Welcome to Indutrade's Capital Markets Day. It's a great pleasure seeing all of you here today. I would also like to welcome our webcast viewers that are with us online today. Before we start, I have some safety instructions for you. In case of emergency, we have two emergency exits. One is located right over there, and the other one is the entrance where you enter the room. Just very briefly, we are here at our headquarters in Kista. In this building, we are about 130 persons, and we share this building with 12 of our daughter companies. The agenda for today, you can see here, the first Q&A session will be around 20 minutes past 10, we will have a short break for about 10 minutes.
The second Q&A session will be around noon. So, we appreciate a lot if you could save your questions until these occasions. But now let's start, and let me introduce today's first speaker, our CEO, Bo Annvik.
Good morning, and welcome on my behalf as well. It's great to see all of you here. We, as a management team, have been looking forward to this day, actually. We are all eager, excited to share more about Indutrade and our way forward. As Frida said, we have chosen to be here at our head office. This building was purposely built for Indutrade in 1988, and it's actually good to be as a head office in combination with our companies. We can spend time here during days and learn more about the businesses and understand the business climate. Hopefully, we'll take some time in the afternoon here and walk around and meet some of our companies as well.
It's about time we had a new Capital Markets Day. I spoke to someone this morning here saying that this is the first. It's not. I know we had one in 2009, I think in March. I wasn't here at that time. Was anyone here at that Capital Markets Day? You were. Good. Good. As I understand it, the entertainment might have been better. They had a live band, I think, at some point during the day. We will not have that today. We can scramble some Irish sad songs and maybe some other things, but we will hopefully have an interesting content and program for you here. I will introduce the management team sort of during the presentation. Before we start, I'd like to introduce our Chairwoman, Katarina Martinson.
Perhaps you can stand up. So, Katarina was elected to chair Indutrade earlier this spring, and you've been part of the board since 2015? Yeah. Please approach Katarina during the day, in breaks and so on, if you want to discuss with her. Great that you're with us. Thank you. Okay. In terms of the program for today, we will spend time on Indutrade as a company, talk about our business model, our strategic direction. We will also talk about some of the new strategic initiatives we believe very much in and how we work with continuous improvement. Acquisitions is a large part of what we do, so our approach to acquisitions, how we work with acquisitions will be elaborated on. Also Indutrade as an owner, both from a group perspective, business area perspective, and individual company perspective.
We try to build the agenda to cater for your potential interest, and you will see several of our members in the management team and also one of our MDs. Again, this is for you, so please discuss with anyone during the breaks and during the lunch. We'll try to be obviously transparent and open about our business and our future. This is a snapshot of Indutrade in terms of size, I would say. We are about a SEK 16 billion type of company with quite a lot of subsidiaries, plus 200 and close to 7,000 employees. The journey started in 1978. It was a family by the last name Tindberg who sold their family company called Bengtssons Maskin in Malmö. The son in the family was Mr. Gunnar Tindberg, who became the first CEO of Indutrade. He was asked then to buy similar companies to Bengtssons Maskin.
The idea was to buy companies fairly small, SEK 50 million, SEK 60 million, SEK 70 million type of size with industrial components in their product range. Technical trading companies with a large market share, strong position in their niche, profitable companies, well-managed companies, with the right type of people with a heart in the right place. This Gunnar did very successfully for quite some years. Most of the focus was on technical trading companies, they also bought some companies with proprietary technology. In 2005, Industrivärden decided to IPO Indutrade. Gunnar Tindberg was 67 years old. The board decided then to recruit a new CEO, and Johnny Alvarsson came on board.
Johnny started to complement the first phase of Indutrade, also internationalizing Indutrade, buying companies more outside of the Scandinavian, Nordic type of scope, entered into U.K., more into the Benelux and further down into the south of Switzerland and Austria and Germany and so on and so forth. He also brought more industrial experience with him. So, more and more, I would say companies with proprietary technology, own manufacturing, own industrial operations. And these two categories of companies complement each other quite well. And I will talk a bit more about that. So, there are some fundamental characteristics, principles standing out when you talk about Indutrade. It's entrepreneurship, it's decentralization, and it's profitable growth. These are very important to us. And this is what I think makes us very successful and also different to quite a lot of other companies.
We are also, I would say, agile, flexible, and we have adapted quite well in terms of different business climates in our history. I will show some examples of that. And we have also always, I would say, had a strong financial position, a strong balance sheet, and we have been able to finance our own growth with our own cash flow during this 40-year journey, which we have had now. Building on that, I would say that also fundamentally important is to understand that Indutrade is very value-driven, values-driven as a company. All these 200+ companies have their individual culture. They have their individual core values, but there is quite strong resemblance in terms of these values across the group. And the—here you see some of these core values categorized as us as a group.
And overriding, we say that people make the difference. We are relying very much on the key people in our companies since we are decentralized. We have quite a lot of trust in our people versus most other companies, I would say. We build on our people. And when you visit an Indutrade company, you strongly feel quite easily that it's very entrepreneurial and it's a lot of passion for the business where they are. They're very close to the customer. They're very close to the applications the customers work with. If you work, for example, in the pulp and paper business or technical salespeople, they know the applications in the pulp and paper business very well, I would say. This is, I would say, key characteristics for Indutrade. They really enjoy working with this very immensely.
The other part is decentralization. As I said earlier, it's very much built on trust. We are a small head office here, approximately 15 persons. It's impossible for us to control ourselves to success. We really need to depend on the people we have in the company, and we trust them to do a great job, and we try to support them in a good way. Indutrade is also very much about the long term. We don't optimize for individual quarters or individual years. We think about long-term best practice, long-term performance improvements when we make investments and when we look at acquisitions and when we work with our companies. And we have, I would say, the luxury and freedom to work long term because we are good at profitable growth. That gives us autonomy to invest in our future, both in terms of people and equipment and competence.
There is a good, I would say, combination between long-term and profitable growth. This is what we stand for. People make the difference, entrepreneurial, decentralized, and long-term profitable growth. We are also very diverse as a business. We have a lot of end customer segments we are engaged in via our customers or directly. Here you see an example of some of them. We are quite big in, I would say, general engineering, general industry. And at the beginning of the Indutrade journey, the scope was really to engage in companies with industrial components who play a critical role in a production system. It could be everything from seals or filters or fasteners, something a company needs both in good times and bad times, and something is mostly linked to, I would say, maintenance and repairs rather than a CapEx budget.
Fairly far from the purchasing department, we are more into the maintenance department and build relationships with them. We are also fairly large in the construction industry, infrastructure industry, more on infrastructure than construction, or I would say apartment buildings in larger cities. That's not key for us, more, I would say, highways, water, wastewater, things like that. This is prime markets for Indutrade. Quite large in the energy segment and also in the healthcare arena. We have quite a few healthcare companies now and are keen to invest more in that. By this spread, we have a natural hedge, I would say, in a recession. We don't depend on a single customer or a single industry. Quite good spread in that perspective.
As I have already said to some extent, our portfolio is based on both technical trading companies, and also companies with proprietary technology and own manufacturing. The first phase was quite a lot about technical trading, and then the second phase also complemented more with the companies with own manufacturing. These play both a complementary role, I would say. They have key upsides or key advantages, both of them. The technical trading company is usually strong in a niche market, in a local market, but don't perhaps have the potential for organic growth. If you are in Flow Technology for the pulp and paper industry in Sweden, you might have 35% market share. It's not so much room to grow. There is someone else representing this agency in Norway or Denmark, and so on and so forth.
They can step by step introduce some new products, but they still want to be at their core, where they have a lot of knowledge and can provide this knowledge to the customer. The organic growth dimension is, I would say, limited for these technical trading companies. They are profitable, they are well-managed, they have a good cash flow, they are capital light, they are, I would say, people light, so they are quite agile and flexible in a potential downturn. The companies with proprietary technology, they have more opportunity to grow organically. They might start in a home market like Scandinavia, they start to export into Europe, and eventually they can play in the global arena and become a big company. We have several good examples of that. That's a good complement in terms of growth opportunity.
They are, again, well-managed, highly profitable, but they tie up a bit more capital, they involve a bit more people, not as flexible, I would say, in a business climate perspective. So, we like both categories, we invest in both of them, and we will continue to invest in both of them also going forward. In a more formal perspective, our, I would say, overall strategic direction is explained on this slide here. Basically stating then that sustainable profitable growth through our structured development of our portfolio companies and acquisitions of well-managed companies, both technical trading and Industrial components, is the core of Indutrade. We are very much a long-term owner, as I said, and we have a buy and build strategy, meaning that when we acquire a company, we never sort of have the intention to divest that company.
We buy that company for the long term. That's fundamentally important to us, and that's also why Indutrade is an attractive buyer or acquirer for a lot of entrepreneurs. They want to see their company live on for the long term, where they can keep the company name, and we can build on the competence and the people in the company. We don't integrate and have a major changeover. We build on the competence and try to make the individual company better. We do this, as I said, in a decentralized way. The MDs in our companies are fully responsible for the P&L, for the balance sheet, and for the business. You will hear examples of that during the morning here. We have some overriding business objective, and that is sustainable, profitable growth.
I would say the key and central part here, I would say, is profitability. Why is that? Is it linked to that we want to provide dividends to our owners? Not necessarily, because we have a lot of ideas what to do with our capital. It's fundamentally important to actually create autonomy and be able to invest in both people, equipment, competence, product development, business development. Profitability gives you freedom to act, and that's very central for us. Growth, I think, is also important because growth is a bit of a receipt in terms of a company's is successful or not. If you can take market share or provide growth, you're usually a successful companies if you do that profitably. Growth for the sake of growth without profit is obviously not interesting for basically anyone, not for us either.
But profitable growth together is—i f you don't grow, there is a risk that you can stagnate as a company, and basically you don't have the ability to employ new people, you don't get more dynamic, younger people into the organization. The company step by step might come into a negative spiral and stagnate and actually lose market share and so on and so forth. We want to see growing companies. Some of them, as I said, have a, I would say, easier situation to grow, and some a bit more difficult, but all should strive for profitable growth. The last part is sustainable. It's not sort of unimportant at all. It's on the other hand, very important, and it has two meanings here. One is sustainable in terms of stable over time.
We don't want companies to optimize for, as I said, certain quarters or certain year ends and things like that. They should work long-term and do the right things for the long term. Also sustainability in a, I would say perspective That we care for everything about human rights and our well-being in terms of our employees, about the environment, about business ethics and things like that. I will elaborate a bit more on that down the line here. Sustainable, profitable growth is something we work towards, and that's also what we sort of charge our individual companies to work towards. Then, we have a quite simple but yet very strong business model. We develop the companies we already own, and we acquire new companies to build growth that way as well.
Job number one, the most important task I would say, is to develop and take care of what we already own. We are obviously keen to acquire, but there could hypothetically, potentially be periods where we decrease our activity for certain reasons. We will never decrease our activity in terms of acquire or developing the companies we own, obviously. That's job number one, very key, very important, and I will tell you in terms of how we do that in a generic way. We are very keen to acquire, and you've seen our track record as an acquirer, and we are involved in that right now, and we are very optimistic in terms of adding quite a lot of companies also going forward. This was a bit of a prelude, background in terms of where we come from, talk about our culture, our core values, and our business model.
