A warm welcome to Lindab's Capital Market Event 2022, both to our participants on site and our participants on the webcast. My name is Catharina Paulcén, and I'm the head of corporate communications, and I will guide you through this afternoon of presentation and question sessions. Let's start right away by introducing our first speaker, Ola Ringdahl, the President and CEO of Lindab.
Thank you very much, Catharina. Hello, everybody, and a very warm welcome to Lindab's Capital Markets Event. My name is Ola Ringdahl. I've been CEO and President of Lindab Group since June 2018, so I'm celebrating four years on this post now, and it's with great pride that we arrange this event. To take us back and describe a little bit the journey that Lindab is on, I would like to take the opportunity to use some key numbers. We say that Lindab has gone through a three-year transformation. What does that mean? Well, back in 2017, we were a slightly different company than we are today. We had three different business areas operating in 32 countries with roughly 5,100 employees.
Sales of SEK 8 billion and an EBIT margin of 6%. During the past three years, we have narrowed down to our two core business areas, Ventilation Systems, by far the biggest one, and Profile Systems that has gone through a fantastic improvement journey. Both of these are core and will remain core in the Lindab Group. If we look at the countries and the number of employees, we've gone through quite a transformation. We have cut down on countries where we were not very profitable before and where we did not have a strong market position. We have withdrawn from countries where we did not see that we had the right development potential. Through divestments, but also through regular shutdowns, basically, we have reduced to a core number of countries, all but one of them in Europe.
We also have a small operation in the U.S. Sales and EBIT margin has developed quite well. Even if we are fewer people today and we operate in far fewer countries, we now have a turnover that is clearly higher than it used to be, and the operating profit margin has been dramatically increased, more than doubled. We now say that this part of our transformation journey is complete. From this basis and from this core operations, we aim to grow both organically and through acquisitions. The transformation that Lindab has gone through is not the only change of events in the world. We have done this and restructured the company and developed in terms of profitability and activities in very turbulent times. We have had the COVID pandemic.
Last year, we had a severe raw material shortage crisis, even though people tend to forget that now because now we are in a new crisis with the war, Russia's war in Ukraine, and also the increased inflation that we see all around us. We think that our customers really appreciate to have a stable and well-performing supplier also in turbulent times. Lindab has managed to supply all products on time, in full, throughout COVID pandemic, throughout material shortages, and also throughout the component crisis related to China and the war in Ukraine, and we intend to continue to do so. At the Capital Markets event, I guess you cannot avoid to touch upon the financial targets.
I should be clear now in the beginning of this show to say that we are not changing them today. The financial targets for the Lindab Group were updated quite recently, in the autumn of 2021. They were updated, and I think that the changes are quite important. If we look at the first one, regarding annual growth, we have a target to grow by at least 10% annually. The previous target was to grow between 5%-8% per year. Now, this accelerated growth target should be seen in the light of increased acquisition activity, which the board stands firmly behind. Now, a growth target needs to be combined with a financial target, and for Lindab, this has been set by the board to be that we should deliver at least 10% adjusted operating margin every year.
The previous target was to reach 10% over a business cycle, and that's a big difference for me in these two targets. This means that in good years, Lindab should be able to perform better than the 10%, and in tough years, we should not go below 10%, and that is how this should be interpreted. It should be seen in combination with the growth target, meaning that our main goal is to deliver increasing net earnings and net earnings growth. The last target has been unchanged for some time, but we should be below 3x net debt to EBITDA ratio. This is my introductory speech. I will not be the only one on stage today. I will have come back with an expo session towards the end of the day.
I would like to take the opportunity today to bring in the help from my very talented colleagues. We are a big team in the Lindab Group, all doing their parts. We have, I think, a very interesting agenda for you today so that you will get a deeper understanding of Lindab. Next on the agenda will be Joakim Lönnberg, who will talk about the ventilation of the future. Joakim is the head of our Region North Europe and has a very big responsibility and also sits on the group management team of Lindab. Olof Christensson and Jan Behrens will talk about the advanced ventilation systems.
You've already heard Olof Christensson, those of you who were participating in the morning session on site here, and what Lindab can do with the advanced ventilation systems for the future. I'm very happy to say that Mattias Johansson. Where are you in the room, Mattias? There, over there. Hi, Mattias. We are so happy to have the CEO of Bravida, one of our absolutely most important customers, and we have a very long relationship between Lindab and Bravida. He will come on stage and talk a little bit about Bravida, but of course, also to comment on the relationship and how it is to work from a customer point of view with a supplier like Lindab. After the coffee break, we will have Lars Christensson talking about our acquisition strategy.
That has accelerated, as you might have seen in the press releases. We have completed our 14th acquisition in the past 24 months. Lars Christensson will tell you a little bit about how we are selecting targets and what is important for Lindab when we do that. Lars is leading our team of acquisition experts. Gabriella will come on stage, and she will talk about what it is like to be acquired by Lindab. Gabriella Wikander Johansson is the Managing Director for Ekovent, a company that was acquired relatively recently. Hopefully she will share some useful experiences from what that was like.
We cannot avoid it, but Lindab has quite a large dependency on steel and steel prices, and you see that our products, they contain quite a lot of steel. I'm very happy that we can welcome the Managing Director of Lindab Steel AB, Tobias Augustsson, who will talk about what we do, how we purchase, how we process, and the steel's route through Lindab as a key material for us. Of course, what we do has great impacts on the sustainability parameters. Lindab has worked for many years with sustainability, and I think that we have come quite far. We have a very dynamic and strong team of experts who are leading us to become even better.
Matilda Isaksson, who is the head of our group sustainability, will come and talk about sustainability from Lindab's perspective. Then towards the end, I will come back and try to summarize acquisitions made and the priorities for Lindab going forward. All right. Thank you very much from me as an opening speech, and I hand over back to you, Catharina.
Thank you. We'll save our questions to Ola for a little bit later this afternoon and move right into the next topic, where we will listen to the market drivers and why, the quality of air is so important. Please, Joakim.
Thank you. Hello, everyone. Joakim Lönnberg, responsible for region North Europe. I'm here today to talk to you about ventilation of the future. I think you will, towards the end of my speech, you will feel that the future is already here. Olof have showed you a little bit, the ones that are here, what is coming. The last two-three years, I would say ventilation is in the media. We can read all about it. It's everywhere. If you google ventilation, I will promise you will get thousands and thousands of hits. Yes, it's connected to COVID-19, but it's also connected to climate change and to my and your health. This is from Amazon, quite a big company.
Their Chief Medical Officer, Vin Gupta, he says the biggest health challenge for public and workspaces this century will be ventilation and air quality.
Okay? He says that air quality at work is directly correlated to brain functions and productivity. For you that are in here now together with me, I think that I can say that you have never, ever been in such a good environment. The air in here, I think Olof has told you before, if you don't have anything else, you are probably right now performing at 100% of your max capacity. I will tell you later on that that's not the case every time. The last number there is quite, it's quite, what to say. We spend 90% of our lives, 72 years indoor. The air we breathe is extremely important. I will get back to this. The other article that I picked out, I picked out two of all of them that are on the internet.
This is from Ireland, and this is from the Department of Education, and this is from the big COVID breakout when they closed down the schools, and then they decided, "Okay, we do have to open the schools again. How can we do that?" They said that, "We need to get some type of ventilation into the school to be able to get them up and running again." Because I think you read in the news, we have the two meters we have to stand apart during the COVID-19. The reason for that is then you get time for the infected particles to hit the ground. This is outdoor. If we go indoor, you don't have any ventilation, then the infection will spread all around.
What they said here in Ireland is that we do need to increase the ventilation to be able to open up the schools. If you read the whole text, it's on the internet. You can go in and read it. They say that we don't have sufficient ventilation in our schools. We have to open the windows, and we have to open the doors into the corridor to be able to get sufficient ventilation in the classroom. When we open the window, it will be quite cold because this was during wintertime. What you have to do is that you have to start your oil burners or your heaters to heat up the school and then open the windows. Here we see we have a conflict between infection and heating the building.
Of course, we cannot open the window and heat the building. This is leading me to why do we need good ventilation? I will tell you. There is hundreds of different reasons. Like, I will talk about three. Number one, we need to build energy-efficient houses. If we look at the houses we built, say, 100 years ago, many of them are leaking everywhere, so you spend a lot of money in heating them or cooling them. The house we build today, the new house, you have read about plus energy houses, zero energy houses. The way to try to see how that is is to put the plastic bag over your head and tighten and see what happens. It's not working good. That's a modern house without ventilation. Okay? That's the way we build houses.
We build them very, very tight, so we don't get in warm air or cold air, depending on where we are. Extremely important for us to bring down the consumption of energy. We need to build tight, and then we need to ventilate. Number two, of course, we do have an outdoor air that affects us. But still, in the major cities, yeah, the outdoor air is very bad, but the air is moving. But if you go indoors, we can see today that it's very much more polluted indoors, and the reason for that is we don't have sufficient ventilation. The third reason is we get sick if we don't have good ventilation. This is a fact. During the pandemic, the WHO said that to get rid of spreading COVID-19, we need to ventilate. This is extremely important for us going forward.
