All right. Good morning and good afternoon, everyone. My name is Joakim Nideborn. I hold the position as CFO of HMS Networks, and today, we're gonna have an investor briefing, as we call it. And just a quick introduction to what we're gonna talk about. So this is there will be nothing new in this meeting, no comments on recent trading. We will go over what we presented in the last quarterly report, the Q4 report that we released two weeks ago. And I will also start by giving the introduction to HMS, and I will also talk about a recent acquisition, Red Lion Controls.
I'll try to do like this, that I will hold a presentation for some 25 minutes, going over first HMS as a business, then our strategic objectives, Red Lion Controls, and then financial updates. I hope that we will have some 35 minutes left for Q&A. So today I only have one screen, so I would like to ask all of you to go on mute during my presentation, and then you can just raise your hand if you have a question, and I'll try to take you one by one. And if you have more questions, you can get back in the line. This normally works pretty well.
We've done this now for a year or so, and, I think it will be a nice session for us, where everybody should have the opportunity to ask questions. And with that, I'm gonna start the introduction to HMS Networks, starting with our mission statement, "To enable valuable data and insights to allow our customers to increase productivity and sustainability." I think that's really a pretty good description of what we are trying to do within the business. Just some quick facts before we get into more details. We're starting to approach 10 million connected devices and over 400,000 machines that are continuously being connected to our cloud systems and supervised through that solutions. We say that we are working in the field of industrial communications technology, which is a pretty wide definition, I'm saying.
We are active in a pretty small niche within this area, and I'll try to explain that better to you today exactly what that is. We try to be in the front of technology, and today we have an offer within 5G that we've been working over some time. Today, not a lot of business yet, but it's an interesting offer for the future. And also try to adapt to use AI, and I think a lot of people are talking about Internet of Things, and that's something we've been doing for many years, to try to connect these various machines to different internet solutions.
Today we are about 800 employees, about one-third in R&D, one-third in sales, and one-third in manufacturing and supporting functions. We do have business in 18 countries, our own offices, and we have distributors and partners in roughly 50 more countries. Our headquarters is in, on the west coast, in South Sweden, in Halmstad, where the company also was founded, about 30 years ago. As you will see in a minute, we just reached about SEK 3 billion in sales in 2023, with an EBIT margin just above 25%. The last 10 years, we managed to do a CAGR growth of 20% growth, and you can actually pick pretty much any base you want. You'll get to about the same number with a 20% growth.
So I think it's been a good growth journey for the company, the last... actually, throughout the whole, the whole period the company's been around. Now, let's, let's get into our business. So we, we have pretty much two, two main areas in our business. We work within the area of industrial automation and building automation. Within industrial automation, we are particularly strong within manufacturing industry. This is about 70% or so of, of our business, and you'll basically find our, our solutions in any factory. And on top of that, we also do some, some work within transportation, transportation infrastructure, where you can see our, we have a big, big part of our business within applications like AGVs for material handling and, those type of applications.
We're in power and energy, where we do, for instance, battery energy systems, where we do the communication for that. And then we also have a separate business within building automation, where we connect air conditioning equipment to building management systems to enable a seamless exchange of information, basically. And what we find is interesting in between all these businesses is that the communication is pretty similar regardless of where you find our solution. So it's pretty much a generic offering in terms of what verticals we are working with. Trying to go a bit deeper in this, trying to explain what we're doing. So we're dividing the industrial automation business in two areas, what we call control-centric and information-centric. And let's have a look at the control-centric business first, which also is the largest part of our business.
What we're trying to do here is to enable real-time control of various manufacturing processes by connecting, for instance, a robot or a similar application to a local network, so that you can exchange information between the different systems that you're trying to connect. This might sound simple, but it's a little bit tricky on the shop floors because you're not using necessarily one standard. We see a lot of different standards, up to 30 different standards, that are being used for information exchange in these environments, which is quite different if you go to an office environment. There are several reasons for this. There are legacy reasons. There are also different requirements in different environments that calls for different type of standards.
You might be surprised to see that the majority of the business here is actually wired applications, so it's not so much wireless. We see wireless growing good the last couple of years and we started to develop a wireless offering the last 10 years or so. But still the majority of the volumes would be on wired applications. And the reason for that is that this is really real time, so we're talking about maybe 1 or 2 milliseconds of latency in order to get these applications to work. And then the wireless standards are simply not fast enough at this point in time. We also have an offer for network monitoring and diagnostics of different networks to make sure that your network is working properly.
