right? They just operate themselves. To do that, you need other form of robots. Why the form factor of the humanoid? First, those factories were built by humans for humans, and therefore, if you want to introduce a robot that can roam around, the human form factor is the most logical one. Second one, that to me is the most interesting thing.
If you look at physical AI, you look at where the innovation is going, it's really two areas. World robotic models. Basically think of. That wasn't me. Think of ChatGPT in the world of robotics. The second thing is imitation learning. Just think back of the history of robotics. It started with all programmed. You had to program every single edge case possible. Now we leapfrogged that completely, and we're basically teaching AEON how to do a new task by just showing how to do the task. We can do it by teleoperation, we can do it by videos, we can do it by synthetic data, but literally, there's 0 line of code needed. The robot just learns by doing.
If that's the premise, then the student and the teacher need to have the same form factor to optimize effectively the transition of the knowledge. If you don't have that, then you need to have very complicated systems that move from what we do to what the robot would be doing. The last thing is that if you think of a humanoid as a singular entity, that's great. If you look at it in the factory of the future where there's hundreds of them, it's effectively a fleet. Each one of them can't do just one task. If it does that, it's not a very good ROI. It has to do multiple tasks.
Again, how do we evolve to be humans, and that we have is because we can actually do many different things with the way we are shaped, if you want. When you think of a fleet, that's extremely important. Why now? One, great progress on the actuators. These are motors of the humanoid effectively. In the last two, three years, we've probably made more progress than the previous 15. The motors that actually feeding those humanoids are much more powerful. Two, way more edge computing than we ever had. Think of the NVIDIA Thor platform at the edge, for example. It's basically about 1,000 more times powerful than what we had two or three years ago. Just imagine what that means in terms of AI capabilities, in terms of reasoning, et cetera, et cetera.
The last one is just physical AI in general, whether it's training, whether it's world models we just talked about, or any other manifestation of AI in the physical world. As you've all seen, I'm sure through the press, it's evolving at an incredible speed. Those three combined, great case for humanoids. Now we go into what's the TAM of humanoids. This chart is from an external source. You've seen many different charts. I would encourage you to do a couple of things. One, ignore the numbers a little bit other than they're big. Every projection we have seen, it's big numbers. That's comforting for us. Two very important points. When you look at in-home versus industry, in the next few years, all the money in humanoids is in industry sector, not in the home.
Lastly, you will see that 2030 is kind of this inflection point. Back to Andre's comment this morning of, you know, it won't be tomorrow. It's actually also based on market data. That's the inflection point. Some people could argue it's 2029. People can argue it's early 31. Doesn't matter. That's the inflection point. When we look at this, and I've had many conversation with Andre and the board, we do not wanna miss that opportunity, and that's why we're doing Hexagon Robotics. Our target markets, given the slide you've just seen, pretty logical. We're going after the industry. One, because of the heritage of Hexagon, of course, but also just because of what the market and where the market is. In phase 1, which is the current phase, we focus mostly on automotive, aerospace, transportation, sorry, logistics, and manufacturing.
That's where the shortage of skilled workers is the highest, and that's where the humanoid can be deployed the easiest way, if you want. We move to construction, energy, and semiconductors, where the environments are a bit more complex to deal with. Eventually, we move to hospitality. We think it's a very, very interesting market, actually, but not ready. It's not ready for humanoids yet. No plans for consumer, which is already a big differentiating factor with a lot of the companies you hear about in the outside. The good thing is, there's a market. Now the question is, do we have the product? We'd certainly like to believe so. Aeon that you see in the back, you see the specifications that you've probably seen from others. Height and weight of an average human, actually.
Degrees of freedom, 34, so a lot of flexibility in terms of movement. Sensors, 16, and that you will see it come back in the presentation. That's a massive differentiating factor. Most other humanoids, even for the industry, typically have between five and seven sensors. Why is 16 important? Because with 16 sensors, as Gordon mentioned from sensor fusion perspective, not only we have more precision, we have spatial intelligence and awareness, which means AEON, in real-time, knows what is around him, or it, I should say, I was told. Around it. Why is that important? When you do a lab demo, not important. When you do YouTube video, not really important. When you deploy to production, you need the humanoid to be very conscious of its environment. Somebody's walking by, a machine has moved, this, that, the other, and so on.
