Hello. Hello. Mic is working. Once again, a warm welcome to Indutrade's Capital Markets Day for 2025. I hope that you enjoyed the lunch and had many fruitful discussions around your table. I also know that today was quite crowded in terms of capital markets events, so we are, of course, very glad that you were able to attend ours. My name is Mårten Svanberg. I am the Head of Investor Relations and External Communications at Indutrade, and hopefully we'll also have many visitors joining online, so a warm welcome to all of you as well. Looking at today's agenda, we will start off by listening to our President and CEO, Bo Annvik, who will talk more about the strategic direction for the group. And he will then be followed by our CFO, Patrik Johnson, who will share some more details about the financials.
And after these two sessions, we will have a Q&A session, so. Remember to pencil down your questions, and we will take them after both Bo and Patrik have presented. And for you watching online, if you have any questions, you can find, at the right-hand side of your screen, there is a button there that says "ask a question," and you can click on that and write down your questions, and they will become visible to me here at the stage. Yes, and after the Q&A session then, we will have a short break of about 20 minutes. And there will be coffee served at the back of the premises here.
When we return, we will listen to our head of acquisitions, Gustav Ruda, and he will also then be joined by Andrea Imbriani, who works with acquisitions in Italy, and Richard Denlin, who is a business segment leader. We will also hear from our business area manager, Joakim Skantze, who heads up the life science business area, and he will talk more about the life science business area, but maybe more importantly, how it is to operate a business area within Indutrade. Then the last agenda point is a panel discussion, and I will present that more in detail when we arrive to that point. Yes, I think we're ready to kick off, and I welcome our President and CEO, Bo Annvik, up to the stage.
Thank you, Mårten. Great to see all of you here, a full room with interest in Indutrade. We appreciate that very much, and also you online, very welcome to the presentations. We feel that we have a really good story. We feel that we have a compelling story in terms of Indutrade's way forward, and that's what we will share with you today, both myself and also the colleagues that Mårten mentioned. We had our last Capital Markets Day in 2022 and one before that in 2018, and in conjunction with both those conferences, we have launched new updated group financial targets. In 2018, we changed our EBITDA margin target from 10% - 2%, and in 2022, we changed from 12% - 14%. We are, to some extent, breaking that tradition today. We are not launching new targets. We will reconfirm the targets we already have.
We feel that they are relevant for our way forward. I just want to make clear for everyone in the room and also in the webcast that our priority is profit growth, sustainable profit growth going forward. That's fundamentally what really creates value. We are really geared to drive that forward, and we feel that we can do that with the financial targets we already have. So with that said, we get started. The key to all companies is people. People really make the difference. I'm very fortunate to have a great management team to work alongside me, and they are a true asset. We have five business area presidents, and you see them on top of the slide here. Per-Olow has been with Indutrade 30 years, vast experience. We have Joakim, he's been with Indutrade approximately 10 years, also very experienced.
Juha Kujala around 20 years, Göte Mattsson 25 years. Those four collectively really know what Indutrade all is about. We have a newcomer in Peter Laveson. We were fortunate enough to be able to attract him, recruit him earlier this year. Peter has very relevant experience in terms of being a part of Indutrade. He has been founding and leading and building a mini Indutrade called [Svevik Industri], and he's also been the CEO of a public company. He's been an investment director. He really needs what, or he really knows what this role is all about. Perhaps most important, Peter, is you started out your life in a farming family, and farmers really know what entrepreneurship is all about and solving problems with little sort of help from others. Great to have Peter also on board. We have Patrik and Åsa.
They came on board shortly after myself, and last but not least, Gustav, who has been with Indutrade running acquisitions now. You've been with the group for more than 10 years, I think, as well, so great team. Personally, I've been with the group for eight and a half years, so quite some time as well, and I'm only the third CEO since Indutrade started in 1978, so that also says something about the group's stability. We will have an additional change next year. I said that Per-Olow had been with the group for 30 years. He's approaching retirement age, and we started a recruitment process. We are really keen to try to promote and recruit internally. But it's a big step to go from running an Indutrade company with maybe SEK 100 million-SEK 200 million in sales to running a business area of SEK 8 billion, international.
You need acquisition experience and so on and so forth. So I think we are grooming these people step by step, not least with the business segment leader roles now, which I will come back to. But this time we finally chose an external person again, and it's Per Lidström. Per is sitting here in the middle. You can stand up, Per. Per is now the CEO of Cibes Lift Group, an elevator company, and he has been instrumental in building the group, leading the group, driving organic growth, innovation, but also doing a lot of complementary acquisitions into the group. So he also understands the model we work with. Appreciates decentralization and giving people autonomy. And before Per went into Cibes, you were with the Sandvik Group in different senior positions and have great industrial experience.
So very glad to w elcome Per eventually in the beginning of second quarter next year. We will mostly speak about the future, but let's start with the history. I joined Indutrade in 2017. At that time, we had sales of SEK 15 billion. Our EBITA margin was 10.9% that year. And we have step by step delivered, I would say, on profit growth in a stable and strong way. You can see on the slide here that our sales is now above SEK 32 billion. Our profit margin for the last five years in average 14.6%. The last five years, we have had organic growth of 5%, and we have acquired approximately 70 companies. And if we look at the last five years, sales growth CAGR of 12% and EBITA of 15%. So I think we have a good track record.
Both myself and the team around me, we know how to deliver profit growth. We have proven that. We have doubled the size of Indutrade, and that's what we are about to do once again. But if we look short term, we have a more sort of problematic situation. We are not fully reaching our financial targets. If we start with EBITA, we are doing quite okay. In 2024, we came in at 14.4%. Year to date, Q3 this year, we are at 14%. So we are basically ballpark around our target level. But we are not really delivering profit growth in absolute terms. 2024 was a bit flat, and this year is also a bit flat in that perspective. So that's what we need to focus on and come back to deliver profit growth. What has happened short term?
We all know that we are in a more recessionary business situation. So to grow organically is more difficult for our companies. So it's been a more flat organic development recently. On top of that, you all know that the geopolitical situation is disturbing around the world. And then on top of that, the different sort of trade barriers implemented in the U.S. came about earlier this year. And that led us to basically think a little bit deeper in terms of acquisitions. We wanted to deliberately prolong some acquisition processes in order to really make sure that we bought the profit streams we intended to buy or thought we were buying.
We wanted to go a bit deeper in the order books and understanding the company situation a bit better to be completely sure that these acquisitions were accretive when they were joining our group, and it was at a level we are valuing them for and paying for. Now, recently, in the third quarter, you have seen that we have pushed the acquisition button and started to deliver on them. It's a bit more stable, is perhaps the wrong word, but better visibility, I think, in terms of the trade situation. So we have felt certain that those we have decided to do, we are comfortable that they will deliver in a good way. And we will continue to deliver acquisitions also in quarter four now before year-end. So I think we will end fairly close to where we were last year. So a recessionary situation, business climate.
We have been a bit hesitant in terms of making acquisitions in order to be sure that we buy accretive businesses. Thirdly, we have also pruned, I think, a handful of companies the last two years, and by that, I mean that. We had a portfolio where some businesses were underperforming. We obviously tried to turn them around. We work with the leadership. We work with supporting from the board. We take in people we need to support them in different ways, but at some point, you need to realize that. Indutrade is not the right owner, and we have had a couple of situations like that, so our model is buying companies, not divesting, but we have divested a few the last year and a half now, and that's obviously taking down our profit growth. Fourthly, we went into a new group structure in the beginning of 2024, and we will.
And predominantly myself, we'll present that in more detail later on in the presentation here. That's building a better platform. But when you go from one organization to a different one, it creates a little bit of turmoil. Even if we wanted to do that very evolutionary, quite slow implementation, we didn't take out the chairperson sort of quickly and moved in a new one. We let the current chairpersons remain for some quarters and slowly introduced new people into the boards and had a gradual change. But even so, we had a lot of new companies to the business area heads. They were familiarizing themselves with these companies, traveled around a bit. Perhaps that took some time from active acquisition work and active other type of business development work for some time. Difficult to put sort of a number on that, but i t obviously had a little bit of impact.
So I would say that these four reasons are the main reasons for why we haven't really delivered strong profit growth during 2024 and in the first quarters here of 2025, but we will definitely do that going forward. Indutrade's business has some fundamental characteristics which are important to understand and which are important for us in order to be successful. The first is to have profitable companies and that these companies generate cash flows, and you can see that on these blue bars in this diagram. That's the cash flow we have delivered in the years on the slide there. Then it's obviously super important to use that cash flow wisely and acquire good, profitable, stable companies, and I think we have done that in a good way. It's a risk to acquire a company, and sometimes you go wrong.
With our collective experience, we seldom go wrong, but we have gone wrong also in the last couple of years sometimes. And the green bars there are the money we have put into acquisition work. And then we have dividends. We are a public company. We have a dividend policy. We want to grow dividends year over year in absolute terms. And we have also done that. And this needs to be managed in a good way in terms of the balance sheet and have a healthy risk profile. And you see the blue curve there, which is our EBITDA net debt to equity sort of, or EBITDA to net debt to EBITDA ratio, which is actually slightly going down over time. So I think we are managing the model well year over year in a good way.
Acquisitions have been a key part of Indutrade since we started, still is, will be also going forward, and I think we have strengthened our capability over the years. You can express acquisition capabilities in different ways. A quite simple way to do it is to see how many acquisitions do we make per year, and that's what this graph is demonstrating. You see the blue bars, and that's the number of acquisitions in any given year here, and we started out some years ago with around 10 per year. We worked our way up to 12, and the recent years we more have been on 15, even above 15 per year, so I think step by step we have increased our capability in a good way. 2011 stands out as a very high bar there, as you can see. That year, we actually bought a h olding of around five companies in Switzerland.
So we met an entrepreneurial family in Switzerland. They had five Indutrade-like companies, which we appreciated, and we were able to acquire them at the same time. So that's why it was standing out really high in 2011. But otherwise, it's step by step an increase in terms of capability. And as I said, this year we started out slow. We have increased in the third quarter, and we will also finish off in a good way here in quarter four. And Gustav will speak more about that later on. The group has also evolved in other perspectives. We predominantly focus on two types of categories when we buy companies. The core is basically technical trading companies, but we also buy what we call product companies with proprietary products, own development, own manufacturing.
And these two types of companies have different sort of pros and cons. The technical trading companies, they are people-light, capital-light. They might be a little bit hindered in terms of growing geographically. They are mostly focused on a local market or a few local markets. And the theoretical EBITA margin potential might be slightly lower than a company with a proprietary product. But those companies, the proprietary product companies, they are a bit more heavy in terms of people, a bit more heavy in terms of capital. But they can grow basically globally as they desire and as they choose. And they theoretically might have a bigger potential for EBITA profit margin. But all in all, they basically deliver the same return on capital. So both types of companies are good to have, and we appreciate both sort of categories, and we will continue to invest in both categories.
Right now, it's almost 60% technical trading companies and 40% proprietary. And I think that's a balance which we'll also hold going forward. We have also internationalized our sales. We started out in Sweden, Scandinavia, the Nordics. We grow early on into the Netherlands, into the U.K., and then southwards down in Europe. Sweden was a bit more than 30% of our sales. Now it's more 20%. And the sort of outside Nordic part of the cake has grown. But we have grown. We have made acquisitions in Sweden. We have been very successful in Denmark. We have grown in Norway, also in Finland. So you will see Indutrade making acquisitions in all of these countries going forward. The pond is full of fish in all these markets, to make some sort of analogy. So there is no shortage of potential companies for us to buy.