Of course, you would like to know upfront if you have a problem with your network, so you can try to correct it before you get downtime. So I think what's really characterizing this offer is reliability and robustness. It needs to cost money when your network goes down, otherwise you will probably not find HMS products in those solutions. The other area that we call information centric, it's a little bit different. It's not so much about driving the real-time control, it's more about getting insights and understanding what your manufacturing processes are doing. You might want to optimize your overall equipment efficiency, and your working force of this productivity and to increase sustainability.
The main offer we have here is remote connectivity to allow you to remotely connect to a certain device, to make adjustments to source code and to do maintenance from wherever you are basically in the world. You can also do the sort of opposite, to take data from the machine and send it out to a cloud application, where you can do analytics of that data and try to learn more about and get better insights about your manufacturing processes. So to this, we also sell a cloud solution where you get a free version with some basic functionality, and then you can choose to upgrade and pay for an SLA and get some more functionality.
Of course, this is something that we think is highly, highly interesting and that we're investing in actually quite a bit for the moment, to try to build that part of the business, to increase the sales revenues that today are rather small, but we see good potential in that going forward. So this is really about collecting data from various streams and try to get insights in your business. And some people will refer to this as industrial IoT. That could be one word to try to describe what we're trying to do here. And then finally, the building automation offer, which is actually quite similar to this control-centric offer, but it's completely different technologies within the buildings, different standards that are being used and also slightly different applications.
Where we are particularly strong is to connect the air conditioning equipment to building management systems, to allow that to communicate with the rest of the building systems. So that you can have for instance, if you go out of a room, air conditioning shut down or goes down a little bit. You don't necessarily have to be cooling the building during night, and to make sure that you don't have cooling and heating at the same time, things like that. Quite simple in reality, but or in reality, not so simple to get it done.
The same, pretty much the same problem we're trying to solve, that you have different type of protocols in these buildings, and you would like to try to bridge this in order to be able to communicate between the machines. If we look at our go-to-market and our customer groups, we say that we are working with two types of customers. To the left, you have our makers, and to the right, we have our users. Why we make this distinguishment is because we have completely different ways of going to markets, which I'll try to show you on this slide. If we stay to the left with the makers, we categorize these customers in two different parts. The device manufacturers that make a smaller device.
And how do you define that? Well, it's not black and white between a device manufacturer and machine builder. Normally, a device manufacturer is with a, a device is a bit simpler. We normally say it's less than 1 cubic meter. And you typically want to connect these to these different networks. That will be typically the solution that we try to get in place for these type of applications. We sell on a design win business model, meaning that we once we have this design win, we've been specified in with the customer and becomes part of the bill of material from the customer, meaning that we'll have sales for quite some years once that design win has been won.
Here we go, always direct to the customer with our own sales force. And this is also one reason that we can hold a pretty strong gross margin. Of course, on the other hand, the sales cost is quite significant in this part of the business, representing 44% of the business, so the largest part of our business. Then going to the machine builder. Here we have a bit of a wider offering. We sell a lot of this remote access, also various gateways to connect machines to the networks that you have in the factories. And here you're not necessarily part of the bill of material, but you often specify it as a standard, as an option to these machines.
So if you want to have remote access, normally you will pick our solution in that case. A little bit less sticky than the device manufacturer business. And the way we go to market here is a combination of some direct sales on the bigger customers and then distribution on the smaller ones. All in all, this is about 25% of our revenues last year. And then to the right, you have the users of the automation system, which is actually the user that is producing something. And here we have a sort of a different offering. We sell a lot of gateways, problem solvers, also this area with network monitoring goes primarily into these end users.
Quite often sold through a system integrator that get a task to upgrade a factory or a manufacturing line, and they will buy a bunch of our products to get that done in a smooth way. 31% of our revenues, this is mostly smaller quantities, could also be projects where if you have a bigger factory, that's gonna be upgraded but normally smaller quantities, and this primarily goes through distribution or e-commerce. Looking at some growth rates and drivers for these different categories. So you have control-centric. Here we have about 8% growth for the coming five years. How do we get to that number? We basically look at various industry reports and try to narrow it down on those sub-segments that are most similar to what we do.