That's very important that we have those sensors. Speed, we have wheels that you've probably seen, we get some quite good speed. If you're wondering what 2.5 meters a second is, it's most of the average person jogging quite nicely, it's quite fast. Why is that important? When you move a part from one side of a factory all the way to the other side of the factory, if the distance that you have to cover is three or four or five minutes, you're basically not gaining anything from a productivity perspective. If it's 12, 15 seconds, absolutely is. Batteries, you'll see a video a bit later, we have three hours of battery, but more importantly, we have a battery self-swap.
We've taught AEON, through imitation learning actually, showing it how to do it, we taught it how to change its own battery. We have two batteries, so we can do a hot swap. That's why you see the auto swap, hot swap, which means it's continuous in operations effectively, other than the 23 seconds precisely that it takes to change the battery. Arm payload of 10 kilograms, pretty standard in industry, and we have the same. Our unique selling proposition is five dimensions. The first one, as I mentioned, super important and very grateful for the Hexagon connection, 'cause we have access to about 40,000 customers. We understand their needs, we understand where they're headed, we understand their pain points.
That's a unique thing that we can always call the right customer at the right level to understand their appetite and need for humanoids. The second one is multipurpose. We'll dive into that a bit later. As I mentioned, a lot of the robots are doing pick and place or moving boxes. We think that's interesting. That's a clearly a demand for it. If you can add inspection and reality capture with onboard sensors, meaning no other equipment needed, then the value of the humanoid, the ROI of the humanoid goes up quite significantly for a customer. The sensor suite, we talked about it quite a bit. Spatial intelligence, but autonomy is also due to those sensors. In the production environment, if you don't have those sensors, you cannot be autonomous. You have to be hardwired. Very, very important.
We believe, well, actually not a belief, it's a fact, that there will be some safety certification for humanoids, just like there are for arm robots and there are for AMRs. Sensors become a critical path to that. If you look at AMRs, there's a number of onboard sensors dedicated to safety, pure safety, detection of object, detection of people, et cetera, et cetera. We have that built in already. When those specification specs come in, we'll turn on the sensors, and we'll turn on the software, obviously, but it will be safety-ready if you want. Few design elements that are quite unique. The wheels we mentioned, the battery we mentioned. The last one I wanna spend two minutes or maybe not, 30 seconds on, which is the end effectors. This is a fancy way to say the hand of the robot.
A lot of our competitors are spending quite a bit of R&D dollars finding the perfect hand, the most dexterous hand with sensors and so on and so on. Having talked to myself about 50 customers and the team even more than that, the interesting piece is actually for 99% of the use cases, you don't need a hand. You need a clamp, you need a gripper, you need some other form of end effectors. We decided very early on, instead of investing a lot in hands, we'll actually have a modular end effector. Whatever the best end effector is for the job is what the one AEON will have. As a side note, which is interesting in that particular context, best hand in the market two years ago, $20,000 each. For a robot, $40,000 just for two hands.
You fast-forward to today, a hand that is roughly twice better, 2,000. We're seeing that the project by the end of the year, it'll be probably 1,000. Probably a good thing, Anders, we didn't invest too much in the hands from a CapEx perspective. But it shows you how quickly that space is evolving. We're making very strict decision on what do we build, what do we buy, and so on and so on. The last thing is data and AI. You've seen it throughout the day. Same for robotics, I would say even more so because the level of data we have is truly multimodal. We have sounds, we have videos, we have images, and so on and so on, and we need to capture all this in one aspect.
That's also what we need to train the robot. Better data, better training, better robots doing tasks. We talked about multipurpose. I wanna show you actually concrete examples. On the left side is what we do with Schaeffler. You can see the precision if you want of movement and manipulation. On the second one is what we do with Pilatus. We're doing actually onboard inspection of fuselage parts. If you're not that familiar with the aviation industry, they have the highest standards, right, in terms of quality, and we can do it with onboard sensors. Reality capture, the video was supposed to loop. It didn't. Hopefully you saw it a little bit. We basically can capture actually with the sensors we have the entire environment, and we can create a mid-resolution digital twin just from onboard sensors.
