A great welcome to everyone in this room, but also over internet, to this Capital Markets update. We did a rights issue this spring, and today we're gathered here to make sure we can prove that the trust you gave us, we have deserved, and also that we deserve future trust. I'll start by presenting today's moderator, today's host, and that's Emelie Lundgren. She has been with Dagens Industri, previously been the top-notch anchor of basically the only real magazine you can find on the internet, Morgon- TV, it's called. Emelie has hammered these, you know, super CEOs with, Ericsson and SKF or whatever. And, she, you know, she's promised to treat me just as hard, as she's treated them. So please, welcome, Emelie.
Thank you so much, and I would say you're the host, I'm just the help.
Yeah.
And for those who may not know who you are, Torbjörn Sandberg is the outgoing CEO and will hold the first presentation of today, and I'm here to help, and yes, I promise to be tough if that is required. Just a few practical things. So my name is Emelie Lundgren, I'm a director at Fogel & Partners. So we will have a few presentations. After each presentation, I will reappear for just a few questions before the next presenter takes the baton, and at the end, we will have an extended Q&A. So for you in the room, you can raise your hand, we'll bring a microphone to you, and we'll take the question as we go.
For you watching us on the live stream, just below the video frame, you have a questionnaire or a small area where you can type in your name, as well as your question or comment, and I will receive it in my iPad and bring it up as we go, at the end, at the latest, in that case. With that being said, Torbjörn, time to go, right?
Thank you very much. Let's roll. Okay, so just to present the people that we are presenting today, Torbjörn Sandberg Kanon, leaving the company first of October. But then, really key here is the regional presidents for China, Yaowen Wang, and Dr. Robert Mamazza, president for North America. That will really explain to us how things are moving in those market that we see as really the key markets for us moving forward here. And then, of course, the new captain on the ship, welcome to Mr. Jonas Nilsson, who's then gonna have a speech about his thoughts. And this is then so if you look at on the agenda, first thing, coatings today and hydrogen. I'll speak about that. As you see, fuel cells, because there's correlation with China.
Then we have electrolysis and America, and then a welcome to Jonas Nilsson. As Emelie just said, after that, the Q&A session. I hope, as always, that all of you participate, and hopefully with really hard questions. Okay, so a little bit recapitulation here. Founded 1997, a spinout from Linköping University, from the Institution of Thin Film Physics. Started, the first period was with a lot of research. We had a pretty wide application that we commercialized at that point of time, but then we have narrowed the scope to hydrogen solutions and autonomous safety. The reason, of course, and we're gonna talk more about that, we are going for best of breed, and that means we have to be very focused to succeed. Other bigger companies can do the whole shebang.
IPO 2004, so we got listed on First North. We still have our headquarters in Linköping, and one of the main things there is, of course, the proximity to the university, which means that we have resources for getting the competence into the company. We're today 50, 50 people- plus, and that also means that we're growing, but of course, we make sure that we don't grow as fast as our business, though, do. And yes, not to forget about the map, right? We have, as you've seen previously, we have our regions, North America, China, South Korea, and Germany. And, you know, South Korea and Germany moving forward, but really the focus where everything is happening right now, to a large extent, is actually North America and China. So that's also the main topics today.
Oh, so why does the customer wants to speak to us and deal with us and making business with us? And this is really the core thing with the markets we're in. The drivers, it is high-speed change from fossil to green that moves very quickly. At the same time, they have the same high power performance demands that they used for an automotive maker. He used to have a drive, drivetrain diesel, now supposed to fix this with hydrogen or perhaps even batteries. The market doesn't accept that this is more expensive or not as good, because then nothing will happen. So this is a hard pressure on them. And on top of that, even though it's early stages and we're moving forward, they are forced to have fully automated production, right?
Otherwise, they won't be in the business if a competitor fixes that. So then the specific challenges that they have is then to keep up with this technology development, and when technology is moving fast, it's not that cool to invest in everything. You can't afford it, right? So even they have to think a bit, "What is exactly we're gonna go after?" In our case, they don't really have experience in coatings and PVD, right? So they have to find that on the outside, and then I think really, really important, when will really the volume takes off? And you know, we have investments for an OEM or Tier 1, the investments are huge. Should we make it ourselves or buy it, or should we have someone else doing it, for example, coating services? Huge discussion there. So how do we meet that?
Well, first of all, the most important, high speed innovation. We are only relevant if we run faster, hit harder, and jump higher than competition. And that's the thing we need to do to stay relevant. And then, of course, as I mentioned, make or buy, we have to offer attractive financial and operational models. And then finally, to match up this with CapEx and automation, we need, we're meeting the need of actually having very scalable way of providing either machinery or coating services, depending on how you look upon it. And there we have some great customer of us. So, PVD, what is it?
Very quickly, you put in something in a vacuum chamber, you cook up something you want to coat with a plasma, boom, it's under vacuum, it hits the surface of the thing, you let air coming in, and oops, you have, for example, a fuel cell plate coated. So enough about that more detailed technology. Well, when it comes to our machine, it's actually developed for flat objects to optimize what we're addressing. And that means fuel cell plates, antennas are ideal. If somebody would start twisting the fuel cell, that wouldn't be good, but it ain't gonna happen. So we do have the right type of architecture when it comes to that. Also, our machinery and the way it's architected, it works in the flow of the production.
So just by dimensioning it right, it will keep flow in the production, so you don't get bottlenecks in other places. Our machine is not only machine, it's also module. So that means you can start with one machine for a certain price and a certain productivity, and then you can add machines that then becomes module, up to what you would say, full scale production, for the manufacturers. And I think we're pretty unique in this, when it comes to actually scaling CapEx with the production level, which means also as they can grow, as their market is growing.
And then we are, I mean, if there's anyone else that has this as well, they can come and pitch it, I ain't gonna do it, but we are the only one that have a machine that can do research, prototypes, pilot programs, and full-scale production in the same day. And I think that's important, you're gonna hear about that as well, how extremely important it is to keep up speed with the marketplace. Okay, so our strategic segments, it's a combination of our traditional track record in certain technologies that then we're using to match with these growing segments. With hydrogen, it's actually electrical contacts that technology we're using, and in antennas, it's how we metallized or coated plastic consumer things.
So those two have been the basis, and then we now see with these great, growing segments, that technology is really good, to keep and move forward in the segments as such. Below hydrogen solutions, you can see the plates that also used in electrolysis and fuel cells. I'm gonna talk more about that. Then also, you can see how the items for autonomous safety, radomes, shields, and antenna, you also can see how the antennas are used in a car. Good. Moving forward here, well, when we went into electrolysis, people were, "Are you diversifying?" No, we're not, and I think that's very important. Small companies suddenly get in something new, you really need to prove and explain why you will do a very good job with this.
Well, you can say like this: fuel cells and electrolysis, that they are doing the same thing, except in the opposite direction. So a fuel cell takes in hydrogen and oxygen, produces electricity, and it pours out some really environmentally friendly water. And you do exactly the opposite than when you do electrolysis. You put in electricity and water, and you get oxygen and hydrogen out of it. There are some differences. Electrolysis need 80,000 hours of, even more, of times of production. A fuel cell, 20, perhaps up to 30,000 hours, so that puts certain demands on it. And then also as electrolysis, this is also very important, it's fuel cells moving pretty fast, electrolysis moving at the speed of light.
That means, that we really, really need to keep up with new development, otherwise, we won't be relevant, and that's not cool. Speed of light, as I said. What's good with that, coming into the differences is also because it's so moving quickly and the market is so big, unlike traditional business, where it's been a lot of focus on cost, we see that we are, the customers, because we're moving so quickly, are prepared to pay a premium, which, of course, is really interesting and very good for us expanding into that business. Okay, so here we can see examples of, exactly how it looks in, reality. So to the left, we have a electrolysis station that then produces hydrogen from electricity.