It's not a one-to-one match, so it's not super simple, but we try to do that. We do the same every year, and it's been proven to be quite right in the past. So I think you can expect some 8% organic CAGR in this business for the coming five years. Then going on to information-centric, which is a faster-growing offer. Also, with some more competition, I think in the control-centric, it's pretty stable. You have the handful of competitors that we meet quite often, but not necessarily a lot of new entrants. In the information-centric business, there is a lot of potential. We see a 15% organic growth, and it's really popular to try to get that data understanding to connect more and more devices to internet.
The largest challenge is the security, of course, with cybersecurity, which is getting more and more challenging, especially after the Russia and Ukraine situation, where we see more and more attacks. And of course, people are getting a bit cautious to try to open up that channel to your factories, even if the win in getting all the data out so you can understand your processes better is worth something. And then to the right, you have the building automation offer, which is also driven by a lot of digitalization, energy savings. Now, with higher energy prices, the last couple of years, it's been a good driver to really try to push that efficiency in new buildings.
This is about a 10, 10% growth in this business on the coming years. All right, let's go over to strategic objectives. I see I'm a bit behind. I'll try to speed up a little bit. We launched this framework in the capital markets day in September 2023, quite similar to what we had before. I think the news was that we added the last two parts with operational efficiency and sales excellence. For us, organic growth has always been priority one. So we've been trying to focus on a combination of organic growth and mergers and acquisitions. That's been the... We said when we launched this plan in 2020, that that would be equal parts in getting the growth for 2025.
I must say now, with the Red Lion acquisition, I think we're pretty much there with equal parts in growth from the organic part and the mergers and acquisitions part. Then we have around all this, we have our people agenda that we think is super important. We spend a lot of time on this, and we have a lot of KPIs and making sure that our people like it and being developed within the company. We say that happy and high-performing employees will create loyal customers, and that's what we're trying to achieve, of course. And of course, also the planet focus to try to minimize CO2 emissions, not only for the company but also supporting our customers in that.
I think here we have some ambitious targets I'll get to in the next slide to do as good as we can. If we go to operational efficiency, what we've done is we've done a lot of investments the last 2-3 years. We've been changing ERP system, rolling out the same ERP system in all our companies. Of course, we do that to get some efficiency in trying to have the same processes, working the same ways, trying to consolidate where we do things. We've also been investing a lot in sales tools to get a more digital customer journey, where we're starting to get effects quite soon when we have the latest releases in these projects.
Which also takes us into the sales excellence part, where we say that we've been investing in building a really strong sales force in many countries at the moment. So the last few years, we've been investing a lot in building that market presence, and now we wanna make sure that we do that as efficient as possible and really get the best out of this, these investments. So I think we have some interesting things going on the internal agenda for the coming years on these areas.
Then, just looking at our targets, we communicated in the capital markets day that we will sign up to science-based targets, to commit to the Paris Agreement, and that's in progress as we speak, and we hope to be able to come back and confirm that we have been approved to this initiative. We also set an agenda to triple what we call the HMS Effect, basically the savings that we do for our customers. Here, we saved 1 million tons in CO2 for our customers in 2022 and 2023, and now we said that we will triple that for 2030. Of course, we need to make better products, and we need to sell them to more customers in order to achieve that.
On the people side, people and customer side, we have an NPS target for our customers of 50, and we actually managed to reach that, so 51 on average in 2023, so really good to see. We also have a customer NPS target of 50, where we have been on that level before. We have been a bit short on that for the last two years, with some delivery challenges and long lead times through the component shortage situation. So we're working hard to get back to this number now. And then we also have a target to have more than 30% female managers, which might seem not too ambitious, but we're trying to do the best we can here.
We wanna have an equal workplace, and we started from, I think, 16% when we set this target, and now we're 22%-23% female managers. So we have some way to go for 2025, and then, of course, we need to set a new target after that to become even better. On the growth side, so growth and profitability, we increased the EBIT target from 20%-25% on the capital market side last year. And then we also added a plus to our Pi billion target to reach Pi billion SEK in sales by 2025. We're all engineers. We thought that was pretty funny to use a Pi target instead of just saying 3 billion SEK.