Super useful in many different cases where you need just the reality capture and the digital twin to be basically fed with updates on a regular basis. You just have AEON roam the factory, and you're done. Quite powerful. What we showed with BMW at the end of February is AEON actually with an Absolute Scanner AS1. Thank you, Anders. Where we actually do very high-resolution scan of the car. We can do it obviously when it's being built, but the example we showed is when it was finished, and we're basically measuring the space between the door and the frame, if you want, the frame of the door and the frame of the car, I would say, with extremely high precision.
Why this is interesting is that now AEON can also, as you remember, end effectors can be modulars. One of those could be actually super high-resolution scanner, and now suddenly, AEON goes from inspection at a certain resolution to inspection at 50 micron, if I'm not mistaken. One of my favorite videos, by the way, of AEON. This was all done through training imitation learning. We showed AEON, "This is how you change your battery." We did it about 30 times, and then we had a training algorithm, and then AEON can train itself effectively to do task. We say 25 second. If you put your stopwatch out, it was actually 23, you know, but very, very good, obviously. Then what we do is we have an intelligent charging station.
The battery swapping is not just to recharge a battery. As you can imagine, in a production environment, the robot has to be updated. There would be a firmware update, software updates, and so on and so on. We use actually the battery station as also our inlet towards updating AEON. Again, if you look at a production environment, that's quite important 'cause Wi-Fi is a bit unstable. If we can push it to the base station, then we have a short-range communication. One of the most interesting charts, I think, of this presentation perhaps is how do we combine robotics, AI, and the, what we call the data flywheel. First, we need a lot of data to train the robot, synthetic data, video data, simulation data, and so on and so on. Most people are doing this in industry.
We think we have a very good understanding in particular of simulation and synthetic data, thanks to the, our colleagues in Hexagon. This is the foundation. If you don't have this, you basically don't have a robot. The second thing is the training. Classical training, reinforcement learning, imitation learning, word models, VLAs, visual language action models, as many acronyms as engineers can invent. This is a training aspect of the robot. You take the data, you train the robot, quite logical. We think there we have actually really good partnerships with NVIDIA and others that help us accelerate our training. You go into robotics. It's nice to train it, but you need to put to robotics, and then it needs to have a brain. It has perception, it has sensors, and also it has to understand motion. Far, so good.
Most other companies do this. We think we do quite better in some areas, but most companies do this. The task. The robot doing a task, which is all about planning and control. What is the data flywheel? Is that this is linear, but the power is if you can bring data back, of course, once it's doing the task. This is where I would like you to pay a bit of attention on the color of that line that will change in a second. At the moment, everybody industry, what are they feeding back? They're feeding back robotic data, the state of the actuator, the angle, the force, the torque, et cetera, all the physical aspects of the robot. Quite helpful to understand how it did the work. What happened, no one captures other than our robot.
That's where you'll see it move to blue. Of all the sensors, not only we capture what the robot is doing physically, we capture the environment. If there was a task and the robot, for some reason, failed the task, the robotic data only will not tell you why the task failed other than a hardware failure. If you had all the perception, all the sensors, maybe the object changed. Maybe the object was not there. Maybe a human passed by and there was a stoppage. This is all the data we can feed back. Of course, we have the flywheel because better data means better training, better tasking, and so on and so on and so on.
This is for us a very important competitive advantage that again, we can capture the data in real-time of the human, humanoid doing the task and feed that back to the training, and that's very unique. We can see a few examples of AI, how we deploy AI. The first one is simulation and reinforcement learning. This one, I always have a good story for this one. This is training basically AEON to go up the stairs, right? It has wheels, so it was not intuitive. We said, "Well, let's teach AEON how to go up the stairs." You will see it. It does many different configurations. You don't have to count them. You can trust me. There's 1,024 AEONs at the same time in the simulator through different things.