We are also l ess dependent on large companies. So, 10 years ago, 30% was what our 10 largest companies represented, and now it's, as you see on the slide, 19%. So we derisk Indutrade as we become bigger and grow geographically and grow into different segments. When I came to Indutrade eight and a half years ago, we had six business areas, and it was a mix of product-oriented business areas and some geographic business areas. Fairly soon thereafter, when we felt that we basically had to broaden the number of business areas because we had too many companies per business area, we made a reorganization. One of the six business areas had a substructure of geographies. We took away the business area and basically promoted those geographies into group management. We got U.K., we got Benelux, and we got the DACH business area up into the group structure.
So there was still then a mix of geographic business areas and some product business areas. And that structure has worked well, I would say. We have delivered on our targets with that structure. But we have grown, and scalability is something you need to work with as a management team when you work with a growth company. And in the later part of 2022, 2023, we felt that we had to do something. The span of control became too big. You have eight business areas and 200 companies, means approximately 25 companies per business area. And our model, as most of you know, is that each company has a board, each company has a chairperson. So it meant that the business area had almost chairpersons in 20, 25 companies, and that's impossible to do that job in a professional way.
So those business area heads, they started to ask managing directors who were experienced to be on boards to also chair companies. But we came to a situation where both span of control was an issue, and we also wanted to fuel growth in a better way, increase our acquisition growth. And also try to increase the organic capability. And we started to discuss how can we organize ourselves in a better way. There is no right or wrong how you organize a company, obviously. You just need to do it in an effective way, efficient way. And we felt that. Let's do it more outside in, in a market sector perspective. And we simulated different ways and set ourselves up for five sector-based business areas. And I will go through them one by one very quickly, but they are implicitly quite easy to understand what they are all about.
Another problem we had in the past was that it was not that easy to understand what Indutrade was, an organization like Indutrade U.K.. What is that? Now we can talk about life science, or we can talk about industrial and engineering, or we can call, or we can talk about process, energy, and water. It's quite easy to understand what Indutrade is all about now for investors like you, but also for customers and suppliers who are interested in being partners to our companies. So we set out to form these five business areas, but more importantly, we needed and wanted to establish a mid-layer between the business area and the companies. So we formed something called business segments. We now have 30 + business segments, and they are led by business segment leaders, experienced Indutrade persons.
When we appointed these business segment leaders, their average experience with Indutrade was 18 years. So they know our values, principle, our culture, our way of working, our models in a really good way. At first, we didn't appoint 30 business segment leaders. We have also done that in an evolutionary way. So some business segment leaders held their MD role, managing director role in addition to being a segment leader. Some became full-time business segment leaders. And we have tried to sort of take it step by step and made the relevant moves when it was time to do them. So we have 30 segments and 220-some companies, which means that it's approximately seven companies per segment. That means that there is a little bit slack in the system, you can say. A business segment leader should be able to manage 10, maybe 15 companies in their segments.
It's intended that there should be a little bit slack, if I call it so, in order for them to actively work with acquisitions. And that's a key sort of dimension into this organizational change, which I will build on in a bit. Brief presentations on the business areas. So we start with industrial and engineering. You understand what that's all about. Industrial components, automation, transmission type of systems, equipment. It can be. Chemical products. Automotive, aftermarket products, and things like that. This is our largest business area, around SEK 8 billion in size, 65 companies. Nine segments. And you see that they have had a nice growth both in terms of top line and EBITDA margin development. Infrastructure and construction, also easy to relate to. Products going into different types of infrastructure projects and construction. Companies being customers.
SEK 5 billion, so slightly smaller, but still a big business area, eight segments, 41 companies. Then we have life science. Deliberate acquisition-focused areas, something we decided to build. We had a smaller core, and we decided to really look for life science companies some years ago, and step by step, this business area has been built. Almost the same size as industrial and engineering, SEK 7.5 billion last year. Even actually bigger in terms of absolute profit, 35 companies, seven segments. And you will hear more about this business area when Joakim presents it. Process, energy, and water. It's also, I think, easy to understand. Products going into the process industry, the energy sector, and water, wastewater sectors. Also a large business area, almost SEK 8 billion last year, 44 companies. And we have a strong position here.
Valves is actually the biggest product group of all product groups within Indutrade. We also have a lot of instrumentation and other types of solutions offered in this area. And last but not least, technology and system solutions. It's perhaps our technically most advanced business area, more electronics. More digitalization. A lot of sensors, measurement type of products. Also our most international business area. Our companies are selling in North America. Our companies are selling in Asia, having subsidiaries in Asia. And also. High profit margin and growth-oriented area. So we feel that we have really built a strong base for Indutrade going forward. It's a new structure. Deliberate investment for better acquisition growth and also better organic capability with support from these segment leaders into our companies going forward.
So by the foundation we already have, we have a strong culture, we have v alues in terms of being entrepreneurial, having this decentralized structure. We are long-term oriented and people-centric. And this we have nurtured for 47 years. And on top of this now, we have invested in a new platform, in a new organization with some extra management resource, which we really haven't had before. So now we are set to double the size of Indutrade again. The baseline for Indutrade is our companies. And it's really built on our individual managing directors. In a decentralized organization, it's very, very much about people, having the right people in the right roles. And when we buy a company, our model is really built on that we keep the owner, we keep the managing director. Because we only buy successful companies, they have done something successful with their companies, so let's continue to build on them.
Give them autonomy, let them continue to feel that it's their company. It's very little sort of change to the employees, to the company after we have bought the company. They have a lot of autonomy. They run their P&L, their balance sheet, their product offering, and so on and so forth. To support them, we dedicate a board. We dedicate a chairperson, board members, knowledgeable persons who can support them. We ask the managing director, "What type of board capabilities do you want?" And we try to build the board together with the managing director. To make the company as successful as possible. You should take the opportunity to talk to our managing directors here today. I think they will say that before Indutrade, life was quite lonely. Very few of them have professional boards, engaged chairpersons, helping board members. They are quite lonely.
They have an auditor, they go to the bank, but very little sort of professional board support. They get that when they get into Indutrade in a strong way. They also get colleagues in their segment, maybe seven, eight, 10 colleagues. They can discuss with, compare with, benchmark with, learn from, and they have 220 other colleagues who they can ask for in terms of whatever question they might have. So it's very helpful for them to have an engaged, supportive board, and this knowledge sharing in their segment, broadly in the company in terms of basically all situations. If you are to build a new factory, there are other companies who have built new factories in Indutrade. If you should implement a new ERP system, we have a lot of companies who have done that.
So the list is long, and they can really rely on the knowledge sharing in a good way. And we have also built an, you can call it an academy over the years. We have tailor-made development programs for Indutrade MDs. For Indutrade management team members. We have functional trainings linked to value-based pricing or capital efficiency or purchasing or whatever it might be that you need as an Indutrade company. There is a smorgasbord that you can take part of. It's on a voluntary basis. Very little is mandatory top-down in Indutrade. You need to report on a quarterly or on a monthly basis. You obviously need to live up to all kinds of regulations, but otherwise you have a lot of autonomy to run your company and you choose what you engage in in the Indutrade system.
So that's h ow it is briefly to run an Indutrade company, and that will be further developed later on today as well. In terms of acquisition strategy. We basically build on the same base. It's an opportunistic approach. We don't sort of deliberately say that it's only in these three areas or four areas or five areas we're going to buy companies going forward. We are open-minded. We look for really great companies with great leaders to join the Indutrade group. So we look for opportunities broadly. We have strengthened our acquisition specialist resources. We have a team here in Stockholm, but we now have specialists in the business areas. We have some specialists in the main countries, and you will hear from Andrea later on what it is about to sort of have that role within Indutrade.
We also have these business segment leaders being much more active in acquisition work, proactive internal lead generation going forward. If we look back, we have mostly been, I would say, built on that brokers come with potential opportunities to us, and we choose between them and we buy good companies. The internal lead generation has also been there. We have always kept our eyes open, looked for opportunities, but perhaps not worked in a really structured way with internal lead generation. Now we are building that structure with the business segment leaders, and we'll come back to that, and you will hear from some of them also going forward, so that's a key asset we really haven't had before in the same way. So, strengthened our acquisition resources in several ways, and we continue to be prudent in terms of pricing.
Our model is not working if we pay too much. We have a group financial target to deliver a return on capital employed of 20%. That basically means that you can only buy on a valuation 5x EBIT or EBITDA, and we buy at six, seven-ish, which means that we buy a little bit more expensive than the return target sort of says. So we need our companies to grow into their valuation. But it's also a benefit to have companies which were bought earlier and already have grown into their valuation. So we have a model which works, but we need to stay valuation-wise on a prudent basis, more or less where we are today. Going into the business segment role a little bit more then and reiterate a little bit what I said.
Organically, I think it's a key strength for our companies to have a really engaged, dedicated chairperson, and that chairperson knows the industry, the sector the company works with, and we also build a board with the relevant capabilities, experiences to the specific company, so the interplay between the managing director and the chairperson and the board is very important. Mostly the board is there to support the managing director, and the system basically works for that. It's the managing director who asks for, I would say, dialogue, meetings, communications. We don't want chairpersons who take time from the managing director if they don't really have the interest. It needs to be a pull system from the managing director to the board, but the board also has a role to constructively challenge the managing director, obviously. That's also important, so there is enough ambition, enough drive.
So there is a really meaningful value-creating dialogue between those two different roles. And I think we are mastering that in a really good way. And then the segment leader is sometimes inviting to segment meetings, gathering the seven, eight , nine, 10 companies in the segment. It's not mandatory. You can join if you want to. And there you decide on an agenda. It's about learning, knowledge sharing. And most companies join, I would say, because it's relevant. If you talk about the specific segment, take the process industry, Scandinavia, for example. They share customers, they share suppliers, they share technology trends. So it's relevant to understand what type of sort of perspective do you have on the next six months or the next two years or next five years or whatever it might be. It's a relevant meeting to be part of.
But you choose if you want to be part of it. So organically, I think a step up in terms of benefit for the companies. If we then look at the acquisition work where the segment leader is involved. There is an example of the slide here where. There are six companies in the segment. The companies are located in three markets. The dark blue markets. I think in this case it's. Sweden and Denmark and the Netherlands. That means this particular segment has no company in nine, 10 large European countries. So the segment leaders are now asked to build. What we call the white spot analysis. Identify what potential companies you could acquire. In the light blue markets. You can do that desktop-wise, you can do it by networking.
You can quite easily now with AI and all other types of tools identify what type of c ompanies you could find with sales between EUR 10 million-EUR 30 million, profitable, strong in their niche. Let's say hypothetically it's five companies in these light blue markets. It means it's 50 companies in this segment that we potentially can buy. When we have that map, we can start to contact these companies, build relations. You can do that via suppliers, via customers, via your network, and eventually you put yourself in pole position for acquiring that company when the time is right for that. This way we haven't really worked before. It's a big asset for us to be able to work with internal lead generation in this structured way. Again, a theoretical example, 50 companies to potentially buy in this segment. We have 30 segments. 30 x 50, 1,500 companies which we potentially can start to have a dialogue with. Big, big asset for us.
We have a history of right now buying around 15 companies per year. If you think that we have 30 segments, I think it's reasonable to say that someone who has worked with Indutrade for 18 years with a business of almost SEK 1 billion should be able to buy one company per year at some point. Then we go from 15 to 30 companies acquisition-wise. It's a big potential step up in terms of acquisitions by the platform we have built now. It's not going to happen tomorrow. Not next year, but medium, long term, this is definitely going to generate acquisition growth for us. I'll give you a real example. 1994, we acquired a company called Alnab. There was a very driven managing director in that company. His name is Peter Eriksson. He's in the room here. You can stand up, Peter.
