Unfortunately, I'm out traveling today with not the best connectivity, so I will leave the camera off to save some bandwidth, and I'm gonna take you through a short introduction to HMS. The way I'm thinking we're gonna structure today's call is that I'm gonna go on for some, well, 25 minutes or so to present the company, with first an introduction to what we do, and then we're gonna have a look at our specific objectives, and then our financial updates based on Q3. Please, can everyone please mute for the first section, and then you will have the chance to ask questions? Thanks for that.
So just to be clear, there will be no new financial information than what we shared in Q3, and I will not answer any questions about current trading and so on. So this, the purpose of the call is to give everybody an introduction to the HMS business to understand what we do rather than what's going on at the moment. But with that, I'm gonna kick off with the introduction to HMS, and if we start just looking at our mission statement, we are enabling valuable data and insights, allowing our customers to increase productivity and sustainability. And I think that's exactly what we're trying to do.
By connecting various machines to different networks and to cloud services, we're trying to get our customers to understand what's going on in the processes and to be able to have a more efficient production. I'm gonna, of course, get a bit deeper than that. Just first, some highlights about the company. So we're approaching 10 million connected devices. I think we'll reach that this year. And just a bit more than 400,000 machines that are continuously connected to our cloud solutions and monitored remotely by that. And we say that we are in the business of industrial ICT, so that's information and communication technology, and I will get a bit deeper also what we mean by that. We are quite early to adapt to new technology and driving some of the development in our industry.
We are about 800 employees, 1/3 in R&D, 1/3 in sales, and the rest trying to support those very important functions. Offices in 18 countries, partners in fifty, headquartered in Halmstad, Sweden, on the west coast. Last 12 months, as of Q3 this year, we were at about SEK 3 billion in sales and a 26% operating margin, and we managed to keep a CAGR of 20%. Actually, based on, You can choose pretty much whatever base year you want, you would find a CAGR of about 20% regardless. Now, we took the last 10 years as an example, but that would go for more than 10 years, and you can look at five years or whatever you want. It will be about the same number. All right.
Looking at where we have our business, so we have developed our business in two base end markets, you could say, what we call industrial automation and building automation. Within industrial automation, which is by far the largest area, we have the manufacturing space, with factory automation as being the biggest segment. You will understand when we go through the different solutions that we have, that we are sort of a horizontal offering. So it's not so easy for us to say exactly what share revenue we have in different verticals. But the manufacturing space is maybe 60% or so of our revenue, so that's by far the largest one.
Then within transportation, infrastructure is also an interesting area where we've been breaking good ground in warehouse handling with AGVs, for instance, where we have a lot of our wireless applications delivered to. Then we have power and energy, where we have managed to break some ground also the last two-three years within battery management with these big solar plants and to manage the battery cells related to those plants, the communication there. Then finally, building automation, where we have a business called Intesis that we acquired in 2016, that's been developing very nicely, but it's a little bit different end market than the rest, so we keep that separate for the time being, where we connect air conditioning to building management systems, and I'll get into that as well.
I think the main point I wanna make is that you see some various verticals and so some different areas of end usage. It's pretty much the same technology that we sell into all of these. So that, I think that's important to keep in mind, that we sell the same solutions to all these different customers. Let me then go into what we call our playing field a bit more in detail, and then you recognize from previous page, the industrial automation and the building automation split. Starting with industrial automation, we have what we refer to as control-centric and information-centric businesses. And if I start with the control-centric, so what we do here is really trying to support, in most cases, real-time controlling.
So it's, to a large extent, robots, robot controlling, where you have a really, really quick information exchange. And when we say real time, of course, that's a matter of definition. We mean maybe 2 milliseconds in terms of latency on the data. Otherwise, we will have problems for our customers. So it's really quick information exchange, and what we want to accomplish is smart manufacturing, increased uptime of machinery, and of course, productivity and sustainability, as is in our mission. And what we really do is, if you look at the shop floor, you will find a lot of different types of network standards that are being used.
When you and me work in the office, in my environment, it's quite kind of simple, because we only use IP, Internet Protocol, for all information, but on the shop floor, it's a bit different. So you have both fieldbus protocols, and you have Ethernet-based protocols, and today we have a range of about 30 different standards that are being used. That makes it a bit difficult if you are a device or machine builder, and you need to connect to all those different systems, then you typically come to HMS for help or someone else but HMS is the topic of today, of course. So I think that's our really core knowledge, how to connect all these different networks and keep those products up to date with standard changes, with new features, and so on.
You might be surprised. You would think that everything is wireless these days. It's not when you look at these type of technologies, and the main reason is what I mentioned before with real-time controlling. I think there is a problem with wireless technologies today, that they are not fast enough to, in a reliable way, be able to handle those data loads in a fast and efficient type of manner, as you can with a wired cable.