Since I came on board a bit more than one and half years ago now, some others in the management team are new. We have worked quite intensely now, the last year in terms of our strategic direction. And, I was definitely not recruited to make a revolution of Indutrade or with Indutrade. It is, as you have seen, a very successful company, and we should build on that success, build on that platform, and try to improve going forward. It's gonna be much more of an evolutionary path forward than a revolution. So, how do we develop companies? It's important to underline when we talk about this, that our approach is very much bottom up rather than top down.
We fundamentally try to ask the MDs of our companies, how can we support you? Are there any areas you feel that you lack competence or you need perhaps board members who can guide you, constructively challenge you, support you? That's the attitude we have. How can we support you? We obviously constructively challenge them as well. But we are very little about top-down initiatives and force change on top of them. It's key for us to have the right leaders in our companies, again, based on decentralization. We need these leaders. We are a small head office again, and they have a lot of trust, and we have confidence in them to lead these companies. So, choosing the right leaders, choosing the right companies with the right leaders when we acquire is something we are good at, I would say, and fundamentally important to us.
We take a lot of time and spend resources on choosing the right people and the right type of companies. We engage in the company's strategic direction. Some companies have been with us for 40 years. Obviously, they have a fairly set strategy, and there we challenge on a yearly basis and see how we can support and how they can tweak that. At the end, it's important that the MD owns the strategy or the management team owns the strategy. We are just sort of input in the process. It's important that obviously they have a clear strategy and a strategy leading to sustainable, profitable growth. We are also keen to work with our companies and making sure that they have a fairly focused agenda, singling out three, four, five things which are value-creating, the most value-creating activities, initiatives they can find, and also say no to initiatives.
That's quite difficult for many people. You always, when you travel around, see people who have a lot of, I would say, ideas and maybe long list of initiatives they want to make or focus on. We don't really appreciate that. We like short, focused agendas with the key initiatives and also understanding what they have said no to as well. We want to see the companies working with talent management. Some of the smaller companies we have acquired during the years have a very strong managing director and that managing director is fundamentally important for the business. Those companies might not really have a management team. That's important to us that they start to work with building strength in the companies and step by step building a team around the MD so the company is not so dependent on a single person.
We also believe in knowledge sharing, and I will come back to that. Even if they are, as I said, autonomously responsible for their company, they can still learn from other Indutrade companies and we encourage that. Then as an owner, we support them in different types of investments in people, as I've said, in competence areas, in product development, business development, production equipment, facilities, and things like that. Some smaller sort of agenda items in terms of how we support in developing companies, and you will hear much more from others about this as well. Then, in terms of acquisitions, we only invest in profitable companies and well-managed companies. We don't engage in any turnaround cases. We are not staffed, we don't have the resource, and we don't have the interest in those types of cases.
We cherry-pick good companies in an opportunistic perspective. These companies are having a strong market position, leading position in a narrow niche usually. And for some people, they might appear as a bit of a boring company. To us, that's great, less interest from others. But strong market position, strong niche in where they are working with a clear offering, which is value providing somehow for the customer. They are led by entrepreneurs. We want the entrepreneurs to continue in the companies. Since we don't integrate these companies, we usually work with earn-out structures, and that works extremely well within Indutrade because the seller cannot point at us or anyone else in terms of not reaching objectives. They are fully responsible, and they want to have that autonomy and responsibility also.
We don't really have any particular size restrictions when making acquisitions. I would say our scope is between SEK 50 million up to maybe SEK 500 million. That's where we predominantly look. We also have a large interest for even smaller companies, but then that's a add-on company to some company we already own. So, then they buy a product line or some technology or a market presence they need and take responsibility and integrate that with their own business. So basically, we have an interest from very small companies up to maybe half a billion SEK. Quite a wide variety of different types of companies who could fit that profile. Why do they divest? Why do they sell to Indutrade?
Lots of different reasons. It can be that the owners have taken the company to a certain level, and then they reach some sort of a complexity level, maybe internationalization. They are not used to that. They want support in terms of that. Maybe a level where they need quite a lot of investments. They don't want to take all that risks by themselves. Obviously, also generation shifts is fairly common also. So wide variety of reasons.m Quite a lot of, I would say, middle-aged people selling to Indutrade, not only people who are about to retire. Many between 45 and 55 for those different reasons I said. They're also keen to come into a situation where they don't feel as lonely as they do sometimes as an owner, as an MD of a company.
They want to come into an environment where they can get support, learn new things, share experiences, and we have a fantastic opportunity to provide that to them. As I said, we are opportunistic in terms of our overall approach. We cherry-pick good companies with great people. And I would say that we have a very healthy pipeline of projects in different stages. During 2018 now, our activity level has been somewhat lower than normally. Some reasons for that, I would say one reason is that I'm fairly new and some others with me in the management team are fairly new. In respect to the success Indutrade has had, we have taken some time to travel around extensively, learn about Indutrade, and understand the company in depth.
That has obviously taken some time, and others previously have used that time to engage in business development and acquisition. The reason that we are new is I would say one explanation. There are also cases, individual cases where we fairly late in the process have declined to move on for certain reasons, just situational, I would say, reasons, so nothing to worry about or nothing serious as that. That happens all the time. But we have had a number of those during the year here. And then also , we have as a team engaged in a portfolio analysis, and that resulted in some activities which are extraordinary. We decided to restructure some companies, divest some companies, and that has also, I would say, taken some time and focus.
Most of that work is now finalized by the year-end, and in 2019, I would say we are all focused on again, business development and acquisitions will be a key part of that. Perhaps even stronger than before, we will focus on add-on acquisitions. And you have seen some recent examples of that, and you will hear more about that during the day. We think that's a great way forward. We build on something we already understand, we already know the risk is lower, and the, I would say, the valuations and the multiples in that part is also very, I would say, interesting for us to work with. In terms of the geographical scope, we work with Northern Europe, Central Europe, and that's been so from the beginning.
Basically, in a risk minimization perspective, we want to buy companies with the same type of business ethics and morale as we have from the Scandinavian and Nordic cultures. We will probably enter into maybe Northern Italy. We might enter into North America eventually, but we don't work actively regarding that right now. Scope-wise, we are in Central Europe, Northern Europe, and it's a huge, I would say, sea or lake to fish in or a big tree with a lot of cherries on them. That's not a problem. We are having a lot of opportunity to choose from, I would say, over time. We have, I would say, as a management team, also engaged in some strategic initiatives. It's not any super smart things, but I would say initiatives that we feel are value-creating for Indutrade.
The first part is actually strengthen our ability in terms of talent management. I've already said that when we acquire companies, we look very much at the people dimension. We also feel that we need to step-wise be even better to develop the people we already have. I will talk a bit more about that. We believe strongly in knowledge-sharing. We have done some of that in the past, but we can increase, improve, be better at that. We are step-by-step introducing a Indutrade toolbox and Indutrade Academy. I will share some views in terms of that. And also sustainability as a core area for us is something we are engaging in more and more now. I will also talk a bit about that. First with leadership and competence development. A number of areas here which are very important.
First of all, we are starting an approach to be a little bit more systematic in terms of assessing our talent, not only the MDs we have, but also trying to understand what we have behind the MDs as a bench strength, you can say. We have a bit of a more structured approach to this now, which we are implementing, adopting. And then, we had certain development programs within Indutrade, pockets of that, mostly actually driven in the Flow Technology area. Now we have taken more of a group responsibility for this and built, I would say, tailor-made leadership development programs, competence development programs for the type of leaders we have and want to have and including our values systems into this and the type of businesses we have, to be even nurturing and developing even better leaders going forward.
Sometimes we need to recruit new people, there are a lot of modern tools in terms of how to do this, and we are step-by-step starting to use some of these tools in a more structured way as well. To help and support us in this area, we did, I would say, a deliberate recruitment earlier this year. We recruited Åsa Wirsenius, who is our Head of People now. And Åsa is coming from a decentralized company, large company with a lot of entrepreneurs. She very much understands, I would say, our culture, the way we work, and will be very supportive in this area going forward. The other, I would say initiatives is active knowledge-sharing.
As I said, Indutrade has done some of this in the past. For example, once a year, we gather all the MDs for a two-and-a-half day conference and share interesting initiatives and topics which are relevant for the MDs. There has been a benchmarking initiative for quite many years within Indutrade, where every quarter we re-release results and where the companies can compare their performance against each other. There is a competitive, I would say, instrument, where obviously a lot of them want to be in the upper part rather than in the lower part. But we think we can actually increase and improve this beyond what we have been doing. This is also something the companies are open to and actually ask for. It's not gonna be a mandatory top-down initiative.
It's gonna be more of a, I would say, a Swedish smorgasbord of different things they can pick and choose from if they feel that it's value-creating for their company going forward. To facilitate this, we have also invested in a new Indutrade Portal, where our different companies and the people in the companies, they can log on to this Portal and find information about the companies. They can find information about our people initiatives. They can have a search function if they search for something specifically and find what other companies are in the pulp and paper area or what other companies have operations in China, what other companies work with, some specific technology area, and so on and so forth. More easily navigate around in the Indutrade world, I would say.
A useful instrument, which we launched only last week, so it's now operational. It's step, and stepwise will have more and more content as times go by here. We have also had a number of, I would say, cluster, knowledge cluster meetings. Fairly recently, some of the companies who are doing business in China met and shared experiences and some of them are sourcing from China, some of them have manufacturing in China, some of them are seeing China as a market. So, they met for a day and shared experiences and decided how to progress going forward in different ways depending on what needs and wants they had from that. This active knowledge sharing we believe in and I think is gonna be value-creating in a significant way for Indutrade going forward.
Sort of linked to this, we are stepwise building more of an Indutrade toolbox. Again, on a voluntary basis, but still very, I would say, useful and relevant for most of the companies. We have recently provided, I would say, some knowledge in terms of how to build strategic plans in a, I would say, simple but strong way. We have worked with digitalization as a key area which is relevant for a lot of companies. We have tools to share in terms of efficient sales operations. Some companies have interest in purchasing, and we are launching initiatives in terms of that. This is part of an Indutrade Academy and a toolbox, where we as an owner can provide knowledge in a structured way, and they can pick and choose in terms of what they feel is relevant and important.
Sustainability, I also said, is core, and I actually think sustainability is part of the Indutrade DNA in a sense, in a very natural way. We are a very long-term-oriented company, and sustainability is all about a long-term healthy environment, I would say, as a society. We correspond very well to that, and many of our companies are quite local, and they have sort of a local engagement where they are present and take responsibility in an active local way. In that sense, part of our DNA and something we are naturally good at. In another perspective, this is something we as a group have just recently started to engage in a more structured way. So, we are in the beginning of a professional journey for us now going forward here.
To start with, we have a code of conduct which is quite elaborate and important, which is implemented in our companies. But as a company, we obviously support human rights, employee wellbeing, we support the environment, we support having a high business ethics and morale and things like that. The difficulty we have is to measure our progress in terms of areas within sustainability. Take environment, for example. Lot of big operational companies measure CO2 impact, for example. That's extremely difficult for us to make that relevant because it's such a dynamic situation we have with all these companies. We're adding new companies, one year to another year is not apples to apples. We will find our way to manage this and drive this forward and follow up this in a good way.
