Hello and welcome, everyone, to the Q1 presentation for I-Tech. With us today, we have CEO Philip Chaabane. My name is Christopher Berger, and I work for Finwire. After the presentation, there will be a Q&A, so please visit finwire.tv and fill in the form to the right, and I will take up the questions after the presentation. And with that said, I hand over the word to Philip, so please take us through Q1.
Thank you so much. It's a privilege to be here this day when we launch our quarterly report, the first one for the year, and I'm happy to take you through a few slides here. We will then discuss about I-Tech and its performance, so starting with some general facts about I-Tech for you who may be new listeners. It's a tech company. The company name comes from Interface Technologies, and we are located in the Gothenburg area, more specifically in the hub, in the sites of AstraZeneca in Mölndal, and there's a correlation between our product and pharmacological development, which we will come back to soon. We're a listed company on Nasdaq First North since 2018, and we are relying then on innovating in biotech and bringing it into the very traditional paint chemical industry, and that is where the innovation comes up.
The technology is available, which is an important aspect. It's not a new thing built on hopes. It's available, and it's being sold and used, and that is selling to the global paint manufacturers around the world with a focus on marine coatings. In this industry, approvals are everything, and we are proud to be approved by all the dominating legislative bodies for shipping, and that also sets a very clear entry barrier protection. As one can imagine, shipping is very global, so is our business, with an emphasis on Asian markets, of course, as that's where the bigger shipyards are nowadays located, and the product has been proving it in different paint systems on quite some marine vessels and commercial vessels of all types, mainly the bigger ones, and I will come back to a few slides on what we have seen from such vessels.
So the technology, which we called Selektope, is actually a molecule, as displayed in the center of the picture here. Its aim is to increase the power to resist marine growth on an underwater hull or a structure, normally then a ship hull. With the molecule available in the paint film, the barnacle larvae get affected in terms of having a triggering swimming behavior. And they get so-called hyperactive for a certain time before they regain their normal status. And by that action, they cannot settle on a surface. So it actually creates a flight mode, forcing them to leave the surface. And that's why tremendously small quantities of this molecule can be used, because it has this biological or biotech mechanism. Barnacles at the larval stage are maybe not so harmful, and people could maybe care less about those. But once they get settled and grow, they build shells.
That's where drag comes in as a big problem for ships who have a high impact on fuel costs. When this molecule is operating at its full effect in a paint film, you can see on the lower picture a test patch applied where Selektope is included. This comes from Chugoku Marine Paints. It's compared to a professionally applied existing antifouling coating without Selektope. You can see the difference after being exposed to quite severe fouling areas in static conditions over a longer time. This is where the power comes in, and this is where the value is delivered. What problem are ship owners then potentially facing when they have barnacle fouling? To start with, barnacle fouling is not the only fouling problem.
There are other fouling organisms as well, but they are more of the nature of being so-called soft fouling, bacterial, or micro fouling, so to say. Now, they don't create the same drag issue and are not as difficult to clean off as barnacles. So barnacles are the public enemy number one and need to be avoided at any time. And the effects of that barnacle coverage then is about 36% extra shaft power if the surface is covered by only 10% of barnacle growth. And that 36% at 50 knots is fairly well correlating with also the increase in fuel consumption. So it's everything to avoid barnacle fouling on a ship hull to maintain an efficient operation, to still make sure other technologies that are invested in and used that are aimed to save fuel also give the return they're expected.
High fouling degree here destroys every other measure of efficiency. So it's about keeping hulls clean, avoiding these kinds of tremendous increases in drag and fuel consumption. This is where Selektope comes in. Markets are virtually everything that floats around on the oceans, should be said. All oceans have a risk of barnacle fouling. Inland waters, not so much. The left-hand picture is the key area at the moment for our customers, and that's a global commercial fleet, which have quite big ships. They have a very stringent operation schedule, and they have a high cost concern. And fuel is one of the biggest aspects influencing the cost, and it may vary a lot depending on the price of fuel, of course, but also on the condition of the ship.
So the hull, which is then in contact with water, is then tremendously important to keep smooth and clean throughout the five years they normally operate between dry docking and maintenance work, now, there happens to be quite a few of these ships, somewhere around 50,000, not all as big as this one, but used for commercial shipping activities, so-called part of the seaborne trade fleet, these need to go into dry dock every three to five years, depending on the age of the ship, sometimes they can stay a bit longer, but normally, we estimate around 10,000-15,000 dry docks and paint opportunities per year. In addition, there's about 1,000-1,300 or 1,500 new builds per year in this domain. Hence, it's a very recurring market, and it's driven by class and regulations, so it has to happen independently of market conditions.