What is very powerful about this methodology, and again, because of the inheritance of Hexagon, we know what it means to simulate very complicated and complex systems, is that all the engineers were absolutely 100% convinced that the best way to go up the stairs was to lock the wheel and effectively just go up the stairs, just like in essence, what a human would be doing. We relaxed some of the rules in the simulation, and we said, "Well, let's not lock the wheel, and we'll see what happens." It turns out that for AEON or any wheeled-based humanoid, the best way to up the stairs is actually to use the inertia of the movement and have the wheel actually turn, so that when you go up, it's much, much easier, actually. Why am I giving you this example?
Simply because in simulation, we learn about solutions that were not intuitive, and that's extremely powerful when you're trying to resolve tasks. The second video is a bit quick. It's what you see actually in the back. It's very similar to what you see in the back. You will see AEON actually doing inspection, and you will see if you don't go pretty quick, there's two boxes, the green box and the red box. The green box is when AEON sees what the part is, and the red box is basically transposing that image to the real environment and seeing how does it need to inspect. Other words, what's happening, AEON sees the object, goes to the object automatically and in real-time calculates what's the right trajectory to inspect the object.
If you move the object around, it will just adjust in real-time. Quite powerful from a perception standpoint. The last one is imitation learning, which is what I mentioned at the beginning. What you'll see is the example. Pay attention a little bit that there's a silver piece and a green-ish piece, if you want. Just through imitation learning, what we did, obviously, is the right hand takes the silver on the right side, the left hand takes the green, goes on the left side. We never told AEON there's a silver and there's a green object, and here's what you need to do. We literally just put all the silver on one side and all the green on a side through teleoperation.
When it got to itself, it actually knows how to recognize the part, sees that there's two different parts, remembers effectively through training that the silver should go there and the green should go there. Imagine how much programming you would have had to do even two years ago to get that to work. It would basically be two objects, all positions on the table of those two objects, any combination thereof, and that's quite extensive. Right? Now, basically, we show it 30 times, it takes two hours, and it knows how to do it. We've won quite a few awards, and we're not going to go through them, other to say that we feel quite good about where we are from a product standpoint, and we're moving forward. Summary so far, there's a market, we have a product.
How do we bring it to commercial? First is recognition that there's quite a bit of competition in the space. This is a selected global players, large players, well-funded startups, U.S., Europe, China, we're aware of it. Why this list? Just if you take a step back, about 90% of the humanoids out there are actually for the consumer space, not for the industry space. This is the selection that's relevant to our market, the industry. The goal is not to give you a rundown on every one of them, but just to tell you we're quite aware that we have competition. The reason we're going to that market is that we feel that we have a differentiating product. If we didn't feel that, I think Anders would be the first one to say Cut.
He hasn't so far, which is all good. But we have competition, but we feel, again, very strongly where we are, and it goes back to some of the fundamental differences we have. The wheels, the battery swap, the sensor suite, spatial intelligence, and so on. Our roadmap, just to give you a view of where we are in 2023 and 2024, we're actually experimenting quite a bit with the form factor, still humanoid, but different variants of it. In 2025, we launched the first product, AEON, at Hexagon Live in June of 2025, and now we're really moving into commercial, so 2026 and beyond. What you see here is actually AEON working at the BMW factory, picking up the battery swaps.
A very clear roadmap for us, and 2026 is the year that we pivot from product to commercial. We have a very different, actually, approach to most of our competitors in that space of what we build versus what we buy versus where we partner. I wanted to spend just two seconds on it. We buy actually all the commodity elements. The raw sensors, the end effectors, the battery cells, we buy that. It's commodity. It will get better and better and cheaper and cheaper over time. Quite a bit of R&D actually to invest in that if you wanna be in that business. We actually build ourselves everything we feel is fundamentally differentiating. The training data, the sensor fusion, which Gordon mentioned, the motion control, and everything AI, 'cause that's really where we see the difference.
I should say everything AI except world models. We'll get it in a second. Where do we partner is where we feel that there's a very high R&D investment needed to get to the right level of competencies. The actuators, for example, we partner with Maxon. On the simulation and the edge AI, we partner with NVIDIA. On the world action model, we also partner with NVIDIA and others. With Microsoft, we do most of the compute, as you can imagine, using Azure, but also all the AI training pipeline. They're very, very strong at the pipeline. We don't have to reinvent the wheel. We partner with them.