Now we added this plus, meaning that we should get to SEK 1 billion organically, and then the plus would be all the M&A that will come on top. Now we just happened to sign a pretty big deal here in December 2023. There will be a big plus on that. So let me go into that, the acquisition of Red Lion Controls that I'm sure a lot of people have questions about. And quick intro, and then we can come back to this to the Q&A. So Red Lion is a U.S.-based company with a majority of the sales, 84% of sales in the U.S.
They have three main offerings, which is called Access, which is quite similar to the HMS offering within control information centric with industrial gateways, some protocol converters and, and routers and access points for, also for remote access. This is about, just less than 20% of, of the business. And here we have some overlap, some new products, but also some overlap in this area with, with HMS offering. And then something we found really interesting is this Connect offer that, that Red Lion has with Ethernet, which is something that we've been trying to develop ourselves and found it difficult to enter that market since it's been— I think that was consolidated a couple of years ago, and, I know those players who are in there keep that close to the chest, basically.
This is something that we believe that we can sell quite easily together with the remote access products and gateway products. You will need a lot of switches if you're gonna connect the factory. You will have a lot of those access points that you need to have connected. So I think this is a perfect match with the portfolio that we have. Just about 30% of the Red Lion sales. And then finally, you had a Visualize offering, which primarily consists of human machine interfaces, HMIs, as it's called with acronym, and also some panel meters, which are a bit simpler displays to illustrate the information.
What's interesting with the HMI is today you have a lot of connectors to the PLCs, the control systems in this industrial automation landscape. So you actually do quite similar things that we do with our gateways, but you also add a panel on top, and you have this middle layer, which is pretty good to also push information to cloud solutions if you want. So I think this brings us a little bit forward in the value chain, and we're pretty excited to get started to integrate this business. I actually came from the US today, just landed this morning. I've been talking to this team how we should get going for the coming months.
We hope this deal can close in early second quarter, something like that, and then we can really get started on this. The business has been around for some time, more than 50 years, about 400 employees, on 4 development centers, 300 of the employees is in the U.S., and for us, a great play to get that platform in the United States. Red Lion has a larger part of their sales outside the manufacturing landscape. So we think that's also quite interesting to be able to get into, to get a footprint into, to some new areas like water and wastewater, where we have some business, but not a lot. Also, oil and gas is a strong business for Red Lion in the U.S.
So all in all, about SEK 1.4 billion in sales, the last twelve months, ending in Q3 last year, doing 55% gross margin and about adjusted EBIT margin of 21%. So not quite at the 25% EBIT target of HMS, but still a solid earnings on in this company. And what we're after is really to get this footprint in the U.S., and here we also get a perfect match, we think, in terms of product offering, and we'll be able to cross-sell some of the HMS solutions in the Red Lion channels and vice versa. We also think that we can take some of these products to Europe, where we have a strong position in HMS.
We believe that the Americas and the European market is about the same size in terms of market size. And as you can see to the left, we've been having a much stronger position in Europe compared to Americas. And now we're getting not fully equal shares, but I think we're getting really a position in the Americas that we would like to have to build from. And then just a few financial metrics on this. So purchase price, $345 million, for us, by far the largest acquisition we have done. And when we do the math on this, we see that this will be accretive to the earnings per share, pretty much from closing.
In terms of financing, we're going into this being debt-free, and we're gonna take on some $225 million in debt. And we have given the board a mandate, actually, two weeks ago, to call for a directed issue to get in the final $120 million equivalent, one hundred and twenty million dollars equivalent to finance this whole thing. So after this, after the directed issue and after the deal is closed, we expect to be on a leverage about 2x net debt to EBITDA. And then before I open up the questions, few comments on the fourth quarter and 2023. I think the year has been quite bumpy for us.
We had a good start in terms of order intake, and we saw a pretty big change in the market after the first two quarters. We were not so surprised about that. We've been having great order intake, building up a huge backlog, much larger than what we've never ever seen before, due to the component situation and the long lead times. And now we see when this is now getting better, we see that a lot of companies are adjusting their inventory levels, and this is actually, well, leading to less orders, pretty much. We saw this trend pretty clearly in Americas already in Q2, and then now we actually see that Americas, the Americas business are coming out of this, so the inventory adjustments are more or less done.