And then we have the center picture, which are smaller ships, less fuel consuming, of course, because they're smaller. But there are quite many, and they are normally operating close to shore, which means they have a big responsibility to keep fouling away for avoiding the spread of invasive species between coastlines. But it's also a type of ships that are now being more and more exposed to alternative fuels, electrical or hydrogen or methanol and so on, all of which have a higher energy price than current fuel. And then the hull becomes even more important to keep clean. We see that there are some initiatives also in this area to invest in really high-performing antifouling coatings. And at the far right, it's the big leisure boat market.
Many boats, but obviously not as important in volume of antifouling, with the exception of a few very big luxury yachts, of course. We have so far had this market as an untapped potential. Now, quite recently, we announced a cooperation in the United States to take the first important steps into this market with focus then on the United States and the surrounding territories, together with Pettit Marine Paint, a prominent paint supplier in the leisure boat domain. Also in Japan, there is some activity through our customer, Chugoku Marine Paints, who have launched Selektope-based antifouling specifically made for leisure boats and yachts in that area of the world. Products exemplified by this picture, not including all by any means, but it's a few, and you can see that officially there are three major paint makers displaying the use of Selektope.
One is Chugoku Marine Paints, the other one is Jotun, and the third one is Hempel. They all developed products that have extended and improved static performance, which means ships can be laying at anchor or at quay or anywhere without moving under longer times than before, without catching fouling, and then certainly not barnacle fouling. And hence, it is a protection to avoid those high numbers of extra drag that I showed in the previous pictures. We're proud to have these products on market, but we're also proud to know that there is about eight or nine more than what's displayed here, although not always for global use, but for some regions. This shows that there is a nice pickup in the use of technology in different paint systems for different areas and for different ship types. But these are the ones we choose to select here.
We show some pictures of performance evidence here, and we have a new building market and a dry docking market, i.e., maintenance. We ship currently around 50% to each of the volumes we ship. New building is important because during that process, there's a period of up to one year where ships are laying at quay, being finished and finalized before delivery. And during that time, it is of high importance that the hulls are not fouled. If they are, they have to be cleaned, and that damages the surface of the coating, and it reduces the lifetime. So having applied a coating with extreme power to resist fouling is of great interest. And that's also the key market where Selektope originated in 2015, and it's still an important market for all our customers when it comes to the use of Selektope.
And then the maintenance market is important from a volume perspective, of course. And there is a ship that we have been following now for about five years that has shown tremendous performance. In this case, it's a Chugoku-based product as well called CF Premium, which is then in this case a copper-free version. But that's different between the different products, I should say. Most of them are copper-Selektope hybrids, but in this case, it's a copper-free system. And over those five years, it's been showing a very low speed loss factor compared to sister vessels used from the same ship owner. The figures are so good that the ship owner has decided to apply it on a range of other vessels that have come in for dry docking. So very convincing results.
It has a very good static performance addressing new build, leisure boat, navy, and that kind of applications, and it's proving its performance in dynamic conditions over a long time period, which then addresses the global commercial fleets, so we have a very good platform here to continue to dig deeper into the product portfolios of our company or our customers, so a little bit about competition and barriers and so on. If we start with paints, it's important to say that the product is compatible with most of the paint systems used on the market today, which are then dominated by self-polishing systems or controlled depletion systems, as they're also called. These are the normal ones used and cover 90% of the market.
Then there's another kind of technology that has been growing for some time and has around 10% market share, which is silicones that sometimes include biocides, sometimes not. The technical compatibility is believed to exist, but it requires more development before it can be fully proved. When it comes to actives and biocides, it's a range of products that are tremendously well evaluated nowadays by authorities. And they are probably among the most well-tested or evaluated products of any kind on the market. The regulatory processes are not too far off from what you see in the pharma industry and so on. Having had an option of around 40 different substances 10 years ago, it's all boiled down to somewhere around eight approved substances around the world. And three of those are targeting hard fouling.
And hence, one or at least one of those three has to be included in every antifouling paint produced that is used in ocean environments. And Selektope is then an interesting candidate as it is powerful enough to replace other substances, but it's also flexible enough to boost other. And then the boosting effect is normally done together with the use of copper sulfide, which makes it very compatible with a big number of paint systems and ingredients. Patents are important, and we do have upstream patents, formulation patents, as well as production patents. And we have a brand we're very proud of, and we use our brand as a symbol of power in the antifouling coating, but also a symbol of sustainability as it's used in tremendously small quantities per liter paint to provide this effect of saving fuel and emissions to air. So the brand is very important.
