Welcome to the HMS Networks' Q4 presentation for 2022. For the first part of the conference call, the participants will be in listen-only mode. During the questions and answer session, participants are able to ask questions by dialing star five on their telephone keypad. I will hand the conference over to CEO Staffan Dahlström and CFO Joakim Nideborn. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Good morning, everybody. Greetings from a rainy Stockholm where me and Joakim Nideborn, our CFO, are sitting around the table here to give you a short update of the report we just published this morning. I will go for a summary and introduction to the company, and then Joakim will dive into the numbers for Q4. We're pretty happy with Q4. A strong development. We see a good development in sales in our organic growth. Surprisingly good on order intake, we'll dive more into that later. We're very happy with the good EBIT development. A lot of the growth is falling through to profits for us. An EBIT margin of over 25% is beyond our targets. This makes us very happy.
Good cash flow back after some weaker quarters and resulting in an EPS of 3.25. All in all, the year, the full year of 2022, very good for us. Plus 27% in net sales, continued to grow on orders and very good development on the profit side. Before going into more numbers, I would like to give a few slides about HMS in general. Our business, Industrial ICT, Information and Communication Technology, is quite interesting market. On one side, it's, I would say more industrial market with the customers that are a bit conservative in jumping on the latest technology. We also see, part of this is an IT market with software and technology that is evolving in the industrial area. Quite well established.
We have more than 9 million devices connected around the world, and we're also quite successful in this newer world of IoT, where we have over 400 machines connected in our Talk2M cloud system for remote service. Of course, we focus on technology with 5G, AI, and the new things. The majority of the growth we are seeing now is much more on the traditional products. Customers are investing in automation, in sustainability, in improving their business. As a company, we are 762 employees this morning, and we operate with 17 subsidiaries around the globe, and we also have partners and distributors in 50 countries. We are located with headquarters in south part of Sweden in Halmstad, but the majority of our employees and our business is out of Sweden.
Right now, we are halfway through our 2025 plan. We have three important targets. We have a big focus on sustainability. For us, sustainability equals CO2 emissions, where we wanna be net positive, both with what we do ourselves. That is a smaller part of our own emissions. We are around 5,000 tons of CO2 in our emissions, but we focus a lot on helping our customers because some of our customers are quite big emitters. Last year, I guess we saved over 1 million tons in CO2 emissions for our customers by using our products and helping them in reducing travels and improving their energy efficiency, et cetera. We also believe that happy and high-performing employees generate loyal customers, and we really like to drive our loyal customer development. We focus on Net Promoter Score for our employees.
We score very good and also Net Promoter Score, where we still score good. After a year with cost price increases and very long lead times, we have seen a drop from excellent numbers to good numbers. We're still over 30, we need to work harder to gain back the confidence from our customers by reducing lead times and improving the supply situation. Target is to reach more than SEK 5 billion in revenue 2025. As you see, we are taking a good step this year in that direction, we're not fully there yet. We have a few years to go, we're quite confident that this will be possible. We talk about our business as we help our customers enable valuable data and insights from machines and systems.
It's about industrial connectivity, connecting machines, so they can talk to each other, but also talk to IT systems and cloud systems. The business we focus on is industrial. We have two separate parts. We have industrial automation, which primarily is manufacturing, processing process industries, but also transportation infrastructure. You see pictures here with harbors and logistics, warehousing. We also have a segment for power and energy, where we see more and more interest in battery solutions and smart system to mitigate some of the challenges we see in power generation, but also power distribution. It's an interesting area. We have a smaller business in building automation. It's 7% of our revenue. Have potential, and we are doing some initiatives there to grow this faster.
It's not what you think about home automation. This is residential, but commercial buildings, I would say, larger shopping malls, airports, hotel complexes, et cetera. They all have a similar communication technology. For us, from a technical point of view, it makes sense to have all these segments. We have two types of customers. We have makers of industrial automation. These are the Atlas Copcos and ABBs of the world. We also have users of automation system. These are the Volkswagens and Stora Enso and these companies that use automation system in their production facilities. If you look on our business model and take how we take this to market, on the left side with our makers, we have two segments, device manufacturers and machine builders.