We also have an offer for network monitoring and diagnostics, meaning that if you have a network that is functioning, you wanna make sure that that keeps in place and you keep the uptime going, and then you wanna make sure that you don't get intruders to network, and you wanna see that all your devices are functioning as they should. That is something we do as well and can also help with diagnostics if there is a failure. So this is really about reliable and robust manufacturing processes. If we then go over to the information-centric area, which is slightly different, here we are really after getting better insights to our customers, increase operational overall equipment efficiency, and also, of course, work for productivity and sustainability.
Here we do it by allowing you to connect your machine remotely. So if you wanna update some firmware and do some maintenance, you can do that from remote. You don't have to physically go out to the plant and connect to the control system, in most cases used through a PLC, a programmable logic controller, which is the main device for making and controlling in these type of environment. So we have actually two main offers in this area. One is, as I said, to allow you to connect remotely, and the other one is to extract data from that same PLC device, which is then controlling your processes.
So then you can extract the data, and we will also help you to visualize that data in dashboards and show KPIs and whatever you want to do with our cloud solutions. And here it's not. I think the main differentiator is that when we talk this information-centric offering, it's not so important to be real time. You would like to learn, and in longer term, drive improvements of your processes. It's not really about optimizing them in real time. And then the third offering in building automation, which is a little bit niched, we are primarily focusing on connecting various HVAC devices, so primarily air conditioning, to the building automation system in order to be more effective in using energy to have the right temperature in buildings and so on.
We also do some controlling for lighting, fire, access control, so on, but the air conditioning is the main part. And it's all about making sure that everybody speaks the same language, so that you can actually connect different systems to another. Then looking at our different types of customers, I think this is quite important to understand our business model, because we have actually, we can say three different business models and two different main customer groups. We talk about what we call makers of industrial equipment and users of automation systems, and it's really about, are you the one who are manufacturing or are you the one who are using the machines? I think next slide will make it a bit clearer what we mean by that.
And I think this, again, is important because we go to market in very different ways. The business is sticky in different ways in these different groups. Let's start with the device manufacturers, and maybe I should first define device manufacturer, machine builder, and end user, and system integrators. That's the three main customer groups that we see. Start on the maker side with device manufacturers and machine builders. The main difference there is it's quite similar, but we say device manufacturer would typically be a device that is smaller than one cubic meter, and a machine builder would be larger machines. And normally the offerings we sell is a little bit different. The cost sensitivity is also quite different in these customer groups.
What you are prepared to offer your client, in their view, is also a little bit different. If we start with the device manufacturers, we sell on a design win business model, meaning that we work a lot to win the design. Let's say it's a robot that's gonna be connected. It could take us maybe 6-12 months to get access and get a chance to win the business, and then we get the design win, and then it takes maybe a year, could be two years, before the robot is ramped up in production. So it's a long process, but in return, it's a really sticky business because our product, in this case, becomes a part of the maker's bill of material.
And then normally the product is certified with that, that, component in it, and then it becomes quite difficult to change, and we, we never see that, that we are being exchanged once we won this design win. And this is also a, 100% direct sales, so it's our own sales engineers that are making the sale. And as I said, pretty long, complex process, but once it's there, it's, it's really good business for many years. In many cases, like 10 years before you, you have a new, new, family in place, and then there's a new, a new race to be run. The other area, on the maker side, is the machine builders.
Again, the slightly larger machines, and the main part of offering that we sell to these type of customers is often this remote access offering. Here we have 27% of our revenue and this is a little bit different from the Deciwin. It happens that we are specified as a static component, but in most cases, we are sort of an option or an add-on that the customers, customer could choose to add. The main value proposition we have here is basically that this machine builder, when they sell a machine, quite often they are also engaging in an aftermarket service agreement.
So they are maybe selling an SLA, that the product is gonna or the machine is gonna work a percentage of the time, and they wanna make sure that they can do diagnostics and see what's happening without actually having to go out to the plant. So that's the main usage that we have, the main value proposition. We also have other applications. Other, Yeah, I guess you could say applications, where also the end user would like to understand what's going on in their process from this remote access offering. And this is a combination of some direct sales, but also to a large extent, distribution sales to reach all these machine builders.
Here we have a lot of different customers, and the smaller the customer, well, the more of them will buy from distribution, and the larger ones we try to handle on our own. Going over to the user side. We have end users and system integrators being the main customers, 29% of revenues. This is a lot of product sales. If you have, for instance, let's say you're an automotive manufacturer, and you're gonna extend a plant, and you're gonna put in a new line or two, and you wanna connect that to the other plants as well. Typically, you will buy a bunch of gateways and try to connect these different plants together, and quite often you are doing this with the help of a system integrator.
And here we see if you're gonna compare the user sales with the maker sales, most often you see a lot of smaller orders with a few devices per order. The exception would be if you have these really large projects, where, of course, it would be lot larger volumes. But it is a quicker business in the sense that here you have typically get an order and ship out the next day or within a week, where the maker business is much longer cycles in the orders. And here we go to market both with what we call a traditional distributors or value-adding distributors that make some kind of consultant service as well, and also through e-commerce, distributors are the main ways to go to market.
