Hello and welcome to this Q1 and Annual General Meeting presentation with I-Tech. With us today we have CEO Philip Chaabane. My name is Kristoff Bergan, and I work for Finwire Media. After the presentation, there will be a Q&A session, so if you have any questions, please visit finwire.tv and click on this webcast, where you will find a question form on that page. With that said, I hand over the word to you, Philip.
All right. Thank you so much, and all very welcome to this quarter one presentation, which is then also extended with a few slides as regards to the upcoming general annual meeting. Let's start then with a focus on the quarter one deliveries from our side. A short introduction to who we are for those who are new to us. I-Tech is a company spun out of the University of Gothenburg research programs, where support was given also from Chalmers and other entities here in town, and we have found offices and located now in the AstraZeneca BioVenture Hub. I-Tech is listed on the Nasdaq First North Growth Market, and in all essence, we are having one product, a biotech solution to fight marine growth on underwater structures, meaning ship hulls and also boat bottoms, so to say.
The purpose is to save fuel, and in terms of leisure boats, also maintenance of course. To save fuel is everything here, when it comes to the shipping industry, who consumes a lot of fuel to transport goods. The product has been gone through significant regulatory evaluations and a lot of development. It's now available since some time, available to the global antifouling paint makers, who are then supporting the shipping industry with application of antifouling coatings to the hulls. As I mentioned, the product is approved in the most important markets, covering the full needs for the shipping industry, and we're working our way through different minor markets, which are on the other hand more important for leisure boats market, and we'll come back to that later on.
The global market means that we are exporting. Everything is going out of Europe, basically. We have some deliveries in Europe, but most is to Asian regions where shipping has its major footprint. We have gained a lot of experience and certainly so has our customers, so the product is now offered and in a range of products, and more than 700 vessels are now using the technology inside their antifouling coatings in one way or the other. We're on the tipping point from going from a so-called startup to a full-blown industrial entity with a export and highly efficient and lean structure internally, which you will see in the financial figures. It's all about the molecule that goes into antifouling coatings.
It is a special ingredient that repels its target organism, which is the barnacle larvae. Barnacles do exist in all oceanic waters, and they have a tendency to attach on all different kind of structures. When they do, they build shells, and that creates roughness, and roughness means resistance. Sorry. Resistance through water, and that's what you want to avoid. The question is how to combat that. In this way, we repel these creatures without affecting them biologically, and we do that in a tremendously efficient way with far lower concentrations used than any other solution. On top, it's more powerful and can be combined with various types of other ingredients which are necessary to keep other fouling organisms away from the hull.
The power of the product can be illustrated on the bottom picture, where you see a test patch with Selektope included and one without. The one without is obviously then a hard-performing, more traditional type of antifouling coating. In very static situations where the vessel is laying idling in warm waters normally, the attachment of barnacles is quite aggressive. Here we show there is a resistance to build barnacle shells on the hull when you use Selektope, which is much appreciated. The market is quite big, as you may know from previous discussions. There's a lot of ships who are responsible for the global trade. We know that from the impacts when it closed down certain ports and so on, that there's a hiccup all over the place.
Most goods actually go on sea, on vessels in one way or the other, illustrated here by a chemical tanker or oil tanker. These need support, and so there's a whole bunch of tugboats and other industrial boats in this segment. You also include the oil industry's supply vessels and so on. There's a lot of pleasure boats of various sizes that also are using antifouling coatings. All in all, this generates in a quite big potential $350 million-$500 million worth of Selektope sales if the molecule finds its way into every single liter that is produced. The beauty of the industry is that the change of coatings is mandatory at every three to five years, depending on the age of the vessel.
There's a large volume of maintenance opportunities every year and also on the new building side for all of these segments. That is a good thing as we always have a good chance to get the product on. Once it's on and appreciated, there's a fair chance that the next dry docking will turn into use the same kind of coating system. Into the quarter then. It's a quarter with increased profit and improved profitability. On the other hand, we see quite a flat trend on the net sales side. The highlights as we said, the EBITDA and the EBIT levels which come out very positively over the quarter, improved, compared to the same quarter the year before.