On the left part, device manufacturer, it's our biggest business, 44% of our revenue in 2022. There we have a direct sales force that work with design wins, where we become embedded inside these customers' products. It's a quite long sales cycle, but it's also a very long lifetime of the product. We can sell the products for a very long time to these customers. This actually, this part has been very good. 2022 has been one of the drivers of our good growth. In the middle of machine makers, we see machine builders. Here we offer connectivity, remote service and things like that. This is today 27% of our revenue. 2022, been a little bit affected by long lead times, and we have had some challenges here.
The ambition here is to work with direct sales to large customers, distribution sales to small customers. Of course, we would like to be part of every machine, but in reality, we become more like an option on their specification. If this machine should have remote access, they use our product. If this machine is integrated in an automotive plant in the line, they should have some connectivity, then we get the order. Finally, a quite quick growing business for us is the end users and system integrators, where we last years have focused quite much with acquisitions and some old organic things. It's 29% revenue. Of course, here we see an opportunity to come closer to our end users and many of our left side here makers, they sell to these customers.
For us, coming closer to the end users is important for us to understand the applications. Here we work both with traditional distributors, but also more, we see more and more e-commerce specialized in industrial automation, where we all see good growth. Let's take a business update, quarter four. Annually, we always report our design wins. This means that we have two phases that the customers are won by HMS when they start integrating our technology inside their robot controller or gluing equipment or whatever kind of equipment they do. When they start this, then when they make the decision to use us for connectivity and start their design of the product, then it's a design win. Later, we also measure production win day when they enter market.
The blue part here, the active base, this is the customers that are through the production phase. That's where we get revenue. We see that the baby blue here, is new customers that have decided to use our product. They integrate it, but they are not out on the market yet. We see a quite stable inflow of design wins, a little bit reduction from last year. We also see that most of our customers have, like we also had during the year, supply challenges. Of course, we see with electronic components that there's a lot of end of life and end of life notice.
We have spent a lot of time with redesigning our products, but our customers have also spent a lot of time with their redesigns, which makes their bandwidth for talking about new products have been limited. We think the 146 new both indicate stability in the market and an attractiveness with our current product offer. The red part is older product that more or less are retired. This means that they will not generate revenue anymore. We see quite normal minus 93. All in all, we see a stable development. Also note that some 10, 15 years ago, this was the majority of business, 76% back in 2012. This business had been growing good for us, but now it represents 44%.
This been our strategy over the years to continue grow in this segment, but also acquire and develop new businesses to make us more stable and less dependent on only this business model. We feel this is a good year, keeping in mind the challenges with supply chain. We feel this is a stable development. If you look in the quarter, we are happy that we could get this good development on sales, but it's also been related to our supply situation that we actually been better than expected. You know, we have products with maybe 100 components. We don't only need 91, 99 of them. We need 100 components to deliver.
We've seen that we've been more lucky than the previous quarters to fill up our planning with products we can deliver. That's been good for us. We also see a good demand from from Europe, for Asia. We see part of the slowdown in Americas after a couple of strong quarters. Still, all in all, our customers remain quite positive for the future. Everybody's concerned about what will happen in the coming quarters, but we don't really see that in our orders, and we don't see that in customer projects. They are still invested. Going forward, we think that supply situation will continue to improve. However, the temporary easing or good successes on Q4 could be also seeing a backlash in Q1 because it's about getting 100 of all 100 components.
We are still having some challenges with companies like Intel and these large ones that still have a very unpredictable delivery situation for some of the key components in the industrial area we are in. We've done two smaller M&A things. We acquired a very small company in U.K. under our Procentec business. It's a small company doing certifications and trainings for device manufacturers mainly. By acquiring them, we get closer to some of these customers in U.K. We also see that this is a good way for selling more of these trainings and expertise services to customers. We also made a change in our ownership in our Spanish business, Owasys, that is kept as a separate business for us.