We start out now with a materiality analysis on a group level. We will introduce that on a company level next year. And based on that analysis, the individual companies need to create sustainability plans and initiatives which make sense for them. Then we will lead and follow up and drive this in an Indutrade way which makes sense for us, and it's not just for show, if I say so. We have a very strong platform for going forward now. We have realigned the organization. We have strengthened the management team. 50% of our sales is now outside the Nordics. We are more of an international group. The international management team we have now is, I think, very set for bringing Indutrade forward. It's very scalable. We don't need to reorganize. We don't need to invent new processes going forward.
We can add 100 companies fairly easily into the structure we have and build profitable growth going forward. We are basically done with the extraordinary activities we have dealt with this year, and going forward is much more about business development. Here you see our management team, and you will meet them. They are all here except for one person today. Perhaps only want to, at this point out, one person, Mr. Peter Eriksson, who's been a long timer with Indutrade, basically built our Flow Technology area and, just recently now left that role and became an advisor to myself and to the management team as a whole. He is a good guidance in terms of our values, in terms of where we come from, and also helpful in our strategic initiatives going forward.
Otherwise, you see a lot of people who've been with Indutrade quite a long time, in our business areas. In our group headquarters here, some of us are new, but the people running and managing the business have been with Indutrade, I would say, at least five years, and some up to 25 years. Very little change in terms of the team managing our companies. Based on these new initiatives we have engaged in, we feel that it was time to update our financial targets. They are, I would say, ambitious, they are relevant, but specifically the EBITA margin target was time to update. Not really because you have asked for it, more because I and the management team feel that these important initiatives we have launched, they should generate value for us as a company.
And we also want to underline that to all our, I would say subsidiaries and our companies in the group that this is important. It's an opportunity to step up and we have certain things for you to support you in the journey to even a higher margin. So i t feels very natural for us to do that. As I said, the other targets I think are still valid, still very ambitious, and perhaps the growth target is quite key to Indutrade. We are a growth company. We have been a growth company, and we want to be a growth company going forward. We hopefully can do a little bit better in terms of organic growth, and we will definitely then continue to grow with acquisitions. Here you see the outcome in terms of our performance, I would say the last five years, and it's quite good.
But you can also see that we are not up to the EBITA margin target yet, but have strong hopes for delivering better and better in terms of that going forward. We have provided profitable growth since the IPO 2005. You can see the blue bars in terms of growth, you can see that we have had a stable and improving EBITA margin in terms of the yellow line there as well. We have created quite a lot of value for shareholders since the IPO. I think the introduction price was SEK 65, there has been a split as well, now we are SEK + 220 and a really great, I would say, success. We strongly believe that we can continue this journey also going forward. Many speculate in a potential downturn. We think the business climate is strong and stable at a good level.
But anyway, to just give you a perspective on how resilient Indutrade has been in previous recessions, on this slide here. We have basically gone from this 11%, 12%, 10%, 11%, 12% EBITA margin down to 7%-8% as most in a sort of negative perspective. So we cope with, I would say, recessions in a very good way, perhaps one of the better in any large cap company in Sweden. We have strong hopes for also being agile and flexible and coping with that also going forward. Some key takeaways from my presentation here. We have a journey of evolution going forward here, and that's based on a successful business model and a well-functioning strategy. We have launched some new initiatives which we strongly believe in. We have underlined that by also increasing our targets going forward.
We are a diversified conglomerate with agile companies very close to the customers. We are flexible as a group. And now we have a platform in place for profitable growth going forward, a strong team, an eager team to take Indutrade forward. With that, I say thank you. And I ask Patrik Johnson, our CFO, to come up on stage.
Thank you. Hello, everybody. It's great to have you here. My name is, as Bo said, I'm Patrik Johnson, and I'm one of the newcomers in the team. I started in April, so I only have, like, six months or so in the job. I previously worked for Sandvik and headed up the finance for their biggest business area, Machining Solutions then. Today I will talk to basically two topics then. I will talk a little bit, I'll dive into the financial performance a little bit, and then I'll talk about our operating model, how we run the group then, basically. So financial performance. What you see here then is a graph of the last 10 years, the profitability, sales, and also the dividend development. And we have, as Bo has pointed out already, have the really strong performance ever since the IPO.
So if you calculate the average growth in the last five years, we grew sales with 12% on average per year, and we increased earnings per share with 15%. And in this graph, I excluded the cost for restructuring we took in quarter four last year for the Sander Meson group. If you exclude those, we increased earnings per share around 15%. If you include the restructuring costs, that was also a good number then around 12%. And dividend increased with 10% per year over these five years then. If you want to understand this a little bit better, what has been driving these improvements then, you can look at the five-year bridge. You can see a growth then in organic growth and also through acquisitions, currency then added 1%.
Acquisitions is of course, the main driver, as you can see. It's margin accretive since EBITDA increased more than sales. Organic development is positive, and we've that has also been okay over these five years, but not as good. And coming back to what Bo already pointed out then that a large part of our portfolio companies are technical trading companies. They have a relatively big market share in their respective niche, and they have a slight limitation in what they can grow. We are confident then in the management team that this is something that we can improve then slightly going forward. That's one of the areas for us going forward. By that, I move over to the operating model then. How do we run then a group like Indutrade?
If you look at that model, our main objective is for the MDs of our companies to feel that they are fully accountable of their operation, that they have the full responsibility for P&L and balance sheet and operations. To achieve this, we feel that there are main principles that we need to work with through decentralized organization. Really lean head office and no allocations. Of course, we need to have a structured governance, and we work through the BAs and we use the company boards. We of course, needs to have a common view on how to look at financial performance. Last but not least, it's important to have then a relatively simple and consistent incentive structure in the company. Let's go through these then and one by one to explain them a little bit further.
Decentralization, how does that work then for us? First and foremost, the companies are really independent. They have their own company name, and basically, they have the full freedom to set their own strategy and run their operations. And by this, they also have the full trust and mandate and also obligation to act, to seize all opportunities and also to sort of handle risks and threats that might occur. They have no obligation really to participate in group initiatives, the few that we launch and drive. Of course, we encourage them to do as much sharing and learning as possible because the possibilities are great in a group like ours. We encourage that, but it's no obligation around it. The formal engagement in the companies is, as I said, and through the company boards.
They have an obligation to report their numbers on a monthly basis. That's also part of the sort of the decentralized framework. The only area where we actually work together, where we are more as a traditional bigger company integrated is the bank and treasury area, which is also important then. Those are main building blocks then to understand how decentralization works in Indutrade. We argue that we are definitely a lean head office. We're only basically 15 employees in the real head office working with these topics, M&A, overall people management, HR, financing is of course important then since that's the area where we're relatively integrated. Business control, sustainability, growing in importance and communication, corporate communication. Of course, Business Areas are staffed with central resources to support and challenge the companies around 25 employees, which, if you do the math, it's around three full-time equivalents then per Business Area.
Working with the companies on a daily basis and also trying to work with acquisitions a lot as well. As I think I said earlier, we don't like allocations, so that we keep at the minimum for the companies to really feel that they own their cost structure in full. Talk a little bit about the formal and governance that we have. We use the company boards as the formal governance forum for all companies and also the Business Areas we have three formal board meetings per year. The quarter one meeting, then we conclude last year, review performance, and close that, so to say. Quarter two, a very important meeting where main focus is the strategy. We engage in a strategic dialogue with the companies. Here also going forward, sustainability, I think will be a key area to challenge and talk with the companies about.
In about this time of year, we have a dialogue around targets and budgets for the coming year. In addition to this then, we from group also have a monthly dialogue, a business review with the BAs to be on top of things that happen during the months and make sure that we capture any deviations or issues that emerge. When you talk about the boards then it's the Business Area's responsibility to make sure that the boards are the compositions are right and well adopted for companies, making sure that they have the necessary competency. Here the Business Area, of course, engage in himself in a lot of companies, but he has also then, a network with experienced and senior MDs to help him in the boards.
And we have also then some tools for the boards to work with standard agenda and other tools to make sure that the board work is of high quality. Capital allocation decisions on investments, it's normally also a board thing, of course. We want the companies to grow and seize opportunities. So, we are normally welcome CapEx request and normally prove them based on presentation of good business cases. That's a little bit about structured governance and continue on that path a little bit then, common financial scorecard. First, I need to say then that every company basically have their own finance department. There are companies cooperating on a voluntary basis, but those are exceptions, I would say. Most of the companies have their own finance department. They have their own finance system.
Once a month, they need to report then full P&L and balance sheet and some statistics in a common system. They also report targets and budgets and forecast 3x a year. For us, the year-over-year improvement is the most important thing. And we also then try to use common sets of KPIs to make sure that we follow the financial performance in a common way. We've had that for long, and that we also try to develop further as we go forward then as an important tool for both board work and governance in general. Then the incentive structure. Here, I think the most important incentive is not really the monetary one. It's the passion and energy you get from owning your business, and that you can really find then in a group like Indutrade.
On top of that, we also have the sort of more traditional classical incentive schemes then, in acquisitions, newly acquired companies. We work with earn-outs one to three years. We have the traditional bonus schemes, and here we are also simplistic. We use profit, year-over-year profit improvement, not more complicated than that, but very powerful. There are also long-term warrant program. Last but not least, and Bo talked about it, we have a benchmarking exercise, a quarterly financial benchmark. We post standings results every quarter for all the companies in four different areas profitability, return, growth, EBITDA group contribution, and EBITDA margin, as you can see there. Once a year, we have awards for this. The most prestigious award is, of course, since we are a long-term oriented company, the five-year award then. That's really something that the MDs aim for.
That concludes sort of the main ingredients then in our operating, you can call it an operating model. If I try to summarize the key message from my short presentation, then I think a really strong track record when it comes to financial performance, which we want to continue with, of course. We have the potential to improve organic performance. We think that the initiatives that we've launched, knowledge sharing, the toolboxes, engaging slightly more with the companies, supporting them, will help us. The model we have, the way we work is simple but really powerful. In the core of that, of course, decentralization and the full accountability at the MDs field. In the area, in the finance area, that's basically the only area where we are more integrated and work more together then. Thank you. Now, it's time for Jonas Halvord, talk a little bit about acquisitions.
Thank you. All right, I'm also one of the newcomers into the group. I started in January of this year. I came from the SKF Group. I headed up the M&A function at SKF for the last 15 years. It became a little bit too much of divestments to my liking. This environment here at Indutrade was quite attractive. Before that, I was actually MD for two smaller industrial firms that could very well have been Indutrade companies, actually. So it's important to say and refer to what has been said here. We have a lean setup here at the head office. Fortunate enough then, the acquisition activities in the group is not a head office type of activity. I t's very much a team effort together with the rest of the organization, with the business areas and also out in the geographical organizations.
You heard this from Bo and Patrik, and you will hear it even more from my other colleagues here in presentations coming forward here. What we are looking for when we are working with our pipeline of activities has not changed over the years. This is what basically characterized Bengtssons Maskin back 40 years ago, is very much what we are looking for in the companies that we have in our pipelines here as well. We are only interested in stable, well-managed industrial companies. We are not interested in any turnaround situations or anything like this. It's important that the companies have a leading position in the markets that they are working in and how they define the markets that they are active in. We are only interested in industrial business-to-business type of companies. Not engaging into anything like consumer type of products.