Where we see still a lot of impact in Europe and Japan, where Q3 and Q4 have been quite weak in this order intake with the inventory adjustment still going on. We expect that to continue for maybe one or two quarters till quarters more into 2024. We also communicated that we're investing in our Ewon business, which is this information-centric business, and we're starting a pretty big development project to have the next generation of remote access being developed. This will actually target a bit of a different customer group, also with some larger manufacturers than what we've been doing before. We've been having a really strong position with small and medium-sized machine builders. Now we're trying to add some more features to go to the larger ones.
We talked already about the acquisition of Red Lion. I'm not going to talk more about that right now. And then for the full year, I think I actually commented on most of this. Couple of things that we did within the company as well. We've implemented a new ERP on top of that, to gain this efficiency. We rebranded the recent acquisition of Procentec and fully integrated that into our business of Anybus. And we talked also about the updated financial targets. So just some quick glance at the numbers. I'm not going to go through everything in detail. You see here on the graph, to the upper left, order intake, and you see what's been happening.
Really strong development up until Q2 2022, then it's been a bit more flat, and now the last two quarters, you see this reduction in order intake. So if you look at the numbers, it looks quite dramatic with an organic decline in Q4 of 34% or for the year of 24%. But I would like to maybe show this slide instead. Some of you might have seen this already. We've been showing this now for three years actually, and what we've been trying to do throughout this whole period when we saw this, this aggressive order placement from our customers is trying to show what do we feel is the underlying market and what we see has been boost orders, as we call it, the light blue, and then now you have the green in the last couple of quarters with, with this reduction.
So if you look at this, you see that, yeah, for sure, we are down a little bit in, in underlying order intake, but it's not a lot. So I think if you believe in this, this whole exercise I've been trying to do, you'll see that, yeah, the market is down, but it's not so dramatic as it might look when you look at the, the reported numbers. Looking at the sales, it's much more stable, obviously, and then we have our big order built-up order book to thank for this. And here we see still a quite solid development with SEK 760 million. Now we had a strong Q4, as you see in the graph in Q4 2022. So we actually have organic decrease of 3%, but still we think it's a pretty solid quarter.
For the full year, we do 15% organic growth. We managed to pass the SEK 3 billion and, all in all, quite happy with the development, we must say. And just to comment on this, because I think this is a key item, the how the backlog has been developing, and you see also the order backlog to the bottom left. We've been up to... We were at SEK 1.4 billion closing 2022, and now we're down to less than SEK 800 million in backlog. So pretty, pretty steep reduction here. I'll try to also illustrate to the right, if you put this in relation to the net sales. We're starting in a ratio of about 0.2, backlog divided by rolling 12 months net sales.
And then we were up to in the middle of 2022, 0.65, and now we're starting to get down to this 0.2 again, being at 0.26 towards the end of the year. So what this tells us is basically that we're pretty much back to a normal backlog and for the sales to be growing, I think now we should be having—we need to see the order intake really coming back strong to sustain that. In terms of profitability, we had some one-time cost in Q4 for this acquisition, and we also made a small restructuring program. All in all, underlying profitability were SEK 193 million, sorry, which is 25.3% in the quarter. Adjusted results for the year were SEK 777 million and 25.7%.
So we're managing to beat this 25% target, which we think is really positive. A big contributor to that is the gross margin. So we managed to increase about two percentage points to 65.3% in Q4. For the full year, we had 65%, also an increase by 2%. So we're super happy with that, and I think that's a quality stamp that we managed to continue to build this gross margin. We do have some help from FX tailwinds on that, and of course, the volume, the growing volume is helping us, but then I think we've also been doing a good job in managing prices throughout this turbulent time. And here you see for maybe a comment that is worth mentioning is also in the pace in which we're investing. So we've been investing a lot in the business.
If we take the full year, we're actually growing our operational expenditures by 20% organically, which is, of course, a lot. But you also see that we've been taking down that pace in Q4, so we only grow 3% organically in Q4. And I said on the Q4 call that we will see an increase in OpEx for next year, but it will not be too dramatic. So I think we'll slow that down, and we'll be a bit careful in what we do, given that we feel the order intake is a bit soft and will probably be a bit soft in the beginning of the year before all customers are coming back and ordering as normal again—s o I think I'm gonna hold it there, and I'm gonna open up for questions.