Then I'm just gonna quickly go through a little bit how we see the market growth in these different segments, because it varies a little bit, starting with the control-centric business, which is a really mature business. It's been around for many years for us. We have a leading position in the market, being number 1 in the world on this, even if it's a rather small niche. 71% of the HMS sales year to date, Q3 2023, and growing by 8% CAGR over a period of five years, according to various industry reports and our own assessments. And then we're going over to information-centric. Here we see a high growth.
We are expecting some 15% growth over the coming five years in CAGR, and that's where we have been since, I guess, 2016, when we entered this business. We've been around 15%, 16% CAGR for this business organically, and we have been voted, I can't remember how many years, the best product for remote access in the world. I think it's starting to approach 10 years now with our Ewon Flexy and Ewon Cosy products. 21% of our business year to date, 2023, and then finally the building automation space with a 10% CAGR. We've actually been outpacing that a little bit the last few years, and this is what the industry report says, what we can expect from the future.
Again, we are pretty big in this air conditioning connectivity to building management systems, and there are. I think we are number one or maybe number two in the world in that space as well, even if it's a really small niche. All right, that was the business introduction, and let's go over to strategic objectives. Here we have. We had a Capital Markets Day in. When was this? September, I think it was, this year, when we launched a small strategy update for our 2025 strategy. We've been talking about, since we launched this new strategy in 2020, we've been talking about having focus on organic growth and M&A, and that they should both drive the top line with about equal parts.
We've been talking about our people strategy and our planet strategy, which I'll talk a little bit more about on the next slide, what we want to achieve there, because those are, of course, really important questions for us. Then what was a bit new in the strategy that we presented now in September was that we're also adding operational efficiency and sales excellence. And why are we doing that? I think maybe, first of all, it's a really important message to the organization internally. We've been doing a lot of investments over the last couple of years in getting better data support, changing ERP system, looking at different ways to go to market in sales with a higher degree of digitalization.
I think now we are at the point where we need to start to see the returns of those investments. So I think this is really important things that we'll work with in 2024 and 2025 to really get the full potential of those investments that's been done. We talked a lot about that internally, so we wanted to make it clear that this is really on top of the agenda. Looking at our targets, I'm gonna come back to the planet and the people strategy here, starting with the planet. We have, since I guess 2020, we've really been trying to reduce our emissions. And while that is really challenging, when you're growing with 20% per year, we've been trying to put this on as high as we can on the agenda.
As a consequence, we have now decided that we're gonna sign up for science-based targets during 2024, to really show that we are serious with this and to get even more focus on doing the right things in the climate topic. We've also seen that our products have a pretty good effect on, for our customers. So saving a lot of emissions when we can reduce travel and increase productivity and so on. And we had about 1 million tons saved in 2022 for our customers, and now the objective is to triple that at the 2030. So that will call for first, of course, improved products from our side, but also we need to make sure that we grow the offering that we have in order to accomplish that.
I think for us, as a rather small company, still quite international, it's difficult to recruit just by paying more. We need to make something else to attract the people to work for us. I think the people agenda has been really important for us to drive for personal development and to have a decent work-life balance, and to be able to show that we wanna have, we wanna help to have a healthy way of living, basically. And we have a target to reach or to stay actually, above 50 in Net Promoter Score on the employee side. I think we are at 51, actually, at the time being, and we've been over 50 now for three quarters in a row, so we're very happy with that.
When we started this work in 2020, we were around 25 in Net Promoter Score, so we really managed to make improvement to get to this level of above 50. And then from, for the customers, of course, it's, it's super important to have customers that are satisfied with what we do, and we also have a target to have a Net Promoter Score of, more than 50 for our customers. Right now, we are not achieving great in relation to that. I think we are around 30. I think the main reason when we ask our customers is that the lead times have been long throughout the period of difficulties with components. So understandable in a way, and we've seen a pretty dramatic drop over this last 18 months when lead times have been extended.
As everyone else, we've been pushing price increases as well. Of course, no customer likes that. So we are, we are convinced that this is a temporary drop, but we're gonna work really hard to get back to the +50 mark. Then finally, here we have some work to do on the top manager positions. We wanna have 30% of our managers being female. Today, we are around 20%-22%, something like that, and we wanna accomplish this by 2025. So that's a really challenging target, but we're working with that as well. And then on the growth and profitability side, we wanna be above 25% EBIT. This is something we increased now in September on the Capital Markets Day.
It used to be 20%, and we see that we've been achieving this 25% now for 1.5 years-2 years, and I thought it was time to really reflect that in the operating margin target as well. In terms of sales, we wanna reach pi billion SEK plus by 2025. And what we mean here is that we organically, we should get to pi billion, so 3.14. Being engineers, we thought it was hilarious to say pi instead of having just 3 billion target. And then the plus would be from any acquisitions on top. So that's how we communicated that in the Capital Markets Day. Let me just take a few very quick minutes on the financial updates from Q3.