As far as I understand, the COVID-19 is fading out, yes, but there is other infections, so we need to get more ventilation. Good. The question arises, how can I fix something that I don't know that is wrong? The industry has been trying to figure this out. If we go out and ask people, "Okay, how can you measure if there is good or bad ventilation?" They say, "It smells bad, but then it's probably not good." What we do now, and this is what actually the health department in Ireland did, they put up CO₂ meters in all their schools. They measure, and Olof showed you this is a typical CO₂ meters, and there is hundreds of them measuring the air we breathe out.
The way to find out if the air is good enough is to measure the CO₂ . It's one way of making sure if the air is moving or not. As I said before, if the air is not moving at all, then we do have a problem with, for example, infections. This is the way we do it, and if we look at the left side, this is it should look like an ear. I hope you have seen it. If you go to a concert, you go to a gym or something like that, you will see this ear. If it's green, then you know that the voice level is okay. If that one turns red, you should leave or put something in your ear. It's unhealthy. The same is with the CO₂ level.
For a CO₂ meter, if that one goes too high, it's not healthy for us. We will not die immediately, but if we are in an environment for many hours, many years, this will have an effect on us. Put it in perspective, if we look at numbers again, we eat around 1-2 kg per day. Depends how much we eat. We eat three-five times a day, but we breathe 10-20 kg per day. We don't breathe three-five times a day. We breathe all the time, 24 hours. The knowledge that you in the room or on the broadcast, the knowledge you have about food, you should get about air. It's as important for you as this food are.
When we come to performance, we do have the health effect with COVID-19. We do have the climate effect, but we also have performance. If we look at sports, for example, that's a place where they have learned how to ventilate. The reason for that, I would say, is that if I talk about breathing 10-20 kilos of air, then we are here, we are quite still. If you are going to play tennis or football, I mean, or run a marathon, you know that you breathe much more. If you have insufficient amount of air in a sports arena, which can happen, but then you will not perform at all. In learnings, as I said before, if you have the right air, good air, you will perform.
It's not only the quality of the air, but it's also the temperature. That is also very important. If we increase the temperature right here now, I think it's more than 21 degrees. That's where we should be. If we go up to 25 degrees, then actually we will start to decrease in performance. We will go down to somewhere around 80% of where we can perform. If we put 100 people in a room and we are at 80% of our performance, 20 of them is not doing anything. It's a big cost. Business, of course, if we go in a conference, for example, this will be very interesting going forward. When we book a conference room, we want to have good air. Good. What do we do?
What do Lindab do to benefit from this, and how do we work? Well, if we look at the outside air, it can be cool, it can be warm, or it can be dirty. On the inside, we can affect it. This is very important. Today we go, for example, to a hotel, a brand-new hotel. I think you have seen. There is no way we can open the window. It's not that way a new hotel is built. It's totally closed. Because if you go into a hotel and you feel this is very hot, then you open the window to get in some cool air. What you do then, you destroy the indoor climate because the system will feel that, okay, now we need to put on more heat, so it start to increase the heat.
If it's cold, you get into the conference room, you feel this is very cold, then you will start to open the window to get some warm air in, and then the cooling system will feel we need to increase the cool here. Today, we don't have windows in new hotels, and this is before what Olof told us before. What we can control is that we have the right amount of air indoor, the right temperature, we do have clean air. This we are working with together with these CO₂ meters. Finally, the future is to be live and connected. All of these systems are getting connected up to the cloud. We can measure, and we can use them with either a mobile phone or with a computer.
Thank you very much, and I open up for questions.
Any questions for Joakim? None at all.
None at all.
You were crystal clear. Perfect.
Thank you very much.
Now we have listened to the high-level description of how important the ventilation system is. Now we would like to move into a real-life example. We will have a demonstration of the ventilation system in this building. This will be done by Jan Behrens, who's the Manager of Project Support for Lindab Innovation Hub. During the Q&A session, he will be supported by Olof Christensson, who's Director of Ventilation Systems. Please go ahead, Jan.
Hello. I don't know how deeply we should go into the technique, but I start from beginning, because what we see here in the building where we are today, it's a building from outside that looks like an industry building. This industry building is where we are here now. On the picture, you can see it in the background is our storage area. Here we have the logistics on the bottom, beneath the roof, and on the upper part we have the Lindab headquarters, and here we have the experience center. What is behind the ceiling? Oops. Behind the ceiling, we have a lot of technique. This technique is here because we want to get the best indoor climate in this office area. We want that the people work as healthy and effective as possible.
Now, you look here a little bit at this ceiling here, because this is an open ceiling area, but we can see it at the other side of the office where everything is covered. We believe this is the best indoor climate solution that we have available. How can we say best indoor climate solution? We heard a little bit about it before. We have different things, we as ventilation builder or I as a designer, can influence. One thing is of course the temperature. We talked about it. When I design a system, I have to think about what is expected in temperature, what is really needed. Hereby I have to see what is the best performance that we get, and on the other side, what is the energy cost. Both needs to be always in relation.
What is the cost of the system, how to perform it? We have the air velocity inside the occupied zones. People feel draft. When you wear maybe short trousers or skirts, you feel it more than others who are wearing maybe suits. We come to the impact of activity levels. People who are active, let's say in the sports center, or if you're sitting and concentrating all day, we have completely different highly effective indoor climate solutions to be as optimized as possible. Impact of clothing. If you have, for example, a bank where you're used to wear suits with ties, or if you're allowed to get into the office with short T-shirts, then we have different environmental effects and different feelings of people. Can we really guarantee that everybody feels well?
The humidity level, the air quality, the sound level, we heard a little bit about that before, is really important that people feel well in their surrounding. That is what we should gain for. Lighting, for example. How do we do that? I mean, there have been a lot of people sitting around and making investigations for that. We know that it's not Lindab own things. That is what the world knows about. We know what is the best indoor climate. This indoor climate knowledge have been taken into norms, and that's the norms we follow. Currently, it is a norm that calls EN 15251, and that will change into a new norm called EN 16798. This is more or less a Bible for the installer, for the engineer who designs the system, and we follow it.
Here we have, for example, different quality categories. What is it what I expect from that system? Is it a high category, number one? The high category number one is easy to say, "I want the best indoor climate." To reach that level is the most tricky part. We can also go down to level 2, 3, or 4. For us, we can say in an office area, we always try to get into the level 2. That is our goal, because then we know it is best. On the other hand side, you see it on the right side, the level number 2 allows 20% of unsatisfied people. That mean every fifth of you might feel it here a little bit too warm or too cold according to this norm level.
We know in our building here in this system, we have made a survey, and we can say no one has said that something's wrong. Here, sometimes someone said, "Oh, I feel a little bit of noise. I feel a little bit of draft." That always happens, and you cannot avoid that's for sure. We can really try to get the best indoor climate that people feel happy in their surrounding. Of course, there's always other things like you don't like your neighbor, you don't like the one in front of you, or the colors of the wall. That is not what we can influence, but the rest we have a chance to influence it, and we do that. First of all, these investigations are listed up in a lot of norms, and we can find a lot of lists.
If someone says, "I want the best indoor climate," then we guarantee if I talk to the people and say, "Okay, do we agree with the level two? That is where we have the best experience." The people say, "Wow, that sounds good." I know level two, what does it mean in PMV level? Predicted mean vote. Do the people, how many of them feel too hot, too cold? What is the CO₂ level required? What is the temperature level required? What is the sound level? I know all this. But that makes life much more complex because if I know all this, I need tools that guarantees that this really works. We at Lindab, we have that tools. We developed it by ourselves. We have a big IT department. I think we are 12, 15 people right now already just doing this.
That is that we have a tool. I'd start on the left side, that's TEKNOsim. I work with all of these tools in my daily business. TEKNOsim, for example, I got a design, then I said, "Okay, what is the heat load in winter times? What is the cooling in summer times that we need?" I can calculate it based on windows, based on walls, based on people, what are they doing inside? Then I can exactly say, "Do we accept 15% unsatisfied? Should we go on 10%?" That sounds so simple because when you have, for example, a cooling demand in summer times, and you say, "Oh, the cooling demand is round about 1,000 W cooling power for a room," then there are so many possibilities to get this cooling into that room.
The most simplest one is having one unit at the wall. You can buy these simple units. This is one unit bringing all the cooling power into the room. That gives a lot of draft. There was a table saying draft is not allowed. That is not good. We can take two of the units or three of the units. We can have radiant panels, we can have so many alternatives, and this to balance is a challenge for everybody. We have the right tools to do that as well. LindQST, for example, is an online tool where you can design the room, or you can get the design from an architectural design, and then you place your devices that you think is the best, and then you can exactly see where is the problem zone. Do we have problem zone?
Is there any air speeds everywhere? What about the sound levels? Where is the sound level in that big office area? Now I'm quiet because can you hear the ventilation? You can't. This ventilation is really well-designed. On the right-hand side, we have our CAD tools. CAD tools is based on Revit. There are a lot of CAD tools, AutoCAD, maybe you hear about that. These design tools, it's not just to place a product and get a bill of material. We use them for simulating. We simulate the system. We know exactly how is the system working under each scenario in summer times, in winter times. That's what we do. We give them these tools in hands. To see it in a different graph, what we got is the architecture drawing. We take the architecture drawing, place it in our IT tools.