You can see the blue area here, that is the electrolysis stacks that consist of a lot of metal plates. And then you can see over here a car with a fuel cell stack, also in blue, that have a lot of metal plates. And, you know, what, what's our relevance in this? Well, you know, a car, it has to run as long as it's expected to, and it's at least expected to run as long as a ordinary gasoline and diesel car. That means that because it's environmental friendly, but it's still, physically speaking, harsh condition in these stacks that produces the electricity, for example. So in order not to corrode these plates, you need to coat them, so they actually stay alive until the end of life of the car, right?
So that's what we're doing, coating the plates, they put them in the stack, they put them in a car or an electrolysis station. So that's why we are relevant, and that's why you're talking to us. And you can see example of that, how it actually works, PVD coating on a plate. Looking into then our go-to-market strategy, and of course, the guys will talk a lot about coating services and how we use that. There are two elements to this that is of highest importance. Coating services and these different models gives us the possibility to generate revenue that is recurring or semi-recurring, but it also give us an opportunity of generating, of course, even cash flow. And that means for everyone, it gets much more transparent when analyzing the company.
It becomes much easier for us to understand how we should plan the company. But also, it's the-- and here we talk about the strategic thing. It is a beachhead, it is the first starting point, and I explained our machine, you know, everything from research to full-scale production, which means that we can hook up the customer with their innovation and how we're actually handling them. And they can test us of technology, sales, operational, dimensions, and they see that we're good, right? Which is then extremely important. It's, it's really hard for a customer evaluate the machine and then have to go and buy the machine for, like, EUR 3 billion-- no, EUR 3 million, right? Then on top of that, when they start with coating services, we are completely agnostic.
So that means that we can continue with coating services for them, building out our own capacity. We can sell them a machine, but then making sure that, of course, we have a service agreement in place, working with different kind of licensing model. And then we have managed services, which is a combination. We put the machine at the customer site, but we are actually the one that's working with it. So that means that they de-risk the investment and still have it running in controlled forms. And if you look upon this, that's kind of just the iteration. You can see the first one here, coating services. Machine is in our place, and it produces plates, and we are the operator. So they send the plates to us, we coat it, and then we send them back, right?
Then managed service eases out the supply chain. They get the machine in their premises, and we are the people then to make sure that it actually works. And then when the competence is up, they buy the machine, and it run it themselves. Many of these plate manufacturers, as you can see out there, they're really good in production, but they don't really have the competence of PVD. So that's why it's a really good solution for them to have our people at the site running the production, and then they still can focus on what they are good at. Yeah. Okay, then, going back a little bit, what we're going to talk about, or a lot of what we're going to talk about, and these are the headlines you could see, in terms of the rights issue.
And here it comes down then, okay, we claimed something at the time, and now, especially from the gentleman, Dr. Mamazza and, and Yaowen, we're going to prove, hopefully, that this is exactly the clever things we've been doing. Electrolysis, because I just want to make a summary, we have progress with customers. Some of them we have not announced, but you can also see that the volumes are growing. We have a strong market position when it comes to electrolysis. As we're working really early, have commercial contracts early, everybody knows that we have the right stuff. And according to that, because otherwise, we wouldn't be relevant over time, we have fast technology innovation. So, that part of the money, we have done what we're supposed to do.
We look into, then, North America, and I think here, well, it speaks for itself, you know, look on the reports and, and, what we have been doing. Rob is going to talk about that more, but, you know, we established a coating service center. We wouldn't be doing that if we don't have traction in the business. Looking into coating service center, where we have now put the coating service center in China, state-of-the-art automation. Yaowen is going to talk about that, but not, of course, only that, because it's so good to have these coating services, because we now can see, I would say it's the first time fuel cells is really for real, and that's what is happening in China. It's really a commercial market, and we're part of that. Thanks to, Mr. Wang....
Industrialization. Well, it's a part of, of a lot of different things, but I think that the end-to-end automation solution in China, coating services, is a great proof of that. We have a program now moving from make ourselves to buy components, which will lower the BOM cost, and it will also shorten the lead times. And also, by doing this internalization, we have the possibility also of building competence centers globally, which is also important part of the industrialization. Okey-dokey. So now I will have a little lecture about hydrogen. And I have to say that this is not fresh news, but the magnitude of this, I didn't really understand until we had a great session with one of our customers, and they explained to us all the stuff that is behind.
So please join the journey with me here. I'm sure that many of you knows this better than I, actually. But I really want to make sure that we all understand what great potential we have in this. So hydrogen, that's really from big to bigger. Hydrogen has been around for a long, long time. We use 30 million tons of hydrogen just to create ammonia, that is used for fertilizers, that's used in farming, so we get food on the table, so we survive. That's a very important part. It's used in steel making. Unfortunately, now, the hydrogen that's used in steel making today is bad hydrogen, but moving forward, and there's some product up in north of Sweden, we're moving to green hydrogen.
In essence, we will then create steel that only emits steel and water, if we do it right. A lot of applications in the chemical industry as well. Then, as we're also gonna look into more, is actually transition of a power system, and as we say, then fuel cells and how the, the hydrogen is used in, in mobility applications. So what's happening with the numbers then? Well, diagram to the left, that is, the global hydrogen demand over, well, up to 2030. And you can see then, just as I explained, it's a lot of bad hydrogen used by, you know, taking from coal or other bad sources. But the green here is growing, and as you can see here, is growing, relatively speaking, as on the expense of the bad hydrogen.
And we can also see here, over in this curve, that is the exponential growth of good green hydrogen. And I think the most important part with this curve, except that it's, you know, growing exponentially, is, of course, that the three markets that will take the lion's share of this, that's our focus markets. So that's very, very good. Then we get into this, that I really hadn't figured out before, but oil, it will kill us all, it will kill the planet. Game over, we won't exist. So we are on the transition of getting rid of that if we're gonna survive.
However, there is something good with oil, and that is that you really can store and transport at the same time, which means if you have energy here from that source, it's actually stored here, and then it can be transported over here and then utilized. So that's good. Grid, that is now what we have in the electrification, don't work that good. Actually, sometimes it don't work at all. And the reason for that is that the grid is dimensioned after how you consume electricity. So that means consuming actually tells the production machinery how much they should produce. Ain't working, we have renewable sources because they produce according to wind, sun, and whatever they have available. So you can't really go use the grid for renewables.
A little bit drastic said, but I still think you could say that. Then, I mean, if we have green, how do you know that it is green, really, if you use a battery car, for example? It comes from the grid. You have no idea if it's green electricity or it's Putin electricity, right? You don't know, and that's also one of the problem with the grid, if you now want to be green, and then it's really vulnerable, right? It's vulnerable for, for cyberattacks. It's vulnerable for physical attacks, electromagnetic pulse, and everything, right? Of course, it pays it. You know, it has its place, but it is needed to start using hydrogen to make this, to replace and enhance the power system as such. And hydrogen, if it comes from the right source, is 100% green.
It can be stored and transported just like oil, and it's good for renewables because, you know, the wind is starting, it starts producing hydrogen. And just to get down into this, why grid is actually failing. It might sound drastic, but it's the truth. In April 2023, this year, during Easter, was great sun. The weather was perfect, just shine down on the solar panels. So they started producing like hell. It was just one problem. All the people was out having high Easter lunch, right? So it's produced but not consumed at all. So the operators got desperate because they have to do something with the electricity. So they lit up all the, in the daytime, all the greenhouses in Netherlands.