It's not super new, but I'll just give you some highlights. I think the quarter as such, in terms of sales and profitability, was a new record for us. Due to really, really high amounts of orders for the last two years, we have now a pretty big order book that we are eating up. We see a bit of a change compared to Q2 in terms of order intake, with a lot of normalization and inventory adjustments going on at our customers. This is not in any way unexpected. I think we've been communicating quite clearly that that's going to happen. Maybe this is happening a little bit quicker than we thought. We thought it would be a slower process. It's now been quite rapid change, and you see in the graph in a second.
But again, I think when we talk to the customers, we are not so concerned. We think that if you adjust for this, the underlying market is fairly, fairly okay, and I think the customers are pretty clear that they are making these inventory adjustments now when component lead times are back to, to normal and, they can't really defend having these big, safety stocks anymore. And of course, I assume that all CFOs out there also have a bit of a higher voice now, and interest rates have, have come up. And again, the, the, availability of components is better, and it's, it's quite natural that safety stocks are being reduced and, and inventory adjusted. So we think that we will see sort of the, the same trend for, a few more quarters.
That's pretty much what we communicated when we launched the Q3. And then just on the balance sheet, we are happy to see that we now don't have any interest-bearing debt anymore. We still have some leasing-related debt, of course, but interest-bearing is now gone, and that makes us in a good position to continue to try and execute on our M&A agenda for the future. And then just to show you, I'm just gonna go through this real quick. Order intake, looking at the graph, the 492, of course, not a great number, but I think it's maybe more interesting to see it in this way when we're trying to show you what we have.
We did this since beginning of 2021, the light blue, which we said is boosted orders that come from these component shortages, and the dark blue is really the underlying demand. And here you see that we are at 642 in Q3 2023 in underlying demand. So yes, it's a little bit lower than in Q1 and Q2, but if you compare to 2022, it's actually a quite okay number. And we say here that we had this normalization of about SEK 150 million on the order side. Then looking at the sales, as I said before, a new record quarter, SEK 789 million, 20% organic growth.
Year to date, we have grown by 23% organically, and I didn't put the slide in, but we still have a pretty solid order book. So to have this order intake with a bit lower pace for a quarter or two more is nothing strange. We have the order book that will support us, and we should be able to deliver decent sales volumes anyway. Finally, on the profitability side, record result SEK 223 million, 28% EBIT margin. Now Q3 is always strong in terms of margin since we do have some vacation effects, and so the cost base is a bit lower. And year to date margin, we're at 25.8%, which is actually a pretty solid result given that the 25% target.
And then also I want to just make a quick note on that. I think we've been seeing good improvement on the gross margin over the last couple of quarters. We had some challenges in late 2021, early 2022, when we saw really high COGS inflation, and now I think we managed to recoup that with price increases. And 65.4% is a really good number for us. Maybe not what we can expect to be on that level forever, but I think that's very solid. And here it's been really price adjustments have been driving, also favorable currency situation and reporting in Swedish kronor and some efficiency improvements we've done in our supply chain. All right.
I think I'll I'm just going to stop right there and open up for Q&A. I said I would go for 25 minutes. It became 27. So the rest of the hour we have for questions. So yes, please raise your hand if you have a question, and I will take you one by one. And the first question I have is from Ludwig. I can't hear you, Ludwig.
Was it me, Joakim? Nikolai.
Yeah, sorry. Sorry, sorry, Nikolai. Yes.
Yeah, no worries, no worries. Well, my first question was on Anybus. I was just wondering if in terms of you have a few different form factors on the embedded Anybus products. This is a quite specific question, but I was just wondering if over the last year or two or three even, whether you have seen any trends in the percent of sales that go to the different form factors, so the modules, the bricks, and the chips?
Yeah, very, very good question, I think. There is a bit of a trend that, I think you could say if I were to look at complete sales, there is a trend that we have a lower percentage of the modules. Obviously, the modules are the most expensive products, but not necessarily the best gross margin. So there is a bit of a change that some larger customers are, you know, building more themselves. So it really works like this: if you buy the module, you buy pretty much a complete solution. If you buy the brick, you will do a little bit of integration work yourself.
If you buy just the chip, you have typically really high volumes and a low selling price, and then you're going to completely integrate it into the rest of your solution. I think we've been seeing better growth. I mean, everything is growing, but we see better growth on the bricks than the modules. And I must also say that I don't follow that super closely. But of course, the Anybus team is doing that, but that's sort of the trend, if I should say anything.
Could you just comment, Joakim, on what, since when you have seen that trend emerging?
I think that's been, that's probably been going on since I started with HMS. That was in 2017. It's not super clear, but it, you know, slowly, slowly, we see that that pacing. And I think it comes from the fact that we are having more large customers.
Yeah. Okay.
And it's not.
Yeah.
It's not so common that a customer would change, you know, from one to the other offering. That's quite unusual.
Okay.
So it's-
But it's more towards the brick and not the chip as such?
No, no.
Okay.
I think there are competitors on, we have some competitors on the chip side, so then I think it's more about choosing a different option maybe. So it's not that you go from a brick to chip normally.
Thank you.
All right, next question. Aaron Scott, please.