Later on, after the IT tools, we place the diffusers. We can see the spreading. Is there a draft? When there are some red particles, we can see there is draft in it. We can see exactly how we designed it, and then we do the design of the system. The good thing is, then we can exactly say what is the price level. We can exactly say what is the cost level. We can exactly say how the system will perform if it is installed as we designed. For this system in this house, we decided, for example, for a chilled beam called Plexus. The Plexus is a really fantastic chilled beam. It has a lot of patents inside, and the good thing is we have cooling, heating, and ventilation in the same product. That makes installation easier, and it performs extremely good.
The good thing on the Plexus is it has a specific zone heating effect. Zone heating is so important because heating from the ceiling with air is a bit problematic. If you lower the air flows, can you imagine what happens? Warm air always wants to go up. So the warm air is standing at the ceiling side, and beneath we have it cold. This is a problem with chilled beams' heating effect. Here we have a patent on it because we have a specific way that we mix the air in a much better way. To do so, we have a small pattern. That is this small element. It's a plastic element. We call it a JetCone, and that is used in our JetCone technology you see on the right side.
This is extremely simple, small product, and this product makes it so simple, extremely silent, and extremely effective to balance and to guide the air in special directions. We are quite proud about it. Also, on the other hand side, it is a so small product that you can install it really simple. We have our UltraLink, the air VAV damper that guides the air to the right direction. We want to know where the air goes to. We can read it inside. We know where the air goes to, and we can balance it. Last but not least, we have our silencers, LRCA. It is one of our silencers. I think we have in Lindab 25 or 60 different silencers. I'm not sure about that. This is really the best of it. It's extremely small silencer with extremely high performance.
This guarantees me as a designer that I have no sound problems in that system. I know that. All of this together makes the system extremely good. Next to this, we have the duct system, which is leakage-free. Finally, we come to a complete design, which I can extremely exact balance and find out in all scenarios what happens. I can say, I guarantee you, the full year, a good indoor climate. What about the energy cost? Running the system 100% level, that we have the best indoor climate, yes, it will work, but it's super expensive. That's not what we want. Therefore, we want to look at the energy cost of a system like this. Some of you heard it before. We have different methodologies that we talk about. CAV, VAV, DCV.
Constant air flows, variable air flow, or demand controlled air flows. Maybe you heard about this before. A VAV system or a constant air flow system is on and off. Yes, it has the best indoor climate as well. On this platform here, it will have the same effect as the other systems. If we are inside, we can guarantee a good indoor climate. To save energy, we can have different methods. VAV, for example, you see it on the right side with the green curves. It has a presence detector inside. If people are inside the room, we have a good indoor climate. If people are not inside, we don't. That saves already a lot of energy. The DCV, that is where the state-of-the-art is today. That is we only ventilate as much as we really need.
We know what is the indoor climate, how good is this, how much more do we ventilate? This knowledge saves dramatically a lot of energy. There are so many investigations about that, how much nuclear power can be stopped just if every ventilation system would be done like this. It's amazing what possibilities we have. In a Lindab system that we call Lindab Pascal, we have a solution like this. Lindab Pascal is a regulation solution looking exactly to this DCV level, and on top, it has also a fan optimizer function. That means we have two opportunities to talk to the fan, to the air handling unit in the system. One is that we have the handling unit preparing always a constant pressure. If we close the dampers, the pressure is going up, the handling unit recognizes and will decrease the air flow.
If the dampers open, the pressure is decreasing, the handling unit recognize it and starts to bring more air inside. A fan optimized function is a communication with the fan. We tell the fan how much air do we really need, so it is not dependent on the pressure. We can go down to 60 pascal, 80 pascal, and we don't need the 200 or 300. That is what we do here, and that saves a lot of energy. The system itself is not so complex as it sometimes sounds. It depends only five components. We have a room controller, which is a small computer at the wall. That has all the settings for the room. Then we have a zone controller.
The zone controller takes all the information, and then we give it to the global controller at the top, who talks at the end to the handling unit. Then there are small extra components in between. It is rather easy to do it. Not rocket science, but extremely clever in function. All of this together makes it really good and guarantees a really good indoor climate. That's what you can see here in numbers. Comparing different solutions, a CAV system with different types of VAV systems, and finally, the Pascal system, is something you can really directly measure. That is an effect that we can see in this house as well. I think all in all, that was shortly about it. We cannot go to the techniques.
I don't want to talk about the ducts here in this system or about the, electronic connections, et cetera. That's not what I want. What I want is to show you that it's possible to make the best indoor climate and to don't make it too complex. Welcome in the building with the best indoor climate. We developed it, we supported it, and we produced it. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Jan. That was quite an advanced system, wasn't it?
It is a fantastic system.
Anyone who would like to know something more about the system or any other kind of question?
Douglas Lindholm from DNB Markets. A question on the market for this DCV product. Is it possible to get some sort of numbers on the current penetration rate for these systems in European commercial buildings or anything in terms of the market prospects would be interesting too.
No, I have. Sorry. First of all, you can say that new builds, the market is moving in this direction with DCV systems, of course. There are still buildings built today with the CAV systems. I would say that DCV is the dominant now, especially for North Europe and North Central Europe.
Okay.
We have a question from the broadcast, and they ask, "Can you actually monetize on these monitoring systems, or is it more used as a sales tool?
Well-
Can Lindab monetize from the monitoring systems, or is this more of a sales and marketing tool?
No, I would say that, first of all, selling the system. To be able, like, Joakim showed and like we showed earlier today, that you can visualize that is also an add-on for a complete system. You can be much faster if there are things that needs to be regulated or adjusted in the system. It's definitely important information which we believe there's a willingness to pay for as an add-on.
Another question we have is if you could estimate the share of sensors now in the systems compared to five years ago?
I think it's much more sensors in the system today because we want to know, and knowledge is something you need to measure. If you don't know, you don't need sensors. Everything that we need to measure, temperature, presence, air velocity, needs a sensor. Yes, there are definitely much more sensors than five years ago. Absolutely.
Any more questions from people here in the room? Otherwise, I will take one more from the broadcast. You mentioned that cooling, heating, and ventilation is done from the same product. Is that not the normal ventilation solution?
No, definitely not. You can, of course, use only ventilation for cooling and heating, but you need around 5-6x more air when you want to deliver the cooling load and cooling energy by air. We use, in this case, water. We have air only for the health factor. To have the best indoor rate or ventilation rate for the best health factor. For energy transport, we use water. That makes the system a bit smaller and not that much air. In a normal system, that is transporting energy by air, that is normally outdated. It is used a lot still to transport energy, but not to cool or to heat the building, just to increase a little bit the temperature of the air bringing into the building.
We also got a question about the cost difference between CAV, VAV, and DCV. Could you say something about that, cost for installing it?
It is cheaper, yes, to install a CAV system. That's why there are still some installations done. I don't have a figure in relation. Maybe you have, Jan. I don't know.
No, not really. It depends. The duct sizes and everything is the same. The only thing is the extra sensors. Now we are talking the regulation equipment, the sensors. It is the electronic devices that is increasing. The ventilation itself is the same. It's just the electronic, the new regulation principles that makes the system more expensive. How much more? I don't know. We just have that the payback time is around about four years.
In normal system times four years, five years, sometimes I've seen also seven years, but that's around the range where we are.
Let's see if we can answer this question then. In new buildings, it's dominant with the new system. Could you estimate the penetration in total, including existing buildings and its renovation. Can you estimate the penetration for these new systems in existing buildings? Is renovation now pushing this further?
I cannot say so much about it. Maybe Olof can say.
I mean, talking about the DCV and the VAV systems, they were introduced roughly 15 years ago. The absolute vast majority of the buildings today, they have another system. It's the smaller part.
Still a lot to do.
Still a lot to do.
Okay. Thank you, Jan and Olof.
Thank you.
You will be around for people here on site to ask more questions.
Yes.
Now we will go into the next topic, and that's a presentation from one of our largest customers, Bravida. We will hear a bit about Bravida's view on the market and what they think about being a customer to Lindab. Please welcome Mattias Johansson, CEO of Bravida.
Thank you. First of all, thanks for having me here. It's, I would say, great honor to be invited to one of our most important suppliers. My name is Mattias Johansson, CEO, as you heard, from Bravida. As I heard, one of the, I don't know if biggest is important, but, important customers, and that's how we see ourselves. I started in this, industry, 24 years ago, actually. Already by then, Lindab was one, quite important supplier to Bravida, even if it has become even a more tighter relationship and a partnership, I would say, in the last, years. I will start a bit of explaining what Bravida, what kind of company Bravida is. This slide says that a good building makes a difference, and that's why Bravida exists, and maybe Lindab as well.
Maybe we should change the word good building to great building because the air quality, the environment within a building is important for many reasons. Bravida, we are offering a wide scope of services. The biggest segments in our portfolio is electrical systems, heating, plumbing, and ventilation. We are doing many of the other things as well: sprinkler, power, security, cooling, solar, energy optimization, et cetera. The interesting with this slide is maybe we are doing a lot of things, other things than not only ventilation, but only 20% of our customers is buying more than one segment from us. Even if ventilation is a quite small segment within Bravida, we have the potential to sell ventilation to the rest of the 80% of the customers.
We see that's a huge potential for Bravida, of course, to deliver more services to the existing customers already, but also to deliver our ventilation services, and I guess the Lindab's product as well, to more customers than we are doing today. We're working with all different kinds of systems that you're actually using in a building today. Today we are talking about ventilation. Just about the market. We are now. I get a lot of questions about where the market is heading, et cetera, et cetera. To understand our market, when we need a different type of products for different type of services, we are in many, many places, many different local markets. We are, as we say in this slide, in around 170 locations. That means municipalities.