Peter is a former business area head and also currently an advisor to myself and the management team. Peter started to work with acquisition growth, and he basically built a list of companies he wanted to buy, and eventually he bought five companies from that list. One of those five generated two more companies. Another of those five generated another three companies. A third of those five generated one company. And that company in itself generated one company. And then he spoke to his suppliers, asked for advice what companies could we potentially buy, generated eight companies. One of those eight generated another company. And another of those eight generated two companies. And then he continued using customers, networking, and so on and so forth, buying 30 companies by being proactive in his acquisition work.
A bit in the same way as we want the segment leaders to do also going forward. So, fantastic experience by Peter. Very difficult to maybe reach 30 in this timeframe, but you can maybe reach five and then 10. So it's possible to work this way, and I think we have demonstrated it within the group. It's important for us to be lean. We are not building a lot of staff. We have a head office of 25 persons. It's been quite small since I joined. It's increased a little bit. The big increase has been in the business area, business segment structure, where it says 55 on the slide there. So it's basically the five business areas, some support staff, and the business segment leaders. All in all, 80 persons in relation to almost 10,000 employees.
You can say employees who are not operationally involved in our companies is less than 1.8%. So we are very lean. We will stay lean. But we have made a deliberate investment in our platform to grow going forward. Sustainability. Our approach to sustainability has been to drive business. And we have not done it to sort of save the world. Our framework is basically built on people, operations, and product and customers. Different ways to gauge that we have engaged people, which you obviously see that we have. Operations, we want to be efficient, also low CO2 sort of footprint. And in terms of customers, we want to deliver value, and we also want our products to have a low footprint in terms of the environmental impact. So our companies appreciate our framework. They use it in their business strategies, and they use the framework towards their customers.
And this places them in pole position versus their competitors. Very few hundred million SEK companies have a strong sustainability sort of framework. Business-oriented as we do. So I think it's appreciated by both our customers and our companies. Ending with our financial targets. As I said, we are not changing them. We are reconfirming them. We think they are relevant. Minimum 10% growth, EBITA margin of at least 14%. ROCE of at least 20%. And then we have our financial stability objective and also our dividend objective. They are all relevant, and they all basically drive towards double the size of Indutrade, top line, bottom line in a good way. So we didn't really see the need to update them right now. But we have a continuous improvement. Philosophy within the group. So at some point, I'm sure we will come back and increase, change.
Our financial targets, but it's not happening today. It's also important to state that these are the group financial targets. Every individual company has their individual targets, making them relevant. But the key for them is to generate profit growth. Their short-term bonus is basically to a very large majority based on profit growth. The same with group management, the same with myself. My bonus is based on generating profit growth to a very large extent. So that's what we are geared to going forward. So to summarize, we've been in business 47 years. We have a very strong culture. We have very strong values and principles. This is something to build on, and we are nurturing this going forward. We have made a deliberate investment in a new organization with some additional resources to be deployed in organic growth help and not least in acquisition pipeline growth going forward.
We definitely think this will also generate organic growth, and we are always finding ways to continuously improve how to make sustainable, profitable growth going forward, so by that, I end my presentation, and we will open up for questions, but we will do that after the next speaker. I welcome Patrik Johnson, our CFO, to the stage.
Okay, so great to be here. Good to see you, everyone. My name is Patrik Johnson, and I've been in the group then seven and a half years. I came on board slightly after Bo, and I will start with only one slide, one short comment on the short term, and then I will stay more time on the more long term and build on a few of the things that Bo spoke about. Fundamental elements in our financial model that I think is really important for you to understand.
Yes, so let's jump ahead. So short term then, as many of you know, and also Bo commented on. Our growth development has not been very strong in the last year, basically. And it has been weaker than we wanted to be. And the main reason, Bo spoke about this, but one major driver of this is, of course, the generally weaker market. And on the back of the weaker growth development, we also see then slightly weaker profit development. But I think, as you could see then from our latest quarterly report, I think the short-term trends then point in the right direction now, definitely. Book to bill 102% year to date, that's a positive development. Quarter three organic order intake was up 3%. And the majority of our companies, more than 50% of our companies actually showed an organic growth increase in the quarter.
So I think it points in the right direction. Also then a strong gross margin. We've seen that for several quarters. And I think quarter three actually was the strongest gross margin ever for quarter three. And the cost side, it's definitely under control. That's my message. And if you look at the A&S cost in relation to sales, it's going sequentially down, even though sales is still dampened. So I think that's definitely under control. So short term in the right direction. So our focus is now very much, as Bo said, to get the growth momentum going. Yes. And so let's leave the short term and move on to a little bit more long-term elements in our financial model. And the first area I want to touch with is how we define and work with what I call then value creation, long-term value creation.
And our definition of that is to grow with stable and high returns. And as Bo talked about, the growth has been very strong over many years. And as you can see from this slide, we've managed to deliver that with also very high returns over many years at or slightly above, or maybe some years slightly lower than the 20%. And the decline you see the last couple of years, it's back to the reasons Bo talked about, mostly the slightly weaker market. I would say the fundamental model still works. And to continue to deliver high, stable returns going forward, there are a few things that we need to work very consistent and disciplined with. Smart capital allocation, and I will touch upon these areas in the coming slides some more. Smart capital allocation. We need also to complement the acquisition growth with good organic growth.
That's super important for us. Prudent acquisition pricing is also critical for us, and also to get some kind of operational return on the organic growth, it's also important, so all these things are critical. So let's dig a little bit further into these then and start with acquisition pricing. Very important, and we talk in this area often about multiples, which is then the price, acquisition price, in relation to the EBITA or the profit in the company that we buy, and Gustav will talk some more about this later on. But I state here that we are really disciplined and prudent on pricing, and if you, I think this graph illustrates that from two perspectives, and the orange-yellow line is the pre-calculated EV in relation to the acquired EBITDA then.
So this is a n internal measurement, so it's not maybe easy for you as externals to follow and monitor that. But it has been very stable. This graph is for seven, eight years, and it has been very stable on these 6x-7x [EBITDA], as Bo mentioned. But what you can calculate and follow based on data in our quarterly annual report. That's, however, a more rough post-acquisition multiple the first year after the acquisition. And how do you do that then? Well, you take the price, which we have available in the total price. We have that available in our quarterly report. And you deduct the earnouts. You deduct potential acquired cash. And then you also need to, when you look at the EBITDA, take away transaction cost. So then you get a rough, I would say, post-acquisition multiple the first year after acquisition.
And then you arrive at these blue bars. Those are sort of accurate data from the quarterly report. And a bit more volatile, as you can see, but it's also so that sometimes an acquisition overdelivers, delivers fantastically already the first year. And sometimes it's maybe they deviate slightly negative. And you have a couple of examples of that. 2021, we had a couple of companies with a very strong pace already directly after the acquisition. And 2022, you have deviation on the other direction then. But all in all, I think both these graphs show clearly that we are very prudent and disciplined on pricing. Especially if you exclude these outliers, then they are very similar, the pre-calculated and the post-acquisition multiples. Yeah. So that's the first area, super important acquisition pricing.
Then I move over to the next area, which is what we focus on when it comes to company performance within Indutrade. There is a very strong profit culture among the MDs and all companies. And this is, of course, super good and something we don't want to change, that we want to keep. But the last years, we have talked more and more also about capital. And from an operational company perspective, then it's a lot about working capital. And for us, inventory is maybe the most important thing, but also receivables and payables and customer advances. And then also machine and equipment, especially in the companies we have that are producing. So all this we think is super important when we talk about return and value creation.
And in Indutrade, we have a measurement since many years back, but I think we put extra emphasis on it the last few years, ROWC. And we use this widely in the group, I would say, and it's very important for us. And if we take it one step further and look on the development of this, I think we have succeeded in a good way to increase the awareness and the focus, attention to capital aspect during the last five, seven years. And the ROWC has actually taken a good step, 5, 10 percentage points, as much as that. Which is good. And I think partly comes from the increased focus in this area. We've pushed it very broadly, I would say.
In all the internal follow-up, the standard reports we have in our common BI systems, in the benchmark, which many of you that have followed us for a long time, they know we have a bit of internal benchmark competition between the companies. We've added more capital dimension into that benchmark. We have a lot of training programs, both on the finance side, but also general training programs. Where capital aspects are growing in importance. STI is, as Bo said, mostly focused on profit improvement, but we have also then, since a few years back, also a capital dimension now. When we look at new acquisitions, we in Indutrade have always looked on the capital aspect, but I think we push it slightly more now. I don't think that's very, I see Gustav nodding here.
So I think that's s uper important to look also on the return aspects and the capital aspects. So, next area, which I think is super important then for as an element in our financial model, that's the continuous improvement mindset. I think Bo also talked about that a little bit. And I repeat a little bit here. We pay then around six to 7x EBITDA, and that means that we start often with a return on capital employed at maybe 14%-16% for a newly acquired company. And that's not enough then if you want to deliver our 20%. From this point on, every company needs to have an ambition to grow into their valuation, you could say. That's why it's super important to focus on organic growth, on organic margin improvements, organic capital improvements on all levels: company, segment, business area, and also on group level.
So key for us. And we do this in various ways. Most importantly, of course, in the individual company boards, setting the right type of targets between the board and the MD. Ambitious targets. We focus mostly on year-over-year improvement, de-emphasize the budget. Budget is not an unimportant process, but I think it's most important to deliver continuous improvement versus the history. And embedded in the incentives and embedded in the benchmark also this area with continuous improvement. So we work with this broadly to get a broad mindset on this continuous improvement. So at the core of the model is then cash flow generation, of course, and then a clever use, clever deployment of this cash that we generate. And there is a very strong underlying operational cash flow from our companies. We speak about that a lot.
And I think also facts s how that free operating cash flow actually increased 7% on average per year the last 10 years. I think that's an impressive number, and that comes from the increased profit, but also good capital management, and also the fact that we are lean on CapEx. The CapEx to sales ratios below 2% as an average the last 10 years, and another important measurement in this area is cash conversion, so how much of the net profit is then turned into cash, and that's shown in the yellow line here and defined as free operating cash divided by net profit, and the average is actually above 100% the last 10 years, and most of the single years as well, so I think we have a strong underlying cash flow for sure, and then moving on to how we use that cash on a sort of a more strategic and overview level.
It's, of course, very important to have a bit of a strategy, a plan. Balanced thought around this, and to have a view on what's a reasonable debt level, what's the reasonable dividend level, and what's a reasonable reinvestment level. And I think this graph illustrates how we have the aggregated cash or funds deployment in the last five years. And more than 85% of the deployed cash, the used cash, is or was internally generated, as you can see from the far left blue bar. The white section there is the increased debt. So not a high portion, most of it, 85%, more than that, internally generated. Of all those funds, 20%-25% used internally, you could say, then for CapEx and working capital requirements, which means then that almost 80% available for more strategic deployment then.
And of that, more than 70%, the more lighter blue area here, used for acquisitions. And if you calculate the reinvestment rate, acquisition spending divided by free operating cash, it's 71%. So, to summarize it, I'm saying strong underlying cash flow, strong cash flow generation, and also then a high offensive reinvestment rate. Moving on, looking at another important area. How do we allocate time, resources, capital internally between companies? How do we prioritize between companies? And how do we have a common view on this? Super important question for us, of course. And we have since some years a common framework for this. We call it then our portfolio model. And it helps us categorize companies in terms of financial capability, but also organizational capability. And we use them then for clever capital allocation decisions, but also adaptation of the coaching.