Hi, Joakim. Thanks for the presentation. I just had one on inventory adjustment or how you've been estimating the impact of destocking. Can I just ask how you calculate the sort of over-ordering and boosted orders that you've seen? It's a more precise estimate than most companies are prepared to give. And then secondly, how long do you expect this destocking to continue?
All right. Thank you, Aaron, for that. So that's, of course, a good question, and the answer is that this is not easy. I think what we did, we started because we realized that something was happening in 2021, where we suddenly saw this rapid order intake increase. So that's when we started to present that development, and it was much easier to look, of course, on the order intake, the boost orders because we simply asked our customers, "So, you know, when do you want delivery?" And we saw if the customer normally would place an order with delivery a month from now, and now suddenly they placed an order in January to be delivered in December, you kind of realized that something was up. So I think that was quite easy to do to exercise.
What we did was we did two things to understand. One was that we looked at the ordering pattern, so from a pure numerical perspective on those orders. And then we also asked our largest customers. So in all our different geographies, we asked the 30 largest customers. So I think we covered our 150 largest customers, which would, I don't know exactly, but it would give you a good indication of representing a large percentage of our sales, of how much they really wanted now and how much they needed for the future. So that's how we did it when we calculated the boost effects.
And then to do the reversal is of course more difficult because it's difficult to go to a customer and ask, "Why didn't you place an order?" So I think we've been trying to rely solely on a pure interview basis with our customers to understand what's going on. And of course, so it's really built bottom up from individual discussions with our customers. And I think the reason we're doing it is because we really need to understand in terms of, you know, forecasting and preparing the demand level in the right way, in the right way.
And then we said, "Okay, we think it's important that we also let our investors in a little bit on this," because we what we wanna do, I think our job is to give a fair picture of what's happening in the company and to avoid unnecessary ups and downs in the trading. Maybe that didn't fully help because I think the share price has been a bit up and down anyway. But I think we try to reflect what we see, and we don't see a problem in being transparent. We realized that we've been more transparent than most other companies, and yeah, I guess that's the answer to your question.
Yeah. And just on. Are you able to share an estimate of?
Uh, yeah
... whether you expect this trend to continue? Yeah.
Yeah, sure. So I think what we said in the Q3 call was also that we, we will expect this to be sort of similar into Q1, and then maybe see, see improvements in Q2 next year. I hope that we'll, we'll see a bit of improvement in, yeah, maybe already in Q1. But I think that, that would make sense for us when we run the scenarios and listen to what the main customers are saying. Because we know that there, there were a lot of customers that placed good orders in, in the first half of the year that are now saying to us, "You know, guys, we're done for 2023. We'll, we'll come back early 2024 because we have what we need already in place." So I think, yeah, Q1 a little bit better, and Q2 should, should be starting to, to move again.
Okay. Thanks.
All right. Rob McKee, please.
Morning. You've talked on previous calls. You've mentioned, and I think this is for the Anybus business, but like, ABB, Rockwell, Schneider as being large customers, I think. But who else are your big customers in that segment? And then do you expect to grow in line with their. So your volumes in line with their volumes? Because it sounds like the mix of in- versus in-house versus outsource isn't really changing. So how do you expect to grow relative to them? And then just also finally on between device manufacturers, machine builders, and end users, and system integrators, will that mix, d o you expect that mix to change going forward? Like, who's growing fastest?
All right. Thanks, Rob. So let's see if I can remember everything you asked. The first, What was the first part now? I forgot to write it down.
Who, who are the large customers?
Yeah, yeah.
You mentioned a few.
Right. Right. So yeah, I think Rockwell and Schneider would be the largest two. ABB is up there, and Bosch is a big one as well, Mitsubishi. And then we have well, a few other ones that I'm not allowed to say. Caterpillar is pretty big. It's, you know, you can basically see the big automation players and big machine builders like Atlas Copco, also pretty big Swedish company. And then we have a range of distributors that would be among the largest as well. Toshiba also a big one.
Okay.
Are you growing, a re you growing in line with their, like, are you taking sort of wallet share or growing units faster than those customers in the Anybus business?
So here's my take on this. The reason I mean, if you were to look at the last, I don't know, 10 years, and just plot our growth versus all of these customers, you would probably find that we've been growing faster organically. I think the reason is that the penetration of connected devices increases. So I mean, it's not, A couple of years ago, it wasn't certain that you wanted to connect the robot, and now it's done in a much, much, to greater extent. So I think that has been, you know, they've been selling, if they've been selling, you know, 5% growth in robots, and we've been selling controllers at a 10% growth, it's just because they've been selling more robots that are connected. I think that's the main reason why we've been outgrowing them.
And, you know, I guess that will continue to help us, that the penetration still will increase a little bit. So I think that's, If you look at the growth estimates that I showed, I think they are a little bit higher than what you would see if you were to look at maybe the best, you know, simple proxy of just looking at industrial automation business as a whole, how that is growing and then you saw that my numbers were a little bit higher. Did I miss something on your question?