As you probably see clearly here, the gross margin has jumped up to 55% for the quarter. Cash flow has also shifted significantly to the positive side, although this will continue to vary from quarter to quarter depending on when deliveries go out and payments come in and payments go out. For this quarter, we just leave it a short note that it's good that it's positive. The cash balance is still very strong, so the financial side is very robust with high solidity. We should also say that we have a quite good customer mix for the quarter.
It's maybe not as good as this has been in the past, but there's no signs that will not come back and, you know, there are normal variances in this. Chugoku is around 80%, a bit below on the contribution on the volume side. On the pandemic side, for us in Europe, it's history as we tend to say, and we're starting to meet up and, you know, live the life as normal, but that's not true at all for the Asian parts. That is actually causing a lot of problems for the industry as such and potentially for us as well. That's, you know, lockdowns drives inability to work and so on. We come back to that.
We also see high raw material pricing structure coming around, which is putting pressure on most of us. Those are the key highlights for the quarter. Giving you some more meat on the bone here. If we start to talk about the raw material prices, I actually borrowed this slide from our official Chugoku presentation in their quarterly report not too long ago. It can be found on their webpage. The purpose of it here is only to illustrate how raw material prices is developing. It's really not going in a direction where it actually lowers the speed of increases. It's well, maybe for the first quarter here, it maybe flattens out a bit.
Looking the quarters below, behind us, it's really a tough situation on the cost side for all the paint makers because domestic naphtha is a solvent which are used heavily in all kind of paint systems, including antifouling. This is something to keep in mind, see how good they can transfer prices onwards, and, you know, hoping that they can squeeze out margins on this, and that will help everyone to move forward. This is a risk area of course, and at some point that may be an issue for us as well. On the other hand, there is this lockdowns, creating a logistical nightmare here and there.
Shanghai, which is a significant port with a large impact on the global availability of materials and goods, is not functioning properly because of said reasons. We see here on a very holistic view and a snapshot from MarineTraffic yesterday that there's a whole bunch of anchorage going on. All of these are vessels at anchorage, and we have filtered out, so it's only the commercial trading vessels. A lot of ships are waiting either with goods on board to ship in or waiting to get in to get goods out.
Obviously, this puts a lot of side effects into the economy, and in this case, actually, factories are closing if they're located in Shanghai, and factories outside may suffer from temporary lack of material, which means paint may not always be possible to produce, or at least not the paint of choice. This may have an effect definitely on the growth rate, of course. Two important factors to keep in mind. Talking a little bit then on the ship repair and new building market. As you may know, I-Tech's products are used in both areas with a large emphasis on the new building market, as most of all customers that use our product is active on the new building market.
Only one of them is also active on the dry docking market. If we start to focus on the new building side, we see that volumes are still a bit low compared to the 2021, where you had 85 million deadweight ton on the scale here. We're still in a declining phase on 2022 year's deliveries. All of those already have paint, so we really don't care too much about that. More important is 2023, where paint is being ordered, and we see a jump upwards here towards 2021 year's levels, and the year is not concluded yet. There might be a chance to get in some more orders here, although they're likely to spill over to 2024.
We do, on the long term, see a large potential for an increase in new building as new ships with new technologies will outperform old ships with old technologies. Hence, new building would be one of the measures to meet the sharp requirements on reducing greenhouse gases throughout the industry. In that sense, it's good that we are part of virtually most of the paint makers' product portfolios in the new building segment. It should be noted that our customers are very focused on using our technology in Korea, which is about 30% of these volumes. That's just for your information. We should move over to the dry docking side.
As mentioned previously, it's something that should be recurring quite steadily every year, at least on a total amount side, because ships do have to dry dock. Number of ships is not decreasing, so hence it's expected to be at least on the flat side. We know there are some periods here where there has been requests for retrofitting either scrubber systems or ballast water treatment systems and so on, that puts a peak in the system or there is a peak in 2015, that means 2020 and 2025, there will be a lot of dry dockings expected to go on. In either case, we only see a positive trend here to retrofit new technology and take care of general maintenance of ships.