They are characterized by either being a technical trading company or proprietary manufacturers of their own technology and products. We are not particularly interested in companies, service companies. However, many of our existing companies, they do have services as part of their offering. In pure consultancy companies or service companies is really not in our scope. We have a couple of markets that we try to shy away from as well. We are not particularly interested in being a component OEM manufacturer to the automotive industry or to the broader telecom industry, for instance. So typically, these are companies with high value-added type of products and solutions, and very often customized to provide this value-added solutions to their customers, but also as a sort of differentiator from any commodity type of products.
And the, of course, as been said here, for us, it's extremely important, the people and the management team. That's really what makes the difference. Sometimes, as Bo referred to, that some of these companies are maybe to be seen as a little bit boring, but the people who are engaged in those companies, they are extremely passionate and proud of their businesses.
These are the type of situations and type of companies that we are really looking for. This ties back then to the sort of company culture that they stand for, and that fits with a value-driven type of environment like the Indutrade Group. This has not changed. This has been with us for many years and continue to be a very strong platform for us going forward. Likewise, when it comes to the sort of decentralized business model that we stand for, this is what we can offer the companies and the owners going forward. It's based on entrepreneurial business culture. It's very profit-oriented and very much customer-oriented as well. We never change the identity of the companies. No, we can say that are extremely strong when it comes to the type of dialog in or what sort of end customer areas or segments that they are engaged in.
This is something that is as valid here in the Nordics when we talk to people and companies out in the U.K. in Germany or whatever. This is a very strong sort of story that makes us really differentiating from many other companies. This has been so over the years, and this is something that continues, and we are of course out meeting a lot of different companies. I was out meeting two new potential candidates last week and this is a testament that we basically have an acid test for in each and every dialogue that we have. This is a key strength that we have. Bo also referred to the new organization structure that we have in place since the beginning of the year.
We have now eight business areas. It's a structure that is well suited to take on new acquisitions and to make onboarding into the organization. That's well in place. But the organization is not only a matter of the structure, it's also the sort of portfolio of the existing companies that we have. That's an area where the organization is playing an important role for the acquisition side of the business. We have an extremely diverse business portfolio now with our 200 type of companies. We are into many different product groups and technology areas.
We have basically the entire breadth of the industrial world, we can say, represented in our portfolio, and this in itself provides a lot of add-on possibilities within the portfolio. I will come back to that in how we work on that in different aspects. More importantly as well is the people that we have in our portfolio companies. The type of network that they have is an extremely strong advantage and lever for us going forward in generating potential candidates. Going into the sort of acquisition process then, I mean, we of course rely on feeding in a lot of potential candidates into this funnel, we can say. We know exactly what we are looking for. In terms of generating the leads into this funnel, we rely both on the internally generated leads from our own business organization.
We tend to like those leads, we can say a little bit more because that gives us an opportunity actually to engage in bilateral type of negotiations. We are happy that these discussions sometimes take several years to conclude. That gives us a possibility to get to know when the people that are engaged in the companies. To some extent, not as a competitive situation, maybe as a participating in broader processes. That is also an important part for us. We have a strong recognition out in the, we can say, the sell side community. And we get a steady inflow also from that side of the market, if we could call it so. As Bo referred to earlier, we have always been, we continue to be rather opportunistic in the type of companies that we acquire.
So, some might find some of our companies very niche and defined into very narrow markets. We are perfectly fine and like those type of situations. But we also have in our portfolio, of course, certain gems, we can say, extremely performing and well-functioning companies. We try to replicate those type of companies into new geographical markets, et cetera. This is a sort of more proactive approach that we are engaging potentially more in going forward. As we said, I mean, the sort of internal lead generation activities, that's something that Peter Eriksson will refer to much more in his presentation, and as Bo referred to, this was something that Gunnar Thimberg engaged in from the very beginning. This is something that is basically in the DNA of the group.
But we cannot take this for granted if we say so. We work very closely with our business areas and with the organization and try to stimulate and encourage the organization to come forward with these ideas. And we try to also provide sort of recognition for the people who engage in this. We put that forward in various forums and in our Indutrade Portal, et cetera. That's an important part. The other part of this is, of course, the external leads then. We have a good name out here in the market, we can say, and that is manifested that we work often on a regular basis with same kind of brokers, if we say so. But it's important for us to maintain this relationship and develop that further going forward as well.
We try also outside of the active project to participate in various forums and conferences in order to spread our word even more, and name even more into this type of activities. In some markets, we are more known than in others, we have to adopt from a case-by-case basis. We also get unsolicited approaches, and sometimes that's generated also from companies who have been acquired by us then. The way that we have behaved in this and the way that we govern those companies actually quite often spreads from one business owner, we can say, to their own network. We have to facilitate these type of approaches coming into the organization as well. We are opportunistic. We also want to replicate the type of best performing companies that we have. And this can be in specific product areas.
We have examples from industrial springs, we have in filters, we have in radio, mobile system providers, et cetera. There we try to look into identifying similar type of companies in other geographical markets, for instance. That's a work that we are doing on a regular basis. We have certain, we can say champions in certain application areas and this is another area where we spend the time and trying to identify potential candidates on that. We also have certain geographical markets that we would like to grow even further. One of them obviously being the German market. And I think all of you read and hear a lot about Mittelstand in Germany and the fact that a lot of entrepreneurs in Germany is about to retire, and that's a big challenge to some degree.
But for us, it's a huge opportunity, really. We had an article here earlier in the spring talking about some 100,000 of entrepreneurs that are due to retire in the next few years. Even if we look into the type of market with the products, application areas, size of companies that we are interested in, we are talking about thousands of companies in Germany alone. That's something that we are working on in a structured way. We know that the type of ownership model that we stand for resonates very well with German companies as well. I mean, we are out there in the market having dialogue as we speak. That also is valid in Italy. I mean, you have almost similarities of the German Mittelstand in the northern part of Italy, and that's another opportunity area for us going forward.
As said, I mean, within our existing portfolio, we also have a lot of add-on possibilities, and we can work on this in as we see it, thee different ways. Sometimes we engage in just a small type of asset deal where we actually acquire a single product line, add that to an existing company, and that's what we call organic add-on activities. It's quite similar to taking on a new agency, for instance. We also have the second type of activities where we acquire more of a business unit, we can say, or a small company. That fits very well into an existing portfolio company that we have, where we actually have decided to integrate those activities from the start. We have one example that we announced yesterday in the U.K.
This is a small company. It's GBP 5 million sterling, so maybe it's into the lower size range that Bo referred to. We have a very similar activity geographically very nearby, and these companies will actually become one. The NRG product brand will survive going forward, but it will become an integrated company. That's a type of activities that we also can work with, within our portfolio. Then we have the third dimension where we spend a lot of time and efforts on the proactive part of this manifested by the Combilent, TX RX, business that Patrik will come back to later as well. Here, this was a mobile radio systems company, Combilent, based in Denmark who had tried over the years to get into the U.S. market, and we found then a company with a strong position in that market.
TX RX will remain very much an independent company along the business model type of that we are working with. We have a lot of opportunities like that in our portfolio. We if we talk a little bit around the way that we conduct our acquisition projects then, this is also something that we continue to work on the very successful way of doing transactions in, from the historical track record. We don't have a one-size-fit-all type of process. We adopt this to the specific cases. We are focusing the key value drivers. We are adopting the sort of due diligence to the specific risk areas, and we work with our internal organization and resources to a large degree. For us, it's very important that it is business-focused, driven. It should be predictable from, in terms of how we work with the sellers.
And we are very much focused around the people and the cultural aspect. So, w e believe that the way that we conduct those type of process, it's also a differentiating advantage for us. As said from the outset, I mean, this is very much a team effort, so when we run our acquisition project, we do that very much in collaboration with the rest of the organization. Since we are looking into several hundreds of potential targets every year, for us, it's extremely important that we have efficiency in the processes as well. It's important that we don't spend disproportionate amount of time on the candidates that will not, at the end, suit us really.
Process efficiency, that's really the driving force, we can say, for our continuous improvement on the acquisition process side in order to be and become better and better going forward, in order to keep up with the pace that we have in our acquisition activities. If I summarize, as the end picture, we know exactly what we are looking for. We have a very clear picture of the characteristics of the company that we are looking for. It goes back to the way that this has been done over the years. It's still very much valid. It's an advantage and a strength for us. The Indutrade culture and the business model is a key process differentiator. It's really an advantage that we have evidence for on almost a daily basis. We have another strength in our internal network and the portfolio of people and companies.
That's a strong lever for continued candidate sourcing. The acquisition process in itself is an advantage, the way that we conduct our projects, and it's built on hundreds of acquisitions, as you understand, so we have really a strong pool of experiences. We have a very healthy pipeline of candidates. We are confident that we will be able to continue on the path that Indutrade has had over the years. And you will see that going forward in the next coming quarters and years as well. We are very confident in that. All right. Thank you. Yeah.
Thank you so much, Jonas. Good. Now the first sort of part of the morning is coming to an end, and we have an opportunity to open up a bit for questions, before we break a bit. So Frida will walk around with the mic.
Hi. Johan at SEB. I heard Patrik talking about the organic performance of Indutrade. If I quoted him, he said he was confident that the sort of 2% EBITDA growth the last five years could be improved. I was just wondering, what initiatives are you driving in the group to fix that, the bit of an issue?
It's working along the lines to basically ask the companies, o r if I rephrase. We have a dialogue with the companies on improving in terms of organic growth. and there are some generic things they all can probably improve on. But we do it also via the board, via the chairman and the MD in a company-specific way and ask them, can you sell more to existing customers? Can you widen your product range? Can you penetrate new customers? You know, number of different areas to explore and put more emphasis into that. Along with the knowledge-sharing we spoke about. Finding new opportunities, new initiatives, learning best practices from others, and also potentially using a little bit of the toolbox we are step-by-step implementing, which can be sales efficiency, value-based pricing, and other types of initiatives.
It is important that it is company-specific and driven by the individual MDs, and we constructively challenge and find ways to support. It is just a, I would say something we strongly focus on now to try to make steps forward. It is not gonna be very significant steps. It is continuous improvement and step-by-step improvement.
Do you envisage a revision of the capital allocation in the group more towards sort of organic existing companies to, you know, allow them to invest more and improve earnings?
I don't feel that that has been, inhibiting or, a substantial reason for holding companies back in terms of organic growth, the capital allocation. I would say that the Business Area heads will have also even more freedom in terms of that, going forward. That's probably not the key reason for—
Okay.
why the growth has been what it is.
Okay. Just finally, how many acquisitions have you reviewed in the last 12 months? Can you give a sort of round number on that?
Yeah, more than 300. We are keeping track on all of them, of course, so.
Yeah.
Yeah, in different levels sort of.
Yes, absolutely.
Yeah.
Hi. Christian with Nordea. Just a question on the margin target, 12% on average over a business cycle. Could you help me understand sort of how you will achieve this? What does this mean for sort of the peak and the trough margin over the next cycle? Does this mean that you will peak at 14%, 15% and trough at, I don't know, 8% or something? Yeah, it just looking back at your history, I understand that Indutrade is evolving all the time, but it doesn't really sort of match up with your history. What will be different over the next cycle?
