Welcome to the HMS Networks Q3 presentation for 2025. During the questions and answers session, participants are able to ask questions by dialing pound key five on their telephone keypad. Now, I will hand the conference over to CEO Staffan Dahlström and CFO Joakim Nideborn. Please go ahead.
Thank you, operator. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to this Q3 report. Greetings from a sunny Stockholm. We're also pleased to have some sunshine in this report. The agenda for today is that I will do a quick snapshot of where we are in our strategy, a little bit of business update, and then Joakim will do a deep dive in the financial summary. We finish up with some Q&A at the end. We published our Q3 this morning, and some good signs, we think. Good level on net sales. We are back on organic growth. That really makes us happy. We also have some headwinds with currency. Joakim will dive into that later. Order intake, fantastic. + 26%. Keep in mind that we had a quite weak quarter last year, Q3. Comparables are not that challenging. Still, 26% is still 26%. That's really good.
We continue to deliver good adjusted EBIT. Both 244 in adjusted EBIT, but a margin of 27% is good for us. We're very pleased to see this. We also can conclude that when we talk about adjustment in the EBIT, it's very little of this kind of reorganization things during acquisitions. It's very clean adjusted EBIT at the moment. A good cash flow, record level, and we are very happy to see that. The combination of good cash flow and good profit also makes us perform well on net debt and our covenants. Just on year to date, this accumulates. We don't reach organic growth for the year. Of course, this is what we follow. Good order intake, and we are happy to see the cash flow to continue to be good throughout the year.
We move into the strategy, but Joakim will be back more on data on the numbers in a moment. We presented our new strategy last month. This spans from next year until 2030. We try to focus on five-year periods because in our industry, it takes some time to develop new products. It takes even longer to make them commercially successful. We believe that strategic periods of five years make sense for us because then we can set plans, execute, and see good results over time. We talk about three, two, one growth. Three divisions, double revenue to EUR 7.5 billion, but also maintain the feeling of being one company. We have acquisitions, we are growing internally, but we want to make sure that we feel and work like one company. There are six elements in the strategy.
If we start with the centerpiece here, win grow keep, where we have more structured strategies for winning new customers and growing existing customers to their full potential. We have more forward-leaning in winning, and we put more effort in the sales and marketing in the coming years. We talk about continuing with mergers and acquisitions. We made a dozen acquisitions the last 10 years, some okay, and some really successful. We would like to continue to perform on this. Half of the growth will come from acquisitions, half will come from our own organic growth. We are strong in engineering and R&D, and we believe that we should keep on investing in our product evolution, where we develop both new products, but we also see opportunities for new business models.
We are improving our software-as-a-service portion of the business, and this is one ambition to be more than 10% of revenue 2030, to be coming from this subscription and the SaaS revenue. We also see good opportunities to improve our operational efficiency, to drive gross margin, operating margin. We are maybe quite okay on gross margin, operating margin compared to others, but we still see improvements. We can improve both the cost side, but also how we do things in efficiency. We also feel that AI tools give us fantastic opportunities to also improve our internal efficiency. These four key elements are framed with two core things for us. We talk about the planet, where we support our science-based targets that we are just in the finishing to get our targets approved, 2030 and 2050 approvals for reduction of CO2.
We also have the key element of what we call people, our employees, where we believe that happy and high-performing employees generate loyal customers. This is really what we want to do. We set new targets for 2030, where we have planet, people, and growth. For planet, we keep our high ambition on sustainability, reducing CO2 emissions to be net zero 2050. We also follow something called EcoVadis. That is an industry rating for most key companies in our world of industrial automation, and we would like to be top five here. This is gold rating by large customers. We would like to continue our people strategy with happy customers. Net promoter score is more than 50. We are getting back to that. We are not fully there yet, but this is a big ambition for us. We also think that having happy employees is not about happy.