So you almost had, like, one sun up in the sky, and completely without any reason, really, had one sun on the ground because you had it in the greenhouses. They-- this is completely bizarre. They had to pump water from one lake to another lake and then back, without any more purpose than getting electricity out of the grid so they shouldn't break down. French nuclear plants, they got disconnected, and there was a lot of solar panels that was disconnected. So all this renewable energy, just out in space. Crazy, crazy. And today, there's a number of examples. Housing projects in London, huge one, getting delayed because there doesn't exist grid.
You have, in Netherlands, a third of the country, it's banned to add new sources or usage of electricity because they just can't cope with it. Stellantis factory in Spain, they can't use it. Stellantis is a car manufacturer. Why? Because they don't have access to electricity and it breaks down many times a day. So, it's pretty clear, and that's also how our European president, Ursula von der Leyen, has said: "Hydrogen, that is what we need to have for making everything work, but also to keep our independence from the outside world." Okay, so we need hydrogen. We have understood that, but to really understand this and how we fit into this, I need to get a little bit technical here.
That has to do with there are really two commercial applications of hydrogen, and that is, alkaline or PEM, the two technologies, I should say, that generates hydrogen. And so when you look at numbers, you look at, graphs or information, it's important to understand that we have access only to a part of the market. Otherwise, you can get confused. There are other applications also, but they haven't been commercialized at all. PEM, what we're doing because of our history in fuel cells, have a lot of benefits. You can see cost of ownership today. It starts fast. This is really important because, you need to start the electrolysis machine very quickly to start generating. If your wind goes like this, and you have a technology like alkaline, it's too slow, it's not good.
But of course, alkaline, it's been around for a very long time, so it has longer, lower cost, and it also have better, durability. For us, well, okay, we see what the trend is. Most of the customer goes in the direction of PEM because all the benefits of current density, for example, it gets better purity in the hydrogen that you produce. So even though alkaline is bigger than PEM, we can see that it is actually growing, and at some year, a couple of years from now, it will be 50%. And then, of course, we hope that everything will be PEM. You also see the demand here, and this is actually produced manufacturing capacity, right? What we're doing right now, and we're well done.
The numbers a bit all over the place because there's so many sources. So if you go and Google on this, you'll see, oh, we got this, this, that. But this is then produced at Bloomberg, so we took the opportunity to show that 31 GW, that... Well, you could say every nuclear plant generates around 100 MW, and that we have 413. So many nuclear plants, you can generate 430 GW over the world today. That gives a little bit on the proportion how it works. And here, that's just to show a little bit more that it's for real. So you can see all the colored customers here, that's exactly like the other chart, the sort of alkaline.
Here you can find the PEM customers, and at the same time, well, because that was 2022, here you can see 2023, and also distributed accordingly. So I mean, there's no discussion about that this is for real. Summary-wise, I hope this is clear in terms of how the new energy system will look, and making sure that we are not depending on the grid. We produce hydrogen, and we consume hydrogen. Everybody knows about that. But here, also extremely important, we store and store, transport the hydrogen to make sure we're not depending on the grid. Thank you.
Thank you, Torbjörn. You've used all of your time and a little bit more.
Yeah. No, okay.
Okay with it. I'm not going to ask you too many questions.
Yeah.
I want to ask you the fact that... Well, haven't we learned through the recent energy crisis that hydrogen is immature?
Well, that's wrong. Immature, it's maturing, and it's getting there. Perhaps we haven't seen so much about that in Sweden, but you can see bigger players that have in their strategy. We are out there building an ecosystem to actually replace the grid, so to say. Now, it's more expensive, which also will take time. On the other side, expensive, that's kind of cool 'cause we make more money.
... I also want to ask you about the market focus as you have, China and U.S. are the ones you're talking about today.
Mm-hmm.
What about Europe and South Korea? You didn't mention them at all.
Well, I mean, yes, they're there. It will take longer time, though. So as always, you have this portfolio of different regions. It goes fast, it goes slow. Make sure that we make money today where it's really have momentum, and let's spend some of that money on other regions when they're taking off.
Okay. I'll let you go for now, Torbjörn.
Thank you very much.
You'll get to sit down. You'll be back again at the end-
Yeah
... of the extended Q&A as well. So for one of the main markets then, that Torbjörn has introduced, China, with the regional president of China, Yaowen Wang, please.
Thank you, Emelie. Hi, I'm Yaowen Wang, Regional President of China at Impact Coatings. Such a pleasure to be here with our dear investors for my first time. A few words about my background. I moved to Europe for master's degree study in 2012, and since graduation, I've been working in hydrogen industry throughout my career. Over the eight years of my career, especially since I joined Impact Coatings in 2019, I have seen great development of Chinese fuel cell industry. So we at Impact Coatings, so happy to support and grow together with our Chinese customer in fuel cell industry of China. My presentation will start with a market overview. I'm gonna outline a few traits of the fuel cell market in China, and current market size and future potentials. Chinese policymakers realize infrastructure is a fundamental pillar of commercialization of fuel cells.
One example, China has built over 360 hydrogen refueling stations as of first half this year, ranking first in the world, and is making more and more intensive investment on infrastructure to make sure the ecosystem gets hydrogen available and accessible and affordable. So another pillar of commercialization is supply chain. So a mature supply chain has been seen in Chinese market with the support from China government, and with the development of supply chain, China has seen a drastic cost down curve just over the past five years, from RMB 20,000 per kilowatt per system to RMB 2,000 per kilowatt. And it's believed to get down even to RMB 500 per kilowatt by 2030.
So, with the mature supply chain, mature infrastructure, China has been exploring all kinds of applications. I think they are on the right spot in terms of application. Current market focus on commercial vehicles, especially long distance and heavy-duty transportation, where fuel cell has stronger competitive advantage versus batteries. Yet, heavy-duty commercial vehicles also require longer lifetime, and hence, more durable coating on the plates. And today, we proudly released our next generation premium fuel cell coating, especially for heavy-duty commercial vehicles. It will have to prevent all the harsh conditions within the stack, and it is already available in our Chinese coating service center, where it has been proven by our customer, has superior performance, and believed to be able to last over 20,000-30,000 hours.
So now, China has mature, more and more developed infrastructure, mature supply chain, and feasible business model. It all leads to rapid growth of Chinese coating, fuel cell market. As of today, China ranks second globally in fuel cell vehicle sales after Korea. As you know, another interesting fact is metallic fuel cell is taking over graphite in China just in the recent couple years. The reason is that the former has been proven to have a lower cost and higher power density, among other technical advantages. That leads to the demand for fuel cell PVD systems increasing rapidly. Last year, the market volume for fuel cell PVD system reached CNY 100 million.
That is almost, high two-digit mark, market growth in terms of fuel cell system. But on the other hand, we are also get access to another market, coating system, coating services. Apologies. So we have, as you know, we set up local coating service center in China, and we get access to this market. And only last year, the metallic fuel cell coating market size is around between CNY 150 million-CNY 200 million. And now we are ready to get a share of that. So, I think having those recap of Chinese market development is a clear, a clear sign that Chinese fuel cell market switching from market introduction phase to commercial growth phase. It's predicted the fuel cell vehicles' annual growth rate will remain between 50%-80% annually until 2030.
The first half of this year, the year-to-year growth rate of fuel cell vehicles was around 70%, and this will remain until 2030. That converts with the target from local Chinese governments to roll out 0.5 million-1 million fuel cell vehicles by 2030. I have, I have described the market trends, market status, and the environmental and political environment, so let me recap. A few important policies have made those developments happen. In 2020, China made this commitment to carbon-neutral development, and since then, hydrogen has been recognized as a key path to this energy transition. In the same year, China revealed its medium- and long-term plan of development of hydrogen fuel cells. One of the key policy vehicles is called 3+2 city clusters.