I know that we are over 400 addresses close to the customers, close to the local customers, where we are providing daily services in all our segments. We're also working with different type of customers. We're working with apartments, which is a small, part of our portfolio, but industry, offices, healthcare, education, infrastructure, retail, and what we call other, that is security and the things that we are some difficulties to specify within Bravida. Working in many different places to many different segments, of course, gives us a very resilient business model. A lot of customers are, coming back and buying from us over and over again. 90% is recurring customers.
Sometimes I get the question, "And what about the others?" That's quite typical when Rögle BK, the local hockey team, is doing an upgrade of the arena that is a customer that we're probably doing the work for once. Very often, long relationships on our customer side as well as on our supply side. Our sales is SEK 20 billion+, 12,000 employees and the LTM EBITDA around SEK 1.5 billion. A lot of different customers in many places means that we get a resilience depending on what happens in the market. Because in Luleå, when we have a high demand in Luleå, we can have a low demand in Malmö, high demand in Denmark, meaning a low demand in Finland.
We are a very stable animal from that perspective. As we see the market drivers, we have talked a lot about the energy efficiency today, cost for energy, et cetera. I would say and argue that until today, this has been high on the agenda for the one who has been early adopters regarding the sustainability, who has been interested in taking down the energy consumption, et cetera. We can see that that has changed. Now we see the energy prices has come up as well. The decisions are made not only on how much energy you're consuming today, it's also about the cost. Energy optimization in buildings, that's our service business. Today, we're building a lot of great systems when we are building new houses, but we struggle a bit on the old ones.
Today, we have seen solutions from Lindab that we are using to make our customers save energy and money. The high energy costs will of course be a driver as well going forward. It wasn't part of the calculation a year ago, today it is. It actually may be the main driver for most of our customers, and this hasn't really started yet. It is something that will impact our business going forward from now and therefore to all our suppliers as well. We also see increased complexity in buildings, meaning that we need to have a better control of all systems, not only ventilation systems. They should be able to communicate with the electrical systems, the lighting, the heating, cooling systems, et cetera.
That means that we need to have products that are able to do that kind of communication. On top of that, of course, the European Green Deal, which will drive the renovation of buildings, existing buildings. A lot of times we discuss and talks about the new build sector, how will that impact our market, our demand? 99%, 98%, I don't know, of our market is actually the existing buildings. When I led the IPO Bravida in 2015, I learned that 80% of all public-owned buildings in the Nordic are not compliant with the EU regulations for 2020, and they are still not. That is a driver that we will see the coming years as well. We have the EU Taxonomy, climate change mitigation.
That is something we need to take into consideration to our customers, as well as our suppliers. We need to be able to present to investors, to our customers, how much work we are doing to actually use less carbon dioxide in our way of producing the services. 30% of all or actually more than 30% of all greenhouse gas emissions is coming from construction or our usage of buildings. If we should do something about the climate change, we need to do something about new buildings and existing buildings. That's my market, that is Bravida's market, that's our drivers in the future. I guess that is the driver for the market to all our suppliers as well. The market outlook. That's interesting, isn't it? Very easy to answer upon as well.
We, in Bravida, we still see a good demand for both service and installations so far. We definitely see a growing demand for all the sustainable services. I would say it's very much still on C-level discussion. I guess if you ask one of my 12,000 employees out in the field, I'm probably sure that not everyone in our company knows about our sustainable targets. We have been discussing it in this type of forum for a very long time now, but that is not the same that all our people are actually working due to those targets yet. That is the same on our customer side. We have launched quite good offers that are sustainable, competitive, and our customers loves them.
When we see their organizations slightly lower down in the organization are going to buy the services, they are buying in the old way still. That is something that is going to be changed. I think that the market will have a good use of the demand for sustainability services and sustainability products going forward. Of course, we see rising raw material prices. Now we maybe see them going down a bit as well, which is good for all of us. Risk from material shortages. I always say this, but we haven't noticed it, and that part of our strategy when we are choosing suppliers to Bravida, because we want to have strong financial partners that can support us even if there are some troubles changing things in the market.
I definitely say that Lindab has been a strong partner in this occasion regarding this as well. Uncertain times, increasing interest rates and inflation may lead to delays in investment decisions going forward, of course. That's something we don't know about yet, but it should mean that there are probably slightly lower demand for new build sector. On the other hand, increased energy prices must drive the demand for taking care of the old buildings, existing systems in old buildings. That will definitely be supporting us going forward. Our ventilation business is 70% of our total sales. It is slightly smaller than the electricity and the heating and plumbing, but 70% of sales 2021 was coming from ventilation. We see this as a growing segment within Bravida, within the whole industry.
I think we have seen the reason why, because there is a lot of money to save to work with these kind of systems. 12% is related to installation of new ventilation equipment, because I think our customers have chosen to invest in new facilities until now. I think the drivers from the sustainability perspective, and it's actually profitable now to install, do something about existing energy systems. If it's lighting, if it's ventilation or heating and plumbing, it doesn't matter actually, because if you can save money today, it is critical for you to do that because you save money and you also need to do to be able to present to investors, owners, customers that you're working with your own ESG as well. Our largest type of facilities is today industry, dwellings, healthcare, and education.
In the Nordics, we are in the four Nordic countries. We can see strong public finances. We know there is a lot of investments, both in the industry sector as well as the healthcare sector, and that is good business for us, and that means also good business for many of our suppliers. Those type of facilities also need a lot and quite complex system regarding the ventilation. Our largest customer groups is of course construction, industry, and the public sector. Again, quite diversified, and in some of the Nordic countries as well, we see that the spending in Norway probably will go up a bit in these times. For every day, they're getting richer and richer. In Sweden, there is going to be a lot of investment in the industry in the north of Sweden.
There are some things that will definitely support our sales going forward as well. Lindab are today delivering around 1,700,000 articles to Bravida. That is a number from last year. They supply to over 30 branches within Bravida. Ventilation, if you connect that to electricity and heating and plumbing, slightly more regional than local in our way of thinking. You can do work on slightly longer distance in ventilation compared to the other ones. We have good coverage throughout almost the whole group. We see the numbers on the map. Actually, Norway have been growing in volumes from Lindab with 48% the last 12 months. Finland, 30%, Sweden, 22%, Denmark, 33%.
There are of course some price in this, but when all are sending letters to the market about the price increases, I'm happy that we don't get the same prices. I think the true reason behind this is that we have signed a Nordic agreement. On our side, we are quite good in active steering. We are promising our suppliers, as well as Lindab, volumes. I'm promising Ola in this case that I'm doing everything I can to move volumes from many suppliers to our preferred suppliers. Then we have had really good service from our supplier, of course, quality products, ability to deliver to us. I think this is fantastic numbers and actually meaning that we are today spending above SEK 250 million in our relationship with Lindab.
This is the journey why I said that, we are moving volumes, we are steering internally, have different KPIs to do what we have said to do, but also our relationship have gone from being more local to work more over all over the Nordics. We have more trust in each other today. We are working as partners. The quality is, of course, very important, both on when we're talking about the products, but also the forecasts from Lindab to us regarding price and our forecast to Lindab, what kind of volumes we expect, et cetera. Then the efficiency, both in how we're working together, but also what we can achieve as partners. Of course, we have our different strategies, but five years ago, at least within Bravida, the sustainability was just something you had to do.
Today, we are discussing that because that is core. That is key to be successful. Sustainable buildings means business for us, as well as for many of our all other suppliers. We have a transparency and trust. We know that we get sustainable solutions from Lindab, from a sustainable partner. It's not good enough to just have sustainable products. We at Bravida can't only deliver sustainable services to our customers, we also need to take care of our internal work regarding sustainability, and we know that that is something that Lindab is doing. Standardization, elimination of waste, efficiency and cost awareness. That is important for us with all our suppliers and always in this case also in this case. This is one example of how it can work when it's working in a really good way.
This is the bus terminal Slussen in Stockholm and my team, together with the team of Lindab, discussed delivery of spiral tubes. I think they were something around 100 centimeters in diameter. To do that transport from Grevie, from this site to Stockholm costs a lot, both in money as well as in tons of CO₂ . We actually decided, who came up with the idea, I don't know, but let's say it was us together with Lindab, actually decided to do the manufacturing at the site in Stockholm. We actually didn't transport the tubes. We transported the steel, and then we did the production at site.
Made it a lot cheaper for us because we had to pay for a lot of transports from this site to Stockholm, and we actually saved 220 tons of carbon dioxide, meaning equal to 220 return ticket flights from Stockholm to Rome. That is a way to deliver value more than just a product in a good partnership. Meaning that it hopefully became better for both of us, and we have a customer in Stockholm that are really happy because they can tell the story in that project and in other projects as well.
This had never happened a year ago because the focus on sustainability, et cetera, the way of Lindab's ability to help us produce local on the site had made this as a reality, and that didn't happen a year ago or two years ago. Potential of saving energies. You have heard a lot of numbers today, but we know that we can save energy, money for our customers through our changing the lighting, the heating system, regulation and control system, but also ventilation system. We know that it's quite tough to admit maybe, but when we are discussing with customers and 50% is lighting or 50% of our business is electricity and only 17% is ventilation.