It's about engagement. We measure engagement index, where we want to be industry-leading of over 80. We keep also a focus of adding more female managers. We've been growing this from, I think, 14% five years ago to 28%. We're not at 30% yet. We believe that a mix of, of course, female, male, but also in backgrounds in different ages, gives a much more of an innovative climate and more productive climate in the company. That's why we focus on these female managers. Then the numbers growth. We would like to more than double to SEK 7.5 billion in 2030. Have a profit target of 25% EBITDA. We move from adjusted EBIT to EBITDA instead. We would like to continue to generate good cash flow so we can also give dividends between 30% and 50% of our EPS.
These are the targets, and we are doing the following to really fulfill that. We talked about product evolution. We think that more than 50% of the organic growth will come from new products that we have not seen yet. There are a lot of new ideas, and we're doing a lot of developments. We're quite excited about the coming years and the new products coming out. We also see that AI will improve our products and the functionality. We'll implement certain AI functions in our products. We also, as I briefly mentioned, move into more of recurring revenue, this kind of software subscriptions, annual recurring revenue to be more than 10% of our revenue. This is coming mainly from a subscription of the software piece that we have that is fairly small at the moment. We see that this can improve for the coming years.
We believe that having high intimacy with customers is key for us. We would like to improve our distribution business, of course. We also would like to grow the direct sales even faster. We see this win and growth strategy we're having, there's a direct connection to have more direct customer contacts and fully understand the future need of our large customers. We continue to successfully execute on our M&A strategy. Each of our divisions has their own M&A agenda. We see good opportunities in this industry to continue finding the right M&As. We also see that our company culture, heart, mind, and soul is a uniting factor for our different business. We would like to drive this to be generating the most engaged employees in the industry. Here we measure this with the employment engagement index to be larger than 80.
But having happy and engaged employees, of course, comes with good leaders. We put a lot of efforts on our leaders and leadership trainings, and we would like to measure this with our leadership index to be greater than 85. Win grow keep. Here we talk about more winning, more growing. We would like to have more of 6% of the last 12 months sales from customers that have won. 6% may sound like a low number. Today we have 3%. This also means that we have a big bunch of happy and loyal customers that keep on buying our products. This is what we call keep. Of course, we'll keep on serving them. We also see that we need some hunters to drive new business and be a little bit more aggressive on the market to win more.
We continue our investments in AI-driven improvements to drive our operational efficiency. From January 1st , 2025, we introduce our new organization with three divisions. IDS, that is 47% of our revenue. Industrial automation is the focus, and here we work with machine builders, system integrators, and end users. Second division, INT, 29% of our business goes actually to the same market, industrial automation, but a different customer group with device manufacturers that requires a different go-to-market. That's a very long sales cycle with design wins, but then we build a very long revenue cycle with these customers and big loyalty. Therefore, we need a dedicated go-to-market for these customers. Then we have New Industries, which is today a mix of building automation and vehicle communication, today representing 24% of our business. This was a bit about our strategy.
If we take one quick snapshot of the business in Q3, before Joakim talks about the numbers, we see good growth. We see some kind of change in the market, that this kind of difficult market. Of course, we still have geopolitical issues. We still have customs and tariffs and all these things. We see organic growth, and it seems like our customers are normalizing their behaviors despite quite a troublesome world around us. Both North America and Europe generate good orders. APAC, excluding China, is more hesitant. Japan is still quite hesitant, but China is better for us. Good net sales driven by IDS performance in North America. North America is the engine for the growth in general, especially for our IDS division, where they have a large portion of their revenue in North America. As I explained, we have a new strategic plan.
We rolled it out internally and to our investors in the Capital Markets Day. Internally, super good engagement. We are very excited about this. We have a strong focus on our sustainability. We talk about people, planet, and profit. That's what we do, and growth. We keep on investing in what we said, in improving our production in the U.S. We are very happy to have local production in the U.S., but we noted a year ago that it was not up to standards to what we think is world-class manufacturing. We are seeing good progress there. At the end of the year, we should be finished with these investments. We are on the right track there. We start to see also improvement in quality, in performance. Of course, this will lead to good gross margins and net margins for us.