That is a nationwide demonstration program of fuel cell vehicles. Five groups of cities were nominated to demonstrate the economic and technical feasibility of fuel cell vehicles, and the target is to create a complete business cycles within their region and develop the supply chain. In addition to mobility sector, as Torbjörn explained, hydrogen has been used in other application as well. Energy storage is getting more and more attention in China. China is the biggest producer of renewable energy and is the biggest producer of green hydrogen and a consumer of hydrogen. We have seen China is building mega size of energy storage projects during their fifteenth five years plan. Okay, so we have seen the current market status and developments.
We at Impact Coatings, so happy that we spotted and embraced the tremendous business opportunity in China. We have made ourselves in a very strong position in this market and achieved a few important milestones for the company. Let's have a look at a few of them. In 2018, we sold the first of its kind, IC 500 fuel cell system to Chinese market, and it's still in operation and serving our customer. In 2019, I joined this exciting journey with Impact Coatings, and shortly we realized it's such a key to keep close to your customers and close to this dynamic market. So I moved to China, 2021, and started a sizing expansion our coating services to this strategic market.
June last year, we set up our local entity for this purpose, and this year, we managed to get up our coating service center in China up and running. So in September, we're gonna celebrate this important milestone as the first coating service center we built outside of Sweden. So please stay tuned, and you are welcome to join us in China if you swing by. But for those who cannot, we have a video to show how our operation works and our facility in China. Yeah, this is just the starting point, and let me proudly introduce the great team behind the scene that made all of these amazing things happened. And now we are a team of 14 strong, enables us to provide better pre-sales and after-sales support and coating services to our customer....
Now, many exciting things happened, but due to time limit, I can only name a few important business updates. Our current main business focus is still on fuel cells in China, but we also see the potentials in electrolysis and energy storage. We will keep work with the key players in that segments and get ready for the future growth. And we have secured some top-tier customer in fuel cell segments, and building a very healthy pipeline of coating services. I cannot name the specific customer names, but what I can say is we are running our tests. We have, the value we can bring with our coating services to our customer has been proven. Now, our customer can see for real how the system works, how efficient and brilliant it is.
With our service, our customer can have shorter time to market, less financial risk, less technical risk, and the combination of flexible offering, coating services and machine sales and managed services, we got our sales pipeline of system also stronger than ever. Look back, we have sold four fuel cell system to China, making China the biggest geographic market for us in fuel cell segment. And this year, we sold one IC2000 machine to Saxon, a global company specialized in high-precision parts for automotive and mobile phones. It's also the first of a kind, IC2000 was sold globally. I think I mentioned many times the word first: first IC500, first IC2000, first the coating service center out of Sweden. So all I want to say is, we have a strong position in China, in Chinese fuel cell segment.
What are we gonna do? Just make it stronger. With accelerating pipeline of coating services and system sales, we are ready now to take next steps. Three focus for the next. So firstly, we're gonna expand our facility and introduce a second production line to our Chinese coating service center, which will triple our current coating services capacity. And we will keep increasing our local competence. As Torbjörn explained in his slide, we built local competence center as well. Secondly, we're gonna leverage the Chinese supply chain to build our local supply base in China, with aim to further reduce cost, increase margin, and be prepared for global growth. Finally, electrolysis is also trending in China. China actually is biggest electrolyzer manufacturer. It's the biggest producer of hydrogen and consumer of hydrogen. The tremendous opportunities are there.
But in terms of time, the technology is still under development, but we are closely working with our customer in their product cycle, so... We are prepared to grow with them in the near future. Thank you for your attention, and we are happy to answer any of your questions.
Thank you so much.
Thank you, Emelie.
Thank you, Yaowen. I would like to actually kind of continue with your last slide there of your next steps and any scale-up plans that you have in China. I was thinking to ask you, are you going to scale up via further focus on the fuel cells or entering the electrolysis area? But it kind of sounds like you're gonna do both.
Yeah, we have a competitive advantage, actually, in both areas, but in the near term, we're gonna focus still on fuel cell segment. We will keep supporting our existing customers, increasing our capacity and local competence to support our current customers. But meanwhile, we definitely will leverage our knowledge, gain our innovation globally, and use that in China and attract new customers and support our future growth.
Given some circumstances, market circumstances, you could say, China's growth rate is not as high as expected after lifting the COVID lockdowns. Is that something that are affecting you? Do you see that, the slower turns of economic wheels?
Yeah, well, it's lower, slower than predicted, but it's still 4%+. But let alone the macroeconomic cycle, I think the transition from fossil fuel to renewable energy to green hydrogen is a mega trend globally. I don't think we'll be affected by economic cycles. And also, China has continuous policy support and commitment to new carbon-neutral development. And as, as I think I emphasized at times, hydrogen is not new in China, and fuel cell has been very matured and ready to take off with a mature supply chain, with a developed infrastructure, and with dynamic markets. Just give you a few examples, China has over 60 fuel cell vehicles makers or over 70 fuel cell system companies.
There are thousands of companies involved in this business, and the government will keep developing and leveraging the competitive edge they have already gained.
Mm-hmm. I would like to ask a follow-up question, but as you said, Yaowen, time is limited, so we're gonna move on. Thank you for now.
Thank you.
You will also be available during the extended Q&A, of course.
Yes. Thank you.
And then from east to west, the other focus market of Impact Coatings, as has been presented, and is the North American Regional President, Robert Mamazza. Welcome.
Thank you, Emelie, for the introduction. Robert Mamazza, responsible for North America. I'd like to start with just giving a little bit of background information about myself. So the lion's share of my career to date has been in the capital equipment industry, specifically for coatings. So the general theme there is hardware modifications to effect changes in coatings that can then be made commercially available at commercial volumes to the marketplace. And one of the technologies that I specialized in over the years was, in fact, PVD. Most of my time working with PVD was spent at Oerlikon, so a lot of the things we did there involved solar, thermoelectric generators, LEDs, we even made coatings for wind turbines to increase the lifespan of these things.
So I've had my moments in time throughout the years that have involved green energy and energy sustainability. So when I look at all of this and you put it all together, finding myself now at Impact Coatings just seems to make sense. It's a company that uses PVD and capital equipment to make these technology-infused coatings for green energy, which happens to now be hydrogen. So if I go back just a quick story. While I was at Oerlikon, one of my responsibilities was to look to the future and identify the what's next, to determine if we had a coating so we could enter that market. And this goes back to 2008 timeframe, where we were doing this. Fuel cells would always come up. Every year, fuel cells. We'd analyze it, and the prognosis was, "It's about two years out, and it's gonna happen.
Two years out." Every year, we said exactly the same thing, two years. So we started moving it back further and further and further in the presentation because the two years would never come. It was always this moving two years. However, now it's here. It's legitimately beyond question, it has arrived, so I'm happy to be here to finally catch that fuel cell wave that we've been talking about for a couple decades now, and to have my play in this be with PVD and capital equipment. So enough about me. Let's move on to what's really of interest here, North America, and what's going on in North America. So if I were to characterize what's happening in this space, I would say the market is growing very, very rapidly, and with this rapid growth, there's a lot of change required.
So the customers we speak with, they have these requirements for a coating, but the requirements for either their fuel cell stack or their water electrolysis stack is also in motion. Everything's, everything's in motion. So that means the technology solution that is generated to address this need must also be in motion, nothing standing still. So with all of this movement, with all these different things happening at the rapid pace, the only way to deliver is to do it collaboratively. So it's us working with the customer and in many instances, some of the customer's other vendors that are, are directly related to how well our coating works. So we coat plates. Plates are stainless steel or titanium. They're made by somebody.