We have a very interesting vertical integration strategy if you want, which is not to build it all ourselves, but to find the right partners and the right suppliers and really focus on where we think the differentiating will be in the next year, two years, five years, 10 years. I think Anders mentioned it also in the morning. How do we win? Basically three things. One, best-in-class product. We talked about the multipurpose aspect, and I will re-insist on that point as many times as I can, because truly a multifunctional humanoid is very, very different in the market than a humanoid that can do one thing, as an example, to pick and place objects. When you're multipurpose, you can do obviously multiple things. That's obvious. You can now manage your fleet very differently.
Imagine if you need to do manipulation and inspection and reality capture. You would basically need to buy X of one, Y of one, of the other one, and Z of the third one. If you have one humanoid that can do all these things, you need to buy actually quite a lower volume, and you optimize the usage of the humanoid fleet in real-time in your factory. That has resonated extremely well with all the customers we've talked to. We also know that we need production-grade performance and reliability. This is, again, I think where the heritage of Hexagon and the know-how and knowledge of Hexagon plays a massive role, which is, How do you deploy those robots in production? Customers need to be confident that the performance and the reliability is there. It's always the case in R&D, as you know.
The first 90% is quite easy to get to. The last 10% is really hard, and that's where we have, I think, just great, great expertise in the company. Commercial scale, we talked about our customers, but what's really interesting, and we'll talk about it at, in the next slide or after, is that every pilot we were doing was meant to scale. It can scale in two dimensions, either vertically, we just sell more AEONs to a customer, that's great, but also horizontally, which means we test use cases with customers where we have that multi-purpose aspect. We'll go into a few examples of how we crafted this and why we were actually quite specific with the pilots we did. We also have quite a bit of experience in driving high margins.
This is a hardware-software mixed business, and it's not that easy to get it right. Again, appreciative of the experience of all my colleagues in helping us figure out what's the right balance. The ecosystem. We talked about the technology partners, but what we have not announced yet, we're working with, is manufacturing partners, system integrator partners, machine builder partners, and we really feel that that ecosystem is going to play a big role. Going at it alone is great, but if you have the right partners in that ecosystem, it's going to be quite powerful, and that has been really proven in all Robotics deployment in the last 20 years. Speaking of the pilots, I'm going to spend a bit of time on that slide because, one, we're quite proud of the partners we have with pilots.
With BMW, we made a big announcement in February. We've been working with them for the last 6 months, and we're doing two things with them already. One is machine tending. The other one is a very precise manipulation of a battery swap. You'll see in the video in a second how precise it has to be. We're, they're quite happy. They've announced actually, they have announced publicly that AEON will be in production at the Leipzig factory of BMW by the end of the year. This is, again, going back to the statement, 2026 is the year of commercialization. We'll be in production in Leipzig by the end of the year with BMW. Schaeffler is a great partner of ours as well.
We've been working with them for about 8 months now, mostly about very high precision manipulation, and now we're also moving to inspection with them. Hopefully, you've seen actually last week, we've released a big partnership announcement with Schaeffler, where they will buy at least 1,000 of our robots over the next few years. Again, another big proof point for us of commercialization in 2026. We'll be in production with them by the end of the year in Germany, and the goal obviously is to expand to their global factory network. But it's, we feel it's a very strong testament, I think, to the partnership that they would go out and, basically, you know, say that they will buy at least 1,000 of our robots. Fill is very interesting.
We announced it at the beginning of the week as one of our new partners, effectively from a pilot perspective. They're a machine builder. If you're not familiar with them, they basically build stations, if you want, of highly technical robotic stations. When they sell it to a customer, of course, somebody needs to operate it. Once it's sold, they need to train somebody to actually operate the station. What we're working with them is to have AEON actually operate the station. There's two great use cases for us. One, AEON manipulating robots, which is interesting in itself. Two, obviously, that it could be a very interesting resell partner for us, where they sell the, not only the station, but with AEON as a fully autonomous solution to the customers.