Also, regulatory approvals are everything in this industry. The European Union is leading it together with U.S. EPA in terms of sophisticated evaluation processes. It takes time and requires a lot of investments, but once you get through, you're one of very few. And here we are happy to see that we are approved under European BPR approval, and we are currently in the renewal process of it to hopefully improve and make it even better. We're also approved in China, Japan, and Korea under similar legislations, and we're taking the steps into the U.S. So all these together, I mean, patents, brands, and regulatory approvals constitute a major barrier for any active agent in this industry. Customers, we mentioned a few. It's difficult to exactly assess who is biggest and where they are among the big five, so to say.
The important thing is to say there are five big players who are clearly dominating the market. Then there's another four, so in total nine. These other four are either strong locally or are upcoming, meaning they are likely to take market share and try to make their way into the big five. The good thing is that we work with almost all of these nine, and six out of nine are actually contributing to our top line in quarter one this 2021 year. That is an important message that the technology is now being picked up by not only one leading customer, but also a range of the other ones in this group of quite exclusive suppliers of marine paints. Chugoku Marine Paints remains a leading customer and has launched quite many paints recently.
We are actually part of six out of their nine fuel-saving products available in their home market in Japan, in which they control approximately 60% of the market. So they really have managed to take full advantage of technology and use it to improve performance and meet end-users' requests on sustainability and performance and fuel saving. So that's very good. If we now look into the quarter, which we released this morning, some key developments, as you may have read, is a 7% revenue growth compared to the same quarter last year, which at that point was a very strong quarter. If we take away currency effects, we have about 12% volume growth between those two quarters. So very positive revenue figures coming in here.
Also important is the EBITDA, which is positive, SEK two million positive compared to one, partially relating then to lower costs, as many have reduced travel budgets and so on. But I think the thing I want to highlight is we have a positive net result this first quarter, which is then the first time ever. We have still effects of external factors, and it is difficult to assess markets. It's still effects of the pandemic. Many parts of Asia have no rollout of vaccines or at least very limited. So we still see lockdowns and so on, which affects the investment appetite, but also the practical work in the dry dock or in new build activity. So we're quite humble about the future here, knowing that there are still braking or reducing effects here on the growth curve.
Then we have the Swedish krona, which plays against us at the moment, but it goes up and down, as you all know. Some details on the customer development side is that Chugoku is actually decreasing a bit, but it's being counterbalanced by the increase in other accounts. We have this unnamed customer we've been having around us for some time that has increased a lot in this quarter. And then there's quite some good activity in the remaining paint makers, which are now six out of the big nine who are contributing to our top line in this quarter. And that's probably the key message we want to convey here, that it's step by step growing into more paint makers' portfolios, although very volatile over the quarters as it's early stage, but it's a good sign.
Important events is the launch of the Japanese products I mentioned, as well as the very new order, which is a frame order done by Chugoku, which we received quite recently. The figures are, as you can see here on the screen, net sales of SEK 14.5 compared to SEK 13.5 the previous year. We have a high gross margin, which is a consequence of a broader customer mix, I should say, and we have the positive net result, which is very. It's a trend line. It's a breakthrough, you could say, as we haven't reached that in any quarter before. It's small margins between positive and negative here, but we're happy to see that it came in on the positive side here, and that is the key things I want to bring up here.
We also see, comparing to previous years in this graph, that margins are maintained at quite good levels despite increased costs at some quarters due to the pandemic. Although this quarter one was a highlight, we still foresee that costs will come in on a different level as we see negative developments in India, as an example, where we have a lot of production. The growth trend goes up and down a bit now, and that's relating to Chugoku has had quite high inventory levels, we have learned. And we think the ramp-up of others is putting a shift to the curve, but we're a bit uncertain about how that would play over the quarters ahead. That's why we call it a difficult-to-assess year, so to say.
Finally, I want to highlight the key fundamentals that the industry is now working around that is impacting and contributing to all the suppliers and actors in this industry, and that's the sustainability agenda, which is mainly concentrated on reduced emissions to air, of course. Shipping being quite substantially contributing to the CO2 emissions, about 2.3%-2.6% of global emissions, can make a big impact by using intelligent and novel technologies of all different kinds. The hull being one of those, of course. Another, which is not so much in the media, is the marine ecosystems, which have had a big impact of invasive species or alien species, at least through ballast waters. Now we see an increasing regulation, or at least a discussion around regulation on also the hull as a contributor to the transport of alien species.