Not every company needs the same type of an amount of support, of course, and the model is based on a very basic concept that you should always try to establish reliability in the basics, and then good product profitability before you should go for bigger growth investments, so those are the sort of the basics in the model, and if you look at the model more in detail, this is how it looks like then, and it has then six categories, as you can see, and it is in three different sort of sections or layers with profitability and operational return thresholds on where you sort of qualify.
And also in the top section, where we have three different categories, there is also qualitative assessment on the organizational capability of the company, what type of product offering they have, what type of competitive position they have, and then organizational capability like management team, system processes. So all these things are important to understand where the company is and what type of potential they have. And of course, the actual objectives and plans and strategy for each company is, of course, unique and individual and is decided in the company board together with the MD. But I think this portfolio model categorization serves as a really good starting point. So that you are not very sort of far from each other in those discussions. You start that you have a common view to look at things.
It also helps the business area management and the business segments leader to look at their company portfolio in a bit of a standardized way to see where they have most potentials and where they need to put their time and money. I mean, maybe it's self-evident. I mean, of course, in the top section, it's super important with ambitious growth objectives and activities plans connected to growth because all the sort of fundamental criteria are in place. Investments and coaching should be geared towards those areas, of course. The midfield, the stable good performers. Here, it's the continuous improvement mindset that should be in focus. Objectives may be mostly focused to profitability. Areas like productivity, capital efficiency. Those areas are super important. Yellow-red area here, a quick turnaround is, of course, important. The objective should, of course, be related to that.
Here also, the engagement from the board should be higher and closer to make sure that MD gets the support he/she needs. It's also important that this is not only sort of for each and every company individually, that it's also, as I said, important for the business area and the segment to have their view of the total portfolio. There are discussions. Agreements in each and every business area management team on how their portfolio looks like and where they have their different companies. So this is a super important tool for us. Then lastly, tying things together, looking at the balance sheet and the strength of the balance sheet. Even though we've had, as I talked about, a really high reinvestment rate, the strong underlying cash enables us to maintain a really strong balance sheet.
Net debt has, as you can see, an absolute value stepwise increased over the years. For sure, but the profits have actually grown faster or more, which means then that the net debt EBITDA is actually going down slightly, and we are at the level of end of 2024 on 1.4, and from a historical perspective, actually a low level, and besides the numbers, I think we have worked a lot with other factors also impacting our sort of financial position. We have stepwise increased our bank group. We have more banks working together, I mean more banks here in the Nordics, in Sweden, but also then have added European banks in our sort of as corporate partners. We work a lot with cash pooling, making sure that cash is sort of available for every need in the group simultaneously is super important.
So cash pool structures, we are stepwise improving that, expanding that. Besides that, we have also then since four years back, an investment grade rating from S&P with a stable outlook. So that also helps us creating a strong financial position. All in all, I think from the financial side, we have everything in place then to continue to grow both organically and with acquisitions. So by that, I summarize. I talked about value creation and talked about that we sort of try to broaden the view on performance. We don't only look at profit. Profit is super important, but we look at growth. We also talk about capital, talk about total value creation. We are a prudent and disciplined buyer. We have been for many, many years. We still are, and we will still continue to be that. Continuous improvement in our model.
We buy companies at 6x-7x EBITDA, and then we need to continuously improve to grow into the valuation. So continuous improvement. We have a very decentralized environment. MDs fully in charge of their companies, but we also want to be a professional owner and give the MDs all the support they need, and we want to do that in a structured way. So here, the portfolio model is one of our most important tools. So to conclude, I think the financial model has worked for almost 50 years now, and it's well functioning. And the strong underlying cash generation and way of working will ensure that we can continue to grow. That's it.
Thank you. Thank you very much, Patrik. And I welcome Bo up to the stage as well for a Q&A.
So if you have any questions, please raise your arm, and you will be handed a microphone. We have one here.
Hi, it's Carl here from Nordea. A couple of questions for me, firstly regarding the financial targets. I definitely think it's sensible to keep the sales target as well as return on capital employed. However, on the margin side. Given that your margin target is over a cycle, you are at a hopefully trough margin of 14%. Last five years, 14.5% above. What keeps you from sort of raising it? Given that M&A is accretive, you get leverage on upcycle. And does it send any message to the organization of how ambitious you are over the coming five years?
As I said. If you talk to the different managing directors, they are obviously aware of our group financial target. But their life is around t heir company and their targets. So they don't really work less or focus less on improving their profit just because we raise our group targets. So I think there is obviously a correlation, but not as strong as you potentially think. It's a signal to those companies below 14% that wow, now it went to 14% + even. So we need to do something better. But the message we have to them is to compete with themselves, do better next year. So it has an impact, but I think it's more for group management, segment leaders steering our acquisition work a bit. And also perhaps being, if that's possible, slightly more decisive on improvements. But it's not so fundamental for us.
Okay, very good. Thank you. And very good to hear about the segment leaders, the M&A ambition of them.
If you look at the 30 business segment leaders you now have, how many of them were internally sourced, I mean, recruited? And secondly, how many of them had experience from working with M&A when you hired them? And how does it look today? Are all of them up to speed to do M&A? Thank you.
Yes, we launched a new organization in the beginning of 2024. And at the time of the launch, it was 100% internally sort of promoted managing directors or experienced persons who took those roles. Since then, we have added two external recruits into segment leaders. But it's very much internally sourced. And as I said, at the time of their appointments, I think the average tenure was 18 years with Indutrade. I don't think all of them had made complete sort of acquisitions by themselves, but I think.
They had been around acquisitions in some sort of role. Either as add-on acquisitions to their own companies or been part of due diligence work or other type of work. Their role in acquisitions is not to be acquisition specialists, that we have other persons sort of to do that job, valuation work or due diligence work or SBA negotiations and things like that. Their work is more to find targets who would fit their segments and then make the strategic and commercial assessment of the company, you can say, and also assessing people. And I'm sure they have, all of them have that capability since 18 years sort of with Indutrade. And then they have the support on the acquisition professionals, I would say.
Okay, thank you. And the final one, if I may, is around you talked about being opportunistic around M&A in your slides, Bo.
Are you more opportunistic today than you were five, six years back, or is it a general description of who Indutrade used to be even 10 years back?
Oh. Difficult to answer. I think we have pretty much the same opportunistic approach as we have always had. We are open-minded. We don't sort of turn things down. We take a look and have an optimistic perspective, sort of an opportunistic perspective. So I think it's fairly similar, I would say.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you, Karl Bokvist [ABG]. So one part that you highlighted several times here during the presentation is the number of acquisitions that you have pursued and aim to do and step up. The other part of that equation is the size of the acquired business. So just a bit curious to hear your thinking about the average size going forward.
Yeah, Gustav will also elaborate on this, but to simplify for you, Gustav, I can say that we basically keep the context where we are good. So, EUR 10 million, EUR 20 million, EUR 30 million, around there is our sweet spot. And we don't really have the desire to go up to EUR 50 million, EUR 60 million, or EUR 100 million . We are good at buying these companies, and that's going to be the core going forward as well.
And as a follow-up to that, do you see similar in terms of percentage contribution growth opportunities for all the segments?
No, that can probably vary and also vary in cycles. Sometimes a different segment is a bit stronger than others. But all segments have future opportunities and possibilities that I'm sure of.
And the final one is the last capital markets that you held, you also talked about the ambition to s trengthen organic growth opportunities and also looking into businesses with perhaps a bit higher underlying growth potential, so to say, and how would you say that this is then reflected in the multiples you are willing to pay, talking about the kind of growing into the final paid multiple?
Yeah. I think over the last years, we have been a bit more open-minded to pay up a little bit more for clear organic growth opportunity. But it's still prudent, if I say so. So let's say that the average is six and a half, seven-ish, maybe we go up to seven and a half or eight or something like that. We don't go to 11, 12, 13 or something like that, so we are taking some steps, but they are in the big picture fairly small, I would say.
Thank you.
Zino Engdalen Ricciuti from Handelsbanken.
A question on how you incentivize these business segment leaders to accelerate the internal lead generation and how you balance their incentives with the organic responsibilities they have as well.
They are also incentivized on profit growth, and the benefit for them is that they can actually include the acquired company in their profit growth. So it's a huge benefit for them to buy one company per year. So there's no sort of financial driver to generate white spot analysis or the mapping, but the benefit comes when they strike sort of an acquisition and fulfill an acquisition. Then it's a big benefit to their sort of segment P&L.
And how do you see that when you, of course, centrally have the responsibility on executing?
But how do you see that when, of course, their benefit is that they make an acquisition compared with, yeah, if they wouldn't have made it? How do you see that when you have built this incentive structure?
I'm not sure if I fully understand what you're asking now, to be honest.
So they, of course, benefit when they actually make an acquisition in that sense. So more is better. But maybe that would, if you see that, maybe then they would generate leads which maybe aren't as qualitative as they might have been if you incentivized them in another way. Or you balance it with volume, so to say.
But it's not that easy to make an Indutrade acquisition. It needs to be a successful company. It needs to be successful in a historic perspective. It needs to be leading in their niche. It needs to be good people.
I mean, we have a big sort of list of requirements in order for them to finally make that acquisition. So, we have 47 years' experience to manage risk in that perspective. So it sounds easy just to make an acquisition, but you need to qualify the company before you are able to do that.
And as it is now, then, I mean, of course, you need to have full support from your business area and normally Bo. And also the board is involved in the decision. So, there's a mandate also, mandate question that ensures that the relevant companies are bought.
Thank you.
Thank you. Any more questions? No? I think we're good for now.
Oh, does it work? We have one more.
Okay, hey. Thank you. Mats Liss, Kepler . You have these five verticals in your business structure now.
And is this sort of an optimal structure, or do you feel that in a few years you like to split it up in maybe seven or 10 just to make your opportunities more visible?
Maybe not to make the opportunities more visible, more in a scalability perspective. If we sort of grow dramatically and need sort of a broader structure, we might introduce a different or a new business area. But we can, in a first step, go up to 300 companies in the group without any structural change in terms of segments or business areas. And I think we can go strongly beyond that also. So it's not likely that there will be a business area or an additional vertical short term or not even medium term. In my book, that's really good because it's always a bit of a distraction to change structure.
Then coming back to the first question regarding the margin target, I mean. You certainly operate above the 14% now, but is it also a way to sort of ease the momentum of acquisitions? I mean, the margin target could be a hurdle for you to make them acquisitions. And should you see it as a package, I mean?
No, but that's one dimension into that decision. We have, I don't know what average EBITA we have bought at now. It's clearly above 14%, but.
We've been accretive on acquisitions the last five, seven years. So for sure, it's an element.
But we could potentially buy a company at EBITA margin level 12%, and if we see a strong plan, committed management, which we really believe in, and go from 14% - 16% EBITDA margin target obviously has some impact on the acquisition strategy.
So there is an element of that, Mats, in it, I would say.
Thanks.
Hi, Max Bacco from SEB. Just a short question, once again, on the financial targets. I mean, you have talked a lot here today that. It's profit growth that drives Indutrade and the variable salary for both you and many of the subsidiaries' CEOs is linked to profit growth. Wouldn't it make sense also for the group to have financial targets related to profit growth instead of sales growth? Any thoughts on that?
I think. If you have organic growth or growth as we have and then combine it with a stable margin, you get profit growth as well. So, between the lines, you have it, I would argue.
Understood. Thanks.
Perfect. Thank you very much. So we end the Q&A session there, and we actually go on a short break now.