I think one big step after the IPO was that we started to buy more and more companies with proprietary technology and own manufacturing with, I think, on average a slightly better potential and also track record for margin. Some years after that, we launched a new Measurement & Sensor Technology area where you see a much higher average margin level than what the group has. I think our acquisition strategy is right now geared more towards an average higher margin level than what it was in 1978, where the 8%, 10% was more the predominant situation, if I say so. That we acquire, step by step, more profitable companies is obviously helping the average over time. Then, again, these initiatives that, we develop people, we grow people, and with growing people, companies will grow, in a positive way.
Again, with this, knowledge-sharing and best practice, they will have, better, I would say, better set of tools to impact their business and work with, top line costs, working capital and all relevant things for improving, financial performance of the company.
All right. Just coming back to sort of the range, the trough and the peak, could you elaborate a bit on that? Historically, you've peaked at 12 and troughed at six or something like that. Going forward over the next business cycle, could you elaborate a bit on the potential range?
Yeah, I think we will be able to be quite resilient in a downturn and be around the levels where we have been historically. You know, I don't know how difficult the recession will be, but looking at our history, I think we are still. We have a spread of segments, companies. They will not all sort of follow each other exactly at the same time. Geographically, we also have a broader spread. We have a bit more inflexibility, I would say, in terms of that we have manufacturing companies with a bit more people and not so flexible cost structure, but still quite a lot of agile technical trading companies. So, I think we will be around the levels where we have been in the past in terms of the lower levels and obviously a bit higher in terms of the best sort of years or quarters.
All right. Thank you.
Hi, Mark at Kepler Cheuvreux. Can I start with just continuing on that question? Looking at the graph going back all the way to 78, the last trough in 2009 was actually quite a lot higher than the two previous ones. Was the acquisition, the more that you had acquired more companies with required trading, or the brands the key reason for that, or had you done anything else? Then I assume that that trend has continued, so what's happened in the past since then in terms of that, except for more proprietary brands? That's the first question.
Yeah. It's difficult obviously to have an exact view on what will happen in a recession, and but culturally, our MDs are very geared at profitable and managing their profitability. They act very quickly in terms of if they see everything from higher raw material costs to any other type of inflationary situation they need to deal with. They deal with it either by lowering their own cost and try to impact that situation or actually moving that cost to increase price and moving that to the customer side, yeah. In recessions, they will be quick and agile and manage their profitability as best they can.
I can't give you a more precise answer on how our recent development in terms of company structures will impact in a recession. It's a fact that we have a bit more manufacturing companies, but we also have an even better spread in terms of industries and also geographies. I think it's gonna be fairly similar.
But then, in 2009 trough should be more representative for the future than the real estate and the IT crash.
But, it also depends on why there is a recession. Is it driven by a certain segment? Is it more in the construction industry infrastructure in the or is it for some other reason? Is it oil and gas related? You know, I don't think we can answer on that.
All right. My second question is in, is on acquisition. You talked a lot about growing in Germany and then potentially moving down to Italy as well, the more [Non-English content] type companies, and also that the companies would be a bit larger in terms of on average compared to what you've done in the past. You also have a big reputation in, in especially up here in the Nordics and the, the, decentralized model is quite well known, and buying these kind of companies is much more known here than down in the, in Central Europe.
Yeah.
I mean, if you look at the list of companies that you do have, how much is geared towards that and towards the bit larger companies, and how much more difficult is it to acquire in Germany and then potentially moving into Italy? How do you go about that?
Again, as in a size perspective, we are, as Jonas said, opportunistic. Those who potentially are interested to sell to Indutrade, they know that the scope SEK 50 million-SEK 500 million, they can turn to Indutrade with cases, if I say so. Then if we end up buying the company or not, that there are a number of reasons explaining that, if I say so. Size-wise, we don't really steer that. We look for great companies. If it's SEK 100 million or SEK 400 million, we are equally happy buying sort of both of them, if I say so. In terms of the geographic penetration outside the Nordics and further down south, we don't have the same network in terms of own companies and own leads, obviously, in those markets.
When we enter into a new market like Germany, we rely much more initially on advisors and different brokers bringing leads to us, and we need to spend time in those markets marketing Indutrade to those type of brokers. That is what Jonas said. We have started a project now to initiate a lot of activities like that. So it's gonna take time to be a substantial player in Germany. And as we are able to acquire companies, we will use those networks in those companies, and step by step continue as we did in the Benelux or in the U.K.. Initially, a lot of outside sort of broker support and then step-by-step building it company by company.
Okay. And then finally, if I may, on prices and multiples for your targets. Do you sense a change in the recent past in terms of the multiples that when people approach you? If you look up here and if you look in new markets like Germany where you have a multitude of companies with the problems that the article was describing, is the difference in price tags if you look at market multiples, listed multiples, they're typically lower in Germany than they are up here as well? Do you see those kind of differences?
I can answer, but I can ask maybe Jonas if you, if you want to answer.
No, I wouldn't say that there is a fundamental change over time. I mean, we have good statistics. One could probably say that there has been maybe half a multiple turn to a multiple turn over a, say, five to seven-year horizon, but not dramatic changes. There is still opportunities within the sort of price range that we are comfortable with. Also to add a little bit on Germany, et cetera, I mean, this is what we see as an opportunity. It's not that we rely entirely on, we can say, potential success for us in Germany in terms of providing acquisition growth.
Hi there.
Hi.
Thank you for three very interesting presentations. A specific question. In terms of the restructuring and heavy lifting you've done since you joined the group, can you give us a sense for what improvement to margin will come from that specifically? Is it enough to really move the needle at a group level?
Minor impact on group level from a margin perspective, but some impact. More importantly, taking or freeing up, I would say, focus and resources from the Business Area heads. A lot of disproportionate time spent on these problem companies from their side, which they now can spend on business development or improving, developing the companies we already own. Some margin impact, but more the other impact which I think is key. I think some of these difficult companies have actually distracted a few people quite a lot over the recent years.
Karl-Johan Bonnevier, DNB Markets. Coming back to acquisitions, looking at the organic growth targets of more than 10% and looking back, company has grown by 8% coming out of acquisitions. I guess looking at the next 5 years, you should expect at least a similar kind of growth coming out of acquisitions to get to that group target. We are coming up to then sums of SEK 1.5 billion-SEK 2 billion added per year through acquisitions. I guess the model of looking at SEK 50 million-SEK 100 million kind of companies will make that number quite large, even if you have produced 300 due diligence processes over the last year. How do you see that evolving? I guess you need to start to look at companies that towards the SEK 500 million level to be able to reach that target that you set for yourself.
I'm not sure if you said an organic growth target of 10% or total growth target is?
Total.
Is 10%, then organic and acquisitions. No, you're right. As we are becoming bigger, obviously it's becoming more challenging to provide the growth. Right now in this strategic perspective we have of three to five years ahead of us, we feel quite confident that there is both the opportunity and that we have the ability to manage the 10% financial growth target we have. We are and have been looking for slightly larger companies since some years back. It's a bit more competition, the more or the higher we go in terms of sales value from private equity companies and others. For example, the acquisition we did in Germany, Inovatools, EUR 35 million, both industrial buyers, both PE buyers interested there.
As Jonas explained, they were really after the model Indutrade provides where the company name is kept, no integration, and they have the autonomy to continue building that company. I'm sure there are other cases like that that we will find and acquire in the next couple of years. We understand your question, but are humbly confident that we can manage that situation.
Sounds excellent. Just out of curiosity, coming into the company, were you ever asked by the board to look through if there was a maybe potential to split the company up into two or three to maybe create an easier growth strategy for the parts than for the total?
That's not been asked in that sense. We don't have a intention to split up Indutrade. We don't have that dialogue in the board. We feel that there is merits in keeping Indutrade together and continue the development we have. It's a natural question also linked to some peers in the industry and so on and so forth. Right now we are not on that path.
Excellent. Thank you.
Yeah. Very quickly, could you give us some description or numbers to sort of company-specific risks in this system? Clearly very diversified with over 200 companies, but in terms of earnings, you talked about a couple of gems in the group that you're trying to replicate, just to get a feel for that situation.
I'm not sure if I can quantify that in a good way for you right now. I would say we have a few companies with sales of around half a billion SEK. But, a vast majority of our companies is around SEK 75 million-SEK 100 million with quite minor impact. Overall quite low risk profile in that sense. I don't know, Patrik, if you want to elaborate on anything more from a risk perspective financially.
No, maybe echo what you said, we have a handful of companies, around SEK 500 million, maybe one company slightly above that, with of course a bigger risk than if something will happen to those.
Hi there, this. Sorry. Do I need to? Okay, sorry. This is Emmy from ABG. So you said, I think, that you increasing focus on add-ons, and you mentioned that the multiples were better or good. Is that post or pre synergies? The other question is this due to sort of market development, or is this something, I mean, is it just driven by that you sort of like the idea of it?
The concept is not new to Indutrade. We have made add-ons also in the past, but I think now as a team when we have discussed direction going forward, we feel that it's more potential and it makes a lot of sense to increase our effort in that sense because the risk is lower and the multiples are also lower, even pre-synergies, I would say. It's a bit of extra work in a sense. You still have to finalize an acquisition with some bureaucracy around that, but we are thinking along the lines to still do that professional, but with a bit more limited, I would say, involvement than we have in a full normal acquisition. So, i t's conceptually very appealing and it's also, I think, inspirational for the MDs to have that instrument and tool in their Toolbox supported by us.
Okay, thank you.
No further questions. You all deserve a cinnamon roll and some ginger bread and some coffee, I think. Let's break for about 10 minutes. Thank you so much.
[Break]
Hello? Hello? It's now time to start again, please take your seats.
[crosstalk] That's a motivational speech. Oh, I feel so good. Why is that beer?
No, it's [crosstalk]
Please let me introduce the next speaker, the Advisor to our CEO, Peter Eriksson.
Good morning again. Welcome back. Yeah, thank you for these nice words, Bo. See if I can fulfill this. I will give you the story about my life within Indutrade since 1995. I had the company ALNAB together with my colleague and companion in Gothenburg, the company ALNAB. We were in 1994 we had about SEK 60 million turnover and was quite a good company. We are a trading company working with valves and instruments of the process industry, we are not one of these boring company that you're talking about. We are quite an exciting company working with valves and instruments. This is actually something you should learn more about, valves and instruments. As I said, 1994, SEK 60 million. Had a good life. Were contacted by Indutrade. I had no intention to sell the company at that time.
My partner, 15 years older, less and less involved in the company, was interested to get an evaluation of the company and could see how much is the company worth. Could be interesting to know. At the same time, there were some other partners also or companies also interested in our company, so that increased our interest to discuss about selling our company. But selling your company is like selling your baby. It's not just figures, facts, and money. It's a lot of feelings and emotions. This took us about two years' time. We discussed this. When I was positive to sell, my partner was negative and the other way around. Two years later, we came to the conclusion that, okay, perhaps it's a good time to sell.