Just the mix between device manufacturer-
Yeah.
And machine builders, is that gonna change?
Yeah. You know, I think what we see right now is that the system integrator business is a little bit better, and I think that we'll see—we've seen for the, yeah, maybe last one, two years, even if I think the device manufacturers have been. It's been looking really well because I think they've been stocking up a little bit. But if you reduce for that, I think that the system integrator and user business will outgrow the other areas a little bit.
Great. Thank you.
All right. Let's see who is in line. I think it was. I'll let Jonathan go first, and then come back to the ones who already asked some questions. So, Jonathan, please go ahead.
Thank you very much. Two very different questions. You talked about the lack of any interest-bearing debt. Historically, you've obviously done a few deals, but I think you recently expressed a willingness to take on bigger M&A. Just wondering if that is still the case? And the second question is on the building automation, the focus on HVAC, has that been a deliberate focus, or that's the area that you think is a starting point into other areas in building automation?
All right, so if I go first on the interest-bearing debt and your question regarding larger M&A, if that's still on the table, I would say yes, that is something that we've been discussing for some time. Also, with us being a little bit bigger, I think the largest acquisition we've done so far is maybe, yeah, some EUR 25 million in revenues, and I think that is becoming a rather small share of the HMS business. So we're willing to look at some bigger targets, and we're looking at some bigger targets at the moment, so I think that's interesting. Then on the HVAC, very good question.
That's exactly what you're saying, if we're looking at different verticals, when it comes to building and integrating those to building automation systems, building management systems, sorry. Yes, that's really been our top strategy discussion on that type of business, and we are trying to do it to some extent, and the value chain looks a little bit different for some of the other verticals, so it's not as easy as it might be in, you know, on a management consulting report. But we do have some of those ideas. Why we started with HVAC, I think the company Intesis started working.
That was how it, the company started, and they managed. I think what we do differently than everyone else is that we actually have really close collaborations with the main air conditioner manufacturers. So we have access to their proprietary protocols, and they are fine with us making these integration to these proprietary protocols, which the other players do not have, so they have to reverse engineer, and I think that's a big upside, and it also enables us to push our offering in their distributor channels in a better way. All right-
So you do, sorry, just to follow up. You do have products currently that address other areas in building automation, or you're thinking about developing other products in other parts of building automation?
Yeah, we already have,
Okay
Products that address, but we don't push it maybe that actively, and we don't make the final adjustments to make it really attractive. So I think there is some work to be done there.
Okay. Thank you.
All right. I think I have the same, the same people in line, that have just asked some questions, so I'm gonna go Nikolai first.
Yeah. Yeah, thanks, Joakim. So just a question on wireless. You mentioned it earlier also, I think within the warehouse and kind of AGV use case that you're seeing some wireless wireless business, so to speak. So could you just comment on to what extent are these new new kind of use cases and customers versus existing customers kind of switching over to wireless? And could you comment on how much business you actually do within wireless and whether it's still relatively small? And then whether you see any threats from kind of wireless wireless growing, right? Because at least-
Yeah
It seems like, just to explain what I mean, so it just seems like your kind of hardware expertise and your kind of form factors and the way you integrate into or you let your customers integrate your products into their products just seems like some kind of advantage, which is more difficult to see in wireless.
Yeah, I think what we do is, maybe first, what type of application? I think it's really about the access point for the AGV. I think that's the main application, to make sure that is connected. Today, I think most people are using Wi-Fi or 4G network for those. And it's not working super good, so we think 5G would be an exciting opportunity to improve the wireless communication and also make more complex AGV requirements, basically. Today it's a small part.
It's about 3% of our business, so it's a small part, but we think, I mean, this has a lot of potential, and I'm not sure if I agree that we would be in a worse position than in any other area to be able to tie up customers and go with our solution. I'm not sure that's the case, but it's not as integrated as an Anybus Embedded module, of course. So there you're right. In that sense, it could be easier to change to a different supplier if that was what you were after. So maybe it could be a market with some more interesting competition and maybe a bit faster moving. But we see that as a fast-growing area with some good potential for the future.
Yeah. Yeah, just one example is this Lumen Radio, which I think you probably know, Joakim. They kind of address that space, right? And I mean, their products do seem a bit simpler in a way. I'm not sure if you know them well.
Yeah, yeah, of course, we know it. We were looking to buy them before they made the IPO. I think the problem we saw with Lumen is probably that they are basing a lot on proprietary protocols, and that is not always or if you see the business that they do, they do a lot of entertainment business, so, lighting, controlling for really advanced, if you have a concert or you have a big movie set, stuff like that. But they're not so big in the industrial space. I mean, that's SEK 2 million, I think. And I think the reason is because you don't. You wanna have open standards. You don't wanna go on proprietary standards.
At least that was looking from our point of view on the, on the industrial automation space, that was the risk that we didn't wanna bet on with, with Lumen. But otherwise, I mean, it's a super nice company, really nice products, and I think they've been doing a, an excellent job in, in what they do. But, but yeah, in the industrial automation space, we believe it's maybe a bit more challenging to grow that. So that's why we, we didn't go after it. I think we, we need to move on in terms of getting through everything. Aaron Scott is next in line.