This is good that it's maintained and actually supposed to grow. Here, Chugoku is available with Selektope products, and they have about 20%-25% market share globally. All right. We move on and give you a glance of the products then that are offered. Not to go through these in general, but ocean-going vessels, which are then the dry docking markets, basically have a few different options when it comes to dry docking. Those are the Chugoku ones. For the new building side of these same, it's a contribution also from other paint makers, Jotun and Hempel, but they are for new building, should be said.
There are regional markets of interest and as we're deep into the Chugoku portfolio, there's a whole range of different products here in this area, both combinations with Selektope and copper, but also copper-free with Selektope as backbone. Where who is serving the domestic fleet, which is then smaller vessels, but quite a few as Japan is a great economy and an island. Great needs to ship goods on water. We're slowly going into the leisure boat market, and why I say slowly is because it's regulatory quite troublesome from a paint maker perspective. We also have to make investments into this area, region by region, so we select them carefully. In Japan, it's already done, meaning products are available.
We are, as you know from previous presentations, in a long process of getting the same position in the United States. As I said again, on the new building side, we have a large presence in both amount of products and amount of paint makers, and many of these are not mentioned up here because of confidentiality reasons. We cannot disclose what those products are or exactly who the paint makers are. There is a lot of interest in this area, and we do ship quite a lot into Korea. All right.
A slide that you may remember from before, one of the big drivers is the IMO regulation on greenhouse gases, both on the new building side, but in this slide we are more focused on the continuous maintenance part of it, where a ship will be rated depending on how good it's actually maintained and improved year-over-year in operation. A ship that is improving its performance compared to one or two years before will get a better rating. As you may understand, a hull that doesn't catch fouling is so much better than a hull that does catch fouling and will move the ship in the wrong direction in this grading. That in itself will cause problems as those who ship goods thus put pressure on a ship owner to have a certain status here.
They don't necessarily go down into the choice of technology, of course, but they do care about being on the lower end of this grade here, meaning A, B category of vessels as part of their sustainability agenda. Summarizing this, opportunity side, and I'm saying this because sales has been flat, not only this quarter but a few quarters before that. It's worth having a discussion about what could be in the forecast moving forward. We won't make any statements, of course, but we can give you some guidance, same guidance as we use.
One is the expected growth in both new building and dry docking over the five years from this year's levels, driven by the need of making ships more efficient in different ways, either by retrofitting technology or by building new. We are more present in the market now with technology than before, meaning there are more customer products out there using Selektope than ever before. Before the pandemic is a completely different picture to now, where I think we have about double the amount of products as we did before the pandemic. We were hoping that that would leverage an increase in sales already this year, but there are other issues around the world which are putting a countermeasure to that, as we have touched upon.
Then finally, last but not least, these IMO regulations. All of these should generate a very good incentive to see a pick up in interest and commercial activity around this technology with the existing products that has now been mentioned. On the downside, obviously, raw material pressure is a key thing to keep in mind. Although things seems to be transmitted quite well up in the value chain, ultimately affecting cost of shipping, of course, but it seems to be manageable in one way. Of course, a lot of big companies are fighting the cost side and doing everything they can to squeeze out margins and select products with the best margins and highest volume and lowest hassle kind of profile. Not always those new products should be said.
There is a lack of ability to produce and supply vessels. Not vessels, sorry, coatings. I heard some story somewhere where the ship actually had coatings from a range of different paint makers to actually cover all the surfaces because no one could deliver the full scope. These are probably temporary hiccups, but still need to keep an eye on them. For Selektope, it's quite important that technology goes into the dry docking segment with more customers than Chugoku to really push the growth curve a few years forward into a new dimension.
Here we do see a lot of R&D activity, that is promising, although, there's a lot of secrecy in this context, we don't know so much, and even if we did, we couldn't tell that much. There is activity, and there's increase in so-called R&D volume shipments, now compared to before. The final picture here is a nice happening in Norway, where the first really big shipping conference, or not conference, a trade show, took place at Nor-Shipping in Oslo, where we had a stand together with the Berg Propulsion, like, meaning, together we could talk about the propulsion efficiencies, the way you can generate power from engine to water, in combination with doing that with as little disturbances as possible by having a clean hull.