And finally, it's about conserving natural resources and taking the best use of that. Of course, if a natural resource ends up on a ship hull, it leaches out and disappears over the five years into the ocean environment and cannot be recycled. With preference, we could be part of the equation of at least reducing those so they can be used on land instead, where you could recycle metals instead. So making a smarter use of materials is also part of our agenda. And by that, I thank you, all the listeners, and I welcome some questions.
Thank you for that, Philip. Yes, let's start with the Q&A then. Q1 was your strongest quarter ever. What was the main driver for the performance in Q1, would you say?
It was a broader customer mix, meaning that we had more customers now contributing to the top line than before.
That was the key difference, I must say, on the top line. On the cost side, it was obviously effects of the pandemic, which automatically implies cost control on a different level than we have had before. I think that goes for many others. So the combination of those made it very strong. We mentioned also the higher gross margin, which is a consequence of having many more customers with lower volumes, which hence contributes to a higher margin in one way.
Okay, next question. You say 73% of sales in Q1 came from named customers. How much of Q1 sale was to CMP?
They are clearly dominating still. I don't have the percentage figure here, but it's clearly the dominating player still. Yeah, that's what I can say at the moment.
Okay, next question. Can you discuss the timeline for products and sales in the leisure boat market?
Volumes are obviously lower, but roughly what % of sales would you estimate the leisure segment constitutes in three to four years?
Three to four years, it will likely still be quite low. Difficult to know, however. Japan is rolling out now, so volumes shipped to Japan go either to leisure boats or to commercial ships. We don't know. We know that they do contribute as of this year. In the United States, where the bigger market is for leisure boats, we have informed that we have this collaboration with a major paint maker. We know that there's investment to be made, which is now underway to get the regulatory approval, and that's going to take at least three to four years before we see any permission to sell in the U.S., and at that point, that will be gradually increasing.
So in the timeframe you mentioned, contributions from leisure boat sales will be marginal, I must say.
Okay. Next question then. You price Selektope based on copper prices. Can you raise prices now that copper prices moved up?
We are not in a position to raise prices as a consequence of being formulated with or combined with copper sulfide in many paints, which means they're already being more expensive as the copper prices increase. However, there are few formulations that are copper-free, as I mentioned. I think our customer who has this product, in this case, Chugoku, I think they're seeing an opportunity here to expand that product, and we will see that in higher volumes at some point, as this will be a much more attractive option for them and for the ship owner. But in terms of rising prices, that won't help us. Okay.
You mentioned the order you recently received from CMP. Can you talk us through the order and what it means for I-Tech going further?
Yes. We see this order as an indication of hope and forward-thinking, which we haven't seen for quite some time. For those who have followed us, we had a similar order in 2019 that is fully delivered. And there's been a few quarters here that we have actually only delivered on spot prices and without those kind of frame agreements due to the reason that nobody really knew what this world was to expect. And now we see this frame order. There's light in the tunnel in terms of planning perspectives. So I think that's how we see it.
It's a confirmation that people are looking forward again, and there is an outlook of increased activity over the period we have talked about here, which is 2021 and 2022.
Okay. What would you say is I-Tech's main focus the coming quarters?
Main focus coming quarter is to continue to keep the costs under control, which will be easy in the sense that COVID still plays a big role in this. But on the commercial side, which is maybe the more important, it's to continue to grow these additional accounts that we now have seen contributions from during this year, this quarter. And when I say that, it's about formalizing agreements. It's about supporting the rollouts and whatever challenges that may arise in that.
Of course, we have a few customers or potential customers that are still in the R&D phase, which we spend a lot of energy on to bring them forward and help them in those processes. So it's a very focused case, and everything we do is about making sure we have regulatory approvals, which I should mention, actually, is quite a big investment at the moment for the renewal in Europe and also stepping in the United States regulatory landscape. Those are probably the most cost-burdened investments we have this year. So obviously, that is a focus. But next to that, it's the customers, of course.
Okay, thank you. And with the last question there, I think that's all the questions we had for today.
So I thank you very much for you taking your time to go through the Q1 for I-Tech, and hope to see you quite soon again then.
Thank you so much, and thank you everyone for listening.
Thank you. Have a good day. Bye-bye.
You too. Bye-bye.