My reason to sell or conclusion that the best was for the company was that we had some different views and I think we had never had any fights or discussions, my partner and myself, but I saw that coming because he wanted to optimize what we had, and I wanted to continue to build. So, we had some different views of the future. When Indutrade contacted us, they were the only party that we felt they were not talking about integration. They talked about a standalone company and then it would be business as usual. The other parties were more financially generous actually than Indutrade, but we saw that they were also talking about integration, that even if they don't mention it, we saw that coming around the corner.
We didn't like integration, and we wanted to be standalone, and we wanted to see our baby grow and to continue to live, to be alive. So, we sold our company to Indutrade. When acquiring company to Indutrade, we are working with an earn-out model, mentioned here before, one-three years. And that is what we have then. It takes us this time to learn the company, the products, the culture. So, if the management leave after this earn-out period, we are able to or have a bigger chance to manage to take over the company. When I sold my company, I got three years, and I saw that as a penalty. I had to stay on for three years and, working in a group, that was not too exciting.
If you have been running your own company for a number of years, you don't see the that it could be any good thing to be in a group like Indutrade. They were talking about business as usual, I was quite skeptic at that time. So, I wasn't aware about that at or I didn't really think that they could live up to what they said. Indutrade came up with like, three board meetings. We got one to well, two skilled persons to the board. Yeah, we actually, we got a reporting system that gives us more efficiency and was a good thing for us. I think we were seen from our customers, employees and suppliers as a much more professional company.
When we had for the first time board meetings when we discussed what was best for the company, not what was best for me and my partner's private economy. I think coming back to the question here about what can we do when I mean, we didn't run the company to optimize the profit. We had the company because we wanted a good life. I think that's something where we learned a lot coming into the Indutrade. And I think after Bo Annvik came in, Hernan, with more, we're talking about cluster and more knowledge sharing, that we have the possibility to increase both growth and profit line. At our first meeting, at my first meeting with Indutrade, I was asked the question, what companies do you want to buy? That had never crossed my mind to buy companies.
We grow by new agencies, finding new products, trying to steal agencies from competitors or steal perhaps was not a nice word. Take in a nice way. To grow in that. To pay for growth, that was never come across our mind. But, I listed, I think, eight to 10 companies at the first meeting. Education program. With my humble attitude, I couldn't see any reason why I should have any training, perhaps as a teacher or something I was. Created a network where we had a lot of things in common, and we have a lot of things to learn from each other. That was when I had finished that, I came to this conclusion. That's something we should have inside Indutrade because we are a big group of companies and the networking is fantastic.
This was the beginning of what we have today there with the Indutrade Academy, with the Indutrade Leader Program and Indutrade Business Program. I think you can say that today we have a full training program for all leaders in our Indutrade companies. I think this is also one thing which will improve our performance. It's not top-down, it comes from it's down-up, but you create a fantastic networking. Finally, some words why I'm still here enjoying working in Indutrade. I like the decentralized model. It gives you the right to take decisions, but it also gives you. You're obliged to take decisions, so you are in charge. You can influence your own situation and your company situation. I think that's a fantastic thing.
I'm really enthusiastic about Indutrade. I ask my daughters about what are they going to do in the future? They say IKEA is a fantastic company. I think Indutrade is a fantastic company. Who else can influence your own and your company's situation as we can? I think, we are not there yet, we will be there. So, Indutrade is general, it's all about people. It's a group of fantastic people in our companies, it's a pleasure and honor to work with these people and entrepreneurs. Still today, I can say that at my age, I learn something new every day. Finally, I like to build and that I was fortunate enough to end up in an organization who likes growth and acquisitions. Coming back to acquisitions, later on, we started to go outside Scandinavia.
We went into U.K., Switzerland, and Ireland. In Ireland, I came across the company ESI and met Morgan O'Brien. Wasn't too easy to convince, we managed. In 2013, ESI became a member of the Indutrade group, and I will now hand over the board to Morgan, and he will tell you about the future in the Flow Group. Thank you for listening and welcome, Morgan.
Thank you, Peter. My name is Morgan O'Brien. I'm from Ireland. It's going to be difficult for you to understand me, I'm sure. I'm here to speak about Indutrade as an owner and being an owner in Indutrade. Let me give you a brief résumé of Morgan O'Brien. Born in 1961. In my head, that's still young. Okay. In 1992, I was working for a multinational company in the U.K., and I got an opportunity to go back to Ireland. I was headhunted as a s ales manager for a small Irish engineering company. They wanted to grow, but they didn't know how to grow. So, I went back to Ireland. Oops, sorry, I forgot this. I joined a company called ESI that was turning over EUR 650,000. Small company. So, here we have a small company. What did it look like?
It was a pump company in the pharmaceutical industry. It was always going to be a pump company in the pharmaceutical industry unless we did something about growth. We followed a strategy called the black hole strategy for growth. The black hole strategy for growth is find out what your customers are buying from you and what they could buy from you. Find out what they're buying from your competitors that they should be buying from you. Using this simple strategy, we followed our customer, and we built a portfolio of vacuum, filters, valves and actuation, control, instruments, safety, aseptic, and finally building skids and systems for our customers. That is a simple follow the pipeline black hole strategy.
The result of this simple strategy, and I'm a simple person, okay, is we went from EUR 650,000, or I think that's SEK 6.5 million, to SEK 300 million over my period in Indutrade. This was all organic growth. I know somebody asked earlier about organic growth. This was all organic growth driven by ourselves. During my journey, in the first 10 years, we had increased the turnover of ESI by 11 x. We came to the attention of a large U.K. multinational who wanted to buy our footprint in Ireland. Having had a taste of freedom in working your own company, my preference was to have a management buyout. We did a management buyout in 2002. The energy that released again in the company, owning your own destiny, we increased the turnover of our company by 200%.
We took it to about SEK 150 million, then we were hit by the recession. Didn't see it coming, almost overnight, our customers stopped spending and our turnover dropped by about 40%. We needed to do something now because I built up a team of people, and I didn't really want to start letting them go. We had a hard look at ourselves and what we needed to do, we came up with a strategy called quote to win, QuoteSmart, which we implemented. I'm happy to say within three years, we were back at the pre-recession turnover despite the fact that the country was still suffering. And we continued to grow out of that recession to, as I said, SEK 300 million. I'd just like to, on the subject of organic growth, have a few words about what is quote to win as a strategy for growth.
QuoteSmart, quote to win. It was born out of the recession of 2008, 2009, born out of desperation. What we started to do was we started to look at our conversion ratio and we said, what are we winning? What are we losing? Should we be losing? What's it going to take to win that quote? We started to prioritize the quotes that we really could win and wanted to win. We started to follow up in advance. We actually spoke to our customers. How shocking is that? Asked them, what is it going to take to win this order? How can we be better? How can we quote what you want? All the time, we were focusing in on the target, winning the job. Finally, we quoted, and we quoted to win this job. Failure was not an option here. We needed to win to keep the team together.
We fought for every percent. Growth is not growth without profit, and we wanted to make sure we were profitable. So, when I say fight for every percent, I'm fighting for a percentage on gross margin. I'm fighting for a percent off my variable costs. I'm fighting for a percentage on volume because if I don't get those three, I now have to concentrate on overhead, cutting people's jobs. And the black hole strategy I already spoke about. This was our simplest strategy for growth, and it worked. Winning habits were formed. We became fit for fight. This is a question even relevant today. Are you fit for fight? If there is a downturn coming, are you fit for that fight
I mentioned in three years our turnover was back to pre-recession levels, and we continued and refined the QuoteSmart toolbox, which gave us that 200% growth. So, during this journey, we came to the attention of another multinational, but this time a competitor of ours who wanted our turnover. We were doing about SEK 17 million, and they wanted it. They came down the acquisition route. The CEO told me how he was going to integrate my company, cut down some of my divisions, let go of some of my people, and as you can imagine, I respectfully told him that wasn't going to happen. We decided we were gonna keep going until I got a phone call from Peter Eriksson, who had been speaking to one of my competitors about acquisitions.
An d they said, the biggest pain on my side is a company called ESI Technologies. Go speak to them. Along came Peter Eriksson telling me the Indutrade story, and this is after two bad experiences from multinationals. And, I must say the Indutrade model was too good to be true. It took me three years to figure out maybe he's telling the truth. Because Peter was speaking about entrepreneurship. He was speaking about acquiring a company to develop it. The previous guy was talking about acquiring to kill us. He was talking about decentralized. You could be your own owner. He spoke about KPIs, and he spoke about growth. We were all about organic growth, and he also spoke about acquisitions, growth by acquisitions. This is something that was really interesting to us.
After three years, we joined the Indutrade family. We now added the growth by acquisition strategy, and that took us on another journey. We were here at EUR 30 million, and in three years, ESI added extra companies. We became a EUR 70 million turnover company, combining organic growth and growth by acquisition. We grew by 44% organically whilst we were a member of Indutrade, and we grew by 139% by acquisition. I was very happy doing this. Then Peter Eriksson came back because he was working with me on my boards, and he said, Morgan, would you consider being my successor? Would you consider putting your name forward to be my successor in the Flow Group? I wasn't expecting it.
I thought about it and said, to be able to grow on what Peter had built, SEK 300 million turnover group, I could do that. I could have a go at that. My name was put forward, and as of January 2018, I became the VP for the Flow Group. These are the numbers of the Flow Group. We're 21% of the group. That's our turnover, that's our EBIT. What's behind that? I mean, you can see some of the logos, but what's behind that? What's behind this is 30 companies in this structure. We talk about having a structure that's fit to grow. The succession planning was made a lot easier for me because I had a very strong financial controller, Joakim Samuelsson, who had worked with Peter for 14 years.
Now I had a strong Joakim. I had a strong financial controller who didn't just know the numbers, he knew the businesses. He knew their operations. He was interested in operations, and that really helped me. Now we had kind of a team of two. I could focus on organic growth through acquisitions, and he would be right there by my side, looking after the numbers and the operations of the business. It's like a Batman and Robin situation. Okay. Now I also have eight ambitious business unit managers who are really buying into this. They want growth. Okay. Each business unit manager is also an MD of a company. They're actually getting their hands dirty. My takeaway messages are, I spent a year visiting my companies, so the planned succession is completed.
The organization is in place for further growth through acquisition. Each of my MDs is enthusiastic. They're out hunting for add-ons and standalone companies. They're leveraging off their networks, their suppliers, their customers, their competitors. So, w e believe we will continue the growth through acquisition. Organic growth as we bring the toolbox that we used or that we learned through the recession of 2008, 2009. We will continue to QuoteSmart. We will continue to fight for every percent. We will work with our people to be the best they can be because it is about people, making them the best they can be. We will challenge, we will use best practice, and we will copy with pride. The other concept of networking, we will now network more. We had the Chinese network, as Bo said.
We had 18 MDs came together to discuss China, what we are doing in China? Why make the same mistakes? Why pay for the same services? What can we do better? We had a pump cluster meeting, we're looking at the power of procurement because one of the flow companies reported that using the power of procurement, they added 12.5% to their EBIT. I could take some of that. We're going to start the power of procurement networking session and training courses to focus on EBIT from variable costs. I started this talk about saying Indutrade as an owner and an owner in Indutrade. I still feel like I'm an owner, but now I'm an owner of Indutrade. I'm still passionate about Indutrade.