A very nice combination and good dialogues on both ends were taking place. Most important also to meet people and see the industry, and the clear takeaway is that despite ongoing troublesome activities around the world, the industry is set and firmly focused on generating long-term efficiency gains to the industry, and that's how to make money. In that sense, we are in the right context, in the right time of opportunity. Let's hope things straighten out and give us a push forward in the sales side. Thank you for following this first half. There will now be a few short slides for the AGM that is on May 12th.
A few words on that, starting off with a nice picture here from the annual report, which you can find on our webpage, of course. Please read. Half of it is an informative fact sheet about the market, about us, and what we see and think, a bit more in-depth than what we can provide in a quarterly report. Please visit our annual report. In addition to that, the annual general meeting will be held electronically, pre-votes only, same procedure as through the last few years. Efficient and safe, as we didn't know really how things were to play out when we planned this. That's how it's gonna be held on May 12th.
Therefore, the importance of giving you some information on this conference call. A few words on the statements, on the CEO statements. You probably recognize this from what I just said or from previous presentations. We do have a strong position, have built a very strong baseline, on this, and we are clearly part of the industry trend of moving to a greener future. We have done that by positioning ourselves with more paint makers, with more products, and we also have so much stronger cooperations and involvements in the R&D work, both laterally speaking with other ingredient manufacturers, but also with paint makers as one way of sharing innovation and together bringing more efficient solutions to light.
Of course, we continue to mention the IMO requirements or maybe regulation nowadays on efficient shipping put in place with different kind of indices that the ship owners soon will have to start to follow. That kicks in 2023. Obviously the marine coating industry is a big part of this interesting movement to a greener future, because a good antifouling coating can definitely save a lot of fuel and carbon emissions. It's said that if the industry itself could convert fully into the most optimal antifouling coatings, there would be gains of somewhere around 80 million-100 million tons of carbon dioxide per year.
Of course, we want to be part of that, and all our fellow colleagues in the industry are working hard to make sure that we get this opportunity under control. Those are, you know, good platform, an interesting timeframe in the industry to be part of this green transition, and then supported by different kind of regulations. All of that is really pointing in the right direction. A bit on the market. There's a lot of paint produced per year. There's a lot of opportunities to grasp, and we do see strong development here from our own side. Speaking about the general market, as I said, there's a lot of CO2 to be saved, there's a lot of money to be put in the revenue side of the P&L, of course.
That's driven by a large and relatively constant number of amounts of antifouling being produced every year, so about 100 million L, and that really includes all possible application types. That's not only the commercial shipping, which is a bit lower than that. It gives you some idea at least of what the industry is about and its potential and relevance when it comes to the CO2 side. As we're talking on the AGM side, we allow ourselves to look a bit back in time and over the years and from 2018 when the company was IPO'd. We see a good uptake on the gross margin side, starting at 36% and now pushing it up to 52%, looking at 2021 full year.
As you saw from this quarter, there are reasons to be positive or optimistic that that will increase over the years and over this year. The EBITDA has been positive over the last three years, which is a good shift from the year we did our IPO. Now we're hoping that sales will come up and then this figure will grow as a consequence. Initially I also said that we're a very scalable and efficient and lean company, which is actually very true. We don't need to grow our cost side just to make sure, you know, to grow top line. Top line will grow, and this will grow automatically without impact of other investments that are needed to keep up with that growth. We're well prepared to be part of an interesting journey moving forward.
Looking at 2021, again, some key events. Chugoku had a breakthrough on securing material and place an order for that, but in a silent period because of the COVID situation, then things started to look better and this was a sign that they want to reserve their rights to get volume from us and secure and help us plan production in as efficient way as possible. That was all very good. An order we're still working on, partially. Global Mercy was one of the PR activities, was the main PR activity, I should say, for the year.