Last quarter, we talked about that our introduction of the new ERP system in the U.S. made us delay some orders. They are delivered this quarter here. This gives a good addition. We've been mitigating the tariff cost by increased pricing in the U.S., and customers have been accepting this in a quite good way. We have products with limited competition, and customers understand that it's not our fault that the tariffs are hitting us. I think we'd have a good conversation with customers. I don't even recall that we lost any customers there. Most of our competition in the U.S. is not domestic U.S. companies. It's actually Asian or European companies. We are on par with these others. Actually, some of these competitors, like from Taiwan and others, they probably have more challenges than we have. With that, Joakim, let's move into the numbers.
Let's do that. We do as we normally do and start with the order intake. Solid quarter, SEK 855 million in order intake. 26% growth, out of which 22% organic growth. Of course, then we know that we're comparing with maybe one of our weakest quarters in Q3 2024. The numbers in itself, the organic growth in itself is maybe not representative for what we've seen sequentially. Sequentially still, I think we do okay. We improve a little bit from Q2. Looking at the year-to-date number, we still see an organic growth of 14% on orders, which is good to be able to conclude. If we look on the different markets, we've said Staffan said that North America continues to be strong. If we look at this sequentially, I think North America is the major driver for this development. Year-on-year, everything is up more than 20% in terms of geographic markets.
It is maybe more than the weak comparable than the current business. We also see a very small positive development in Europe, a few million better than the previous quarters. That leaves APAC, where we have some issues in Japan, or maybe not issues. We lack the big orders, especially in the INT division. I'll come back to that as well. With Japan struggling a bit and China continuing to develop as well, China has now surpassed Japan. China is actually the third-largest market for the INT division. We also see a good development in the building automation part of New Industries, where the Middle East continues to deliver new records and is becoming the largest market for us in building automation. I think what we can see in the quarter is that we're now having more markets to stand on. China is becoming a bigger part for us.
The Middle East is becoming a market to count on. I think that's very positive that we developed a group with more of these markets that can contribute to the overall development. If you look on the bottom left graph, you see here that we also have a bit of a negative FX effect of -6%. That is more than made up by the acquisition, which is now the Peak Systems part that is coming in as the last quarter where that is not part of the organic business. That's adding an 11%. Let's continue to the sales. Here we deliver record volumes with a few million margin to Q1. Also, here we see a bit of a weaker currency that is impacting that. Overall, quite okay result, we must say. Staffan mentioned it's the first quarter since Q3 2023 where we have organic growth.
That's good to deliver this 8% organic growth in the quarter. We had some deliveries in Q2 that we couldn't get out because of the change of ERP systems in the U.S. manufacturing. That is now being delivered in full in Q3. We're making up on those SEK 15 million, which is, of course, adding to the development in Q3. That also results in a book-to-bill that is lower than 1.96. We've been seeing slightly higher book-to-bill for the earlier part of the year. We hope that we will get back to deliver good book-to-bill ratios going forward. One of the contributing factors to development is the U.S. manufacturing that is ramping up. We've been making some investments that we said we were going to do when we took this business over. We still have some developments that are being done pretty much as we speak.
We were over there two weeks ago and looked at how it's been developing. We can see that in some of the process steps, we've already improved the yield a lot. We know that there are some results to come in during Q4. Q4 will be a challenge. The team is working really hard to be able to deliver good volumes while making the change at the same time. That will be a very important quarter to follow. Staffan also mentioned that the tariff situation is handled for the time being in terms of being compensated. We see some positive effects here on the sales side from those price increases to mitigate the tariff impact. Just a quick deep dive on the different divisions. We're starting with IDS.