When we come up with a calculation that we are saving more money on the 70% than on the 55%, that's not always good for us maybe. The biggest potential in a building is actually to save money on the ventilation systems. The most common thing for our customers is to change the lighting. I would say that those two is coming more and more. Lighting is something you can see. Ventilation is more harder to understand. If you do the change of the ventilation system, then we heard today you also get a better climate indoor, higher productivity for the personnel who is using the room as well. 20%, as we see it, is the potential to save if you are changing the old ventilation equipment to a new one. Our relation to Lindab.
Lindab delivers high quality HVAC solutions to us, definitely. Have been partners since, I don't know for how long, but I started 1998, as I said, and by then they were probably quite small supplier to us, but the partnership have been growing and today they are one of the most important suppliers to us on the ventilation side. We know that we both are focusing on sustainability, sustainable products and solutions for our customers. What we also think is important from Bravida is that we can have long-term contracts, so we can be proactive in our way of pricing our services to the customers. You can only have that with a financially strong supplier. I think that Lindab also think it's a good idea that we are as stable as we are, and therefore a reliable and accessible partner, definitely.
I were here a year ago, approximately, and this room was not finished by then. I spoke to my fitters who were doing the assembly behind this wall, and they have said they have never, ever mounted as much different type of products in the same area anytime before. We have heard this is probably state of art, and we are lucky because we have been partner and we have actually got the opportunity to install it. So Q&A
Thank you, Mattias. We'll start with a question from the webcast. You are a bit earlier in the business cycle than Lindab. Have you seen any signs of delayed or postponed projects due to the inflation?
No, not yet. I think it's a small amount of projects that have been delayed, but that can be for some reasons that happens all the time. I try to have quite good, I know our biggest customers is the construction companies. As far as I've seen and understood, all the biggest construction companies in the Nordics, they have increased the order backlog and the order intake until end of Q1. Our businesses close to the customers haven't noticed it yet. To be honest, I would be surprised if we can't see anything very soon on the new build side.
On the other hand, there are lack of resources in the industry, so I think that the renovation market is something that we are focusing a lot on, and hopefully they can actually cover at least some of it.
Any questions from the audience here on site? The next question is, could you comment on what percent of your ventilation products that are provided by Lindab, and how does this compare with other partners you work with?
I can't give you a number, but our purchasing strategy is that we try to team up with few suppliers. In the sector that where Lindab is or, someone else, they are delivering most of it because that is how we are thinking. We don't think that we can get the best prices, best services just because we are big. We need to promise something, and I don't know if Lindab agrees, but we are promising, discussing different volumes, and we are doing everything we can. I mean, all the line managers, our purchasing team, me as well, when we have our quarterly reviews, we are following up where and how our project managers and fitters are buying. The main part is delivered by Lindab.
We like that.
Yeah.
Okay.
Doesn't mean we. Of course, we are professional, both Lindab and us. They want to increase the prices as much as possible, and we want to keep them as low as possible. I think that is just a dimension that always are in that kind of relationship. We can discuss other things as well.
Let's move into that topic because we got quite a lot of questions in that area. One is, Lindab was early in adjusting prices when the steel prices went up. Do you think that Lindab took advantage of the installers whose margins were squeezed due to fixed price contracts?
I don't know how other companies think, but we, as I mentioned, have seen this partnership as a good partnership because we have long-term contracts. I think to be able to price project services that we are going to deliver in a year from now, nine months from now, et cetera, of course, we need to have some forecast transparency along contract. I think in our discussions, we had got forecast from most of our suppliers that we have priced into our offers, of course. How others have been doing, I don't know. Of course, I can understand that we have a central, very good, strong procurement team that is providing us with forecast from discussions with our suppliers. Of course, not everyone can have that.
When Lindab went out, quite early and said that they have to or going to increase prices later on, I think that is good for us, that is good for the industry. That is also good for the smaller companies because that is some kind of guidance, giving a heads-up from Lindab, to everyone. Watch out, the prices will go up. If they have drawn some advantage of that, I leave to Ola to answer. I don't know.
Are you putting pressure on Lindab now when steel prices are going down?
I hope we are. Yes, we don't have to, because in our way of working together with Lindab, we have that kind of clauses. I think, of course, there will be discussions. Of course, I expect prices to go down when raw material price goes down. Of course, we need to be on our toes and make sure that is happening as well.
How would you describe the competitive landscape with Lindab's products in the geographies that you represent?
I think Lindab is one of the top brands. I also know that you have a network with all these local stores, shops, whatever we call them, which is important for many of our competitors. I don't like when we are going to the local shops and buying material because that means that we haven't planned the sourcing of the material. I want our project managers to put the order early and make sure that it is direct delivery from this site. I also know that the service business, then it is important to have the network with all the different local stores. I think that is one advantage to Lindab, definitely.
Even if I think that we internally in Bravida could be a bit more professional sometimes.
Any questions from the audience here in the room? No? Then I would like to thank you, and good luck with the business.
Thank you. Thank you so much.
It's now time for a coffee break, and we're actually ahead of schedule. Let's stick to the times planned, so we will have the coffee break until quarter to three. During the coffee break, we will show a video that will be looping on the screen, both here in the room and on the webcast. It will be a video, it's a time-lapse of an investment we did in the village near to Grevie and Förslöv, where we have our factory for building products. It was a nine-month project. We did a time-lapse to show how complex an investment can be. Investment is one of the topics we're gonna talk about this afternoon. We hope this video will inspire you while drinking your coffee and having some cake.
See you at quarter to three. Welcome back after the coffee break, and we start this session by talking about acquisitions. This will be presented by Lars Christensson, who's the Director of Business Development and M&A, and he will be joined by Gabriella Wikander Johansson, who's the Managing Director of Ekovent, a company that Lindab acquired about 1.5 Year ago. We will go through both presentations before we come back for questions. Please, Lars.
Okay, thank you very much. Maybe just a few words about myself. Two and a half years with Lindab, 25 years in business development, including some venture capital investments. With me not on stage, I have a few members of the business development and M&A team. It's not just me working with it. We have three more people. We also have a general counsel working a lot with M&A, our finance team and a lot of people in the Lindab organization. It's not just me working with this, just so you know. Okay, first of all, what type of companies make us tick? What companies are interesting for Lindab? First of all, quality companies and by quality companies, we mean companies that have a strong market position, they are profitable, and they are stable.
We don't like turnarounds. There was a history in Lindab when we did those kind of acquisitions, we don't do it anymore. Secondly, internal commitment, and this is really important. We are a decentralized organization. When someone in the organization comes to us telling us, "This is really a good company, why don't you have a look at it?" Then we get interested. Whereas the opposite would be, we go to them and say, "This is a good company, can't you take care of it?" You see how the dynamics work very differently. We definitely prefer when we got approached by the organization, and in fact, that's how most of the acquisitions we have done, where they originate from. We like owner-managed companies. They're often very well-run.
They have a long-term perspective in terms of customers, suppliers, employees, just like Lindab. Size-wise, the normal acquisitions we have done and most of what I think we will be doing in the future, the majority, they will have a revenue of roughly 50-150 million SEK. Quite small compared to the size of Lindab. That is partly because that is what the market looks like. There are lots of those companies around. We are fortunate to work in an unconsolidated industry. Just to give you an example, we have internally what we call a long list, which is companies we think are interesting. We are roughly having about 250 companies on that list at the moment.
Most of the acquisitions we have done, they were not even on that long list because we did. There were even more companies. We have about sometimes 10- 30 companies which we have on the short list, which we actively have said: Yes, we would like to approach them. Maybe we're having a discussion with them, seeing if there is an interest. Maybe roughly up to a handful of cases, we're actually having a discussion with, a serious discussion. We have signed an NDA, we are in the transaction phase. Transaction phase can take everything from a couple of months to years. Small in size, we have done recently two bigger acquisitions, Felderer in Germany and R-Vent in the Netherlands. We will do those kind of acquisitions as well.
Most of what we will do are the small ones. Synergies, when I joined Lindab, there was a consultant, I will not say from what company, calling Lindab saying, "So how do you think about integration?" My short answer is, "We don't really do integration." It's not quite true. We do it in the financial part because then we are a listed company. The company we acquire, they have to fit into Lindab financially. Apart from that, we don't tell the companies, "Now you need to do this or you need to do that." They are still independent companies running their business, running the product development, the marketing, the sales. They are still responsible for their customers. We add a number of opportunities to them.
They are usually quite happy to say, "Yes, we would like to take advantage of a steel purchasing agreements. That makes sense for us, or the freight agreements, or we would like to sell our products through Lindab sales network." We don't tell the companies we acquire, now you need to operate differently. We want to keep the entrepreneurial spirit they had. Last point here, direct contact. Many of the companies we look for and the companies we have acquired, actually almost all of them, they have been owner-managed. We have approached them. We have initiated this discussion presenting Lindab, why is Lindab interesting? This is relevant because it all. If it's an auction, usually the price is the most important parameter.
When we approach an entrepreneur selling his important company that's maybe the biggest employer in the town or the small village, he needs to be sure that we take care of the company, and that is very important. We need to have this relationship with the person that we're buying the company from. You may have seen a version of this slide, or actually, this picture, in our annual report. This one, but the one before. There is a bit more information on this one. Just to explain a little bit what type of companies we look for, and a bit of why. On the bottom axis, you see from left to right, the size of the company sales.