We went from 60% ownership to 80% ownership. The remainder of the 20% is still owned by four really good entrepreneurs that is running the business, and we are super happy with this combination that they are part in driving the business and run the daily business, and we help them as the main owner, long term. Interesting business that they will be able to develop over the next couple of years. If you look on the year as, all in all, it's more or less the similar things, fantastic year. The trend has been favorable for us. We believe that these trends will continue, let's keep a close eye on the sourcing situation and how this order situation.
We've talked about boosted orders, that customers place orders for filling up their safety stocks and longer lead, longer placing orders with a longer outlook. Joakim will dive down a little bit more into these details in a few minutes. If you look just on the full year and make some reflections over the 30 years plus we've been in business, if you look on this, we can... Of course, we had a slow start in the nineties, all in all, it's been a successful growth journey. We were, we IPO'd in 2007, had a little bit bump like others in 2009 during the financial crisis, came back quite quick.
The last 10 years have been a good mix of organic growth with strong markets, but also our new acquisitions that have been helping us to become a bit broader. We also in 2020 that this early phase of COVID gave a lot of uncertainty in the market, but we quickly bounced back. Last couple of two years have been fantastic for us. We think this is a beautiful graph, and we are committed to just keep on developing this graph for the coming years. Right. Joakim, should we move into the details and numbers?
Let's do that. We're starting out with order intake. As you've seen, a strong quarter, SEK 780 million, 3% growth versus Q4 in 2021 that was filled with boost orders. Organically small decline with only -1%. For the full year, glad to see that we're reaching about SEK 3 billion, 21% growth, 10% organic. Now for the second quarter in a row, we see book-to-bill less than 1, we're starting to eat a bit of our order book, 0.94 for the quarter, still 1.22 for the full year. There's been a strong order intake for sure throughout the year. I think Staffan touched upon this already, but we have a little bit different trends that we see in the market. We see the, in Americas, we've seen a declining trend throughout the years in orders, which continues in Q4.
Still on good levels, though, still growth, but it's pretty clear that the trend is a bit weakening. However, in Europe, and also I must say in Asia, we see a little bit different situation, where we see a bit of a tick up in Q4 in comparison with Q3, for instance. This was surprising for us, and I'm gonna comment more on this on next slide. It's for sure that the market is still performing quite well. To summarize it, what's driving this, we can see that it's still the embedded business within our Control Centric offering that is doing very well.
That's I think the same for Q4 as for the whole year. To talk about the year, we can also say that Asia has been very strong. We've had a lot of long orders from some of our key customers there that's been driving for sure some of the boost, but also very strong underlying demand from Asia. That's a bit larger than it's normally been for us. Everything has been good. I mean, it's a year that's for sure our best year ever and nothing to complain about, really. Maybe to talk about what's most interesting and maybe where we are a bit surprised ourselves, looking at this graph that we've shown now for two years, showing our underlying demand as we see it and what we refer to as boost orders.
We here said in Q3, where we saw this was declining quite rapidly, we did not expect that we're gonna get these both boost orders. Maybe I have to talk about what we have been seeing here for the last two years. There's two things really. One is the fact that customers are increasing safety stock due to these long lead times and more uncertain deliveries. This effect probably peaked out in Q4 2021, Q1 2022, when we saw that several customers were actually going from 3-6 months or 6-9 months in safety stock, and even some customers that is up to 1 year now. The other thing is the fact that the deliveries have been uncertain, not only from us, but from several suppliers.
Therefore, most customers or many of the big customers at least are placing very long orders. Instead of placing orders for 1 quarter, they're now placing orders for one year. When we talk about this boost effect, we are really referring to a situation that occurred before 2021. I think that's important to say because otherwise we would say that in comparison to Q4 2021, there is no boost effect in 2022. It's just that the behavior from the customers will still be in the sense that they are placing long orders in larger extent than before. I think that's important to remember. We are not so sure that this will be a rapid decline of this boost effect or a reversal of the boost effect.