So I'm just gonna ask you to please raise your hand if you have questions, and I'll try to help you ask those questions. So please raise your hand if you have questions. Right, I have one question from Gustav. Please go ahead.
Yes, hello. Just in terms of Intesis, I mean, just curious how you look upon the underlying market for sort of building automation systems, given the increased focus on energy efficiency. Are you seeing any regulatory tailwinds in any geographies playing in here to sort of intensify the growth rate for this segment going forward? Or are you expecting it to be around the 10%, as you sort of referred to earlier on the slide there?
No, I think, I think there is a lot of regulations going on that is working in our favor. But, but what we, what we have said is basically with that going on, we think that we will have a 10% organic growth rate on, on that business over time. We've been having some really good years in that Intesis business, and it's maybe one of the, the brightest outlooks that I, I think we have in the group for that. I think we're very well-positioned. The competition is not too fierce. There are a few players in there, but not too many. And, and with all those regulations going on, and for instance, in Spain, you're only allowed to cool a certain, certain amount of degrees, and you need to be able to prove that. And also in...
You have, like, in various, I think it's in France, you have supermarket applications where you need to be able to show that you have a cold chain. So you need to be able to show that you have kept the temperature low over time, and then you need to have this type of connected systems in order to be able to extract that data and show that that's going on. So I think there's a lot of things that are working well for us, but that 10% is our view on everything included, basically. All right, so I have a question from Angus. Please go ahead.
Hiya. I was just wondering, previously, you sort of alluded to the fact that you were lacking Ethernet solutions, and Red Lion has, of course, filled that hole in your, in your sort of portfolio. Are there any other holes that you see within your existing portfolio that you want to plug, either internally or, or through M&A in the future?
Yeah, good, good question. I think, you're right in the statement. What we are looking into a little bit, we're always looking into this information-centric solution. We feel that there is this remote access and remote data. I think that is something that will grow very nicely for the coming years, and we solve it very well for PLC systems, basically, if you have a PLC as a control system, so that we do very well. But there might be other ways to connect those systems that we can work with. We've also been discussing if we should add sensors to the offering to try to go a bit further, and then you can put a lot of sensors in place and connect that information as well.
We feel, though, that the competition there is a bit more fierce, so not necessarily the first choice. And then we've also talked on the capital market, say, about cybersecurity, to see if we can do something to support our customers there as well. This is still a quite immature business in terms of the operational technology. From a cybersecurity perspective, it's quite far behind the IT space. So it's not necessarily a core area, but it could be an interesting add-on for us in the future as well. So that's something we're trying to monitor as well. All right. I have another question from Gustav. Please go ahead.
Yeah, maybe just to build on the Ethernet switches there, and your comment on Red Lion. Did I understand you correctly, that you will bundle the Ethernet switch into your current sales offering, and so this will sort of raise your average selling price, that it will include the switch now? Or, how should I interpret this? Then maybe just a follow-up, will this be material to your sales then, and how does this compare to your current offering? Do you not offer the Ethernet switch at all now or?
Yeah, so good question. So we do have - we actually developed a few switches ourselves, but we're not super successful in that. So you will. If you make a big infrastructure product that you typically see on the system integrator side, I mean, you will need a bunch of switches in order to connect all your devices. You need to connect those into something, right? So you put a lot of switches in place to be able to connect devices, and then you aggregate it upwards in like a network structure.
So those customers are already buying these products from someone, and we, we think it's a perfect fit for us to come and say, "Hey, guys, we can offer the whole suite for you, so you don't have to go to someone else. We'll offer it for you." And since a lot of people put a lot of emphasis on that, that remote access, I think that is probably seen as a more value-added offering compared to the switch offering. We think this is a perfect, perfect, situation to try to just go with that as well to the customers.
I think we have pretty good relations with a lot of those customers, so it will be an interesting area to explore, especially Europe, where we have strong, strong relations and, don't necessarily sell this offer today. So I have another question from Angus. Please go ahead.
Sort of on the other side of that question, what sort of opportunity, what extra amount of growth do you think you can get by selling from your existing portfolio into a new market through Red Lion, so out in the U.S.? How much of a sort of positive impact is that gonna have?