From quite small companies, EUR 10 million here, up to about EUR 200 million-EUR 300 million sales. On the left axis, type of company. What's the main business of the company? Distribution. Distribution of products. A product company or more of a technical competence, patents, for instance. One is to cover the white spots. Where are we not present? We are very much in a local business. We need to be present where the customer is, close to the customer. Filling white spots. We have done a lot of acquisitions, of that type. They can also be bigger, what we call B here, establish a strong presence. That is in markets where we are weak or not present at all. The two big acquisitions we have done recently, Felderer and R-Vent, are very good examples of B.
Those tend to be bigger, of course. When it comes to products, it can be smaller as well as bigger companies. You could say that there are white spots in terms of our product offering. Could be in our global offering, but it could also be in our very local offering. In a local offering in Southern Sweden, for instance. We were not very strong within the fire and smoke business. So then we acquired Ekovent. E, consolidate in strong product areas. There are a number of product areas where we are strong. Of course, we would like to go even stronger. Not very strange. F, strengthen our technical competence. We have acquired one company in Ireland where this definitely was the case.
They had patents within the smoke evacuation, which really it was basically one person and the patents. But this has really helped us building a new business. There is to the very, very right here multinational ventilation companies. Just to say, we don't rule this out, but it's not actively where we look. We know there are companies that possibly could be interesting, but it's not where we spend the most of our time. Yes. With that, I would like you to give some actual facts what it is to be part of Lindab. So please, Gabriella.
Thank you. I think I use this one. Done.
Yep.
Gabriella Wikander Johansson. I'm Managing Director of Ekovent, and I joined Ekovent for around soon six years ago and joined the company as a sales manager. With the acquisition of Lindab, I got a new role. Who are we at Ekovent? We are a Malmö-based company founded around 50 years ago, 1972, and we produce and develop products for the whole Sweden, I would say, but within fire dampers, roof hoods and louvers and so on. What I think is about a little bit unique with Ekovent, that even though we are a small company, we have production, we have development, we have sales and marketing.
It's a really a complete company, although a small one. We were acquired first of October 2020, so around one 1.5 Year ago, and that was really a big thing for us. There was a bit of concern within the company, I would say, being acquired by such a big company when we were such a small part of that. At the beginning, that was stressful, but within time, it has really settled in the best way, I would say, and I will come back to that later. Short about us, around 120 million SEK in turnover. Founded, as I said, 1972, around 70 employees.
We have sales offices in Stockholm, also managing the northern parts of Sweden, in Gothenburg, Helsingborg, and then in Vellinge, just south of Malmö, we have production and sales office as well. I will now not go into the depths, but the main part of the products that we have are fire protection, as Lars said previously. We are also offering a big range of roof hoods and louvers, both as standard but also very special roof hoods, I would say. Dampers, all kinds of them. We also have some VAV systems and fans. The main fans is smoke exhaust fans. It's big fans for smoke evacuation. It's a big variety of products. Fire protection, roof hoods, louvers, and dampers, all produced by ourselves. We have agencies for VAV and fans.
A few highlights, I would say, from being acquired by Lindab. At first, when we were acquired, it was, "What does Lindab want to do with us? What are the demands? How do they want us to work, develop, and so on and so on?" When that settled a bit, we more asked the question, "Okay, how can we develop Ekovent in best possible way using the synergies from Lindab?" That was when we really could start working, I would say. One of the really big positive things were on the investment side. How can we transform Ekovent to manage the future challenges that we have here? Being a small, privately owned company, I would say that would have been very tough because there are lots of things that needs to be improved.
Now we have a very strong company behind us as a mother company who are really open to investments. Of course, we have to fulfill the requirements for everything, the investment according to the investment requirements, but that's also a challenge for us. We know that, okay, if we get the investment approved, then we have a short payback time, and we know we can really utilize it. This has really turned our way of thinking and really thinking forward, how can we build the best Ekovent? What support do we need? How can we utilize Lindab in best possible way, I would say.
Investments, we are investing a lot in the company right now, and it's you see it everywhere, and it's positive for everyone, just not me and the management, but to see that the working environment is improving, we are getting new machines, and so on. It's really a push for the company that all employees see that Lindab is really putting effort to make us a better company. When it comes to sales, I'm actually borrowing a quote from Ola Ringdahl. "It's about collaboration, not incorporation." That means that even though Lindab is a very strong company in Sweden, we are still leading our sales activities and so on here in Sweden. But we have lots of common customers, like Bravida is one of them. There, we can have a common agreement, and we support each other in best possible way.
We can also use common sales channels to develop sales. For example, if Lindab has lots of customers who are buying fire dampers from other suppliers, that's an area where we can expand our business and work together in that way. We get a local presence. By 30 stores in Sweden, all of a sudden, our customers can go in there and get some of the products that we are supplying in the market with an extremely easy access. That's very positive. What's also very interesting here is to see the different collaborations that we have now started within Lindab. For example, we are producing some products in far north to supply the northern customers of Sweden.
Instead of producing everything down in the south of Sweden, we can look at other Lindab producing sites, and that's great for sustainability, for transport costs, and for being close to the customer. Local presence is really a two-step thing here, I would say. Lindab also arranged something called the Lindab Dagarna, where they invited close to 300 customers, where we were also present and were able to pre-present us. That was a great opportunity for us to get access to all of these customers. That's one step of the synergies that Lars mentioned before. Purchasing, Tobias will come back to that later on. What's interesting within purchasing is that even though we are a small company, we had some suppliers where we were an even bigger customer compared to where Lindab were.
When we could start seeing those synergies, it gained both of us, and to see the volumes that we had within some suppliers. With the acquisition, when Lindab bought us, we got an enormous market knowledge that we didn't have before when it comes to pricing and so on that Tobias will go into later. That has really strengthened us how to go to the market and so on with our pricing, and also now we can optimize sourcing in a completely different way than when we were this small company. We get a whole network of contacts in a different way than we had before. R&D is extremely important for us. Since fire dampers is one of our main areas, all of those products are third-party certified. That means we need to test them externally all the time.
We have fire testing at our own facilities, but now we can do other tests at Lindab facilities that we had to go externally to do previously, but now we can do them at Lindab, so that we get an access to high-tech laboratories. We also have a wide range of experts, and we are also already discussing for other Lindab who need fire dampers, how we can support and discuss and develop things together. We get experts, I would say, and then also support in the development process. It's really an opportunity for us to step up and become even better, and that's a huge strength, I would say. Last but not least, there are many things to list, but I would like to mention a few more. Internal control.
Previously, when we were a privately owned company, it was lots about finance and the accountants, and they asked about financial control and so on. Now the internal control is involving so much more. It involve the sales process, do we have control over that? Purchasing process, control. That's really pushing us to become a better company. Including more departments, making us improve a lot. Sustainability that Matilda will speak about later, we have really, really been forced to lift and work more sustainable and really to see we have to map the company, how much scrap we have, how much energy we use, and so on and so on, and report that, of course. Now we know, okay, these are our weak spots. Here we have to improve. Here are our strengths.
They're good, but how can we improve them even further? Lindab as a big company with these demands is really pushing us to become better, I would say. Last but not least, the working environment for everyone in the factories. There, we have really improved a lot. We're registering, for example, all risks and deviations that we have now, and we have a system for mapping that, and we can also monitor all improvements that we're doing. Then there are networks within the group, so the operations manager get a network to discuss with difference how we can improve everything and so on. I would say the working environment within the company has really improved tremendously. That's also with the support that we have.
Okay, check on these parts, how does these ones fulfill regulations and so on. Even though we were fulfilling everything, but now we can do it better and make sure that we are a bit ahead of everything instead of being running to catch up with everything. For us, I would say it has been improvements and also getting this network of people everywhere. Now you know that there is someone you can call. We don't have to be experts on our own. There are someone we can call and ask for help. That was a bit about our short history so far with Lindab, I would say.
Thank you. This has been a topic that sparked a lot of questions. We'll see if I can sort them out, all of them. What's the split in the M&A pipeline between ventilation companies and building components companies?
Profile Systems. I think it's roughly the same split as the current sales, roughly. About 2/3 ventilation and 1/3 profile.
Is there an expectation that the acquired company should reach a certain operating profit after a certain number of years?
The companies we acquire, they're quite different. You probably noticed, for instance, Felderer, we said that they have a profitability lower than Lindab's average. Our ambition is to grow it to the same level as Lindab. We don't want parts of Lindab that are significantly lower. There is no specific timeline saying you have to do this in one or two years. It depends very much on the type of business in the company.
When you acquire a company like Felderer who doesn't sell Lindab's product today, how do you approach that?
In Felderer case, it was very easy. The first thing they asked us, "So when can we start selling Lindab Safe products?" We did not go to them saying, "No, now you have to sell Lindab." It's quite often the case, we say, "You run the business, your customers, they know what they want to buy." Very often they say, "Yes, then we want to buy Lindab products and sell them to our customers because they want the Lindab products." I would say it's the other way around, rather than we pushing them, "Now you have to sell Lindab's products.
If we come back to Felderer, that's a company with a lower margin than Lindab's margin. How do we work with raising that margin? What's the business case for that?