As long as this situation is in place, which it still is, we're uncertain de-deliveries and still some components are difficult to obtain, we still think that we'll see these longer orders for customers in many ways. Before, it was more about placing forecasts for a longer period and then short orders for a shorter period. Now we don't really see the forecast, now we see the orders instead. I hope that clarifies a bit. Let's discuss it further in the Q&A if there are more things that need to be clarified there. In terms of net sales, we also had a very strong ending to the quarter. We managed to push out SEK 464 million, so increased by 34% or 22% organic.
For the full year, a strong year, 27% growth, out of which 17% organic growth, reaching about SEK 2.5 billion was a nice mark to pass. Here is really what we see that we're able to deliver the strong backlog that we've had on embedded products, where we had a really strong order intake in Q1, Q2, many customers that started placing those orders for a couple of quarters ahead that we managed to deliver. We all see both Asia and Europe on those embedded orders driving growth. I think overall it's good as you see the numbers, this is what's pushing the market a bit upwards. Maybe this is a little bit better than what we had expected. I mean, the backlog has always been there.
It's just been a matter of being able to convert with those components that's been difficult to obtain. We see let's see maybe some temporary relief in the supply chain. We managed to solve most problems in Q4. Still, there are a couple of dark clouds ahead that we need to manage. We managed quite well, I think, during throughout the year to fix that, so let's hope that we can continue to do that in 2023 as well. There's been a discussion around pricing, and we see now that in Q4, we have 11% growth driven from price increases comparing to Q4 in 2021. For the full year it's about 9%. This is a bit back heavy. We've been discussing this before as well.
If you don't remember, we made one price increase towards the end of the year in 2022, January 1st, and then we made a 2nd one from July 1st. This is where we see now a larger effect in Q3 and Q4 compared to the 1st part of the year. This leaves us with a still a strong order book, even if it's declining slightly from Q3, with the book-to-bill being 0.94. SEK 1.4 billion is, of course, by far the largest order book we exit the year with, 63% up from Q4 2021. This leaves us in a good place for getting a good start of 2023, for sure.
You have on the right hand side, we've been showing this also for a bit, the orders that we have for delivery that's further out than three months. That is quite stable. It was maybe more interesting throughout 2021, where that was increasing a lot every quarter. For this year, as you see, it's been quite stable on the same, on the same track as around the 60%. This we expect to be something similar when we still have these long lead times. Over time, I'm sure that will come down, but we don't really see that trend yet. Sales per region. Not too much to say about this. I think Europe is finalizing the year very strong, 64% of the total. America is 19, and APAC 17.
We believe over time, this will be some 60, 20. We've seen some movement there, but I think that's the main message we have here. Okay, let's talk about our profitability as well. You see here also record quarter of SEK 192 million compared to SEK 109 a year ago. As Staffan said, 25.1% margin, and really nice to see that we can be on this 25% level. It's the same as we have for the full year. The adjusted EBIT margin is 25% with SEK 626 million EBIT. Couple of drivers behind that. I mean, one is the gross margin that we managed to improve.
You see now in Q4, same level as we had in Q3, 63.6% compared to 60.8% 1 year ago. A couple of notes on that. We see that spot purchases, we still have them. It's declining slowly, so we have, I think, SEK 2 million less than we had in Q3, significantly less than in the beginning of the year. We also see that the price increases that we made, especially from half year 2022, is having full effect now in Q4. That's good to see that we're pushing those out as well. For the full year, we're ending up with margins of 62.9% compared to 62.4%.
Just let me remind you that in 2021, we saw a completely different situation where we started out the year with good margins, close to 64% in the first two quarters, then started to see a bit of a hit on the margins due to the price increases on components, where we needed some more time to push this to our customers. 2022 has now been the complete opposite, where we've been improving the margins throughout the year. All in all, we're in a good place starting out 2023. We've done a decent job here in managing the difficult climate in increasing prices. We should be able to protect those margins throughout 2023 as well.