So there will be coffee served in the back. And we will meet again here at 2:50 P.M. Thank you. Okay, everyone, welcome back. Time flies by. Hello, everyone. Hello. Quiet, please. Quiet. Hello. Thank you. So time flies by, and it's time to jump directly into the next presentation. And I welcome up Gustav Ruda to the stage, our head of acquisitions and business development.
Thanks for the introduction. Hello, everybody. Great to be here today. I'm going to start off with telling about my journey to and within Indutrade. A couple of words about my background. I'm an engineer from university. That is, I've never worked as an engineer. I have about 20 years of professional experience.
I started my career in consulting for a few years, and then I moved on to a newly started private equity fund here in Stockholm, focusing on the Nordic small cap segment. I worked there for about seven years, and during the time, I was analyzing a lot of companies, Nordic companies. And I realized that most of them did not fit the private equity model. They wouldn't double or triple in sales or double or triple profits in three to five years. So I started to think. Could there be a structure where such companies could be acquired? And could be owned over a longer period of time? I did some research, and I found Indutrade. And then later on, as a coincidence, I met with Indutrade in an acquisition process. I met with Claes Hjalmarson, who was quite a character.
I will use the picture here of the small boats that we used for many years. We started to discuss, could we work together? This was like an acquisition process. It took about six months. We had a couple of meetings. We had a few phone calls. Then we met again, and then we started to discuss. Later on, we decided to try how it would be to work together. That was ten years ago. Bo, you said that you are the third CEO in 47 years. I've had the privilege of working with two generations of management within Indutrade. First with Johnny Alvarsson and Claes Hjalmarson for a couple of years, getting to know Indutrade from the inside, understand the history, the culture, and the power of decentralization. Then later on, together with Bo and Jonas.
Where the strategy has been refined, we have structured the company more, and we have prepared for future growth, and there are other senior people in this room and outside of this room who I've also worked with in senior management. What is it that we would like to acquire? What are we looking for? That's a fairly simple question because the acquisition criteria have remained stable over the years. It has been tweaked, fine-tuned a little bit, but to simplify this, we look for a type of company. It should only be business-to-business companies. It could be technical trading or manufacturing companies, etc., etc.. It should be a company and a market that we already understand or have the potential to understand going forward.
Also very, very important that the product or the offering of the company should have a limited piece price and a repetitive need. Then we have the financial criteria. It should have sales of SEK 50 million-SEK 500 million . A healthy gross margin indicating that they actually add value to their clients, their customers, stable earnings, and then a decent return on operating working capital. But then more important, people. Our due diligence starts with a first handshake when we meet a new company. And preferably, it should be family-owned companies where the seller, the owner, cares about the company's future, cares about the company's brand, cares about employees and the future. It should also be people that we believe will thrive within Indutrade, down-to-earth people. High flyers will most likely not be happy within Indutrade. And I said that we have tweaked the acquisition criteria over time.
So gradually, we have focused more on organic growth and operating working capital. If we take a deeper dive into this, yes, we have a long list of preferred characteristics of a company. But I can tell you that not any acquisition opportunity will tick all criteria on such a list. So we have to be open-minded and look for not only already what we own. There are so many niche industry segments that we don't know already. And we are opportunistic, just like we have heard before. And now we have defined our segments. It is very important that we, going forward, will not limit ourselves to the segments. You do not know what will show up. You do not know, like a company in Denmark called Crysberg providing management of irrigation systems at golf courses. We did not know that such a company existed before we met them in 2016, 2017.
And then how do we do that? We meet with many potential targets. We meet with many companies. That's how you can judge whether it's a good company or not, to meet with a lot of people. We build relationships. We focus on what is important, what matters. You could do a due diligence, take several months, and you can dig into any area, and afterwards you realize that. Why did we do this? So focus on what is important. We are transparent and disciplined. We always tell it as it is to the entrepreneur, to the sellers. But still, it is about to get the acquisition done. That's the ultimate goal. So we also need to be pragmatic and flexible and solution-based. And then Indutrade people have always been a little bit different. And it takes some courage.
You need to be brave to stick to that and be different. Which leads us to the next topic. Why do people, why do entrepreneurs sell to Indutrade? Why do they sell to us? Well, first, they think about the new owner. The price tag is important. It should be a fair price, a decent price, but then if you care about the future of your company, you think about a new owner that is long-term, provides stability, has a good history, has core values, good culture, and also has experience of one, buying the company, and two, owning and developing it over time, and this boils down to our good reputation in the market. Our best ambassadors are the people who have sold their companies to us. There are quite a few of you in this room who recently or historically sold your companies.
The best proof that we can get, that I can get if I have done a good job. Is a seller that comes to me after a year or two years and said, "Gustav, you described to us what it is like to work within Indutrade, to be part of Indutrade. But now, after a year, we have realized that it's even better to belong to Indutrade than you explained." So why do entrepreneurs sell to Indutrade? Well. People do business with people. People sell to people. So the companies that we acquire, the sellers, they have sold it to individuals within Indutrade. Yes, the umbrella is Indutrade, but to individuals. So relationship and trust. In the past five years, we have made roughly 70 acquisitions, and we are always open for new acquisitions.
Sometimes we can slow down the processes, like Bo just explained what we did in the first half of this year. And we are extremely selective in the acquisition processes we pursue. And if you look at individual quarters, it can be a bit lumpy, but you don't need to, we don't need to panic about that because we have a very good, continuously a very good pipeline that we work with. If we look into the companies that we have acquired, the 70 companies. All business areas have made acquisitions in this period of time. And we have deliberately acquired more life science-oriented companies even before we had the business area today called life science. Where are the companies located? In the middle pie chart here, we can tell that roughly 50% of the companies are located in the Nordic region.
Netherlands, Germany, U.K. have been markets for Indutrade for quite some time. They account for about 35%. And then we have other interesting companies we have acquired: three companies in Italy, which we will speak about in a few minutes. We have acquired three companies in Ireland. Opportunistically, we have acquired companies in the Czech Republic and Poland. And if you look at the right-hand side, you can see that 50% of the companies are technical trading companies and 50% are manufacturing companies. Looking at the long-term trend, at the pace, the number of acquired companies over time is stepwise increasing, and so is the EBITA contribution, adding some SEK 200 million-SEK 300 million in EBITDA in the past four years. And this will continue.
So we are now at roughly 15 companies per year, and the idea, the strategy is to go from 15 to 20, from 20 to 25, from 25 to 30. It will not happen next year. It's a gradual improvement or step up. We look at some 300 companies per year. We fill our funnel with ideas from our well-developed broker network and with ideas from our 200+ companies. That is from our business areas and from our business segments. Rather quickly, we sort out about 2/3 of the 300 companies that we look at. And when we enter a due diligence process, we are pretty sure that we want to acquire that company before we spend money on lawyers and potentially other external advisors. Most of the due diligence is done in-house. And there we take the support of financial people.
We have financial controllers that are super good at evaluating the companies. This is, if you look at the boxes here in the slide, this is an example of the year 2024. So we looked at 300 companies, we sorted out 200 companies, we initiated 21 due diligence processes, and we ended up acquiring 18 companies. And if you pay attention, going back to the slide before, you noticed it said 16. This includes two smaller earnouts, which we didn't announce with a press release. And in this specific year, 75% of the acquired companies were internally generated, 75%. And when we have the idea and approach a company, we decide whether we want to buy it or not. Most likely, of course, then there can be discussions about price. But we decide we can meet over a longer period of time.
Sometimes we meet over years to get to learn each other. Sometimes it is a bit quicker. Patrik, you said that we have a prudent or a disciplined price. How do we value our companies? We have a fairly simple multiple-based valuation model that we share across the organization. We scrutinize the plan that the seller provides, and we focus on a few key metrics. The multiples we pay range between five and eight. We want the company to grow into the valuation. So within a period of three to five years, it should reach a return of 20%. And the acquisitions should be EPS accretive. Then we are disciplined. We don't need to look in databases for comps. We have some 200 relevant benchmarks from acquired companies. We use an earnout to protect our downside.
And to bridge any value expectation gaps with the seller, to share the upside with the seller and protect our downside. And we work with a clearly defined walk-away price. We do not engage in bidding wars. We know where our threshold is. But in most situations, our business model, our culture, and our people differentiate, and the seller or the sellers, they decide to sell to us. And that is something that we learn fairly early in the process. We don't pay the same multiple for all acquisitions. We differentiate it. Even more now than 10 years ago, differentiate based on size, type of industry, growth potential, e tc. Also, the situation can determine what we pay. About 10 to 15 years ago, acquisitions were handled by the Acquisition Manager, the Head of Acquisitions, and the Group CEO together with the business area managers. Then stepwise, capabilities have been refined.
It started with I was the first one then to be employed in the head office, working with acquisitions together with the head of acquisitions at the time, and then we added acquisition specialists some three years ago. We added acquisition specialists in selected countries two years ago, one and two years ago, and since two years, we have the business segments leader, the business segments contributing. This is a pretty crowded slide, but to explain a little bit on how we work, so on group level, we have the overall responsibility for the strategy and to handle the pipeline, both internal and external leads. We own the process and develop the toolbox, and we also work with quality assurance, and then you can realize for each and every business area and for each business segment, they have their own strategy and they work with internal lead generation.
The countries, in particular. In Italy and Germany. You work with lead generation, you develop the broker network in that specific country, and provide extremely important local knowledge in the processes. And then g oing through this slide, all people engaged work with due diligence in various forms. A couple of years ago, could it be six or seven years ago, Bo, you mentioned at the AGM that we were thinking about Italy, one shareholder. He asked, "Are you kidding me?" No, we were not. But since five years, we are interested in Italy. In 2021, we acquired our first company. Close to Milan, Italprotec. And since two years, we have Andrea working with us in Italy. Welcome, Andrea.
Thank you, Gustav. Thank you all. And my name is Andrea Imbriani, and I follow acquisitions in Italy.
I'm also an engineer with an MBA, and I have 25 years of working experience, about 10 years in strategy consulting, and 15 years in corporate, mainly focused on M&A and strategy. So the first question is, why Italy? Why has Indutrade decided to enter in Italy? Italy is the second largest industrial economy in Europe. It's 14% of the industrial production. This is especially true if you look at mid-sized companies, small mid-sized companies. Italy normally, it's quite famous. We don't have large companies, and we have a lot of mid-sized family-owned companies. And this is the target of Indutrade, and that's why it's very interesting to be in this country. Now, a bit of geography. Italy is divided in 20 regions, and the map shows the regions divided in terms of GDP with equal spending power. And the blue regions are the ones with the highest GDP.
So you see the circled area, which is northern Italy. And northern Italy actually has the same GDP level of Central Europe and Northern Europe. So it's a very wealthy part of the European region. Some examples are Lombardy, quite famous because of Milan, definitely is the financial district, but also very strong in terms of industry. Then south of Lombardy, you have a region called Emilia-Romagna. The capital city is Bologna, and Bologna and Emilia-Romagna are very strong in the mechanical sector and also in the medtech. So that's very interesting for us. Another example is Veneto. That's east of Lombardy. And Veneto is not only Venice. Veneto is also Padova, Vicenza, Verona, and these are very wealthy districts. So it's very interesting to be in these regions.
Another factor is that Northern Italy is very similar to Central Europe and also N orthern Europe in terms of culture and productivity, and this is the reason why we're focusing this region to grow in our country. Now, a bit more in industry. Italy, we did some statistics. Italy has 180,000 manufacturing companies, so when I was talking about small, medium enterprises, this is what I was talking about, and if we look at the chart, the two middle bars, these are companies between 10 and 250 resources. These are the small, medium enterprises. There are 67,000 small, medium enterprises, and of these, two-thirds are located in northern Italy, so there's a huge potential in terms of companies that we are looking at. Even more, 80% of these companies are family-owned. This was also said by Gustav before. Our priority is family-owned companies. These are companies with whom you meet.