I'm passionate about the people. Because I'm passionate about the people, I think we have a winning team here, and we will deliver on a good investment. I hope you understood me. Thank you.
Good morning, everybody. My name is Patrik Stolpe. I'm the Head of the Business Area Measurement and Sensor Technology. I've been with Indutrade for for four years since they started the Business Area. I would say that I've been following Indutrade for for a number of years. I always admired the business model and the decentralized model that Indutrade is using. When they started up this Business A rea measurement and sensor technology, then I happily accepted the challenge. If you look at in the Business Area, then measurement and sensor technology, it's a group of really, really great companies. They are all specialists in some kind of niche market, and they are leaders in some way then. Really great companies.
They all have their own products that they develop, they produce, and they market and sell worldwide. It's an interesting company and also the products have a technically high content in themselves. If you look at our sales then it's 11% of the Indutrade's turnover. We have a run rate of about SEK 1.7 billion-SEK 1.8 billion. And we have an EBITA margin of 17.2% then, so it's a very profitable Business Area. It's interesting also because the market is growing then. I mean, you all have heard about Business 4.0 and the Internet of Things and so on. The need for our product that's developed and produced and sold in our companies in measurement and sensor technology will be growing for the future.
If you want to monitor things in your productions and so on, there is great need for sensors and specifically the smart sensors that can monitor things. That is driving the growth also in our Business Area. Our companies to the left there, it's not the most famous companies in the world. It's not like Ericsson and ABB and so on, but you can see their products all around you in the society. We have, for example, we have a company in Denmark called Crysberg that controls the irrigation in places like the lawns of the White House. Also, they are controlling the irrigation of the parks around the Statue of Liberty. You have windmills all around you, and they are very likely aligned with instrumentation from our company, Easy-Laser in Gothenburg.
If you're sitting in a car, for example, the dashboard where you see the speed and so on might be controlled and calibrated by our solution then from Alpha Technology. Water and wastewater are transported all around you in cities and so on, and the pumps might be controlled then by a solution from Abelko, and to ensure then that you will have a clean and safe water infrastructure in the cities. It's really, really nice companies, and it's a very interesting business area to work with them. It is also probably the most international Business Area that we have in Indutrade. So, we are present all around the world. We have production, for example, in Sweden, Denmark, U.K., Netherlands, Romania, and Europe. We also have productions in U.S., in Asia, like in Sri Lanka and Malaysia, and also in China.
If we look at the sales, it is also spread around the world, of course Europe is a very important area. We have 25% of our sales in the Nordic countries, and in the rest of Europe it is about 37%. U.S. is also a very important area for us, we have 28% of the sales in Americas. Asia, of course, is a growing market, so that is also a focus area for us to increase the sales in so. To be present in the world is very important for us. For some of our products and so on, I mean, we need to be present there, because as the customer says, it doesn't really matter what kind of products that you have.
If you're not here close by on the local site, we are not interested in our products, because you need to be here to support us and to help us when something happens, and so on. Local presence is very important for some of our companies, and so. How is it then to lead a Business Area? We all talked about the milestones or keystones in Indutrade business model to acquire company and develop the company further than so. Of course, we manage the companies and follow the companies through our board meetings. That is a very important thing. Patrik told about the operating model then. We have three board meetings.
The first one is around the follow-up on the previous year to see what key takeaway we could take from that one, to see what we have learned, what we have done good, and what we have done bad, and so on. Of course, then the next important meeting is the strategy meeting in Q2, and then we have the budget meeting in Q3, Q4 somewhere then, so. Our role as the board members or chairman of the board then is of course always to challenge, to constructively challenge the management team in the companies to see what we can do better and so on, and maybe to raise the ambitions also. We talked about the growth and how we're driving growth, and also about the profitability, the how we can increase the profitability in the company. I would say that there's always ways to increase profitability.
We talked about the Business Area having 17%- 17.2% as a run rate then, but we strongly believe that that can be better also in the future. I mean, you can always control your profitability. You choose your customers, you choose your products, and you can always choose to focus a little bit more on the profitable products and to choose a little bit more on the profitable customers that you have then. So, I think that the profitability and the way that you can improve that is all in the company's hand. We are also supporting the companies in between the board meetings. That is very important, of course. All the different companies, they have different challenges and different needs, and different kind of need of support that they have.
It can be a company that has reached the capacity limits for the production and so on. And then, w e need to talk to them and discuss about what we can do in investments also, if we can invest in a new building or invest in new machines, that's a big part of the job. We are discussing something drastically can happen in the market that affect the companies in a different way that we need to turn around. This is a real strength in Indutrade because we are a small, agile company that can be redirected in different ways. Or it can be a new managing director in place also that needs to be, have some guidance. So, there's a lot of things to do also in between the board meetings. We talked about knowledge sharing.
We have a group of 200 companies in Indutrade, and of course, there is a lot of knowledge within this group then, so by bringing people together, there is a big chance that we can share this knowledge in between the companies. We have today eight business areas, but I mean, the business areas are not silos. I mean, we're also working in between the business areas in order to share knowledge then so. And one example that has been brought up is the Chinese cluster then, of course. To bring company that have an interesting journey to go in China then, to bring them together in order to learn what shortcut we can do then. I mean, if someone has struggled with something, we can have that experience directly and transfer that to another company so they can be faster getting into the market.
We are also looking at the people, making sure that the company's on top of their organization to have the strong management team also after the managing director, and also to try to find the key talents in the organization that we can help developing further. That's a big part. And of course, selecting the managing director for the company is a very important area for us also. Sometimes managing directors retire or leave for a different reason, and we have to appoint the right person there. If we look at the Business Area. Of course, we also have a strategy to grow and we also have a challenge then to always be a little bit better on the EBITDA margin. Acquisitions then is a very important part for our journey forward.
We work very closely with Jonas and his acquisition teams, and we're looking at trying to actively find companies. We do that by searching actively by ourselves, but also we are using our network, both internally and externally. I just want to talk a little bit about two examples, and so. We have lately acquired two companies. We acquired TX RX, a U.S. company working with the mission-critical communication components. Then we acquired a company called Thermo Electric Instrumentation in Holland that are doing temperature sensors. If I start with TX RX, then it has been a kind of a long journey. Combilent are a company in Denmark that are doing components for the mission-critical communication systems, and they have been extremely successful all around the world, with one exception, U.S..
They have not been able to enter the U.S. market. They have been trying for years. They got the right products, they developed the right products, but they have not been able to enter the market then. So then, of course, they looked at other ways to get into the U.S. market, and they have been looking at acquisitions and then actively find one. But then, of a coincidence then, I mean, a company called Bird Technologies owned a company called TX RX. They approached us and wanted to buy Combilent from us because they saw the perfect fit of these companies together then, so. Then we told them that, I mean, we really like our companies and don't want to sell them, so.
They had a long discussion with them also for quite some time then and convinced that maybe they could sell the companies to us instead. After almost two to two and a half years, then we came to an agreement, and then we acquired the company. Now the group and Combilent and TX have a global footprint, so that was a very nice add-on then that geographically fits very good together then, so. As we probably mentioned also earlier, we're still using the decentralized model, so we don't merge the company together. TX RX name is very strong. The brand is very strong in U.S. Of course, we will continue to use that in U.S. for the future. Combilent is a strong brand in Europe, so we'll use that also.
Then, we have Thermo Electric, which is a kind of a different start. Of course, I mean, the temperature sensor, Rikard have a very good control over the temperature sensors all over the world, so it's a company that we've known. It started a little bit different than the owner of Thermo Electric approached our Business Area head Robert Timmer, and said that they had in Benelux, and they said that they had a company for sales. We had a bit of a discussion then in Indutrade and said that, well, this company would probably fit better into the measurement and sensor technology group then, and especially within the Pentronic Group. We started in May having a quick discussion, then came to an agreement, did the due diligence, and then we closed the deal then in the beginning of October this year.
Now that is a part of Pentronic. Of course, when it is add-ons like this, it's very important that the managing director that want to take over the responsibility for that company have the final saying. They have to be in charge. They really want to have this challenge then. It's very important. We never force a company into that this will be your responsibility if they don't want to, because that's wouldn't be very good then. Of course, Rikard Larsson, who is a Managing Director for the Pentronic team, was heavily involved in the process. By that, I think I bridge kind of well in order to hand over the world then to Rikard Larsson, our Managing Director for Pentronic, who will be our next speaker.
Thank you, Patrik. So, being probably the last on the stage today, this will be the most technical presentation today, but I'll try to make it not making it too technical. I will talk about Pentronic and the Pentronic Group. First, maybe I should introduce myself, Rikard Larsson. I've been in the Indutrade Group for now, five years. Used to work for a company called Autoliv for 16 years in the part of Autoliv that nowadays are Veoneer. I was asked to join the Indutrade in 2013, leaving a very good and exciting company, with some good reasons to actually move to Indutrade with an interesting business model, a very interesting company in Pentronic to take care of, and also the view from my office, which is seeing the Baltic Sea every morning when I coming in.
What we do in Pentronic is what you see on the picture here. This is actually a temperature sensor, in this case, shaped like a boat. We have only done one so far, not sold that yet. But on the other hand, this year we have made more than 500 new products that we have delivered to our customer. Really, custom design is our standard. Where do you find our products then? I assume some of you today have had some milk or yogurt or cream. Is that true?
Yes.
It's quite likely that one of these sensors that you see here on the picture has been monitoring the process for pasteurizing that milk or packaging the milk as well. That is one of the products that we do. From an altitude perspective, you can find our products in submarines below sea level. You can also find them in aircraft, about 30,000 feet above sea level. But also in laboratories to make some pharmaceuticals, develop new drivetrains or climate systems in the automotive industry. Of course, also in different kind of processing industries, you will find our products. Pentronic, in short, consider ourselves today to be a leader, at least in Europe, to provide this kind of product to our customers. We have now been in this business for more than 50 years.
We have managed to build a quite good business out of this. Last year, had a turnover of about SEK 187 million. That also includes one of our acquisitions that we did in Netherlands a year ago. With the latest acquisition that we did just recently, what Patrik mentioned about Thermo Electric, we are now 170 very dedicated employees in this group. Try to explain a little bit more what we do and where the products might be used. You saw the sailboat on the first picture. This is actually what it normally looks like when we sell it to a customer. Very, in the beginning, simple product, something that measures temperature here in the tip of this. You need to connect that product into some sort of instrument or a control system.
But really, what we provide to our customers in the end is, of course, this product or a similar product, but it's a lot of competence built into that product. Whether it goes into a very high temperature, 1,200, 1,500 degrees, whether it's used in hygienic sensitive areas, whether there are vibrations or other constraints that really need to be considered when we design the final product that goes into our customers' solutions. Give you a few example of where you can find our sensors. For example, a gas turbine. To control a gas turbine is a lot of temperature measured. There are examples of where you have more than 100, maybe up to 150 different temperature sensors mounted on the machine. You can see a lot of pink wires on the right side there.
Each and every of these pink wires are connected to a temperature sensor. It's really a key parameter to control this machine all the way from efficiency, performance, environmental compatibility, and that's related to that. You can see also on the bottom here, this very simple temperature sensor, the sensor tip in the end, the connector in the other end. We put a lot of other mechanical parts or do adjustments to that product really to fit into a specific application. You can imagine there are quite some variants of this product that goes into this machine in the end. Another example: steel industry, all the way from making the pellets out of the ore, controlling the humidity to have the right humidity when you put that into the blast furnace.