A hospital ship that is using Selektope on its hull, a ship that is laying at quay, at anchor, very long time. A perfect match, an interesting project which we endorse a lot. We did have a breakthrough in our strategy of opening up and speaking and innovating with other companies. We do pay a lot of attention to the work with IFF, which is now sold. Their division of microbial control is now sold to Lanxess. Great project with great interest from both sides and open-minded ideas on how to help the industry come up with even better coatings that are lowering emissions to air and hopefully also lowering emissions to sea. All of that is running in the background.
Long-term projects, of course, as it takes quite some time to get the results from field tests. We strengthened the team a bit, both on the R&D side and the sales and the market side. Very exciting to get new team members with different backgrounds and different angles into our company to really help us improve in every aspect we can. We're very grateful for good recruitments in 2021. Finally, a slide on the growth developments on this chart up here, where we have a very nice situation, 2018 to 2020, just in quarter two when the thing, COVID hit, and actually put a stop to the growth, actually decreased it.
We're now doing everything we can to prepare and be as strong as we can to regain this interesting uptake in growth. We really hope that the curve will start to shift not too far away from now. A good development on the gross margin, which is continuously being improved despite other factors going on. That's good. Not least, positive EBITDA margin or result from all the way looking back to quarter four 2019 and all the way through to now. That's a sign of strength and sign of stability on the financial side, and we hope that the investors appreciate that the baseline and the case itself has been built so much stronger than only two to three years ago.
On top of that, we do have a lot of potential with new products and customers that hopefully can be released fully into the market when things stabilize. It's overall super solid financials, which open up for a good position moving forward. The AGM includes formalities, as you know. To take part of those, please go to poströsta.se and, if you're a shareholder, and then vote the way you want to. The main topics here is summarized. It's adoption of the income statement and balance sheet, of course. Allocation of company's results, discharge of liabilities, election of the board of directors.
Here it's worth to mention that we are proposing for the board, the electoral committees, proposing Raouf Kattan, who's a senior figure in the coating industry who we would like to work a lot with. Very good person and very good experience for this company and in this scope of time for the company's development. We look forward to get Raouf on board. We need to elect the auditor and remuneration of the board of directors, as always. As last year, there's also a decision on incentive program, and that was last year communicated. That would be an ambition to have a three-year program on the exact same terms in terms of size of the program. Last year, the one was launched.
This year it would be the second, and if that first statement holds, the third program should be launched next year. That's a vote for the shareholders to make. By that, I want to thank you and finish with this slide of a ship in Japan, where they tested Selektope on parts of it and maintained other coatings on the rest, and you see a tremendous difference again. Visually really looks interesting. Again, it's a new building ship in this case. Thank you so much, and I'm ready for questions.
Excellent. Thanks a lot, Philip, for the presentation. Now we have you on the screen as well. So let's kick off this Q&A session. You mentioned there that you had a strong development of the margins for a few years. In Q1, we had a strong margin as well. Could you please elaborate a bit on the development of the margins? As you mentioned, if revenue picks up from here, maybe later this year or depending on COVID, et c., do you think that you will keep the high margins?
Okay. First on comments on the margin itself. It has increased to new levels, as you say, so it's worth putting a remark on that. We have a better customer mix that supports a general increase in gross margin. We also have been successful in some price increases. Then there is always a variance here on cost of logistics and the whole supply chain cost that goes a bit up and down, certainly in these days. This quarter it came out quite well. We are clearly aiming to maintain this level that was communicated in this quarter. Again, there are some external factors that we cannot really control.
If logistics goes the way we want to and the customer mix increases together with higher volumes, this figure has a fair chance to remain where it is or possibly even improving. I would say, you know, around this figure for the year would be a good result.
Okay. Thank you. Next question. Is it possible to get some light on the customer development side? Any movements among undisclosed customers?
Yes, there are movements around undisclosed customers, and there are quite a few undisclosed customers now. I think we have three that are really actually contributing strongly to the sales figures, to the top line. What we see is that they are all preparing, not only preparing, they're offering their Selektope versions of whatever products there are, which are super difficult to find into the new builds or their special antifouling offers to capture the opportunity. Therefore, there is a lot of confidentiality aspects going on in this area. It's a bit important here to keep an eye on the growth on the new building side, because if that grows, certainly.