You meet the founder or the entrepreneur who has inherited the company. It's very important to establish a dialogue with these people, and this is the priority in terms of companies we look at. And so it has been a journey i n 2021. As we were saying before, we purchased the first company in Italy in 2023, the second. Last week, we did the closing of the third company. And looking at these statistics, but not only the statistics, looking at what we've done in the last two years, the activity, we have a target of 50 acquisitions in the mid-long term in Italy. I mean, there's really a lot of potential. And so how are we doing this? This is coherent with everything which has been discussed today. The first approach is working with business areas and segments.
We have regular contacts with business areas, especially with the segment leaders. We are working a lot. We have a lot of meetings, video conferences with segment leaders to understand which are the customers, suppliers, peers, which have activities in Italy. So we have a list of companies, and we are trying to contact these companies on a regular basis. These are the best companies to contact because normally you have direct access. So you have a salesperson, you have someone to contact in the company. And then, even more important, when we start analyzing a company, the segment leader or very often the MDs of our companies are involved to better understand the company. Second thing is scouting. Financials in Italy are public, so it's possible to do long lists of companies. And we then regularly analyze these long lists.
We do short lists based on financial targets and business areas in which we want to focus, and we have contacts with industrial associations. We have local networks, and this is the scouting activity we're doing, and in some cases, we contact entrepreneurs and find the right moment to contact them and initiate a discussion about M&A. Finally, the brokers. In these two years, we established a broker network in Italy. Indutrade is known by more than 50 brokers. The brokers we work with are typically mid-sized boutiques, auditors, or sometimes small brokers. The smaller ones are more regional, and the larger ones in the capitals, and we are in continuous contact with these brokers. It's really a continuous contact email, and at least twice a year, we have regular meetings with them.
And this has brought us to sign more than 50 NDAs since 2024, showing quite a lot of activity in terms of M&A potential. Finally, how is Indutrade seen in Italy, especially since when we started to be more present and talk about Indutrade? Well, the long-term investor model is a bit more a model characteristic of the Nordics. It was less known in Italy. And both the brokers, but especially the entrepreneurs, really like the alternative, which is not the financial investors, typically the private equity or the strategic, the industrial. And so they see a new model and a new solution for their company. And especially for entrepreneurs, they like the values of Indutrade.
They identify themselves in being entrepreneurs, but especially the decentralized model, the long-term model, they find a solution for their company to continue, to keep the name, to keep the values, and very careful to their people. So they really appreciate the values of Indutrade. The Indutrade organization, the new Indutrade organization, is very helpful. Typically, when we meet an entrepreneur, the first thing he looks at is, well, where will my company fit? With whom can I work? And where can I have knowledge sharing? So that really helps both to explain Indutrade, but also to fit the company in an organization. Finally, Italy, not everyone speaks very good English, especially the older entrepreneurs. And so having a local organization which understands the culture, the business culture, and also speaks the same language helps a lot.
Very often, we are visiting companies with myself and colleagues, which are segment leaders, MDs, to better understand the company. So overall, I have to say there has been a very positive feedback of Indutrade in Italy, both by the financial community, especially I would say by the entrepreneurs with whom we are working on a continuous basis. Thank you very much.
A nd another colleague of ours. You have been working within the flow technology business for some 20 + years, Richard. Welcome.
Yes, thank you very much, Gustav. Thank you. Glad to be here. As Gustav mentioned, I've been with Indutrade for quite some years, and I'm here to tell you a little bit about that journey, but also how I work with acquisitions in my role as business segment leader. My journey began in 2003 when I began at Gustaf Fagerberg AB in Göteborg.
I started out with sales and product management, selling valves and instrumentation solutions to everything from Coca-Cola and Tetra Pak to the mines in the north, the chemical industry on the West Coast, pulp and paper, and our Swedish nuclear power plants. So that was a great school. In 2021, I became the managing director of the company, and in 2024, I was appointed business segment leader, process, and energy. As you already heard today. My key focus as a business segment leader is to really support our companies to thrive within the Indutrade family. To create sustainable, profitable growth over time. But it's also to acquire new companies into the segment, to grow the segment, and broaden the portfolio. I have a clear objective. And that is to acquire at least one new company into my segment every year.
And in order to do that, I work with a strategic acquisition plan, both short-term, looking at possibilities here and now, assessing companies, but also a long-term perspective, looking into new markets, new product groups, and new sub-segments into my energy segment. In this, I develop and maintain a pipeline of internal leads. I proactively build relationships with a lot of companies and potential targets. And I support the acquisition team in the acquisition projects. And here, my role is really to take ownership of the commercial, the strategic, and the cultural evaluation of these companies. And for me, this is crucial, of course, because I will be responsible for these companies post-acquisition. And so what am I looking for here?
From my perspective, coming into this as a business segment leader, I, of course, want to understand the market and the potential in the market these companies are in, the products, the portfolio they have, the business model. More importantly, it's actually the strategic plan moving forward, of course. The key thing, and most important thing for me, is the culture of the company. That's maybe also the hardest thing to assess many times. I listen, what I hear, what I see, and what I feel when I talk to these companies, really trying to understand, are they passionate about growth? Are they passionate about their people and their employees? Do they have values, and do they use their values and their skills and their behaviors in order to contribute to their customers?
So these are the things I try to find out about the companies. But then how do I find acquisition targets? Well, my role is to find internal leads. And I have many assets, actually. One is that I have been working for a long time in one of our companies, which means I know what it takes to be an Indutrade company. But I also have 20 + years in the industry, as Gustav said, and that is also, of course, very valuable in order to understand markets, products and companies. But my greatest asset by far is the network I've built over the years, both externally with customers, suppliers, industry experts. But even more importantly, the internal network of managing directors, which I work very closely together with. But also the people in our companies. They are a great asset in this work.
And obviously, the Indutrade team with both the acquisition team, but also other people within our business. So this is really a team effort, finding new targets. And I use and get support from this network, both when it comes to opportunistic leads. They feed me with continuously good prospects that I can look into. But they also are a great support in the strategic work, trying to find new targets. For instance, I work together with our companies in order to explore acquisition prospects near our existing companies, like Bo was talking about, the white spot analysis, trying to find maybe similar companies in other geographical markets. We look into the companies' suppliers, their customers, but also the suppliers and customers' distribution network. Here we can find great many targets. And actually, probably most.
I would say for me, it has been the best way of finding new companies so far. But we also look at a more long-term perspective, looking into new markets, new products, and sub-segments within energy in my case. For instance, I've been looking at electrification of the industry and what components and products do we need then. H2 production, steam production, of course, and products in these areas. Lately, and right now, I'm actually looking quite a lot into heat exchangers. So these are also the long-term things, trying to build new possibilities for the future. Employing AI has certainly sped up this process. It's much easier today to make good market analysis and also actually creating long lists of companies. It's easy to get companies out of AI. It can actually also help you in a large way of sort of qualify them to some extent.
But what they can't do, they can't tell me that AI can't tell me that much about these companies' culture or their strategic initiatives moving forward. So once again, I would like to emphasize that our employees are our superior quality control mechanism in order to secure high-quality internal leads. And I would like to just end up with a few examples. It's always fun to talk about examples, trying to make you understand a little bit how my daily work can look into this. And the first one is this summer. Me, together with a team within Indutrade, me and a colleague, another BSL, we made contact with a few of our companies, and we sat down and we started to figure, okay, how can we break into the aquaculture business in a better way?
These companies we talked to, they had a footprint to that and were selling quite a lot. We were strong with valves, hoses, and pipes. But we started to look into what other products are there. And we find quite a few interesting product areas where we thought, here, we could actually probably find good companies. So once again, we used AI to identify a whole list of companies. And that was probably evaluated at 1,000 companies. But then we brought that down to about 40 companies that had the right owner structure, the right size. And attractive profitability. Then we sat down with this and looked at it in the team, trying to find out, okay, do we know this company one way or the other? And here's the key for me.
I personally have a little bit tough with making cold calls, trying for 40 companies, hoping to find a lead. So instead, we sat down really and realized that we do actually have contacts one way or the other with these companies or some of them, and then we started with those. Fortunately for me, most of them were actually also participating in a large exhibition in Norway. So I could just go to that exhibition and learn much more about the companies there, talking to the people, getting to know them, understand the culture, etc. So now we have a couple of interesting leads in this area, which we are pursuing for the future. Finally, sort of an interesting, fun story for me was an add-on acquisition we made beginning of this year.
It's a small company we a cquired Pemac AS to one of our existing companies, Fagerberg AS in Norway. The whole story started with two employees meeting at an exhibition, started talking, realizing that, wow, we have a lot in common. We have complementary product portfolios. We are strong in different geographical areas of the Norwegian market. Maybe we could support each other and work together. Long story short, they went back and a contact was made between the owner of Pemac and the managing director of Fagerberg. They put together a business plan where they're looking at the merger of these two companies. They presented it to me and I thought it looked really interesting, ending up in an acquisition about 18 months after the initial meeting of the exhibition. So that is in practice how it can work. Thank you very much and I'll leave over to you, Gustav, to summarize.
Yeah, to sum up a little bit, you know, Indutrade is about evolution rather than revolution. So the most important message here is that we stay the course. The acquisition characteristics have remained more or less stable over time and we will continue to acquire Indutrade-like companies. We stick to the concept of being opportunistic and open-minded. We will not change that. We have invested in the team. We have more acquisition specialists, so we will leverage that going forward, and we do already. And we will strengthen our proactive lead generation primarily through our business segment leaders. And that means that we step-wise will increase the number of acquisitions per year and the EBITDA contribution over time. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you very much, Richard, Andrea, and Gustav. And yes, we actually need to jump straight to the next presentation.
And I welcome up Joakim Skantze, our business area manager for life science.
Thank you very much, Mårten. It's a great pleasure to be here. And I just want to start to say by that to be the BA manager in Indutrade is most likely the best job you can have. You are really a tight team that works together to achieve a goal. And what you do is to develop companies and do acquisitions. Can you do something better? And then you interact with MD, high performer MDs, as you, Jacob, back in the seat there. And I think we really have to emphasize that the people that make the most value from Indutrade are our MDs. They are really important. And they work very hard in their companies.
And then, from my perspective, to follow all these 35 companies within a year with all the situations is very inspiring. And then it comes to acquisitions. And now Andrea just slipped away. But he arranged a closing dinner actually last week. And those closing dinners can be quite emotional. The seller talks about that he has grown up with this company. He has been there down and upwards. He has finally decided to sell his company and he has told his employees that I actually sold my company and I decided to sell it to Indutrade. And then you feel that, okay, we Indutrade, we actually take over someone's baby and we're going to be the lifelong parent of this baby. So it's really a strong commitment, a strong responsibility. And I think this gives us a specific purpose in the job we actually do.
But the main purpose is, of course, to create shareholder value. And the purpose of this presentation is to give you some insight on how to run a business area. My short background, I'm also an electrical engineer. I worked a couple of years within Accenture. Then I joined my family company. During 10 years, I was part of the fourth generation and we sold equipment and consumables to the graphic art industry. We were about a SEK 300 million turnover company with 100 employees. Typical trading Indutrade company, actually. Then I moved over to Traction, which is a smaller investment company. But the thing with Traction was that Traction always invested in minority shares because we strongly believed in the driving force of the entrepreneur. And I think that is one of the keys. Within Indutrade, do not destroy the driving force of the entrepreneur.