We're not ready to answer that question yet.
Okay.
I think we will do that exercise and look at the synergies. We have a few hypotheses, but I think we need to get back when we don't even have the keys to the company yet. So I think we'll have to get back when we have our—
Yeah.
Arms around that a bit more.
Cool. I guess while I'm still on the line, could I sort of dig into your relationships with some of the IoT platforms? So I noticed that you have a relationship with PTC's ThingWorx, where your devices directly link up into their platform. Is this—i s ThingWorx doing the same thing as Netbiter or Argos, or is this a completely separate offering? And are they—s o is one sort of potentially a threat to the other, if that makes sense?
Yeah, I think, so I'm not a, not an expert at ThingWorx, but I think there's not too much overlap. And I think ThingWorx takes on where we, where we end our offer, basically. So if you wanna do more stuff, on the cloud side, we don't offer a lot of that. We, we basically transport the data for you, and then you can do whatever you want with the data yourself. So I think it's, it's a good complement to ThingWorx. That's my understanding.
Okay. And do you have any other sort of partnerships with companies who are maybe trying to build out this idea of a digital twin within factories? And are your devices quite integral to these sorts of solutions?
Yeah. Yeah, so I think—
Yeah.
We have a few partners. So we have what we call a solution partner network, where you have companies that typically sell some—t hey have their own IP, doing something with the data, selling those services. But in order to do that, they need to get the data. And a lot of IT companies think it's really difficult to understand the OT world. So everything on the shop floor related, we call operations technology, right? So different standards and different environment than what you see in the IT landscape. So they just wanna get that data from OT to IT, and then they, then they're fine, then they know what to do.
So they tend to use our solutions to get that intel, and then they do what they do, right? So today, we don't have a lot of solutions on the IT side. You'll get some basic functions with our Talk2M cloud that we have in the Ewon business. But for the more advanced customers, they tend to do something on top of that.
Okay, okay. I guess if we could, if I could maybe ask about 5G and the sort of themes that you're, you're seeing there, and how exposed you are to that, and whether you... How big you think 5G is gonna become in terms of industrial communication, and how much growth that could add to your business in the sort of medium term?
Yeah, I think that's... It's a very good question, very valid, and very difficult to answer, to be honest.
Yeah.
But I think what we've been. We took a position quite early in 5G, so we've been working with this. I think we were actually exploring that already when I started, six, seven years ago. Since a couple of years ago, we have some proof of concept products out, so a lot of customers are testing that. What is a bit tricky though is, first of all, it's rather expensive, but it is an interesting offer because it's. The latency is much lower than with 4G or with Wi-Fi solutions. So you can actually do more, you can actually get closer to these control-centric applications also with 5G, given that the latency is lower.
And I think for some businesses, it makes sense if you have a lot of moving applications, like an AGV, for instance, in a warehouse setting, then I think it's a perfect example of where it would be a fit. But most of the time, if you have, let's say you have a robot or something, I mean, you still need to power it up with a power cord. So the value in getting to wireless is not necessarily so high in those types of applications. But I think for us, we've been trying to take a position as a thought leader. We've been doing a lot of testing. We've been doing some work with the Boston Dynamics dog you might have seen on YouTube.
Yeah, yeah.
Real communication there. So I think we've been rather successful in getting some cool applications going. But to get scaled, to really get this proven, I think it's probably a couple of years out. So I think Staffan has been saying, our CEO, has been saying all the time, it will be beyond 2025 before they will be in the volumes. I mean, today we do maybe $1 million in revenues on 5G products, so it's just, yeah, just testing at the moment. But first, it's been important to take a position and show that we have these solutions. We're gonna be there and test them and make sure that the next generation thinks that HMS is a part of that.
So I think I'm gonna have to pass on the market potential. But of course—
Yeah, yeah, that's—
I'm sure eventually there will be a huge potential, but it's, it's difficult to say at this time, since it's not really—i t's not been taken off yet.
Yeah. Okay. I think that's all from me for now.
All right, any more questions? Just raise your hand if you have questions. All right, no more questions. This was a quiet group. I'm not used to that. All right, but then I'll, I take it as everything is crystal clear with the presentation, and, I'd like to thank all of you for participating in the call, and wish you all a good day, and thanks for the interest in HMS.