I mean, we only get figures on the global side, but Korea, Japan is quite a significant part of the new building scheme. We know that there's a good chance that we will get a lot of contribution from that.
Okay. Thank you. You mentioned there in the presentation that there has been a huge development in products the last years. If we look ahead, are you planning on launching new products, or have you just recently launched new products that you can share a bit more details on?
Yeah. It's a good question, right? From our side, the product remains the same. From the customer side, there are developments here and there. What has been in a public forum, although we have to search a bit, is in Japan and Korea where our customer, Chugoku, announced the regional pre-launch of yet another Selektope product. I think it's, you know, number 14 in their range of products or something for the Japanese market. The interesting thing about that is that's a new copper-free formulation.
That is good because the copper-free versions, the one they have and potentially this one comes out really interesting when it comes to their margins as they can avoid to use a metal that is quite expensive at the moment. That is interesting that they shed light on a product that they've been working on for quite some time, and that all that efforts are actually going in this case to copper-free formulations, which we think is not only good for Selektope, but the way to go to keep costs under control and hopefully to support our argument of also reducing the emissions, not only to air, but also to sea. Let's see where that goes.
It's an early-stage thing, but at least they touch upon it. That's a good development. In addition, as mentioned, there are more products that we're out there. We don't have names on all of those, as I said, for confidentiality reasons. The chances that a ship gets Selektope now is much bigger than two years ago.
Okay. Thank you. If we look ahead, what's your thoughts on the market outlook? Is it fair to expect a recovery during H2?
That has been our expectations all the time, and that's been driven by the fact that these IMO indices are kicking in 2023 and nothing really happens with anything until it gets really hot and urgent. In second half of this year, you're clearly approaching 2023, so decisions need to be made. That's been one factor. Of course, it's not so short-sighted in this industry, so starting to see an increase in second half this year should be reasonable. Then that growth trend hopefully remains many years as it takes time to, you know, for ships to come into dry docking. So that's one reason. The other reason is that there are much more products on the market in Japan and elsewhere with Selektope.
At some point, the results from their pre-launch or early launch activities should generate enough confidence to actually create a step change, and hopefully that actually occurs, second half of this year. That's how we built up that argumentation. Let's hope that the global, you know, political things or COVID-related things are not disturbing this, more than what it has done. Yeah, I cannot speak for that, so let's see.
Okay. Thank you. In which currency do you have your production costs?
Dollars. We pay in dollars. We pay production materials, and you know, we buy material from suppliers in dollars, and we sell in dollars. There's cost in SEK on the labor side here, of course, on premises and so on. The currency contribution obviously had a positive effect, as you may understand, to this quarter.
Okay. Thank you. Next question. I-Tech has now five quarters of flat net sales like other paint makers. Does this mean that I-Tech cannot gain market shares against alternatives?
By looking at those numbers, probably a fair statement, of course. We do see an increase in market share in the new building area in Korea, where all of the makers are focusing on this. We do see a decrease on the other hand, or have seen a decrease, as you all are aware, from the Chugoku side, as they pushed it through a lot of volume in 2020 and end of 2019. That became a lot of inventory during COVID. That is hopefully now resolved. There's been decrease in that side, an increase on the new building side, and hopefully Chugoku comes back, and then you have an increase on both sides. From those numbers, you say yes, is probably one of the conclusions.
Okay. Thank you. Are ship owners more sensitive in an inflationary environment? In that case that they go to cheaper alternatives.
Well, that was certainly the thought if we wouldn't have had this IMO pressure to improve efficiencies on the vessels. They have to invest, and they will have to find ways to invest, or else they will have much bigger problems than inflation. We hope that will countermeasure any other attempts to go cheap, to you know cut costs and be less exposed to the soaring metal or material prices in general. That's what we're hoping.
Okay. Thank you. What is the net effect in demand for Selektope-based products in light of the increased raw material prices? Will there be any negative effect for premium antifouling, for example, as paint makers increase their prices?