They are doing a lot of things. I think one of the important one is to actually sell the Lindab products. We are of course looking at things, how can we work together with other Lindab units to source more products? I think that's the most obvious one. Then it's rather small things. Steel sourcing can be quite a lot of money for many companies. It's not one big thing, and then we do that, and then we're done. It's a lot of small things we do.
If we talk about steel sourcing, what effect would that do for a company like Ekovent to change the purchasing from your former to Lindab's agreements? We have kept our supplier for quite a long time because it was a collaboration for many, many years, but we are now switching to Lindab Steel. We're also changing material, so we're getting better access through Lindab Steel. You don't want to comment on the savings?
No.
I think that's a no. Okay. A question about the average margin in our M&A pipeline. Is it above or lower than Lindab's?
That's a good question. I would say that it's quite similar. It's not. There are some companies with higher margin, there are some with definitely lower margin. On average, about the same. I would typically say that small companies tend to have higher margin in our experience. The bigger companies have lower margin.
Do you have a company the size larger than SEK 1 billion in revenue in the pipeline?
It depends on how you define the pipeline. In the long list, definitely yes. I think that's all I can say.
How will you brand the acquired companies?
Normally the acquired companies, they have been very successful building their business. They have built up a strong brand, and then we see very little reason to destroy that brand. There are some examples where it's obvious this will become a Lindab entity. We acquired a small business in Skellefteå in northern Sweden on this white spot type of company. It was obvious from the beginning, this is going to be a Lindab branch. In most of the other companies we have acquired, they keep their brand because they have a strong brand.
Just like Ekovent.
Yes.
Felderer's products, will they continue to sell their own products or will those be phased out by Lindab products?
I think it's a bit too early to say. They decide, again, it's not Lindab telling them, "Now you need to do this or that." It's Lindab really deciding. Or sorry, it's Felderer deciding. Freudian slip here. It's really the local company because if we do it, we take away the motivation and also give them a lot of reason to say, "You told us to do this, and then we don't make the profit you wanted us to make.
Any question from the audience here in the room? One final question on this topic then. It's about succession planning. When we acquire a company, quite often the owner or the managing director is still there. How do we work with succession planning? Is that up to the acquired company or does Lindab get involved in that planning process?
We are definitely involved. It's one of the first questions we think about when looking into companies. I think Ekovent is actually the only company where the MD has left so far, and that we knew from the beginning when we started the discussion. The former MD said, "I've worked very hard for many years. I'm getting close to retirement age, and when I sell, I'm going to retire." And then we could plan for it. In all the other cases, the MD has stayed and wanted to stay because they want to take care of the company they have built up. There is of course always a risk, but I think the biggest risk is if we don't let them operate independently, then they will get tired, then they will leave.
Usually we look into how sensitive is the company's business to MD leaving? If possible, we try to see are there candidates internally? It's one of the first things we really look into.
Well, thanks a lot. I have some more questions, but I think I'll save them to Ola later actually. Thank you.
Thank you.
We're gonna move into the next topic. It's also a hot topic. It's about steel and it's also about investments. Tobias Augustsson, our Managing Director for Lindab Steel, please.
Thank you. Good afternoon. As Catharina said, Tobias Augustsson, happy to be managing director for Lindab Steel, the factory located just a couple of hundred meters that way for you in the audience. I will say some words on material flow through Lindab, material in this case being steel. As Catharina also said, we'll say some short words on investments and how we go about investments in Lindab and our thinking there. First, some words on the material itself, steel. Steel is what you get when you combine a bit of iron ore, you have some carbon, you have most often some recycled steel and then some other elements in smaller portions and turn it up to 1,700 degrees, that's what you get, steel.
One of the earliest references that I have found to steel, it's been around for a long time, is a bowl made in Greece in the seventh century B.C., so that's almost 3,000 years old. Today it's the most commonly used material in the world. We have 3,500 different types, different grades of steel depending on which application you want to use it for. It's good to know your way around before making that choice. Steel is the main component in our product, as you have seen. There are some reasons for Lindab liking steel as much as we do. One is it is 100% recyclable. You can recycle steel an infinite amount of times over and over and over again. We also like it because the durability. It simply lasts for a long time.
When you put steel into a steel product, a finished product, the average lifetime is 40 years at least. Putting it to a more complex construction, a building, et cetera, it's well above 100. It lasts for a long, long time, and that is good for Lindab. We use this one. The flow of steel through Lindab, for us, it starts with the steel mills. Then it goes to Lindab Steel, which is what I am representing, and then to the production units that we have across Europe. From there, it goes to the Lindab branches, which is the point of contact for the end customers. Starting with the steel mills, we have our steel suppliers in Europe. Our biggest ones is Tata Steel, ArcelorMittal, and SSAB in Northern Europe or northern Sweden.
We also have other suppliers for sure, but, and we also can source from Asia, but the main ones are in Europe. We have long and strong relations with all of these suppliers. Availability is for sure a key, and on the steel market, being proactive is a necessity. The lead times are very long, and we need to secure our volumes well in advance. On the picture here, you see the steel mill in IJmuiden in Tata. That's in Holland. From there, the steel goes via ship to Halmstad in Sweden and then via truck to Grevie. That's what you see on the picture here. The trucks are normally specially customized.
One coil to Lindab Steel weighs roughly 15 tons, and a normal truck can take 30-35 tons, so a lot of trucks arriving to Lindab Steel every day. Lindab Steel is Lindab's internal steel service center. What we do is that we store, we process, and we distribute steel to Lindab internal production units across Europe. We are the largest buyer of steel in Northern Europe, so it's a lot of metal coming in, and we have three main processes in Lindab Steel. We can slit, we can cut, and we can recoil. That's what we do with the material itself. Slitting, you take a wide coil, you cut it into more narrow pieces. That's represented by the picture to the right. We can do cutting. Then we have a big coil.
We cut it into metal sheets, place it on a pallet, put some envelope around it, send it to our customers. Normally used on our laser cutting equipment. We can recoil. We have the 15 tons coil. Our customers cannot handle that weight. It's a lot. We recoil it down to 250 kilos or above, put it on pallet, send it to customer. Besides the steel, and this is what Gabriella mentioned, we take very much pride in being a competence center. The steel is one thing. We process that, we deliver that, but we also have great knowledge both on the technical part and the steel market part. We know what color systems to use.
We know how to handle corrosion, to prevent corrosion, and we know the price, evaluations or developments on the market, when to buy, where to buy. We try to share that experience as much as we can within Lindab. I think that is what our new acquisitions mostly know or get from Lindab Steel. When the steel is processed at Lindab Steel, it comes to our production units, either a factory producing ventilation parts or profile parts. The ventilation parts you've seen. You've seen one of our biggest factories just down here in Grevie, where you have seen the ducts in the picture. You have seen the silencers. You heard a lot about them. The fire dampers and the monitoring devices, the UltraLink. That's what we get from the factories producing ventilation parts.
In the profile side, that's normally what you see outside buildings, the rainwater systems, the roofing, and also the panels. That's what we turn the steel into in the production units. We have a handful of central production units located around Europe, very highly automated. That you've seen in this factory also. Very speedy production, normally a bit smaller units or products that is easy to transport out to our customers. We have, like, 30 more local production units. They are not completely manual. They can be highly optimized too, but compared to the central units, more manual and larger products. We strive to produce our biggest products as close to the customer as possible to have efficient logistics. The final stop for the steel in Lindab is the Lindab branches. Now Bravida does not go to Lindab branches. They get directly from the production units.
Normally, this is a way to get in contact with Lindab. For our end customers, that is professionals, installers, and construction companies, we do not sell to private individuals normally. The branches, yes, they can have some production. They do some ducts, for example, but normally they are a warehouse, making sure that the customers get their stuff in time and act as a sales center within Lindab. We also strive to be a one-stop-shop concept. Besides the actual Lindab products, we also have everything else that you might need as a professional, the gloves, the fasteners, the tools, and so forth. That is what you get when you stop by a Lindab branch. Supporting all this is a very important area, and that is the investments. We try to be in the forefront and to have a competitive edge.
We really need to invest all the time and continuously in not only the equipment and machines, but also the facilities to support the flow of material through Lindab. On the picture to the left, you see what is so integrated, that's assembly cells, smaller units, smaller products being produced there in very high volumes. To the right is a laser cutting equipment that we have in many different sites throughout Europe. In the midst here, we have the transport and logistics center in Förslöv, newly erected to support the Swedish market with material in short lead times. Down at the bottom here, I will say some words on the slitting line, which is an investment we actually are doing in Lindab Steel right now.
I will take you through the main steps and main thinking in that, just to give you an idea on how we go about our investments. As all investments, it starts from an idea. The idea in this case is to have redundancy, and capacity, and safety. Redundancy to be able to secure deliveries at all times to our customers. Capacity, we are increasing volumes all the time. We grow organically, we grow via acquisitions. We see and feel more volumes through Lindab Steel. We need capacity increase. Safety, always priority one. With new machines, we get better safety. We get better economy and better conditions for the operators. We go into pre-study. Yes, we always do that. Let's see how we can realize this idea. There are a number of areas to consider. It's quite complex to install a big machine into a factory.
First thing that we look at is the capabilities, and in general, Lindab is striving for automation. Lindab Steel is in this case. We want to automate our machinery as much as possible to fit the customer needs. Our customers normally have high variation in demand, and we want to have short setup times, be very flexible. Automation is very good. Another very important area, I think, is the reliability. We want machines that work. They should work for a long time, and when they do not work, we want to be able to fix it quickly. We want good service and easy-to-find components, and that tends us to go to premium brands. That is what we are looking for when we find machines.