We are delivering maybe the strongest numbers among the different divisions, especially on the sales side, where we do a new record quarter with SEK 439 million and showing some sales growth organically of 21%. Also, then slightly weak comparable in Q3 2024. This is quite strong for this business, we believe, with a 10% organic development. Sorry, 21% organic development. We're also managing to deliver for this division really strong margins with 27%. This has been improved a lot, primarily driven by the volume, but also some gross margin improvements that we will talk more about in a second when we look at the gross margin for the group. All in all, as we said, good deliveries from the U.S. This is very U.S.-heavy, this business. That becomes really key for achieving good numbers. We see that.
We also still keep a pretty nice order book for the remaining parts of the year. The main difference compared to Q2, which you saw was significantly lower, here we have those SEK 15 million that was delivered out in Q3 instead. You also see the price increase effect from the tariffs. This is, of course, the area where we have the highest tariff effect. All in all, a solid quarter from IDS and a big contributor to the strong group results. We have INT, where we are a little bit still struggling. We're almost on the same level as before in net sales, same level as last year. We're still not really up to organic growth yet. We hope that will come in Q4. On the order side, you see really good numbers if you look at the percentages with 34% organic development.
Again, maybe here we had the weakest development in Q3 last year. If you look sequentially, we're more or less on track with the same pace that we've been seeing for the earlier quarters this year. This market is quite German heavy, and we are still not seeing that lift in Germany. It's still quite a hesitant situation from the customers, which we are convinced that will turn at some point. We see kind of similar signals when we talk around in the industry. It's maybe not so surprising, even if we had hoped to see a bit of a better development. Still, for INT, this is a bit of a cash cow. We deliver good margins of over 28% adjusted EBIT, so even with some potential on the volume side, we do quite okay. I mentioned China before.
This is where you see the biggest impact of China developing strong. The final division, New Industries, is a bit of a mixed picture within the division. We have the vehicle communications part, which is developing more or less sideways. Given a strong weight with the German automotive players on the customer list, I think that is okay in this market. The positive thing this quarter is the building automation business, which was a bit weaker in Q2 and now is coming back with record order intake, really nice order intake. I mentioned Middle East before. That is going very strong in the building automation business. All in all, we do a 21% organic order intake increase and a 14% increase in sales. I think we have to be fairly happy with that development in this market. Let's look at what all this comes down to in terms of results.
A record quarter in EBIT, SEK 244 million in adjusted EBIT and 27.3%. Staffan said that there are basically no strange adjustments here. It's only the amortization on overvalues. As you might have seen on the Capital Markets Day, we will go over to report EBITDA with only the A for next year as the financial metric, and then we will take away this adjusted EBIT. It's essentially the same thing that we present today. Looking at year to date, we are close to achieving the 25% target, 24.5%. We hope that we can maybe be there somewhere in Q4 and be able to close that gap. Let's see how that plays out. On the gross margin side, it's 64.1%, which we think is a very good level.
Two major things: we have a favorable product mix on the margin side, the INT embedded offer, where we normally have really good volume on the different customers, but the slightly lower margin is developing weaker. The other parts of the group are developing stronger, which is giving us this positive mix effect. The price increase effect from the tariffs is compensating. We see a bit of an increase both from last year and from previous quarters. I also want to mention, I forgot to say that in the beginning here, that we have on the EBIT side, we have now, first of all, a pretty good natural hedge in terms of higher cost base in the U.S. to mitigate the dollar weakening. We also have some really efficient FX hedges, some hedging contracts that are compensating more or less the full FX loss on the EBIT line.
We still see the impact, of course, on sales and orders. When you look at comparables, I think you need to look at organic development. On the bottom line, this is more or less neutralized. Final comments on the OpEx: we see a small increase, 7%, probably half of that inflation and half related to some sales and marketing investments. We're starting to fill some positions and to start up some small investments here now to get going for the future. As always, we have some vacation effects in Q2, maybe some SEK 15 million of lower OpEx, which is, of course, helping, especially in the third quarter. Looking at the EPS then, 3.88, a very strong level. A strong result is the main driving factor. Pretty clean net financials.