But within Traction, we actually worked with more of turnaround cases or we thought that we're going to build value by working with low-performing companies and create value. But after experience here in Indutrade, I think it's much better, much easier to create value from already existing good cultures where you know how to price, when you know how to compete, when you know how to be profitable and a winning team. So I really prefer the model of buying already good companies. The first eight years, I was responsible for the industrial components. I think we had a good growth, but we also had a good growth from a team perspective. I think we started to build a good way of working as a team. And I think we had that travel also within the management team in Indutrade.
If I take some time to reflect on Indutrade today and Indutrade when I started, I think we had the same values of the entrepreneurial drive, the decentralization, and things like that. But I think we are more of a professional owner today. I think we are more of a strategic partner to our companies and MDs. I think we are using or getting out the dynamics of the networking and the experiences within the family in a better way today. I think we have a better idea how to grow companies from SEK 80 million to SEK 150 million. That's quite a huge step from an organizational point of view. I think we have a better view of how to grow companies from SEK 150 million to SEK 300 million and SEK 300 million to SEK 500+ million .
And then I think also the infrastructure in Indutrade with the leadership training programs, portal, and so forth are also a big improvement, as well as actually driving business value out of sustainability. Why life science? Well, the medtech portfolio, we had a medtech portfolio already within industrial components. That was a quite small portfolio, but it's grown and we develop it well. And also now it's a very small portfolio. There are a lot of opportunities. It's a dynamic market segment and a lot of white spots. So, for me, we added the pharma companies, and that was new for me, more of an international challenge. So I'm very proud of taking care of the life science business area. Then if you talk about development opportunities, I think it's quite clear. The size of a business segment today is the size of an industrial component.
So if we are able to c reate the business segments as engines, as industrial components and other BAs. I think there is a great future of development here. So I think our task is actually to make the business segment leaders, the business segments, very dynamic in their growth. Okay. Okay, shortly about life science. We have two major business segments, the pharma segment and the medical. Pharma, you have huge; it's a huge market, huge players. The customers are the big pharma companies, pharmaceutical and biotech companies. The pharma manufacturing is well spread over Europe. We are positioned also very well spread over Europe. The medical part of the business is more sub-segments. We have the med tech, we have the lab tech portfolios, we have the diagnosis area. And our customers there are the hospitals, the care centers, the labs, the diagnostic centers. So it's two totally different areas. Pharma is slightly larger.
Medical has slightly higher EBITDA percentage. About 40% is consumables, 35% process components, 20% equipment, and 5% service. And I would say also that the pharma part of the business is more project-oriented than medical. So compared to industrial components, I think that life science is a bit more volatile in the short perspective, but it has a very good underlying growth. Okay, within the pharma business, I think we have a very strong cluster within the pharma companies. You hear Bo and Patrik talk about the single-use companies. They actually sell flow components and single-use assemblies. And we have about 10-ish companies and 11 clean rooms. And they work very tight with each other in that sense. They share same suppliers. They have shared experiences and use. And I also think that that group of companies we have is very well spread over Europe.
So we are a very attractive supplier to other suppliers. Then I should also mention that the pharma production, that's really a quality-driven process. It's not a process-oriented process. It's very quality-driven. So you have certifications, validations, live up to GMP standards. Which means that there are no mistakes, no contaminations. That means also that our customer validates our processes and approves that. So when you are in a process, you are in. They never change you, and also the same, if you are a qualified supplier, you will always get requests further on if you do a good job. And I think we are in a very good position there with good positions on our main customers. Some examples. Colly Flowtech, they supply these single-use systems to Cytiva ÄKTA 450, which is purification equipment. And these single-use assemblies are exchanged every batch.
They are then produced in a clean room in a certified process. This is a [top set] application from UltraPure, also used in sterilization verification processes. That's a heat system with valves and pumps from ESI and the green line. The last one is a skid, which actually produces highly purified water to steam processes. The medical companies, they are a bit smaller, more different, and we have more small sub-segments. Our task here is actually to build those small sub-segments larger. We work very actively with add-on acquisitions or acquisitions around those sub-segments. Here we are much stronger in the Nordic area, but we have companies also in Poland, Czech, U.K., and now Italy as well. This is a very good group of companies with good EBITDA and growth potential. Some examples, Rubin Medical provides pumps and CGM systems to type 1 diabetics.
The good part here is that a pump has a warranty of four years, meaning that we sell consumables for four years, reservoirs, injection sets, and also this glucose sensor here. So very good business. AMAB is a smaller company that's communication and alarm systems to hospitals. Karolinska has their systems, and we are a market leader in Sweden for that. Labema is another interesting company in Finland. They supply equipment and consumables to labs and diagnostic centers. This is a Hamilton robot for liquid handling, connected with an AI analytic platform from SOPHiA GENETICS to detect early diseases. Okay, so our team. I think we have a fantastic strong team. And the organization is set up is the same from each BAs. We have some business segment leaders. We have a business controller. We have a financial controller. We have a dedicated proactive M&A resource.
A people person, and also a sustainability person. This is the lean organization for a turnover of SEK 7.5 billion. I think it's also worth saying that what you have said earlier. I think we as a business area has a very. Bo is letting us drive this as in Indutrade's. We are very self-independent. We set our own targets. We have a clear responsibility to develop the business areas. We have good support from the Indutrade infrastructure of the trainings, the portal, M&A knowledge, expertise from finance, and so forth. The main task we have is to develop and acquire. We acquired seven companies last year, four standalones and three bolt-ons. This year, we have acquired six companies, two standalones and four bolt-ons. Our target is, of course, to increase this pace.
But it has to be said that we do that without jeopardizing our quality in looking for companies. And I think it has been mentioned as well by Bo that we don't have a specific EBITDA percentage target, but it should be quality companies with the potential to grow. It could be a 12% EBITDA company or a 30% EBITDA company. Then you can ask what targets do we have then for organic development? Well, as a BA, we have. In life science, high targets, but the targets are actually set in the companies themselves. So our targets are mainly a sum of the BA targets. But still, I think we should be able to grow more than average within Indutrade with the underlying growth we have. I think also that it's important to say that our ambition is to.
By organic growth also increase our organic leverage year by year. Then if you ask yourself, okay, what are the critical success factors to optimize organic growth? The number one answer is, of course, to have the right MDs and the right management teams in the companies. That means that our most important processes are the MD recruitment processes, the succession planning, and the training of people. Then I would say that the number two answer is to develop companies towards an ideal company or optimize its potential without destroying the driving force of the entrepreneur, of course. And here I think the BSS has a key role to coach, encourage, and act in different business challenges and with different MDs. So good leadership skills are essential. Patrik showed this portfolio model. I think this idea and model is quite simple but very useful as well.
So when we t ry to identify the growth potential in a company. Then we actually look into these parameters. Do we have the market opportunities? Do we have the right focus and offer in each company? Do they price right? Do they add value right? Do they have the internal structure? Do they measure what they do? Do they follow up what they do? Do we have obsolescence in inventory, good cash management? Do we have the good BA systems? Internal structure, I think, lacks a lot in companies that we acquire from the start and has to be improved over time. Then, of course, the leadership in the company is very important. Do we have a leader that encourages, drives performance? Let other people grow in an organization? And also a management team. Very often when we acquire a company, at least a smaller company, the entrepreneur has maybe one key person.
But if you want to grow a company larger, you have to create your internal engines and the engagement from the whole company. So I think these parameters actually summarize what's the growth potential you have in the company. And many of the companies do this exercise themselves, of course, but we also do it to map and see what we should coach and what we think is good to do over time. Then I think there is another interesting perspective, and that is that the culture in the company, I think, can either be growth-oriented, where you have a vision, a sales-driven leader, gladly do investments. And then on the other side, you have the profitable-driven companies where you focus on EBITDA, high gross margin, careful in costs, no risk-taking. And I think both of those cultures are fine and very good in the company.
And from a portfolio perspective, we can have both. And if I look into life science, I have more of growth-oriented cultures in my portfolio. While I in IC had more on the other hand. So I think these tools actually are quite good in mapping and understanding how you want the company to develop. And as said, to develop people is a key process for us. To develop people is the same as to develop companies. And I'm very proud that we have a very strong, actually, leadership training within Indutrade. Then we do succession planning. And you can also discuss whether you would prefer to do internal recruitments or external. I think that if you want a company to keep its culture and you build on existing success, of course, the internal candidate is better to prefer.
But if you want to change your culture, maybe there are in a company which is very profitable-driven. Huge potential to grow, maybe you would like to have an external MD with some more growth-oriented experience. And also, of course, if you want to do a step up in a company, you preferably do an external recruitment. We talked a lot today about acquiring. I would say that we do, as has been explained here, we have the bottom-up approach where the business segment leader sits down with the MD, goes through the market, suppliers, have a study, do a long list, short list. We have actually done two acquisitions this year on this approach, Nordic Labs in Finland, which was an add-on to Labema and also Optimed, add-on to Cirro.
Then we have the top-down approach where we actually look into areas where we are not today, but we want to be. Matrix is a good example where we actually had the long list, short list, and contacted that company in a very specific good area, and it took less than 12 months to actually conclude that deal. And then, of course, I think we should have the opportunistic view as well. But as said, if we go into the total new market where we don't have the knowledge, then it's very important that we actually acquire a company with good knowledge in it, with a good market, more of a low-risk company where we really feel comfortable and we can grow on. I think we've done two good opportunistic acquisitions. I categorize you, Fredrik Miclev, as.
For our perspective, not a key area from before, but you really added some knowledge and a fantastic company. We also acquired MeHow last year, which is also a very successful company for us. Then, me, as responsible for business area, we have some kind of structure in the way. From a yearly calendar perspective, we normally have three board meetings periods for the companies. And then the business area, we actually do once a year this portfolio model and growth analysis on our companies. We have our own strategy meeting to set our targets, our prioritizations, where we can be better. We have one with focus on the people development. We go through what succession candidates do we have, what development plans should we have for the MDs, and also the people under the MDs are the key people that we really would like to see develop.
And then the fourth meeting is more of a last year evaluation and put activities to the next year. We have one BA conference a year, and then it's up to the business segment leaders to have cluster meetings. Very much the cluster meetings we have today is a bottom-up approach. They actually contact themselves and work together. Okay, this will be my summary. Slide. Yes, we have a strong position in both pharma and the medical segment with significant growth potential. Yes, we have full responsibility for developing our companies and value accretive acquisitions. Yes, we have a lean international team driven by a strong purpose. Thank you for listening.
Thank you very much. Thank you, Joakim. Before you leave, I just want to check if anyone has any questions they would like to ask Joakim. No? Thank you very much, Joakim. Okay, everyone. So the last a genda item today is actually a panel discussion. So I welcome Jan-Erik Larsson, Fredrik Alexandersson, Anders Hegaard and Declan Field up on the stage. And. Yeah, as have been highlighted during this presentation, the core of Indutrade is, of course, the individual companies. And that is then why we also have invited two managing directors and two business segment leaders to have them share their perspective. So first of all, we have Fredrik Alexandersson, who is the MD of Miclev. It's a Swedish company, a Swedish technical trading company with an offering of products for safe microbiological processes in clean room environments. And then we have Jan-Erik Larsson, who is the MD of Alnab, which we heard Bo talk about earlier. It's a highly successful company as well. And you, Jan-Erik, you have been the MD for over 20 years now.
Yes. The third one only.
The third one?
As well as in Indutrade.
And then we have the two business segment leaders, Declan Field and Anders Hegaard. Declan, you are the co-founder of ESI Technologies in Ireland and the U.K. And you were previously the operations director a nd we approached the company back in 2010, and it was later sold to us in 2013.