Those things that they do in the manufacturing of that plate has everything to do with how we can marry a coating to the plate and have that coating perform a specific function. So without the collaboration, it doesn't happen. This is not an off-the-shelf, pre-canned solution type business. This is an intricate, constantly evolving business, and I think that would characterize other regions as well. That's just the nature of it. Market size, I quoted a market report here from Deloitte. There is a variety of these you can reference. If you look at different providers of these reports, you might have some slightly different numbers when you get down to that level, but in all cases, it is high two-digit growth, so very similar to China.
50%-80% is common, and in some instances, there's even a doubling between certain years, and this looks to be a sustained phenomenon going forward. So if I were to look forward, you have these from a variety of sources saying the market's attractive and it's growing. You have government forecasts saying the same thing, so that supports that. If you look at customer forecasts, they also have similar growth. So you have multiple inputs, multiple different types of entities doing the same analysis, and they're all seeing the same thing, which makes it believable. It's a very fertile field in which to be, and we are currently there. So regulatory environment. So there's a couple highlights I have here. There's more to it than just this and further. All of these have been defined recently under the auspices of the United States Hydrogen Strategy and Roadmap.
So that's like this overlaying thing that encapsulates all of these, pulls them together, and basically charts the future. So if we take some of the larger ones that probably are gonna have a greater influence, the top one, the absolute top one, is the Inflation Reduction Act, is offering a tax credit of up to $3 per kilogram of green hydrogen. So it is possible for other generators of hydrogen to clean their hydrogen sufficiently to get some of this... but they are unlikely to get the $3, and the $3 is most likely to come from people whose water electrolysis, which is exactly what we're doing. So basically, the cleaner the hydrogen, the more you get. Now, this is a tax credit, which differentiates it from a lot of the other ones.
So a tax credit is something administered through the IRS at the end of the year. There's no application for it. If you can demonstrate that you produce green hydrogen, you get the tax credit per kilogram that you have sold. This was put in place to support the following two. So we have net carbon emissions. Both Canada and the United States have the same goal by 2050. So all sources that can generate CO2, whatever it is, whether it's for heating, whether it's driving your car, commercial vehicles, power generation, all of these are intended to be dialed down to zero. So that means no fossil fuels, no burning any hydrocarbons if this is to be achieved. An intermediate goal is clean electricity, so this is specifically power generation.
By 2035, that is supposed to be 100% clean, which also means zero emissions. So this is a shorter-term intermediate goal, which is going to require a whole lot of work, and both governments are 100% on the ball to make these things happen. Hydrogen is a big part of this. So if you look at a parallel goal, so this isn't necessarily an incentive, but it is a clearly defined goal, it's the Hydrogen Energy Earthshot, where the objective is over the course of the next decade, which this already started two years ago, so we're in that decade, to reduce the cost of green hydrogen down to $1 per kilogram.
Right now, depending on the source, there's a lot of variability here, where you get it, the timing, location, the price of green hydrogen in the United States can range from $5 at the very, very low end, all the way up to $15. All right, so quite the range. So they want to collapse this down to less than $5, down to $1. Then we have the Infrastructure Investment Act. This is more of a traditional type funding, where you have R&D dollars. You have to apply for them. Usually, they require a consortium, so it's a commercial entity, it's a government lab, it's a university, so this could be complicated. Application processes can be convoluted. Then you get the money to do some research to develop something that hopefully one day you can sell, right? Not so much of use to us.
Maybe others that took advantage, have them in a position now where we can engage with them, but the top one, this is of immediate benefit, and this is providing this huge draw of people into this space. And as you pull this draw, all the vendors in the supply chain benefit, of which we are one of them. This slide goes in a little bit of detail. I think I've delved into some of these quite a bit so far. So the Infrastructure Investment Act, $9.5 billion. Inflation Reduction Act, where you have the $3 per kilogram. I think the funding here is, like, $360 billion. Don't quote me on that, but it's in that ballpark, so it's a massive number. It takes place over the course of a decade, right?
So it's not some flash in the pan. "Now, here's a benefit. Let's all do something and then figure out what we're going to do for ourselves tomorrow." It is sustained over 10 years. Another way to look at this is you have the reduction to the cost of hydrogen down to $1 per kilogram over 10 years. This is also over 10 years. So assuming success, the price of hydrogen drops to the point where the cost of a kilogram of hydrogen could be less than the tax credit. So in other words, at some point in the near future, the tax liability just gets obliterated. It's annihilated.
And if, and it's not clear whether or not this "if" takes place, if it's a refundable tax credit, this means, say, for example, your tax liability is $100,000, and your tax credit is $150,000. So if it's refundable, tax liability gets wiped out, then the extra $50,000 comes to you in the form of a check, right? So this is going to create... Even without it being refundable, it creates a gold rush. If it's refundable, it creates an extra gold rush because there's just so much money being placed in the market. Then we have other things like clean vehicle credits. We have at the federal level, many states have them. Each state's going to be different.
This one here, so the federal government, if you buy a personal vehicle that consumes hydrogen, $7,500, so this is just a regular car, or if it's a light commercial vehicle, it's up to $40,000, and there are certain criteria that you have to meet in order to get this money. But this is also an end-user incentive to kind of pull things, and it trickles right down to the supply chain. And the last one is tax abatements. This is very local, so this is a local municipality. This could be at the state level, where you have things such as income taxes or state-level corporate income tax be abated, which means in the beginning or for some duration, it's brought down to zero and then gradually is brought up to whatever the standard rate is.
In terms of a corporate income tax abatement, that in conjunction with a tax credit, this is just fuel on the fire for these sorts of things. There's a lot of stuff going on. I think the incentives are in place. Many of these are unprecedented. They had things similar to this for solar and other forms of alternative energy, but, but nothing quite at this level, and it's all happening within a couple of years. It's not spread out and little by little over time, you've got it. Most of these things came into effect since 2021 up to the present. We've been incentivized. A little history, how things have unfolded in North America.
I started April 2021, and my initial charter was to outreach, make some outreach to some of the main players in the area, establish contact, and see if we can get things going. So this actually happened. By the end of the same year, we had interactions with a variety of customers where we're exchanging samples, and I think this is something important to elaborate upon. That, about a year later... It took almost a full year to go from one step to the next, where we got our first commercial PO. So it is a sequence of events that all must take place from that first point of contact to serial delivery, and that's just the nature of the business. I think on another slide, we mentioned 12-24 months. In the beginning, it was more like 24 months.
Things have accelerated. Now it's closer to 12. Some of these steps include initial contact, introduce the company, see if it sounds like there's something there of interest, get an NDA signed, have a technical discussion where they present to us their technical needs for the coating. We present the capabilities of the coating. If it's agreed that, yes, it looks like something's there, we start exchanging samples, and this takes place at the coupon levels. You have several centimeters by several centimeters. They send us their material, we coat it, they evaluate it. If it looks good, then it goes to higher level testing, and this testing is probably the most important and takes the longest time, where you have stack-level testing.
So it could be an approximation of their plate, so a smaller plate, or it could be the full-size plate, where they make mini stacks and they test them for longevity. So some of the key aspects of our coatings is they protect the plate, right? Corrosion resistance, and they also perform other functions, but these other functions must be sustained over time. In the case of fuel cells, it's about 20,000 hours. In the case of water electrolysis, it's 80,000 hours. No one's going to take your word for it. They're going to want to see what you've done with their own eyes in their lab. So these longevity tests can take up to several months. It's just the nature of it.