We see also that interest rates are coming down and the debt itself is coming down, which is, of course, lowering the burden on the net financials and then improving the EPS. We have a one-time effect in the fact that we have some lower tax related to the U.S. in the quarter, which we cannot expect to see going forward. It's always rewarding when that happens. That boosts, of course, the EPS a little bit as well. Maybe my favorite part of this report, the cash flow, which is very strong. We have a cash conversion of over 90% and good profits in the base coming over to SEK 258 million in cash flow from operations. We're continuing also to see a decline in inventories. We've been seeing that throughout the year.
I think we have a little bit left to take in Q4 as well, and then coming more into a good level on the inventory side. That is supporting as well. Very nice to have that to delever the balance sheet, which we see also now on this slide that we're continuing to do. We are closing the quarter at net debt/EBITDA of 2.66 as reported. If I exclude IFRS 16, as we might think is a better way to see it, we are doing 2.6. Just to compare this, after Q2, this was 2.92, and after Q4, this was 3.37. We've been reducing some 30 basis points in the quarter, which is, of course, very good to see. We've said before that we should be below 2.5 at the year end, and everything points to that actually happening as well. We've been talking a lot.
We're going to open up for questions in a minute. Just a very high-level wrap-up from what we've been seeing: all in all, recovering in several geographic markets. North America sticks out as the strongest area. Still some more potential in Europe, a little bit hesitant for INT. Happy to say that Middle East and China are now growing into more important markets for the group. We're doing the investments in the production facility in the U.S. We've already now been building the capacity, and that will happen even more during Q4. Going into 2026, we will have better capacity and more flexibility if we need to change some production to the U.S. to set up a better tariff situation and get tariffs on the components instead of finished goods. All in all, we think that this tariff situation has been fairly well mitigated for the time being, at least.
We still try to keep flexible to see what happens if there will be changes coming forward. Finally, all in all, good results, record profitability in cash flow, SEK 244 million EBIT, cash conversion 91%, and a strong cash flow. We can continue to delever as planned with the business. With that, I think we can hand over to operator and open up for some questions.
If you wish to ask a question, please dial pound key five on your telephone keypad to enter the queue. If you wish to withdraw your question, please dial pond key six on your telephone keypad. The next question comes from Simon Granath from ABG. Please go ahead.
Hi, Staffan and Joakim, and congrats on the robust numbers. Initially, we have recently been talking about smaller projects progressing decently despite the elevated uncertainty shown in recent quarters, while larger projects have been halted. Are you witnessing any change in customer behavior of the larger projects more recently?
No, we are lacking large orders still. It's a broad-based increase of smaller orders from many customers, I would say. We still lack the large orders that we would like to see. Maybe the only area that sticks out for us is maybe Japan for the INT division, where we normally will get some large order every quarter. I think it's more about a timing effect, and we hope that that will materialize. Otherwise, I think it's like Staffan said, yeah.
Very clear. Thanks for that. On cost, I think we've been talking about that if sales volumes do not pick up as you've been anticipating, OpEx would likely stay low. If volumes come, you would also increase cost partly in order to reach your targets as well. My question is essentially if you are presently seeing the progress you've been anticipating?
Yeah, I think so. I mean, if you look on the market demand, it's not great, but it's okay. I think with the cost side we're having right now, we are performing well on this market. To be really happy, we would like to see a stronger market because it's still not great. We hope it to be better in the coming years. Right now, we are pleased to see these signals that it's actually moving in the right direction with a little bit of organic growth in net sales and things like this. The market is still a little bit hesitant, I would say.