On the OpEx side, maybe a little bit higher than what we had expected. A lot of things are happening. We have some marketing trade shows that is going on now again, that wasn't there in maybe a year ago. We're increasing OpEx by 14% organically in the quarter, 15% for the full year. You know that Q4 is always, sort of an expensive quarter for us given those market activities that we're doing. I think all in all, in order to get to that nice, EBIT margins, we have the gross margins working for us. We have currency as well that is helping us a little bit here. That's some operational leverage that we're growing in a good pace here as well.
That is driving our net sales to increase by 34% in the quarter. EBIT is actually 25% up compared to one quarter ago. Also for the full year, those numbers are good. Just to quantify those currency effects, we have a SEK 30 million push on the EBIT from positive FX effect in quarter and SEK 39 million in 2022. For sure that's a good help. Looking at earnings per share, SEK 3.25 in the quarter and SEK 10.89 for the full year. The board has proposed a dividend of SEK 4 instead of SEK 3 a year ago. I mean, that's the most interesting news on this. No main things that are strange otherwise between the EBIT line and the earnings after tax.
Cash flow, also good to see that this is coming back a little bit. We are sequentially, I mean, from Q3 to Q4, we are growing the business 22% on sales. Of course, that also builds some working capital, but not in the same pace. Even if we have the working capital that is -SEK 31 million in the cash flow, that is still on a decent level, I think. We have a small inventory buildup. We have had a pretty big buildup throughout the year, SEK 167 million for the full year, 31% in the quarter. This is flattening out. I think we've done most what we need to do, and we'll be more flattish and maybe even we could be able to reduce inventory for the coming quarters here.
But I think it's at this point in time, it's all about being able to deliver and not take any unnecessary risks. It's not this inventory chase that you normally see is really about delivery. It's not a big concern of ours and good to see again that we are building the cash flows. Final slide from me, looking at the balance sheet a bit more than. We have reported debt of SEK 300 million, out of which only SEK 46 million would be what could be seen as real debt. And we have these leasing parts, SEK 155 million, and debts related to options of SEK 99 million as well. I think all in all, we end the year with a very strong balance sheet.
We have only 0.39 in net debt through EBITDA, which of course leaves us with a lot of room for future investments, acquisitions. Where we hope that we can be a bit more active for the coming years. We haven't really managed to convert what we had hoped for throughout 2022, but we hope that we can do a more interesting job going, looking ahead with that. Staffan, if you want to summarize.
Yes. Thank you, Joakim. As I said, we are happy with the quarter. We are a little bit surprised that quarter four orders was as good. We've been expecting something a bit slowdown, but the markets and the customer remains positive. They are concerned about some kind of uncertainty coming up for 2023. We feel that there are strong long-term drivers in increased automation, sustainability. We also start to see some of these effects with nearshoring and some moves around the world to be more regional than global in your supply chain. I think this also drives and helps the business for HMS. I think we need to make up our mind, should we be careful or should we still focus on growth?
We are focused on being a growth company. We are still investing, but we are staying agile, and we are trying to avoid with what we call sticky cost. Of course, we hire more people, we do more investments, but we expect the growth to continue. There's an uncertainty in 2023 that is really difficult to get our arms around at the moment. The full year, fantastic year. The thing that we are not happy with is the M&A side. We compensate this with a good organic growth. Of course, our strategy is to have half of the growth from organic and half of the growth from M&A. It's good to see that the organic growth is compensating for the lack of M&A.
On the M&A side, we've been seeing that we haven't really found the right targets. Some of the discussion we have last couple of years have been on the wrong price level, we think. We are not stressed on buying companies. We need to find the right candidates to the right price. We'll keep on searching. Well, let's work on that. All in all, a good year. We're happy with it, and looks promising for the future. With that, Joakim, should we open up for Q&A?