They put it in an aggressive environment, they run it, they collect the data, then they extrapolate out to 80,000 hours, and this is how they determine, "Should be okay out there." Because what they don't want to do, just believe you or take a shortcut, build these stacks, push the stacks in the market, and then get phone calls three years down the road, 'cause 80,000 hours is going to last a long time, depending on how they operate it. So that will be in operation three years in the future. So you want to be certain when that happens, the phone's not going to ring and somebody saying, "Something went wrong with your stack," and it may be the coating. So they're going to go through all these tests. Once you pass the tests, then you can go into serial delivery.
This we did November of last year, and it just ramped up explosively. It was, "Okay, good, we like it. Let's do it. Can you give me 10,000 plates immediately?" So it's like, "Okay," and it's just all hands on deck and just churned it out, and that's what kind of set the tempo for where we are now. So the first commercial business for the region was in November of last year, and this continues to this day. We're still doing that business. It's being addressed out of Sweden. So again, back to that collaborative type environment. The colleagues in Sweden are running the plates. We have R&D in Sweden. Between myself and the customers, we have at regular interval calls to see how we're doing, what's needed, and it's working very well, right?
The international team, it's like as if it were one team working very well to make these things happen. So eventually, we want to be local. Local makes perfect sense because it alleviates a lot of the issues with time zones, issues with exchange rates, issues with customs, among some other things. It just makes it easier when you get the much higher volumes. So we created a legal entity in June, which is the foundation for all of this. So we can then switch to brick-and-mortar, local presence, do more. And to date, a lot of the focus has been water electrolysis. In the beginning, it was 50/50. So back in April of 2021, it was fuel cells, water electrolysis, equally proportioned. Then water electrolysis took over almost exclusively.
So within a company that does both, they shifted all their R&D resources to water electrolysis, maybe because of some of the incentives, incentives that are out there. Now, we're just starting to see things swing back a little bit, where we're getting more and more inquiries in regard to fuel cells. So it looks like the path forward will involve both. Exactly what proportion, I would anticipate the near future to be water electrolysis, with fuel cells being in second place, but nonetheless, they both will be present. Okay, business update. I mentioned on several occasions, business is ongoing, so it's not just market penetration at this point. It's we're there. We're generating revenue out of the region.
I can't mention specific customers, but if you were to look at a list of who you believe the key players would be in the region, we're interacting with many of them at various levels. So there is that 12-24 months. If you look at all these activities, at any given point, we have some activity going on with somebody, so that pipeline is full, all the different positions are occupied, and sometimes with the same customer, we'll have multiple positions. 'Cause you can have a customer that does fuel cells, water electrolysis, and they could have several fuel cell products, and they can have several water electrolysis products, and they can have different things within the same stack that need to be coated. So all of these are in that qualification cycle.
Some of them have passed all the way through, and we're coating them. Others are at various positions, so there's a lot of activities going on in all these different places. So right now, we're in at some places, so that's like king of the hill. That's a position you want to protect. If someone else were to show up today and want to displace you or get some of what you have, they have to enter this 12- to 24-month sequence of activities to get where you are and then convince a customer that it's worth doing this. So where we're in, we're in, but that doesn't mean we can relax. These coatings are evolving with the customers, so we have to evolve with them. All the applications and use up, everything's in motion, everything's evolving forward.
We have to remain relevant by innovating on our coatings, making sure they're still relevant, and proactively doing this ideally, not waiting for a customer to say, "This isn't right. I think we're going to need you to do this," but work with them to identify what is that "this," so we can jointly get it together, so we're in time for the need. This also means, as far as us being present, is going to be a key part of that. We have volumes such that it doesn't make sense as the volumes grow, to be shipping them all over the place. So, local coating service center, we anticipate this early next year. We're surveying locations right now. We have everything I think we need to make a decision, but I can't divulge what that decision looks like 'cause I don't wanna speculate.
We have to go through the official process, and I don't want to get ahead of myself. But what I can say is most likely on the East Coast, this is where we have the largest consolidation of our customer base is on the East Coast. Doesn't mean the West Coast doesn't have anything or central, it's just that's where it is now. When this changes, we'll evolve with it. But what's gonna be key is, as these volumes are increasing, and based on the forecast, they are increasing quite a bit, is to proactively do what we need to do in terms of the coating performance and our ability to deliver upon these capacities. So super important, grow our market share within existing customers and by customer acquisition, be present, and once we gain a position of advantage, keep it. So I think in a nutshell, that covers it.
To summarize, market's growing fast. We are present with relevant solutions, and we're prepared to do what it takes to stay the course. If I missed something, please ask me.
I don't think so. I'll come up in just in case. Okay, so you talked a lot about the political framework, really incentives-
Mm
... and structures. What about your presidential election next year?
Okay, this-
Can a new president, a new administration, reverse something, mess up something?
Yeah, this is a great question. So to the extent the incentives are at a local municipal level or at a state level, I think they're somewhat inoculated from all of this because they control their own budgets. So I would say put that in the safe category. If we look at some of the other legislation, some of it is bipartisan in nature anyway, so that's not gonna be targeted 'cause both parties voted for it. However, the Inflation Reduction Act was put in place by the Democrats alone, right? So this could be vulnerable. However, a president alone, he or she cannot undo a law, right? It has to be done in conjunction with Congress, and it needs both houses.
So the House of Representatives and the Senate and the President all jointly have to decide, "Let's change a law," and it is a large, convoluted process to do that. So there's more than just one election is gonna dictate whether something could be changed. Further, this is in place right now, and companies are receiving these monies. Also, what we're talking about here, specifically with hydrogen, it generates energy. U.S. has a strategy to become energy independent. I'm not certain someone would have an appetite to say, "Well, let's reduce the possible number of kilowatts in one area and move us back from energy independence.
So-
I think we're most likely okay, but we're gonna keep an eye on it. It's definitely something we have to watch and track.
Anything can happen during a U.S. presidential election, I think we've learned.
Correct.
Good to know, the kind of circumstances around it. The U.S. Coating Service Center, as-
Mm-hmm
... you're going to put into place, how far are you from it? When do you think you will have full operations, basically?
So we have proposals from listing agents and proposals from construction companies to put together what we'd need in a facility that could serve as a ready-to-go coating service center. We're assessing these now. All the inputs are in, so in the next week or two, we can make the assessment. Once we have something definitive, it's much easier to talk about it. And also once we have something definitive in terms of an actual location, then it's easy to put together the balance of the timeline because then it's installing the capital equipment and fitting out the rest of that in that location. So we expect early next year to be operational.
Location first, timeline later?
Yes.
Okay, good to know. You'll have to sit down a few minutes-
Mm
... because we have one more point on the agenda-
Okay
... before we bring you all the speakers up again.
Thank you very much.
Thank you, Robert, so much. So we heard from Torbjörn, we've heard from the main, the two main markets. Now, we want to hear from the next main man who's coming in. Jonas Nilsson, welcome.
Thank you. So my name is Jonas Nilsson, and I come from LiU Invest, which is the venture capital arm of Linköping University. And I start as the CEO of Impact Coatings on 1st of October. And actually, Impact Coatings is also or was a spin-out from Linköping University, but has now grown up to a real commercial company ready to grow. And I think Impact Coatings is a great company. So let's see. So from an outside perspective, looking at the presentations, I have one reflection, and that is, we have a very good product-to-market fit in Impact Coatings. And not only a product-to-market fit, there is actually a very good company-to-market fit.
Having the hydrogen market as the expansion market, that is a market that is green, it's emerging, and it's of the right size to be grabbable. So that's, that's a very good product-to-market fit. And looking at the presentations from Rob and Yaowen, they sort of give the image that they live and breathe hydrogen. And if you were the customer, who would you buy from? The large corporation, which do a little bit of hydrogen in the shadow of the main business, or the focus company who live and breathe hydrogen? I live in Linköping, and I've recently been the chairman of three different material science companies. They are not listed, but in total have brought in a decent amount of venture capital.