That's also very clear. A question on tariffs. Were you able to fully compensate for the tariffs in the quarter as a whole in terms of gross profit? Furthermore, given your report comment that you anticipate further changes in tariff regulations, how would you anticipate customers would react to changes in tariffs? If there are more tariffs, would you then be able to increase prices further? If the opposite happens, if tariffs diminish, are current prices then sustainable? Thanks.
In general, I think that we've done some general price increasing. We have not specifically only increased by tariff only. We combined this with some strategic pricing and inflation and things like this. We think that if the tariffs are increasing somewhat, we might not be able to do another round of price increases short term. Let's see that. I think we took some extra headroom when we did this change during the year here. I would say that we are probably fully on the total, we are fully compensating ourselves at the moment. There are some differences from some customers that are minus and some customers are plus. In total, we are covering our extra cost and actually probably a few dollars more.
Perfect. That's all for me. Thanks.
Thanks, Simon.
The next question comes from Joachim Gunell from DNB Carnegie. Please go ahead.
Thank you. It's not only the weather in Stockholm that is sunny. I think that you are also a bit sunnier in the way that you communicate with regards to end markets. Can you perhaps say just a bit about how you think about the pacing of orders throughout the quarter and then the start of October? Adding to Simon's question, you've been very cautious and diligent and strict on OpEx in a tougher for longer market scenario. Here, for the first time in seven quarters, you are actually increasing your OpEx year over year organically. How should we think about it?
I think when we look at the total, it's quite sunny. I think it's been like in early spring that some days it's been colder than we expected. Some days it's great weather. You never know. I think it has not been rock-solid improvements during the quarter. It's been a little bit of up and down. We had some weeks disappointing, some weeks possibly surprised. I would say it's not rock solid. That's my feeling at the moment.
I think we normally see a weak August with some vacations, especially in Europe. That was the same this year. July was quite good. September was quite good. I think October has continued in a similar pace that we've been seeing in a quarter. I think this is pretty much where the market is at the moment. That's pretty much our takeaway.
Perfect. Also, I mean, how's the progress of ramping up and modernizing the production facility in York going? What further steps need to be taken to get to Swedish manufacturing standards in your view?
Yeah, I think what we saw there last week or two weeks ago when we were there is that we are maybe halfway. Some process steps are fully completed where we see very good progress. I mean, we are doubling the output in some, and the quality is now almost on the level we expect there. Still, we are facing this. For some of the process steps, we are getting the new equipment in in Q4, and we need some adjustment time. At the end of the year, everything should be—all the machines and all the new investments are in place and the renovation of the facilities and everything. We need maybe a quarter or two to really work on the details to make sure that this is clockwork. We are taking good steps in the right direction. This also gives a very positive atmosphere with the operators.
People are smiling in the production there. We're doing investments, and they also feel that they are important. We see quality is rising, so we also see the pride is coming with the staff there, which is very important for building good quality.
That sounds encouraging. Margins have been, I mean, stellar here in light of still fairly low organic volumes, right? Can you just talk a bit about the FX hedges here in Q3? What would the translation effect on, perhaps for you, Joakim, what would the EBIT translation effect have been without the FX hedges and all else equal? I think is it fair to assume that FX will incrementally become a headwind in Q4 margin sense?
Yeah, I don't want to go into exactly the impact from the hedges. We don't normally report that. We've been super lucky with the timing throughout the first three quarters in the year, especially in Q3. We're getting a great effect on the hedges we've done. Obviously, that will not continue at the same pace going forward, given that the hedges we have taken at that point in time, the U.S. dollar was at a lower level. I think you can expect a couple of million in negative EBIT effect from FX in Q4 in relation to what we've seen now in Q3.
Lovely. Finally, we are now three quarters into the new organizational structure. Can you just comment a bit on, just call it, signs where you are seeing traction of this new strategy and that you are reaping the benefits from this more effective and decentralized setup?