To control the blast furnace, when melting the steel, to provide the right quality for the steel material, including temperature profiling. You can actually see on the picture here, maybe some of you can see there is a small glowing box on top of the steel plate there. That's actually a system, an electronic system that monitor and log temperature all over the surface of that steel plate to make sure that it has the right quality when it comes out of the oven. Electronics that go through 1,200 degrees for a number of hours before we have the right steel material in the end. But all the way through to make the final product, it could be valve pring. Whatever kind of steel material, we have products and services, which is also important.
We do calibration for our customers to make sure they're measuring the right temperature. We do training, to learn our customers how to apply these kind of products and technologies and really how do you measure the right, temperature in the end. Another example, I talked about the milk and dairy industry. With our acquisition that we did in, Netherlands a year ago, we had, came across a system that monitors, the milk storage and cleaning of the milk tanks all the way through the farmers. Going into the processing of the food, also to make. Actually, maybe don't believe in that, but making the packaging material and how to fold the packaging material involves a lot of temperature measurement.
Packaging the milk in the carton boxes to transport them to the supermarket, also we are supplying products to monitor the actual fridge, and also the local health authorities, they are using our products to control that the supermarkets have the right temperature in their freezers. Those are some examples of products and technologies that we are providing. And could we build a business out of that? This is just to show how this business has developed through the years. In 1981, we had a SEK 10 million turnover. Last year, we ended with SEK 187 million. We are continuing to grow this business. Out of this, I would say we have probably a 4%-6% organic growth yearly. Then we add some acquisitions on top of that.
How did it start up with Pentronic then? It started up actually, as I said, more than 50 years, in the mid-1960s here in Stockholm with a company called Telemetric. Few engineers that left Honeywell at that time, realized that you can do business out of temperature measurements and instruments. Even at that time, Stockholm was congested, and the previous owner decided that he needed more space and found that in Västervik. The company was moved to Västervik in 1973. The brand name came out in 1977, Pentronic, and we kept it like that since. We were one of the first Swedish private companies to have temperature accreditation laboratory. We were also early in having our quality and our environmental quality systems in place. We came on board Indutrade in 2001, together with a few other companies at that time.
We made, so to say, our first acquisition in 2008, a small company in Karlstad, to support especially the Swedish processing industry in the Värmland-Närke region. We merged the product line from a sister company, GDevelop, in 2014. In 2017, we made our first acquisition outside of Scandinavia, which was RS Technics in Netherlands. Just a month ago in late October, we had our latest acquisition, which was Thermo Electric Instrumentation, also a company in Netherlands. That gives us a footprint today, which you can see here, two main operations in Västervik. We have a sales and accredited lab in Karlstad. We have our operation of RS Technics in temperature sensors. They also do control electronics for the milk storage tanks, for example, but other applications as well. We have the Thermo Electric Instrumentation in Waddinxveen, primarily focused on temperature sensors in the energy industry.
Also they are strong in semiconductor manufacturing, which is an interesting part where Pentronic were not active, but we found a very good add-on acquisition to also get that kind of business into the group. Key drivers for Pentronic might be some good reasons for why we are reasonable successful so far. We rely pretty much on competence, high degree of graduated people working in the company. Throughout the years, the 50 years, we have built up a database of a lot of application knowledge to understand all the customer needs and how to tailor our products to a specific use of that product. We also have the so-called quality stamp with the accredited laboratory, saying that we understand and know what we are talking about when we talk with our customers about temperature. We also work close with the Indutrade Academy. We do provide trainings.
One interesting example of working together with the academy is not that it's our most profitable business, but some of you might recognize that we have a ski team in the Olympic Games this last winter, and they were actually using Pentronic, a specific Pentronic temperature sensor to measure the snow temperature and try to predict how to wax the skis to be successful there. Parenthesis. Service level to our customers is very important. We have the office open every day, every workday throughout the years. You should always be able to get in contact with our sales engineers. We have a strong focus on on-time delivery. Normally, we are about 99% on day first order acknowledgment. Try to keep our lead time short because sometimes our customer need the product now, then we should be able to do that.
Very much about flexibility to make the product that fits exactly to the customer needs. As I said in the beginning, already this year, we have made more than 500 new products and supply to our customers. Efficiency. We're talking about making money here in the end, we are making money to be able to invest in our business. We have a very integrated quote to invoice process. So, everything integrated into one system from the quote throughout the production design, delivery, the invoice goes to the customer. We're also very focused on continuous improvement, not making the big steps, but we are trying to improve and be a little bit better every day in our business, and that's in the mindset of all the people in the company.
This is just to give you an example of our customer base. We are proud of working with all these different companies. For example, Tetra Pak has been a customer to Pentronic since 1965, and they are still our second largest customer. Long-term relationship. So, being part of the Indutrade group then, what is that about? You have probably heard it from many speakers today. A solid group, long-term perspective fits very well with the Indutrade, sorry, with the Pentronic idea. There are never problems when it comes to invest, whether it is in product development, whether it is new machinery, or add-on acquisitions to our existing operation. It's very good to have this competence in all the different companies around us.
Just give you one example. We had a request for quotation for quite significant business in South Korea. I think it was last week or two weeks ago. They asked us what about your local agent that can support us? Unfortunately, we don't have a local agent in South Korea. I made a few phone calls half an hour later, found a company that had that agent there, and they were on top of their feet and gave us very good support from the start there. Just one example of being part of this kind of group. We have the chairman and the Business Area head, which is always trying to be a good speaking partner. Being an MD in a company sometimes could be a bit lonely, as you need someone to discuss things with, and that's excellent to have that.
But also to challenge me and the management team in our company and our group of how can we be a little bit better? How can we grow the business? How can we make more money out of that? Fits very well also with Pentronic. As me being a MD in Indutrade, I also had the opportunity to be on the board on a few sister companies in the group, which gives me the opportunity to share some of my competence and background. Also I'm building the network, and I certainly learn things every day when I'm visiting another company in the group. Last but not least, trying to explain a little bit about how we are trying to build this Pentronic Group in our very niche market.
We have set out a target within Pentronic that we should build a SEK 500 million group within a recent amount of years, and that should be focused on temperature measurement, because temperature measurement is what we know, and we think that there are still enough need in the world for temperature measurement devices going forward. We have set out the strategy of how do we do that. First and foremost, we grow with our already existing customer base, try to develop that on a daily basis. That's important. Take care of what you have before you're looking for more. We have also worked extensively with introducing new technologies, both to existing customers, also trying to find new customers. So, for example, the Industry 4.0, which requires our temperature sensors to be connected to the world and to Internet.
We have developed a lot of electronic sensors. This is just one example that we did 10 years ago. Hopefully, next year, we're launching a new platform and a new technology that will add significant business to us in a different area, still based on temperature measurement, and give a complete system to our customers how to monitor and control their products. Thirdly, we are also constantly looking for new acquisitions, how we can expand our business. It could be into geographical areas, or it can be in certain areas of temperature measurement where we are not strong or strong enough today. Why do we do that through acquisitions then? It is a very niche market that we are in. We are working with custom specific designs that requires us to be fairly close to the customer. We need to speak their native language.
As I think Patrik said before me, we need to be there and work with them on a daily or weekly basis. That's difficult to do for all customers around the globe, being in Västervik. We cannot start new operations or new companies in other countries, but we have found out that adding companies like RS Technics or Thermo Electric give us this opportunity to do that with already existing products, already existing customers that we can continue to build on. How do we do that? We are, of course, looking for targets in different geographical markets, but also into different sectors, as you probably heard with Thermo Electric before. Just give you a short review of the different acquisitions that we have done since 2007. Cal-ISO/Orbi-Tech, which was a company already established here in Sweden, we had a partnership for them, with them for about 10 years.
They were more interested, the owners of the company, to interact with customers and do calibration, not so interested in running companies. It was a good fit to add that into Pentronic. We could take care of all the administration, and they could focus on the daily operation. RS Technics, slightly different story. Local manufacturer in the Netherlands. A broker contacted Indutrade, knowing the Indutrade model. There were two owners of that company. One of them wanted to retire, one of them wanted to stay in the company, to continue work, but he was not interesting to have the full ownership. Again, they wanted to have someone taking over the company to make sure that this company will continue to develop and continue to support the employees and the business they had. That was a good fit.
We wanted to go into a new geographical market, and we found a very good home for the RS Technics in Indutrade together with Pentronic. Thermo Electric, as Patrik explained through his presentation, they are a key player in the energy segment, and especially semiconductor solar panel business, which was of interest for us. It is quite larger acquisitions than we did before. That came as through Robert Timmer in Netherlands. We thought it would be a good fit to add that to Pentronic, and therefore we closed the deal in October. Summarizing my presentation, our business idea is to provide the best solution for temperature measurement to each customer's unique demand. Today, we consider ourselves, with the latest acquisitions, that we are European leader in this area.
I would say that it's excellent to have the network and the competence within the 200 companies in Indutrade to support us and our business, and it helps us to grow this business going forward. Thank you.
Trying to summarize briefly, strong, successful company, very values-driven, strong, positive culture. We are staying with the business model we know and has been successful, but we as a team have strong ambitions to improve, and we will improve step by step in a continuous way. We have launched some new initiatives we believe in, and we have underlined that we believe in them by increasing, improving our financial targets. We stand strongly behind that. One sort of big reason for gathering here today is also that you now have met more from the Indutrade broader management team. During lunch now, you can still mingle and talk to several of the members here. Again, you can talk to our chairwoman as well.
And you hopefully have a better view of how we, how we manage as a group or on a group level, on a Business Area level, and on an individual company level, which Rikard introduced. After lunch, there is also an opportunity to meet a couple of more companies who are based here in the building. Please don't rush away, take the opportunity to walk around in the building on that mini tour and talk to those companies, and hopefully you will get the same feeling in terms of passionate business owners who will explain how they make their business thriving going forward. I'm not gonna sort of launch anything new message in terms of the business climate.
We just reiterate what we said, in conjunction with the quarter three, that the business climate is good, stable on a high level, and we are humbly optimistic and confident in terms of Indutrade going forward in a longer term perspective. Thank you very much for listening. I think I'll ask some of the members who have not presented stand up so you know who they are, and you can more easily find them in the during the lunch here. Peter Rowlands, perhaps, you stand up. He's the head of our U.K., doing a fantastic job right now. Åsa, fairly new, heading up our people initiative. We have Robert Timmer, who is a long-timer in the group.
I don't know, did you start working when you were 15 or?
Almost 25 years ago.
Heading up our Benelux operations. We have Juha Kujala heading up our Finnish operations. We have Göte Mattsson somewhere there, heading up our FMS operation. Frida, you have already met. Is Susanne here? Susanne is heading up our Finance operations. We have Joakim Skantze, a tall, handsome man in the back, heading up our Industrial Components Area. Please mingle around and we break now for some lunch and maybe Frida has some.
Questions.
Yeah. Of course. Before we do that, if anyone has questions, absolutely. Sorry. I don't think so. Thank you again. Welcome to the lunch, and we keep in touch.