I can say that Linköping University and the Linköping region is very, very good in material science. So having the headquarters in Linköping will be beneficial for recruitment and competence supply. Also, you heard from Torbjörn that the company puts the customer in the center and offers solutions to the customers rather than selling complicated technology. And here is also an example that we have new facility in the U.S., we have the facility in China, which are both close to our customers to address the customer market. So we put the customer in the center. So a little bit about me. I have a business mindset, but a technology background, and I've been working the last 20 years with pushing research from idea to commercial companies.
I've done that in different positions, like product manager, like CEO, board member, Chairman, and investor. I can look back on some successful company journeys. We have a very good position. The expansion market of hydrogen is a smart choice. The strategy set by Torbjörn and the team will stay. I will continue with my 100-day plan. There will be no big changes on the first of October, but I will also make sure to support Rob and Yaowen, so they can continue to do their important work with the customers. Once again, my name is Jonas Nilsson, and I'm very happy to become the new CEO of Impact Coatings, starting in two weeks. Thank you.
Thank you so much, Jonas. You can actually stay on stage.
Mm-hmm.
I'm going to ask the other speakers to join us as well, since we want you all here for the questions and answer category. While everybody gathers their thoughts, reminder again, in the room, raise your hand, and we'll come with a microphone to you. You at home, you can ask a question via the form that is just below the video frame. Okay, so while people gather their thoughts, Torbjörn-
Mm-hmm.
Why are you leaving?
I've done what I was asked to do.
But this sounds so interesting and stuff is happening. Aren't you tempted?
Well, I've done what I was asked to do, but that doesn't hinder me from continuing the business, which I probably will.
Mm-hmm. Okay. Yes, sir. Someone in the room, let's just give you a microphone as well.
Okay. Hello. So my first question is, regarding the competitive situation within the hydrogen area then. I'd like to just—if you could briefly, say something about, do you see the, the top-notch competition coming from OEMs or companies like yourselves that are in PVD? I, I don't expect you to be very specific here, but just if there are differences between China, North America, and all the rest, or similarities.
I can just quickly start. Competition exists. Some of them are really smart, but as, as Jonas said, we live or die with hydrogen. We're a specialist company. They have big business in coating glass or whatever it is, which means that they have to deal with small business on the side that sometimes do not get treated as well. So I think that's actually one of the most important things to understand how we deal with competition. Easy come, easy go. So, that's what we have today, right? I don't know if anyone wants to add about the local conditions here as well.
Yeah. Sure. Yeah, China is a very dynamic market. It has competition, for sure. You have domestic PVD system suppliers, and you have the global system supplier entering this market actively. But if you go to the expansion, you will find out we are probably not—if not the only one, but actually one of the few that can provide both systems and the coating services. And at this current stage of this industry, that is super valuable to our customers. So I think we also have a very good product that require customer need. And as Rob has explained about product life cycles, we are in a good positions. I think we just need to adapt to the pace of, like, our customers ahead of our competitors.
Maybe I can add something. Some of the competitive landscape or the specific competitors, they're some of the usual suspects you'll see here, and I'm sure you might see some of them in Asia as well. My observations have been: Is it possible for someone with a machine to make a coating suitable for a fuel cell or electrolyzer plate? I think the answer is yes, but can they do one million plates per year? That's another question, and that's a key question. If they can't scale up, then their coating is irrelevant. It's simply irrelevant. Further, as I mentioned during my presentation, these coatings are constantly evolving, so it's not an off-the-shelf solution. So, and it's not a question of, is there somebody that has a machine that can come up with some coating that might satisfy today's requirement?
It's, can they keep that coating relevant over the next so many years? So if they don't already have a competence in hydrogen technologies, if they don't have that right now, I don't think they're gonna be able to get it in time, because it's not just the coating, it's understanding how that coating interfaces with everything else in the stack. So it's more of a systematic understanding and perspective that is needed to define the form, fit, and function of the solution that we provide, and I think we are rather uniquely positioned in that regard.
Hmm.
Do you wanna-
It's not only about understanding the technology, it's about understanding your customer and the customer's customer and the complete value chain. And by being a focused company, you can do that. And that's a competitive advantage compared to sort of a company that serves everything.
Did you have a second question?
Okay, well, I guess you kind of mentioned the... it's not just the coating, it's also the production system.
Mm-hmm.
But, if we're talking about your secret sauce, long-term, I mean, is it within the coatings and the prescriptions for the coatings, or is it also for the whole production system, would you say?
The coating cannot be separated from the machine, right? Because as the coating evolves, the hardware needs to evolve as well. This is the challenge, right? Within any given machine configuration, there are some things that you can do: changing pressure, power to the targets, that you can affect change in the coating with. However, they only go so far. So at some point, hardware modification is gonna be required. So it's both of them and how they come together. And this is where if you have some of the larger coating companies, especially a coating company that buys their machines from someone else, it's gonna be more difficult for them to do that because they don't hold the keys to the castle of changing that machine. So for them, it would be a drawn-out process, and they'd likely be too slow.
But in the event somebody could make a machine themselves, like we do, that is clearly an advantage, and understanding how the coating interfaces with everything else and being able to predict what those changes are gonna be before they're demanded of us, I think is also a key.
We also, when it comes to electrolysis, which is speed like hell, as I said, there are some things we hope that we understand that don't other people understand, and that has to do with that there are certain requirements on electrolysis that you don't have in fuel cells.
Mm.
So that specifically is a good example of we need to handle it very carefully. We need to really study, but here is one where we actually have a secret sauce.
Okay, and just, well, kind of a follow-up on that one then. The coatings that you're providing the American company with, is it includes noble metals?
Sure.
Sure. Are you... Will you be able to replace those with ceramic coatings? Is that the, like, what your ambition is? And could you also mention then what kind of cost savings would that give to the customer?
First of all, yes. I mean, that's the whole trick, what I was talking about, these secret things that will enable us to really understand it, and that would mean that we can lower the content of the noble metal. What we're gonna exchange this with is, of course, in secret. When it comes to lowering the cost, yes, the ultimate goal is to remove it all over, at least just keep a complete fraction. Cost lowering, well, I can read the numbers and see how much noble metal it is. It would actually be bad for our revenue, but our margins will be cool, right?
Do we have another question in the room? Yes, sir.
Yeah, we heard about the growing market, and we heard about your equipment and that you're specialists, but what matters is if you really can increase sales in the future. So my question is: for the U.S. and the Chinese market, is Impact Coatings telling anybody something like... I mean, a potential customer, but not a non-customer, will he, will he know about Impact Coatings? Are they talking about you in these markets, or do you have to present yourself first for the new potential customers?
I'd say at least in the U.S., we have our name out there, and a lot of the new customers that I speak with have heard about us due to our current presence in the market. So we really push to be known, and to the extent that we may not be, we also try to have outreach individually to customers to let ourselves be known. So it's not a passive approach.
Yeah, the same thing in China. We are probably one of the pioneering companies, both globally and in China. We have built excellent business reputation within this within Chinese market. Probably everyone knows, no sauce, in at least in the hydrogen segment. But, autonomous driving, that is a market that we are developing and keep branding, put our brand out in the market. And, yeah, I cannot say much, but we are working with some players in that area as well.
Thank you for your answers.
Okay, so yes, another question?
All right, I have another one. Your new, newest machine, the IC2000, has larger chambers in order to make these electrolysis plates, right? Does that cover, like, the bulk of this TAM currently, or is it just still a fraction? Do you need to make even bigger chambers soon?