Yeah, just on the operating profit margin target, obviously, it implies a slowdown or contraction in margins from current level. Is that done so to leave some headroom for acquisitions? And so if acquisitions aren't made of lower-margin businesses, we may expect margins to remain nearer to current levels?
I think it's a relevant question, and I think there are three parts to the answer. I think yes, one is because it's difficult to find acquisitions on a 25% or 25%+ EBIT margin basis. Most companies are not there in our industry, and we don't want that to be too limiting factor. I mean, there are many good companies that, of course, do a little bit less than 25%. So I think that's one reason. Then we also need to acknowledge the fact that, I mean, right now, looking at numbers, we've had these boost orders. It is maybe on the peak of the macro landscape, so that's helping us. Plus, that we have a pretty weak Swedish krona that is giving us some leverage as well.
So I think there are a couple of things that we, we just don't wanna, we just don't wanna paint it in and say that it's gonna be like this forever. But I think the acquisition one is maybe the main, the main reason why we don't say that, we should expand further than that.
Yeah. That's even despite the revenue target not accounting for acquisitions?
Exactly. The SEK 3.14 billion is without acquisitions. Yeah. Correct.
Yeah. Thanks.
All right, I think we have Rob as next in line.
Yeah. Hi, thanks. At the Capital Markets Day, you talked a bit about security and the opportunity, and you clearly see something in the market that you think needs to be addressed better. Staffan talked about it a bit, but I didn't, Is it possible to, yeah, just explain what it is you see on the back of flow? Like, where is the opportunity that you see? And then as you think about acquisitions, would these be like hardware or software? What types of businesses exist that would be interesting to you in security?
Yeah, good question, and I think we received a lot of questions on that topic. It's certainly not that simple. I think what we see is that I think the security thinking on the OT, on operations technology, on the shop floor, is really, really poor. So there are a lot of risk, and it's not a problem unless you start to connect devices to the cloud, and I guess the problem that arises now is that a lot of companies want to connect the devices to the cloud to be able to gather all the information, and of course, that's part of our business to do that. And what we've seen is that, you know, many of the large users, big plants, they do not want to do it because they're afraid of the risks.
So, I mean, for us, we see it as a bit of a business enabler for the rest of our business as well, to make sure that there is a better offer to, with, with firewalls and threat detection and, and so on. So we've been looking into that quite a bit, and we see that there is some void in the market. There are a few companies that are starting to do interesting things. Unfortunately, it's difficult from an M&A perspective because you have some really large companies that are doing quite okay, and then you have some smaller ones, more in a startup phase. But not too many mature companies of the right size for us.
It's a bit difficult from an M&A point of view, but what we wanna do is, yeah, exactly what I said, try to support with the first most basic step in order to improve your security in those networks. And, yeah, we have a few targets that we're looking at, but it's, I wish the list was longer, if I put it like that.
Okay, thank you.
All right, Jonathan?
Yes. Hi. Just wanted to kind of come back a little bit to the, the idea of the margin targets and, balancing, profitability with revenue growth, and, perhaps a slightly more philosophical question asking you, which would you be willing to sacrifice if you had to for a year or so? Would it be the revenue growth? I mean, you're already ahead of kind of the trajectory of your revenue growth target, but revenue growth or, operating margin.
I think, you know, now, I know we didn't talk too much about the trends and our positioning in this call. We had a discussion on that in the Capital Markets Day, and I think we believe that we are very well positioned in this industry. And given that that's the case, I think we would be willing to sacrifice the profitability, of course, not to any means, but percentage points if we think that we're doing the right things for the long-term growth. So I think you can probably expect that if there were a bit tougher times, that the operating margin would go down a little bit. I mean, that would be our priority is to do the right thing for the top line.
I think that's been discussed with our owners and in the board a lot, and I think everybody's pretty clear on that priority.
Okay. Thank you very much.
Thank you. All right, we have nine minutes left, and, did Jonathan have another one? Your hand is still up.
Oh, yeah, sorry, I forgot to take my hand down, but I will have another one since I have the floor.
Yeah.
Yeah, just on the longevity, I guess, and kind of, not dominance, but the market leadership of Anybus. I guess if it speaks to the competitive positioning and high quality of the product. But I guess also as if you look at it from the other side of the coin, it's a revenue concentration challenge. I mean, it has been your flagship product for an awfully long time. I'm guessing that Anybus, your Anybus offering now looks very little like the Anybus offering when you first started it. So how do you kind of think conceptually about the dominance of Anybus and carrying that flagship on for the next few years and even decades?
I think it's a good question, and I think maybe I can say it like this: We did not expect Anybus to be so strong as it's been for the last three years. I think it's been. That's been almost the highest growing offering. It's been up to this 20% organic now since 2020. And I think that's the reason we expected the other areas to, you know, to each sort of share of wallet within HMS, but that did not happen in this period. So I think maybe it's also fair to differentiate the different Anybus products, because of course, Anybus Embedded, that was sold to the device manufacturers, that's the largest offering.