Let's do that. Jonathan.
If you wish to ask a question, please dial star five on your telephone keypad to enter the queue. If you wish to withdraw your question, please dial star five again on your telephone keypad. The next question comes from Simon Granath from ABG. Please go ahead.
Thank you, operator. A particular congrats to you guys, Staffan and Joakim, for the strong results. A couple of questions from me. Starting off, just circling back to the boosted order topic, did I interpret it correctly that you expect the recent trend to continue ahead, given that there are still some uncertainties in the supply chain, and thus you do not expect the potential revert as a normal distribution curve as we have previously talked about to materialize? Obviously, lots of uncertainties, but any comments are helpful. Thanks.
If I start on general and you are coming, dive in. I think quarter four shows that the expectation we had that this should be some kind of linear curve bouncing back in a couple of quarters proved to be wrong. We see both that some of this boost effect continues, and we see a stronger than expected demand. I think this will not be a fully theoretical curve, sinus curve that goes up and goes down again. We are a little bit. The uncertainty have increased. We are happy with seeing this, but we were initially expecting this kind of boost orders to start to correct in 2023. What we see now in Q4 is a different scenario. I think Joakim, what do you say? This is difficult to assess at the moment.
Yeah, I think, I don't disagree with anything you said, Staffan. It's, We're thinking a lot about this, on our side, of course, as well. We were a bit surprised what we saw in Q4. It's pretty clear that there are still component challenges out there. The lead times are still long, which is causing customers to place those long orders. We still see a lot of investments going on. That's pretty clear in the industry. It's, given what you read in the papers, it's maybe surprisingly strong how the business holds up. I think it's very difficult to speculate more in the future what's going to happen. We were pretty convinced before that we were going to see this, reversal throughout 2023.
I think what we saw now in Q4 is maybe causing us to reevaluate that a little bit.
In addition, I think we can say if we, if we look at how we act internally, we are allowing ourselves to have much higher inventory. We are saying that even if things are getting better in lead times, we are still placing orders to our suppliers with very long time ahead. I think we and many others have been burned our fingers with this kind of optimized inventory, slow, short supply cycle, stuff like that. I think people are concerned, and this will not be a quick return to a just-in-time attitude. It will take a couple of years before customers really adjust to optimizing the inventories, we believe, because the expenses for our customers have been so high in not being able to ship their machines or build their cars or whatever they do.
I think this will have a slower correction than we initially anticipated.
Thank you so much. That's very helpful to hear all that color on the topic. Just moving back also on the sequential growth in real demand orders here. Is there any particular trends that have been accentuated here in Q4? I know that we have previously been talking about nearshoring, but also you have other trends that are giving tailwinds to your operations, certainly. Could you talk a bit on the nearshoring topic? Thanks.
Yeah. I think people are talking about nearshoring. Sometimes, when we talk to customers, we get a feeling that not so many customers are moving existing production away from China, towards Europe and Mexico. It's more the decisions of where to place your new production. That's clear that you invest in, and that's where we have most investments as well. I think in media, we see a lot of discussions about this. We see that the actual change is a bit slower, but for sure, our customers is placing more of their new production sites closer to their big markets in Europe and in North America. It's not a quick change.
It makes a lot of sense. It looks like Ewon had a strong quarter. Is this in part driven by recent product launches, or does it mainly relate to a strong market?
I think that is mostly related to a strong market as such. We had a really good start to the quarter with, some good shipments out there. It's a mix, of course, but it's, I don't think that the new launch is the driver this short time.
Great. Just a final question from me. OpEx was up 35% quarter-over-quarter, which partly reflects seasonality as you touched upon, Joakim, but still it's up. Are there any recurring items included here, elevated personal bonuses, et cetera, due to strong orders?