Not sure I follow the question fully, but paint makers are officially trying to raise their prices, of course, because they're suffering a lot on the cost side. From our side, we are monitoring the cost side closely. So far, we have been quite okay, and we have been able to push forward some of the issues we may have had or that we foresee we will have to the paint makers, to the customers. Meaning we need to keep up with the general trend in a certain sense, but also we are a bit reluctant because we think we have a good pricing model. We think we have a good offering. We need volume now. That's the most important.
Of course, we reserve our rights to change the price also on our side. When it comes to paint makers, obviously premium coatings become more expensive. Obviously, ship owners are probably more reluctant to use premium coatings in this environment. Again, the thing that could take out that negative factor could be the IMO regulation and the combo of high oil prices, which means the incentive to invest in premium antifouling coatings is much higher now than before. The last thing is that ship owners, at least the giant ones, certainly container and bulkers, if I understood this correctly, are making quite a lot of money, which obviously helps.
Big ship owners who have a lot of activity, who are really caring about the fuel bill and have the ability to do something about it, they will go premium. For the rest, there might be a short hiccup until they realize the IMO target is coming around, so you can't really escape.
Okay. Thank you. You mentioned there in the presentation the dry docking market. What can you do to grow more into your customers' dry docking portfolio?
Well, that's why we invest in R&D. That's been very clear for us already in 2018 that we need to do a lot more to make sure that the technology is easy to use, and we understand all the problems that may be associated with going from new building to dry docking. New building is very planned, very exact on when you produce it this day because you know you're going to apply it that day. One country, maybe two countries, very controlled environment for application and so on. Dry docking is different, right?
You can have one dry docking booking, and then three weeks before it's supposed to dry dock, the country is changed from the ship owner side because they have a different trade all of a sudden, and you have to ship all that material to a different continent where they now decide to dry dock. You need a lot more flexibility. To get there, you need an infrastructure to support that, and to get into those high volume products, we need to make sure that we can help our customers formulate a product that has a good interesting margin that doesn't suffer on the other formulation problems. That's why we invested so much in R&D because we understand that we need to make sure that we can get a grip on all these aspects.
I think we're doing quite well there. There's good grounds to think that we will see more activity in that area. Again, it's an R&D-related activity. You cannot only translate new building products directly into dry docking, at least not on a very global scale, maybe regionally. Investments in R&D is everything there, and there we're doing a lot of work since two, three years back, which I think is exactly the right thing to do.
Okay. Thank you. Last question for this Q&A session. Are you working with the clients of the shipping companies to make the shipping companies, so to speak, use better antifouling products and to reduce the effect on the climate?
Yeah. Good question, right. We obviously are not only working toward our customer, we try to be ambassadors for technology at the shipowner side and wherever else we can, where it makes a difference. It should be said that the key points of interest for us is obviously our direct customers. They need to feel happy and comfortable and find a winning position with our technology. That's the first part. Secondly, we need to have the shipowner community to understand the benefits of the technology, how they can use that to their advantage, and maybe even how that kind of antifouling could help them respond to the people that you mentioned in the question here, those who actually put goods on the ship.
To go directly to those, if you speak to big companies who are responsible for a lot of the transport of goods, they are not into technologies. They're mainly focused on this grading on the IMO scale as an example, or that the vessels are actually completely full and not transporting empty space, so to say. To go to them with technology is very difficult. It's not really on their radar. Ship owners, on the other hand, they need to focus on it. They need to make sure that their ships are compliant with this IMO indices and so on. In that context, we have a much bigger impact.
It should be said that we, together with everyone else in the industry, are very much promoting the nice effects of a good antifouling coatings with the 100 million tons of CO2 that can be saved every year, and that's that we do together. The whole industry is doing, working in the same direction. Of course, that affects those who put goods on the ship at some point.
Okay. Great. That's the third, final question for this Q&A session. A big thank you to you, Philip, for the presentation, both for Q1 and for the annual general meeting, and a big thank you to all of the viewers and to all of you who have sent in questions to us. I hope to see you again on the next presentation with I-Tech. With that said, I wish you all a very good day. Thank you.
Thank you so much.