I think we're starting to see that the new organization launched here on the first of January is starting to work well. Of course, this also reduced headcounts by almost 10% in that change. That was also, as always, a little bit of a negative feeling the first couple of quarters. That is behind us. People are positive, and they realize that what we're doing now is the right organization. People are closer to customers, and each division is feeling that they have the accountability to run their business. I think we're doing good progress there. When it comes to the strategy, we are just rolling it out. We are seeing very good excitement in the organization about this. Actually, one of the operators in the York
facility two weeks ago told me, "I really love our three-to-one grow." He's a production operator on the factory floor in the U.S. We've been rolling out this in a good and successful way. Of course, the proof is in the pudding. Now we need to deliver on this, and it will take some time before we see the effects of being more forward-leaning in sales, investing more in product development. That will take years before we see the real financial impact. That's why we do the five-year plan.
It seems you're on the right track. Thank you very much and have a great day.
Thanks, Joachim.
The next question comes from Gustav Berneblad from Nordea. Please go ahead.
Yes, good morning. It's Gustav here from Nordea. I thought maybe just to start off on IDS. I mean, just looking sequentially Q over Q, it's a massive margin expansion. Of course, I understand Q3 is seasonally strong on margins, and you have a bit higher volumes and price increases. Can you just comment a bit on this expansion? Are there anything that sticks out that we should sort of know about here?
I think you summarized it pretty well. I think when you have 64% gross margin, the volume comes down pretty well to the bottom line. With an improvement in the gross margin in itself, that's been very successful, of course. Just for IDS, just to make that point again, we were a bit short in Q2. It's maybe not fully fair to just compare those two quarters. We had some SEK 15 million that was spilling over into Q3 due to the manufacturing stop and then start with a new ERP. That, of course, makes a difference when you compare those two quarters. We are very happy with the development. 27% EBIT margin is, of course, a very good level for IDS.
Okay, that's very clear. If we look at Q2 here, a bit larger if we look on the year-on-year growth in R&D expenses. Now, in Q3, you are close to flat. Is it possible to say anything regarding the capitalized development cost in Q3 this year compared to last year?
Yes, I think we were up SEK 7 million, if I don't recall incorrectly. You can probably go back and check that if you want. It's in the report.
Yeah, it looks quite accurate.
Yeah. Maybe a more important comment on that. I think what we're seeing is that we are ramping up in some areas the development pace. You saw also we made the sales and marketing was up a little bit in Q3. We are starting to invest a little bit to fulfill the strategy for 2030. I think I mentioned it also on the Capital Markets Day that we will see in 2026 and 2027 probably a higher investment pace in R&D to come out with the new platform for IDS and also to execute on the new, especially the INT initiatives. We will be trying to address some larger customers, both with a software offering and a new embedded offering. That will drive some more investment pace going forward. I think you received maybe a little bit already in Q3.
You will see it in next year and 2027 as well.
OK, that's very clear also. Just the final one here on margins. You comment a bit on the positive mix effect. How should we think about this going forward, short term, so to say?
I think what we believe and what we still believe is that the embedded business in INT has some more volume in it. We think that we will see slightly higher levels in INT. If that becomes a larger share of the total, of course, that will put some pressure on the gross margins from today's level. Still, I think we've done some pretty good job here. We do have some potential still with investments in the York facility. Somewhere around this level, I think 63%+ , I would expect us to be able to deliver anyway.
I think also we need to look on the gross margin a little bit on longer term. We see variations quarter on quarter due to, as we say, the product mix. We have some customers with fantastic margins, some with mediocre margins. All in all, the trend should go in the right direction. We have a target to be over 65% in the new strategic plan. That's what we focus on for the midterm. There will be some variations quarter by quarter.
All right, perfect. That's very clear. That was all for me. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you.
The next question comes from Jesper Stugemo from Handelsbanken. Please go ahead.