There's a little bit of that. I think what's. We are trying also to take the benefit of the strong business as we have. We'll see going into Q1, we'll see also, as you know, salary increases with a relatively high inflation that is gonna push everything up. I'm not sure that Q4 will stick out so much looking ahead, even if there are some costs that are normal for Q4, but not normal for the other quarters, if we put it like that. Q4 specific costs, there is a bunch, yeah.
Great. Thank you so much for having my question, and congrats again on the strong results.
Thanks, Simon.
The next question comes from Joachim Gunell from DNB Markets. Please go ahead.
Thank you very much, and good morning, Staffan and Joakim. Touching on some of the points Simon asked about, but just can you talk just a bit about how the quarter progressed, whether you saw quite sequentially increased activity towards the back end of December, et cetera, and perhaps also in particularly what product areas you saw that growth?
I think the all in all for the quarter, it was picking up, you could say. It was started out okay in October, November was a bit better, December finished off really strong, both on orders and deliveries. The strong December is a bit unusual for us. We don't normally see that given it's a shorter month. That was a bit surprising. That was the general trend. For the embedded business, the same, what I just said was even more extreme. Whereas for Ewon, for instance, we had a bit of the same, the reverse pattern. It started off good in October, okay in November, declining a bit in December.
I think all in all, what maybe caught us a bit by surprise was that December finished off so strong, both on orders and in sales.
Have, the start of January surprised you in any fashion?
January has continued in a similar note, not as good as as the end of the quarter, but still quite okay. We don't see what you read in the papers. We don't see anything of yet that there were gonna be massive decline or recession or anything like that. Still quite solid.
No, that's clear. I mean, the backlog continues at SEK 1.4 billion as we have seen through recent quarters. Obviously you have a slightly call it above normal visibility here on the call it sales and sales side for 2023. Can you just comment a bit about for how long into 2023 this backlog provides you with certain levels of visibility?
Yeah. I think you could say that is a pretty much perfect linear decline throughout the year. There is also some orders already for 2024. That's maybe SEK 200 million for 2024. Rest is for 2023. Here you have about 40% of the backlog in Q1, and then it's declining, as I said, linearly over the year.
Great. When it comes to, I mean, obviously the design wins report is not losing importance, but becoming less material for you, as your product mix has changed. With regards to that we are seeing call it, with the stats that you provided to us, it would appear as design wins are somewhat stagnating in terms of year-over-year growth at least. To my surprise, I mean, Anybus Embedded was the main growth engine in 2022. The numbers you provide here, they don't say anything about the actual value of the design wins, right?
Perhaps you can say anything about, how this trajectory of design wins basically, impact your overall, call it, attainable growth trajectory from a midterm perspective.
I think just in general, I think you're right that it's been a fantastic year on this Anybus Embedded. That is the majority part of the design win business. It's not because there are a lot of new design wins, it's the existing design wins that are average. The average income per customer have been growing a lot. It's growth is coming from the existing business, existing customers, and they are simply selling more of their products where they use our technology. I think we could... What say, Joachim Gunell, can we estimate a 20%-25%, something like that up?
Yeah.
In general.
I think the average revenue per design win is up even a bit more than 25%. That's the main driver. Of course, there's some price in that. Also that we have, we see on our large design wins, our large customers are performing extremely well and taking on big volumes in the year. I think that's helping that number a lot. It's been very stable for many years, and we see a pretty clear tick up in 2022 in terms of revenue per design win.
Keep in mind, part of that business is probably where we see also this safety stock because we are embedded in their device and product. Without us, they can't deliver. I think here is the area we've also seen most of the effects of this kind of safety stock. When we work with the system integrator and end users, the users, as I talked about, there it's much more if we can't deliver, they will buy something else because they are not so, we are not so well integrated in that business.
Very clear. Just on a final note from my end, can you comment a bit here about your strategic priorities for 2023 when it comes to, I mean, you've touched upon integrating your product areas more, investing into growth and as well perhaps what you see as your financial muscle obviously has grown over recent quarters. What do you see in terms of M&A priorities?