But the gateway offering, which is a distribution or system integrators sale, that's been growing just as good. So it's a different packaging and different customer, target customer, and that is also growing really nicely. So I mean, if you compare to, I'm gonna go back all the way to the financial crisis, because then we only had Anybus Embedded. So since then, and seeing also what happened in the financial crisis, which wasn't fun for us, as for most other companies, I think we have a much wider portfolio. And also the full wireless offering is also within Anybus, and that's a completely different offering. So it's not one, only one offering in Anybus, but for sure, I mean, it's a very big part.
I think Anybus in itself is about 60% of revenue, so of course, a super important part, there's no doubt about it. And I think, that's also one part where we're looking for complementing acquisitions to try to spread ourselves, on some more areas, not be too dependent on such a dominant offering. Because we wanna build a solid and good growing companies in all type of environments for the future as well.
Great. Thank you very much.
All right, Nikolai?
Yeah, yeah, just a question on growth, I guess both in the medium term and the long term. So on the medium term, and if you just look at the most recent order intake in Q3, and even if you guys are right in this de-stocking effects that you estimate, the order intake is quite low compared to your targets that you set in the Capital Markets Day, right? So could you just kind of compare those two numbers a little bit and tell us how you think about it? And then on the long term, what c ould you talk about what, on Anybus, could you talk about what opportunity you see to grow the number of design wins?
Yeah, so I think on a short-term basis, I think I can just repeat what we said in the Q3 call, which I think is still valid. I mean, obviously, we see that the order intake will be lower, and it was low in Q3, will probably be a bit lower in a couple of quarters more, as I said before as well. We do have the order book to rely on for a little bit there to keep the sales on a decent level. But in terms of 2024, we also said that on the Q3 call. I mean, a flat number compared to 2023 would not be bad for 2024. I mean, that will be. That's just pure math. With that lower order intake-
Yeah, yeah.
And order book that is not there to sustain, 2024 will not be a super year in terms of growth. But I think then we should be through this inventory adjustment, and we don't see why we shouldn't be back to good growth after 2024. And I think that's why I showed these numbers before, what we expect in the different offerings. And we believe that that will be in a good manner after 2024. And as we said on the capital market statement, we wouldn't still have the target at SEK 5 billion if we didn't think it was achievable. And of course, we always wanna have tough targets. And that, that's a little bit how we like to work as being competitive people.
But I think, yeah, we're still in a good position to reach that one.
Could you comment on the design wins growing the number of design wins long term as well, okay?
Yeah, I think, you know, I think that we're in a good position to keep growing the design wins. We've been having a solid trend, a bit of a bump, I think it was 2020 with the pandemics, but otherwise I think we've been, we're showing a decent growth. And, maybe just to also be clear on how you should interpret that, it's if we're gonna have a growth with. So new design wins is actually, that's new customers, you could say, or new wins on an existing customer, and then you typically grow with your existing customers. So any growth design wins will be sort of on top of the normal growth, and I think that's why we also can outgrow the market.
But if we can keep a couple of percentage points in growth in design wins, I think we're in a good position to continue to show good growth numbers. It will not be 10% growth in design wins. That will not be the case. But if we can do 3%-5%, I think that's not too bad. All right. I think we're starting to run out of time. I'm gonna give Aaron the last opportunity.
Thanks, Joakim. It was just on similar to Jonathan's question, but more on the longevity of HMS's market leadership position. You know, you've mentioned markets were growing sort of high single digits, double digits. Do you foresee any change to the competitive environment, whether that's new entrants being attracted to the market or new technologies taking share from HMS? Or and secondly, are there any changes to the market that might disintermediate HMS, be that generative AI or otherwise? Just your thoughts on that would be helpful.
Yeah, I think it's actually a bit of a mixed picture on if you compare between the different offerings. I think on the information-centric side, where we have this remote access, remote data offering, there we see a pretty big high activity on new solutions and on competition side. And of course, everybody's trying to fill that offering with more software services, which we are also working on. And we added some extra 30 engineers, which is quite a lot for us, beginning of 2023, to work on that. We'll talk a little bit more about that, I think, in the Q4 report. We're gonna explain more what we are doing. And again, I think there we see a movement on the competition side.
When it comes to the Anybus offering, I think Staffan always says that, I mean, that's our CEO, Staffan Dahlström, "That's still a blue ocean." There are a couple of handful of players that's been there for a long time. They're still there, and b ut we don't see a lot of new entrants, and we see, you know, it's pretty much business as usual. We are trying to expand that offering a bit as well, and I guess the competition is doing that also. But all in all, I think there's, we don't expect any major changes in the recent time on that side. I hope that answered the questions. I think we're running out of time.
I need to run to next meeting, but thanks a lot for listening and taking interest in HMS, and hope to talk to you soon again. Thanks a lot.
Thank you, okay.
Thanks.
Bye-bye.