Their customer base is 100% overlapping with ours. We have great synergies from that perspective as well. Microsoft, you see them as a tech partner, but they're also actually a pilot. We have three AEONs working in Houston for Microsoft. I would say it's more in a lab environment at the moment, but obviously, what we're doing is we're pushing the envelope of what a human can do in strong partnership with them. They were actually the first one to buy AEONs. We actually have sold a few AEONs this year. Very low volume, of course, but again, all the way back to the theme of 2026, year of commercialization. Pilatus, for those who don't know, is a high-end aircraft manufacturer. This was the inspection use case that we showed.
With them, we're working mostly on inspection of fuselage parts, which is again, has extremely stringent requirements on how precise that inspection has to be. What we've realized with them actually is that with all the sensors that AEON has, if AEON is at the right distance from actually a built-in fuselage, it can actually do inspection of a large part of the plane, which is a really difficult problem currently in the factory lines of airplanes. Quite happy with the partnership there. One which we cannot name yet, we thought we would, but we've been working on them with them for the last four months, I would say. It's in the automotive space, a big European automotive manufacturer, and there is the full gamut.
We do manipulation, inspection, and they're also looking at AEON to do reality capture. We hope to announce them by probably summer when we finish the big first pilot, and then we move towards production with them as well. We're quite happy actually with where we are. This year was quite pivotal for us. We're moving away from just a product that is nice to look at and having good demos to really a product where we have a clear line of sight to production, again, with BMW and Schaeffler by the end of this year. With Fill, actually, we're looking at early next year and with Pilatus as well. We feel that we have really good momentum, but again, for us, it's all about a differentiating product and a year of commercialization.
I always like to think that although those slides are quite interesting, if you ask me, in a completely objective manner, that the best thing to do is to do what does a customer think of AEON. With this, I'll have a video. Hopefully, the sound will work. I'm crossing my fingers, because the music will wake us up quite nicely. This is what BMW actually shot on their own with AEON. They had AEON working. There we go. You probably noticed that the end effectors were quite different across the use cases, just a proof point of that.
We're very happy and proud with the partnership with BMW, but I think it's a good just to summarize all it is like, well, it's about AEON in action in production, and that's what it was in one of their factories. Just to conclude, we think, again, we're really well-positioned, really built for the industry, differentiating factors, the wheels, the battery swap, the sensor suite, the spatial intelligence, and ready to scale. Now that we're moving to production, it's a big moment, by the way, for the division when you go from the concept to now we have a product to now we have customers actually rolling out in production. We're at just in that journey. We're super excited about the next few years. That's it for me.
Anders, I think I'm passing it back to you for a wrap-up, and opening the Q&A.
Can you hear me again? Yeah. Thank you, Arnaud. Fantastic presentation of a very interesting product for us going forward. I just want to wrap up a bit with going back to the slide that I had in the beginning. What did I want or we want with this day? Basically, to get a clear message of who are the new Hexagon going forward, what are we focused on, precision measurement and positioning technologies. We have a strong fundamentals with a strong growing markets, future markets, and we have leadership position wherever we operate, basically. Proven operating model with clear performance management, and as you could hear from our businesses, clear business strategies within all of our divisions going forward to generate profitable growth. We have communicated also clear financial targets going forward, which we are determined to fulfill.
With that, I want to thank you all for participating, both in London and also online. Sorry for being a bit late, but Tom, I think we will be going to Q&As anyhow.
Yeah.
Yep. Give us a minute to set up the stage, I think. We will be soon back.
We got the mic? Yeah. Perfect. Hi. Yes, last Q&A of the day. Probably focus on Autonomous Solutions and Robotics if we can, any other questions we will entertain as well. Okay. Got one just there, Elena.
Thank you, and thank you for all presentations. Very insightful. Arnaud, I have a question for you. You described in your presentation the example with the hands where prices have been driven down 90%, and you get double the capacity or something like that. You also talk about software coding and AI is driving that cost down. What makes you feel sure that the price of an AEON will stay up or drive higher? Or is this gonna be a volume market and prices are driven down at the same time? Thank you.