Yes, good morning. Hi, Staffan, and hi, Joakim. Many good questions already. Given that China now has surpassed Japan, I guess this is more related to market dynamics and the current demand picture. Is it this strategic refocus that you have in China to prioritize this market, given that it seems like you have a good portfolio there with little domestic competition?
Yeah, I think the strategy we have for China is to be more selective. Primarily, we see for division INT that they have a product offer that is attractive in China, limited competition. If we look on things like IDS, we see much more domestic competition there. I think we are also reducing our efforts in IDS division there, or at least not investing in it. I think we try to really analyze where can we be successful, where can we win, and put all the more eggs in that part of the business and then just accept that some of these domestic competitors we have for IDS, it's really difficult to win with an American-made product with the same functionality as a Chinese-made product in China. You can win with that in the U.S., but you can't win with that in China.
I think we realized that and put our focus where we can win.
All right. A follow-up on the Japanese orders here, larger orders. You haven't seen them here in Q3. What are your expectations on the volumes in the coming quarters? How close are your dialogues with the customers there? How good visibility do you have?
Very good question. It's not easy to answer. I think we expect that our customers will come back in Japan. It's been a tough market. A lot of our Japanese customers used to be successful in China. We see this both in Europe and in Japan, that the domestic competition in China is increasing. Some of our Japanese customers are suffering on that. It's not that we have lost customers in Japan. Our customers have problems with their Chinese markets. I think that's a clear indication. We expect Japan to come up again. The Japanese market itself looks promising. The China export is difficult for them.
All right, all right. Okay, that's all for me. Thank you.
OK, thank you, Jesper.
The next question comes from Thomas Blikstad from Pareto Securities. Please go ahead.
Good morning. Congratulations on a very strong quarter. A lot of good questions already answered here. I'll be very short. I was just wondering if it's possible to get a refresher on how much of your manufacturing is currently outsourced to EMS partners, and what's your view on this long term with impact on margins and so forth?
Good question. We love to talk about this. We have a strategy with manufacturing to do all the new and ramp-up products, as well as low volume products in our own manufacturing. When these products are good and stable and keep on growing, we normally work with strategic EMS partners in Europe, in Asia, and also in North America to make sure that they can deliver the high volumes because we feel that we don't have the capacity for this high volume. I think that strategy has proved working well for us. Joakim, what could it be if we look on revenue?
I'd say about 50/50 at the moment.
50/50, yeah.
Before the acquisition of Red Lion, I think we had a majority that was outsourced. Then we took on a big manufacturing plant in-house, and we've been making some small adjustments. I think it's about 50/50 at the moment.
If you look on part numbers, maybe more than 90% of part numbers is made in-house. These are low volumes, and maybe 10% is done through EMS. That's the high volume. That's really the dynamic we are looking to fulfill here.
OK, that's very clear. Thank you. You don't expect any, let's say, development here, just the same strategy going forward, basically.
I think the long term, we are moving production out of China from one strategic EMS partner or actually one location. It's the Norwegian Kitron that we're working with there. We are reducing some parts in China and ramping them up in Malaysia due to some customer needs and opinions about they have higher taxes on made in China and things like this. This gives us flexibility to move between different sites as well without us doing all the CapEx investment to do that. It works pretty well, actually.
Yeah, thank you. Congratulations again.
Thanks so much.
As a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, please dial pound key five on your telephone keypad. There are no more questions at this time. I hand the conference back to the speakers for any closing comments.
Thank you. Thank you all for your participation in this Q3 call. We are happy to see some more sunshine, as I said. It's not great, but it's okay. I think we deliver a fair result under the circumstances. We keep on running out with our long-term strategy for 2030. We have a big focus on this. I'm sure that there will be some variations during the coming quarters. This market, more positive market we are seeing right now, it's not for granted that it will continue. We see that the signal we are seeing today is that it's moving in the right direction. That's quite clear for us. Please stay tuned. We are coming up with Q4 quite soon as well in the quarter. Look forward to talking to you at that time. Thank you. Goodbye.