Or should I start?
Yeah, yeah, go for it.
No, I mean, it covers a big part of it. There are some of the volumes we're really trying carefully to think out if we should do eventually a change and look into having bigger sizes. But it's also really important to understand what strategy our customers have, because we think that the most forward-looking are very modularized strategy. So they have small stacks, and they add the stacks together, and that has to do with, of course, you want to have a stack with just a few wind snurre or, you know, windmills, right? You don't want to have a huge, monolithic way. So when we look upon that, we also see a strong direction, a strong driver of actually keeping the plates pretty small. C runching the numbers, comparing investment and yield, that's actually what we're looking on today.
Okay, let me break in with some questions. The technical ones have been taken by the audience. I'm very happy with that because I don't really know that. I want to ask you about the timeline, because you've been active for about 25 years.
Mm-hmm.
If you want to be, you know, maybe on the negative side, you could say you haven't fully commercialized yet. The shift to hydrogen, will that delay kind of a full-scale commercialization further?
No, it's the other way around. I think that with the traction the customer wins, we have proven that we are commercialized. Otherwise, we won't be able to handle these customers. And it's not really a contradiction, but as we say that innovation speed to get better prices from our customers and stay relevant, that is, of course, something we need to do very, very quickly. I'm not saying that is on the expense of industrialized or co-commercialized, but it's a big part of running fast, more than necessarily having all the processes right. I mean, they're talking to us, hopefully because we're smarter and we run faster.
Okay, so, Jonas, given that you're entering the company soon as the CEO, and we have someone like Elon Musk, who's focusing on electric vehicles, saying that he won't do hydrogen, why do you feel, and the company feel, like you're betting on the right horse?
Yeah, two reasons. First, when you look at the hydrogen market, hydrogen as such is not new. There is an existing hydrogen market. What is new is that we have a green portion of the hydrogen market, and the green portion is increasing, and we are going with the green portion of the hydrogen market, and that is a very fast-expanding market. So we can go into that market, we can expand with the market. And there are sort of many current applications on hydrogen. Then I would also turn to my colleagues, who have very good insights in the fuel cell industry.
Yeah. So maybe I can shed some light on this. Elon Musk has said a lot of things, and he's referring to specifically automotive applications. So the applications go well beyond personal vehicles. But to the extent that we are talking about personal vehicles, I think the market can speak for itself. Okay, battery cars had a head start, so they're at a more mature position right now. But if we look at two comparable vehicles, the Tesla Model Y, and then you have the Toyota Mirai, right? One of the barriers regardless of the technology, is this thing that I saw referred to as range anxiety, right? If I have a charge, how far can I go? Do I have to come back? Where do I charge it? How long does that take? How do I do that?
Right, with a Tesla, you're talking hours to get a full charge. They do have the ability for rapid charges, but that's still 30 minutes to get the rapid charge, and that's a partial charge. And the range you get from a full charge in the Model Y is, like, 480 km. So if you look at the Toyota Mirai, in comparison, right, you can fully recharge it with hydrogen in less than 5 minutes, so it's very similar to a gas vehicle, but the range is 640 km. So quicker refueling, larger range, this directly mitigates one of the main concerns for either of the two technologies. And all the major automotive manufacturers are manufacturing hydrogen vehicles, so this is the market speaking for itself.
But if you want to point fingers at problematic areas, so he says, "The density of hydrogen is low," right? All fuels have different densities, for that matter. But if we look at batteries, you have the lithium-ion batteries, and you have the cobalt-based batteries. Lithium, geopolitical issues are arising about: Where does it come from? How much do we need? And cobalt, specifically, there are NGOs right now trying to classify that as a conflict material. So batteries aren't the holy grail necessarily either. If you contrast that with the fuel cell, there's nothing of particular sensitivity in a fuel cell. So I personally don't have any concerns.
Yaowen, do you want to add something?
Well, it can be a big debate. We continue forever.
I'll call Elon Musk in.
Yeah, we need Elon on stage.
Yeah, but he has, Rob has mentioned a few advantages of fuel cell in passenger vehicles, but actually we can already see with our eyes in China, commercial vehicles has already been able to compete with battery and fuel cell commercial vehicles. So it's coming, and also we have talked about hydrogen storage. If you just look at hydrogen, the cost of hydrogen storage per kilowatt, kilowatt hours, if it's, it's an energy. Kilowatt hours cost of storing electricity in battery comparing to storage in pressurized tanks, hydrogen storage is cheaper, and this has tons of better, better, thousands better performance in terms of lifetime compared to battery, and in terms of material saving, right?
As you—as Rob explained, and in terms of how stable, and I mean, for long distance and for long period of time storage. So vehicles— Yeah, I think we can probably, okay, we can stop over here, and we can continue this forever.
Yeah, Torbjörn, you don't get to answer because we need to move on. We kept our audience longer than we promised to do. So, a question for, well, maybe you and Yaowen, mainly from Anders: "What happens with Hyundai? The new agreement signed, does it also have a commercial part, or is it just R&D?
We have really good cooperation with Hyundai, but... No, strike that but. It's just like we are working together, commercially. When time is ready, and we together have done the right thing, we will explain that, right?
Mm-hmm.
This is not easy stuff, so that's also why it's taking time.
Do you want to add something, Yaowen?
Well, I can speak a few words for my colleague, Chris, Dr. Christian Juhlin. Hyundai is make great contribution to the global fuel cell automotive industry as a whole, but we don't really spoke, talk about our customer, but we talk for our customer. So I think, talk to our customer. So I don't cannot really speak to it here.
No.
I think we just keep supporting our existing customers.
All right. Let me check if there's anyone in the room before I hand over the final word to Torbjörn. Or actually, I would like to ask, before we end this Q&A, I would like to ask the entire panel, given your stock price, share price, it hasn't been too much fun for the shareholders, given a few years back or so. Why should one invest in Impact Coatings? Torbjörn, let's go.
First of all, should not ever a CEO comment on the share price, so I don't do that. Well, in short, you've seen what we're talking about today. You've seen our track record since the capital injection and all these fantastic things these guys have been doing, and I hope that speaks for itself.
Yaowen?
Oh, yeah, I think we are making excellent things, and cost coating service center coating service business models generates of even cash flow and predictable business growth, and we see great traction within both China and the United States. I think that is quite self-explanatory.
Robert, you want to add?
So what I can say is, if we just look at this in terms of generating value or increasing value in whatever form that is, we have a technical solution in an attractive market that is growing, right? So that's a magical combination to find oneself in. This is where we are, so we can expect positive things going forward. As they say in North America, "When the sun is shining, grow hay," right? So right now, the sun is shining, and the forecast is it's going to continue to shine for the foreseeable future. So I think we're well-positioned to create that value, which can translate into other things that shareholders might be interested in.
Jonas?
Yeah, it's a great company, and we have a great expansion market. We can step in on a market that is expanding very rapidly, and the size of the market today is sort of grabbable for us. So we can stay focused, we can be there, and we can focus on this market.
All right, so four answers, four pitches for why to invest in Impact Coatings then. I'll leave it up to you if you want to hear more from these presenters. If you want to see those presentations again, you can go into the Impact Coatings Investor Relations site, which will be available from tomorrow to see the entire CMU again and the different presentations. And thank you so much to everybody in the room. Torbjörn, do you want to say the final words?
Well, thank you again, participating in this, in the room or online. Thanks, great guys, you know, extremely well spoken, and thank you, Emelie, for a good session. You might have been a little bit too easy on me.
Sorry. Thank you, everyone.
Thank you.
Okay, thank you.