I think we have two main areas. We need to make sure that we keep on growing in our existing business. That's clear. We have one team working hard on that, we need to, we are doing some changes also in how we go to, how we think about M&As. Of course, there's some opportunity to do some smaller bolt-on still close to our business. I think we are trying to develop a strategy where we think a little bit bolder and think bigger in this. We have good financial muscles. There are some interesting opportunities, I think we need to work a little bit more on a bolder agenda for the next couple of three years when it comes to acquisitions. We need to...
We've been fishing in the same waters now for a couple of years, but we need to go from sweet water to salt water maybe to get some bigger fish in.
All right. Perfect. Thank you very much. Congrats on stellar results.
Thank you, Joakim.
The next question comes from Victor Högberg from Danske Bank. Please go ahead.
Good morning. Just checking one thing on the order backlog. Did you say that 40% of it was slated for Q1? That would be below SEK 600 million. Could that number increase given the decent start of Q1? Or did I misinterpret that?
I'm not sure if I really follow your question, Victor. I said that 40%, yes, it's for Q1. That's correct. Then you said if that number could increase?
Yeah. Given the decent start now to the first quarter, if you would see a situation where clients would want more.
Yeah, of course. I mean, they still allow to place orders for Q1, for sure. If we're gonna be able to deliver on it is a different question, I think. Right now we have a pretty cool, fully booked manufacturing facility. Of course, that could increase. Yeah.
Also on the OpEx side, if you could help repeat, I had a problem with my line. What was Q4 specific? How much rolls into 2023? The Q4 OpEx, even if you adjust for some items, was, I think SEK 20 million or something higher than what you commented on for Q4 in connection with Q3. How much of that was driven by Q4 specific events, and how much to expect to roll into the full year of 2023?
I think Q4 is, as we said, always higher than the other quarters, since we have all the sales and marketing activities and so on in the quarter. We have some Q4 specific items that will not be reoccurring. That could be maybe SEK 50 million. With that said, though, we will see cost inflation on salaries hitting us in Q1. I think Q1 will also be if even if you take away this Q4 effect, Q1 will be a bit higher than what you've seen before, if we put it like that. There will be a bit of a tick up in Q1 due to salary increases.
Tick up in relation to Q4 or in relation to a normal Q1?
To a normal Q1. I think if you think a bit like this, if you lay out the quarters within a year and you adjust for the Q4 specific items, I think you will see a bit of a continued increase in Q1 that will be maybe a bit higher than what you've seen between the other quarters in the year, given that we'll have the salary inflation.
Okay. Thank you.
I hope.
Great.
was clear.
Yeah. Yeah. In terms of the underlying orders, this seem to be remaining at somewhere around SEK 600 million. Would you say given that you were positively surprised in Q4 in terms of orders, and that seems like customers' demand is still good. Would you say the SEK 600 million is the underlying level still, or is it actually higher than that?
I think this is. What we say is that, I think it was SEK 633, right? That we expected as the underlying. Again, what really surprised us was that SEK 85 in boost effect. If you take the look at the underlying growth throughout the last year, the SEK 633 was the strongest of the quarters. That was maybe a bit surprising that it was gonna be stronger than what we had in Q1 and Q2. A lot due to what you read in the papers, if we're gonna be honest. We didn't think it was gonna hold up that well. It's pretty clear that the industrial investments are still good. If it's SEK 630 or SEK 600, I think that's that could also be as temporary variations.
Somewhere in that, in that range is where we see the market at the moment.
Okay. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
There are no more questions at this time. I hand the conference back to the speakers for any closing comments.
All right. Thanks very much for attending this Q4 call. As we said a couple of times, we close 2022 with smiley faces and confidence for 2023. There'll be some challenges, especially on the supply side, but there'll also be some opportunities on M&A and others. All in all, we remain positive and have a growth ambition for the year. We need to stay agile for any surprises that will come during the year as well. There will come surprises. That's quite certain. Let's wait and tackle them when we see them. Thanks for attending, and have a great day. Thank you.