Great question. I think you have to look at it two ways. If you had a single-purpose humanoid, I think it's a bit of a race to the bottom. If you have a multipurpose humanoid, which we are, actually the ROI is on the total value, right, for the company that's using it. For example, you have manipulation, sure. A shortage of skilled workers, great. People can make their own assessment on ROI. When you add inspection, the value is less about doing the inspection when someone else could be doing it, is that it's a fundamental bottleneck in many of the factories.
The parts go out of the line, if the inspection is the inspector, for lack of a better term, is not present, sick day, this, that, the other, they just pile up, which means there's nothing going through the rest of the line. That's where when you look at multipurpose humanoids, the equation cannot be the economic equation is actually not the one-to-one of the price versus, it's really what's the value to the customer. All the conversation we had so far, that value is quite high, and we will maintain it high by doing more with AEON and making sure that our robot always bring a lot of value, right, of business value to the customer.
Great. Just one at the front here.
Thank you very much for the presentations. I guess, you know, it makes full sense for you to exclude robotics from financial targets, right? To really go after this opportunity. How will you handle the growth opportunity, you know, in the coming, call it five years? Because I guess there's a scenario where you can accelerate costs quite a lot, meaning that including the cost in the margins would all else equal go down for the group. Is it a situation where robotics will in five years' time cover your own cost with revenues? Is it that you need to find sort of a partner within two years? If that makes sense. Just how will you what will the strategy be for the coming five years?
Yeah. Thanks for the question. I tried to elaborate that a bit in my presentation. We are currently looking into this, and when we have a clear strategy going forward on how we will execute this, we will come back, and we'll tell you. Until that point, we will go play to win. That is fully funded by Hexagon, and Arnaud and I decide on how much that is. That is increasing quite quickly, as you said. The opportunity is tremendous, right? This is an area where, like Arnaud has talked about, we have an advantage over, I would say, all the other competitors currently, and we intend to keep that.
Until then, we are funding it within Hexagon. We are, like I said, looking also for partners going forward on how to accelerate further. We come into what Arnaud said, the inflection points and everything, different amounts of money are needed, of course.
Thank you. A little bit on the same, on the same topic. I think we have gone from mid-single digits EUR million costs per year for the robotics business to EUR 25 million to maybe EUR 50 million. Is that sort of the trajectory you should sort of continue to expect? Then we have to make up our own mind what the revenue is gonna be, but is that the kind of trajectory that we are looking at?
You should expect that will increase year-on-year all the time.
Second, let me add on to that. The inflection point we're talking about between 2029 and 2030, but can you be more explicit about what is the trigger of that inflection? Is it the capability of the robots or the pricing or?
I think it's a great question. I think it's a combination of a few things. I think capability of the robots, there's a lot of use cases we can do today. The inflection point is more about how many of those can you do in a single factory and not a single use case, right? The second inflection point is really when we start seeing physical AI being able to enable a deployment of a robot in what is called zero-shot learning, which at the moment, whether it's imitation learning or simulation reinforcement learning and so on and so on, it takes quite a bit of data, right, to get the robot to do the task with a high reliability.
The moment that changes to you show it once, it's done, then you can have a very steep inflection point because now anybody like Schaeffler, for example, can take the robot and teach new tasks, you know, overnight, right? That is a few years out. I think the third big inflection point we see is just honestly just demand and volume, right? When you have lower volume, the price is higher obviously. When you get to that point in time, you just see that effect that you've seen in many different industries, right, where it just switches, right? Again, as it's end of 2028 to early 2029, 2030, the market will tell.
Physical AI will be one of the drivers, I think, and we're still a few years away from the word model that many companies talk about. We work very closely with all of them, but it's a few years out before you can just have a robot look at a video once and be able to do a task.
A question, an accounting question maybe for Enrique. I was wondering about this new for EBIT focus you have, EBITAC. I like the idea that you focus operationally on the sort of cash EBITA. I understand you will still be capitalizing the R&D and have a reported EBIT with the same impacts that you've done historically in Hexagon, implying that you will have a different impact on the balance sheet than if you just focus on the cash EBITA, and that creates a little bit of issues looking at return on capital employed, et cetera. Is there a reason that you're keeping the capitalization? I mean, I met loads of CEOs saying, "I just expense all of my R&D direct," and I think that's the way the investors will prefer to look at things as well.