That's correct, yeah.
Yeah. And you then became the MD as well, but now have moved to the business segment leader role. And Anders, you are having a shared responsibility, partly being the MD of the Danish company Klokkerholm within the automotive aftermarket. And also being a business segment leader then. So warm welcome. And if we start off then maybe with a question to you, Fredrik.
You quite recently sold your company to Indutrade, but what made you choose Indutrade and what factors were important to you when choosing your new owner?
Yeah, good questions. First of all, before you take a decision to sell a company, it's not easy because I founded a company in 1996. So it's not just a decision you take and wake up one day now and to sell the company. So it's a long process for me. But anyway, I took a decision a couple of years ago to sell the company. Based on the premise that the company and the employees should continue to operate in the same procedure as before. And then I were in contact with several companies, and one of them was Indutrade. And the information I received from Indutrade made me very impressed.
Their philosophy is that t he company they acquire shall continue to operate in the same spirit as before, as well as they are acquiring companies that are leading in their industries. Bottom line, I went into contract discussion, due diligence was made, and the 2nd of July last year, I sold the company, and right on, they created a board with professionals from Indutrade and me as an MD in the board. The board meetings are well-organized, well-planned meetings, and to my opinion, the strategy board meeting is the most important. Because now we are challenged by two professionals that have extended experience from the business in our strategy that has helped us a lot. Another thing, and I call it a toolbox. Indutrade has a toolbox of support in different processes like sustainability, legal, HR, finance a nd they're also offering education of the employees.
So in general. I would say that the company today that I sold one and a half years ago is a much more professional-run company. And this is from my heart. I'm super happy that I really sold the company to Indutrade.
And I mean, knowledge sharing is, of course, one big part of our offering to MDs, but h ow often do you interact with the business segment or other MDs within the group?
Yeah. Good thing. I'm part of the life science division, and I have over 30 years of experience in the life science industry. And now I'm meeting up during our MD meetings, life science MD meetings, where I'm meeting up with other MDs that have the same background like me, that we can exchange experience, sharing success stories. And for example, me as an MD, I always have some challenges in my day-to-day operations that I can address.
With other MDs during this meeting. If we look into the meeting we had in Milan, Italy, this year in June, Indutrade had also invited key speakers in different subjects that also support us.
A nd Jan-Erik, you have been with Indutrade for quite some time.
Yes.
Could you elaborate a bit on your view on the development of Indutrade during these 20 years that you have been the MD of Alnab?
Yeah. The most obvious thing is that we have, during this time, I think, grown at least 10 x, so there comes a lot of changes, of course, around that. But most importantly for me is what has not changed as well. The decentralized organization, entrepreneurial spirit, and the long-term perspective, which is very important for us MDs, but what I feel lately is the focus on organic growth.
We have seen in several slides now the c olored circles, where we have positioned our companies. And obviously, everyone would like to be on the top, but it's important to know where you are and where you want to take your company. And extremely good for us. And also what we have heard many times before today is the knowledge sharing, I must say. I feel like we have grown some kind of continuous learning culture, which is very important. And also very welcoming is the new organization, I would say, as well, with fewer divisions and the segments.
Yeah, I was about to ask that as well. I mean, how has the group, the new group structure, the new five business areas, how has that impacted your role as MD, if any?
In all good ways, I must say. I have a much better, or better, a faster access to my HR person.
We have our segment meetings, which is also very important, where we can help each other. Depending on where you are in this portfolio that we have seen, we can help each other. And I see also that the BAs must have done a fantastic job as well to organize the different segments. It's not. We have not put all the company names in a hat and just draw. There is a really good composition, I think the right word is, in each and every segment, which is very important. So we can really help each other there in a much, much better way.
Declan and Anders, what's your take and reflections on the group's structure and your new role as business segment leader?
Well, I work in life science. I work with Joakim. I look after U.K. and Ireland predominantly. So working with the companies, I find that i t takes a lot of time, but in a good way. So collaboration is what we try to instill. So we create a platform of collaboration. We can actually get the companies talking together. And when you think about it, it's all about the people. So if we're there and we're available, as you said. Then it does support the companies. And you're closer to the companies. You can make quicker decisions. And if you know what the company does, then you don't waste time talking about or explaining the issue. You already know where it is and you're better able to make the decision with the MD.
And I also think from Bo that has been a clear direction for us as segment leaders to really work with the acquisitions.
Both, of course, in the way that we do the white spot analysis, finding out what possibilities do we have, being active in this market. And when we are active, we also see that we'll get more of what we call the opportunistic opportunities that we should also get in a much, I think, in a very, very fast way.
And I mean, the relationship between the MD and the chairperson or a business segment leader is, of course, crucial. But could you elaborate a bit on how you're working with that balance of not interacting too much with the MD and, yeah, but at the same time challenging them?
I think the MD is king or queen of their own castle. And I think it's very important not to destroy the culture or the ownership. I think our support, our role is very much in the support role.
But the MD can be a very lonely position. You can be isolated sometimes trying to make all the decisions yourself. Knowing you're open to a chairman or a BSL who can help you make those decisions or just be that bouncing board, but also put you in contact with companies that may have taken the journey before. So you might have an opportunity to say, "Well, I need to build a clean room. How do I do it? Hang on a sec. We have companies who have done that. Let's put you in contact with them and get that collaboration going." So it's very much about working with the company, encouraging the company, and the management team. And Joakim again alluded to that. It's not just about the MD. It's about the depth and strength behind the MD. And that's where the management team comes in.
And I would like to see promotion from within. I think a very strong message from within the companies is that if we can promote from within, we've got people working for us. It's a good place to work.
And I think succession planning here. Succession is easier now being a segment leader because I think we have a chance to be much, much closer to the companies than with the old structure.
Yeah. And if we understand what the companies do, so you're shoulder to shoulder with the management team, the MD. So you're walking that journey as long as they want you to walk it with them. And I've yet to get rejected on that because I bring experience, I bring knowledge. And then we have a network ourselves that we work across.
So we're not just limited within our own segment or even in some cases within our own business area. So it's a much more focused approach, but it works very well for me.
And also, I think generally.
Oh, I can only agree. I mean, earlier when we had an MD meeting, we were 40, 50 people. When we have an MD meeting in the segment, now we are 8 to 10 people, and we can create much more value together. Faster. And we often see our sailing ships navigating in the archipelago. I don't know if it was Gustav who showed it. I can feel as an MD now that we have some new great tailwinds actually navigating there. I wish I was 30 again, to be honest. You are only 30.
And this last two years, it's been quite a special or challenging market situation.
But how do you ensure sort of the right balance between making decisions that deliver sort of short-term values and those that create long-term values? Maybe you can start, as business segment leaders, from your perspective.
I think a good supporting tool for us is our portfolio model. Because looking at the portfolio model, if you're up high in the growth companies, we have a better chance to look at it long-term. Whereas you go down and are a propelling company, then I think the short-term, which would be a much bigger part of driving that business, I think the understanding of that with the portfolio model is at a very good level.
But I think we are actually a long-term owner. We should have and focus on a long-term strategy.
So when we do employ short-term, it's for that kind of turnaround situation or an opportunity when the market that presents itself. We have situations that. Particularly on blue-chip customers in growth areas where they may come to us or one of our companies, we have an opportunity. We need to react quickly. How do we do it? So that would be a short-term decision, but always looking more long-term. So yes, engage in short-term, but look long-term.
Any reflections from you, Jan-Erik or Fredrik?
No, the only thing I can say is that just continue to work hard. And I used to say excellent can always be better. So that's my philosophy.
Agree. That's good. I want to see if anyone has any questions they would like to ask to the panelists.
Thank you. So I'm just a bit curious here since we have two business segment leaders up here. When the new structure was launched, how did it come about? Were you just encouraged to throw your name in a hat? Or how was the selection handled?
Well, the BSL as such is not really a new idea. I have the privilege of working in the ESI Technologies Group. And years ago, I knew if I needed to grow, I needed to create mini companies within ESI. So if you take our growth, we went from a turnover of maybe EUR 18 million in 2014 to, I think I can be corrected in this, EUR 85 million in 2023. To get that. And then what we had to do within that is obviously we needed people. So we created business units within that. So that was then taken.
I take the privilege just by Indutrade, and the bold structure was created, which was like a cluster MD looking after two, three, four companies. So it was very much a tested system before Bo and his team rolled it out. And then I was approached earlier on. And it ticked two boxes for me. It gave me a segment of companies with like-minded product groups, people across Ireland and U.K., and it was biopharma and medtech. So yeah, it was interesting. I jumped at it.
And for me, I would say I was fortunate enough to manage one of the larger companies in Indutrade for some years, quite successful. Then slowly my BA gave me more opportunities to work with the boards. And then when the new organization came up, I actually had an interview with my BA and with Bo as well.
And then I also had previous experience from a different segment with 12 years experience from that segment, and then I ended up getting this role, which is now a dual role right now.
Thank you. Any more questions from the audience? One more from Karl.
Thank you again. But what you mentioned about the bolt-ons, we touched a little bit about it. In terms of the prior presentations with M&A and so on. But w e view either as managing directors of one particular company or now as business segment leaders of several. How do you look upon the kind of encouragement from the Indutrade structure to look at growth opportunities in terms of a bolt-on rather than as a business segment leader to acquire a kind of complementary company?
If I understand you correctly, you're saying. Particularly a question is on bolt-on.
So will we find a company that we bolt-on to an existing company? That comes from within the companies themselves, I find, that the MDs, we challenge. I mean, part of the board structures, we challenge the companies every year to grow. We make sure they realize their potential. We're not. We're all want to be up there in that portfolio mapping. So to do that, y ou will get opportunities. I'm working in one at the moment where it's a bolt-on, but the MD is driving it. So we would encourage that. We're just going through the process. So yeah, I would encourage bolt-ons, yes. If that's your question.
Yes. So basically. Are the bolt-on ideas stemming from the individual companies or encouraged from the business segment leader?
That could be both, I would say.
Both, I'd say.
It's like when you do a budget in the company. It can be part of a mock budget where you look at your products and you look at your customers, and then you come up with a figure. The companies themselves will be pushing for growth, and there's two ways you can do that. You can grow organically, or if you want to get an opportunity, it comes up, you take it, and that's a bolt-on.
Thank you.
Perfect. Thank you very much. I think we'll end the panel discussion here.
And lastly then, Bo, welcome to the stage. And now you have the possibility to ask any final questions you might have. So, do we have anyone wanting to ask a question?
Crystal clear.
Crystal clear. Oh, perfect. But from my side, thank you very much for participating today.
I leave it over to Bo for any closing remarks.
Also, thank you from my side. I think it's been really good on our side. We have tried to be comprehensive, transparent, and give you an insight into how we think in terms of the group management, but also in a business area perspective, business segment perspective, management or managing directors, the functional area in terms of acquisition, so try to be open, transparent, showing our way forward. We have made a deliberate investment in a new structure. We have added some resources and these resources work in terms of the business segment leaders in a new way. They support their companies, try to strive for organic growth together with the MDs, and also have a clear target in terms of acquisition growth and pipeline building, and altogether, we are set for growth.
And our ambition is, as I said, to again double the size of Indutrade, work with both top line and, more importantly, bottom line, and create value also going forward. And we have the structure now to double the size more or less without a big new reorganization. Now it's delivery, it's focus, and sort of moving forward. So by that, thank you. Hope you enjoyed the afternoon here. And please stay on for another while if you want to chat with any of us or look at the exhibitions and so on. Thank you very much.