Could it be a tax issue, for example? Coming into the tax issue, you're guiding for a higher tax rate going forward, 19 to 21% versus historically 18%, and I think you achieved this attractive tax rate when you acquired Leica, the Swiss asset base, at that point of time. Now, with Octave, I don't think there's any changes to the Swiss exposure. Is there another reason for this tax hike?
Maybe I start with the tax question first. The EU's Tax Pillar Two also means that no country can do below 15%, and that effectively means that Switzerland has had to move up, and that moves up our average tax rate. That's the effect. Essentially, the mix of the countries that we have moves us up a bit from the 18% to the 19% to 21% range that we're in. It's not so much that Octave moves up. Actually, that has a smaller impact. In terms of the accounting question, the honest answer is that I don't know technically exactly how we will, you know, how we will handle that.
Actually, we need to sit down and look at that. The fact remains that we will continue for at least quite some time, at least, you know, keep the EBIT1, which means essentially that we will have a timing gap between capitalization and amortization of that R&D in terms of our, how we're, you know, our actual reporting. The key KPIs that we are following will be EBITAC that essentially expenses it and as a way for essentially so that we look at the total cash expense. I think I was having a conversation with some in the break.
Essentially, we take our full EUR 600 million, essentially say which ones of those, what are our top EUR 100 million and what return is that giving versus the bottom, EUR 50 million or EUR 100 million. I think that is much more of an interesting management accounting question than exactly how we capitalize and amortize. Hope it makes sense.
We have time for one more question, so we'll go to the back just there, Helena, by Madeline.
Thank you very much, and thank you for the presentations today. It's Ben Castillo from BNP Paribas. Two, if I can just squeeze them in here. First one for you, Arnaud. It feels like, you know, you alluded to earlier with the cost deflation of some of the components for AEON. Perhaps it's not the hardware that has the moat, perhaps it's maybe the industry domain knowledge, perhaps it's the data layer on top. Today, I guess you're selling hardware, but how do you position yourself to maybe capture that data or software opportunity long term that may have more of a durable moat? And maybe I'll ask a second question afterwards, but start with that, please. Thank you.
When we sell AEON, it's actually, it's a combination of software and hardware. The software side is that we bring some training elements, right? That the chefter can train the robot itself, for example. There's a cost to that. How do you maintain that over time is that we feel that that portion will be more and more important for customers. They want to train the robot on a particular task. They want to train the robot at doing inspection, not just manipulation, and so on. When we look at how we sell AEON, the CapEx, typical CapEx, if you want a model, is the least likely, right? In the short term, we think there'll be some of that because different budgets from different companies, but it will move quickly to robot-as-a-service model.
In that context, frankly, you assign even more worth to the software than you do to the hardware. Yeah.
Just a follow-up question, this may be for you, Anders or for Enrique to comment on here. I get that the robotics business is a totally different business to the rest of Hexagon in terms of where it is in its life cycle. Could you help us just, you know, what are you aiming for? What might you re-report on the progress here? You know, perhaps either milestones on certain revenues or shipment rates, you know, what should we anticipate from you? When it does start to generate revenues, will you be including those but excluding the costs from your margins? Yeah, how should we think about that R-evolution? Thanks.
Yeah, like I said, we will not include anything with robotics in our targets with the way we follow up, neither the investments or the revenues. We will be fully transparent externally with revenues, with cost, and the result for robotics, but it will not be included, and I would say hindered in its development by the group financial target framework. Like Arnaud said also, we play to win, and this is needed to be able to play to win within the Hexagon group. With that, I think we are concluding, Tom, right?
Yeah.
From us up here, we really thank you. It's been a pleasure to talk to you today. There's also an opportunity to have a look on your way out on the booths back there. Looking forward to speaking with all of you soon again and travel home safe. Enjoy the fantastic London weather. It's not very often, so take the opportunity. All right. Thank you. Take care.