The where to install part, I think, is a symbol for our long-term thinking and also that we don't take shortcuts. On the top right picture here, that's a red area. That's the machine that we will install in our factory. That is in the middle of the factory. That is for sure not the easiest place to put it in, but it is the right place. When we look back five-10 years from now, to get maximum productivity from that machine, that is where it should be. It will cost some more now. It will be a lot of hassle in production, as you will see, to install it, but it is the right place, and that is also very important. We work, of course, a lot with risk analysis. We do simulations, as you can see, to the bottom right.
How will the machine look like? How will it be for the operator to move around it? What's the space requirements that could be needed, and so forth? A lot with the risk analysis. Of course, we need a case. We should have a short payback time, and we should have a good realization plan to make this work in practice. With this project, this is where we are now. We are in realization. As I said, a lot of movements going on. The picture shows just one of the relocations. We will have to scrap two machines, two big slitting lines, and relocate two slitting lines just to make way for the new one. We will have to dig two holes, 7 meters deep, 5 meters long, just to make room for them.
All of that has to be done at the same time as production is running, which leads us into mitigation activities. We are quite good at Lindab to plan for this. Our customers must not be affected by us installing any machine. They should take the benefits afterwards, but they should not suffer when we are doing it. The mitigation activities is really planning for this, securing extra capacity, securing extra storage, volumes, what's needed when we do that installation, that's something I think we are quite good at. We're halfway so far, and so far our customers haven't noticed. Once this is done, in this case, Q2 2023, the machine will be here. It will require 10 trucks to deliver it here. For us, it's a big thing. This is, by the way, the biggest investment Lindab Steel has ever made.
For us, it's a huge deal. Focus then when the machine come will of course be to get it installed, but main focus will be on the soft parts, training and competence development of the operators, 'cause this is like the space rocket compared to a normal machine. We need to be able to utilize the machine in a good way. When we come this far, Lindab way is to try to get as much as what we can possibly can by getting the operators up to speed with the new machine. Then there will for sure be a follow-up when the machine is installed to see that it delivers as promised. Good. That was it.
Thank you, Tobias. As usual, we've got some questions from the webcast.
Mm-hmm.
One is, are the customers willing to pay more for fossil-free steel?
My answer with it being way back in the chain is yes.
Good. When the steel prices start to change, what time gap is it between the spot prices and Lindab's contract prices?
We have quarterly prices at Lindab, so maximum three a quarter, three months, depending on when the price start to change.
How much better purchase price does Lindab get compared to a smaller competitor when it comes to buying from the large steel suppliers?
I think that is very difficult for me to answer, but in general, what we find is when we do a new acquisition, our new acquisitions are happy with the steel prices. That's as much as I can say. We have seldom heard it the other way around, so it's normally quite good.
Any questions from the audience here in the room? They're all so polite. Okay, thanks a lot, Tobias.
Thanks again.
The next topic is sustainability. It's an area where a lot of things have happened. Matilda Isaksson, who's responsible for sustainability in group level, will now give us an update.
Thank you, Catharina, for handing over to me. Yeah, with Lindab, we want to create a better climate both indoors and outdoors. As you have heard several times, we spend the most of our time indoors, and we are highly affected by the indoor climate. Buildings account for a huge part of the global emissions, and 60% of these emissions comes from electricity and heat consumption, and 20% from the material. We have a big responsibility to do our part to change this. With our sustainable offering, we can both decrease the energy consumption and still make sure that the user in the building are there in an optimal indoor climate.
We have a lot of ongoing activities that will have a huge impact on our non-financial targets, but also for our customers, like Bravida, and the end user. We are part of the development of fossil-free steel by being partner with SSAB and also working closely together with H2 Green Steel. We are guaranteed volumes from 2026, but as you know, with innovative projects, there is always a risk for delay. We are also collaborating with other steel makers. This morning, I was in a meeting with ArcelorMittal, and we had great discussions, and they have so many plans, and it's by far so exciting. That's, yeah, the best part of my job, being part of collaborating across the borders with our suppliers and customers.
We have also recruited a lot of sustainability specialists to speed up the involvement of sustainability becoming a part of the everyday business. Because in order to become a sustainable company, we need everyone at Lindab involved. Everyone can contribute and is so important for us achieving our goals. We are also improving our KPIs continuously. We have set tougher targets, and we plan to measure even more areas going forward. By 2023, we will have to report according to the new legislation, CSRD, and I would say we are quite prepared. Our sustainability report has been integrated in the annual report since 2019. We have traceable, transparent, and high-quality data since we invested in a platform last year for sustainability reporting, and this even enables the third-party review.
We did also an external verification of our Scope 1 and Scope 2 measurements with a good result. At the same time, we started the screening of Scope 3, which is very difficult but also very important since 90% of our emissions come from that scope. We will share the results in the next annual report. We also exceeded the reporting requirements for the European Taxonomy in the last annual report. We both reported on the eligible and aligned for climate goal 1 and the share of eligible for climate adaptation. We are also looking into the TCFD reporting since that framework, that method will be part of the CSRD, so that is something we will have to include in the next annual report, but we have not decided the extent yet. Some more details about the European Taxonomy.
73% of Lindab sales are considered eligible, and 66% are considered aligned for climate goal one, which is climate mitigation. We cannot achieve 100% today since not all sales are covered by the requirements and the criteria in the EU Taxonomy today. However, EU is looking at adding more products and sectors, so hopefully we will have 100% eligible sometime in the future. Consider then the alignment, not all markets where Lindab are active are ready to invest in the most energy efficient solutions, but we are active on the markets in trade associations, so to increase the awareness and the demand for those products. With the European Green Deal and other related initiatives, we really see a change coming here. But 100% is not possible at the moment.
What we see is that we have the greatest possibility to have a high impact on climate mitigation and transition to circular economy. The other goals are equally important, but at the moment, they are quite hard to address on Lindab sales. We are waiting for the acts for the other goals, so it's too early for us to say something there. We're following it closely, and we are also following the development of the EU Social Taxonomy very closely. I think it will be a good add-on to the EU Taxonomy that we have today. For sourcing that we heard a lot about regarding the steel now, we want to take responsibility throughout the whole supply chain, and I think this is a must. We cannot become sustainable by ourselves.
We need to integrate with suppliers, and we need to work closely with our customers. One and a half year ago, we implemented the Lindab sustainable sourcing method, which consists of three steps. First, the supplier signs the Lindab Supplier Code of Conduct, or they can present their own, and we can approve it. The second step is that they do assessment, and the question then in the assessment is based on the risk of the supplier. The third step, I think the most important one, is that we also go on-site to suppliers with high risk, and we use a third party to go there to make really sure that they comply with our code of conduct. The risk of the supplier is based on the location, and we use the corruption perception index from Transparency International to determine the risk.
As you can see in the picture, 2021, we had only 1% of our purchases from suppliers in high-risk countries. This is something we also plan to decrease. We want to move to Europe with a lower risk or, if needed, be in other parts of the world, but in low or medium risk locations. We have had one finding so far. It's a supplier in a high-risk country that does not approve of the third party coming there to do the on-site audit, and we are working with them now. Hopefully, they will agree to our demands, and if not, we will have to end our collaboration with them and find another supplier. The suppliers in the scope for evaluation then, looking at high risk, it's the suppliers with a purchase over EUR 25,000.
In low and medium risk, it's above EUR 100,000, or if the supplier, of course, is considered strategic importance for us, then the purchase volume doesn't matter. We are preparing for the coming European due diligence law that will be mandatory for us by 2025. We are taking the first step, but there are a lot of things more to do. We need to extend the risk analysis to include more going forward. Each company are implementing this method as we speak, and we have quite tough targets on this, for the Lindab company. All of the suppliers in the scope will have to sign the code of conduct or present an approved one, this year.
Science Based Targets, this is very high up on the agenda and, something I'm really looking forward to. We are taking the decision on this during 2022. As I mentioned before, we have started the pre-study of the emissions, and they account for more than 90%. This is also, I think, the most difficult part of my job. It's so hard to get data, reliable data and high quality, and it's based on a lot of assumption. It's an iterative process, and all companies are facing this today. I think we will see a lot of changes here, companies becoming more transparent and also digital processes and tools that will help us do this in a better way.
We have started the detailed analysis now, and as we can see that, purchased material and product category 3.1 have the highest impact, and this is because of the steel we use. Collaboration with the steel supplier is one of our most important activities going forward. We also have to dig in a lot more to sold products. This is quite interesting actually in the Greenhouse Gas Protocol because we at Lindab, we develop more smart products now than ever before. When you calculate it, you have to include products that are smart and use electricity in the usage phase to function and have a long lifetime. The better products we do and the more energy we save in the building, the higher emissions Lindab will have in that category.
We cannot take credit for the energy savings we do in the building using Greenhouse Gas Protocol. We are looking into something to add on here to really show the impact of our products, so you can see how good they actually are. For transportation, it's difficult, but we have a lot of activities going on there as well. We are closer to the customer and trying to manufacture closer to them as much as we can since we have products that have a high volume with a lot of air in the trucks. This was all for me, but I really look forward to share more updates with you in the future.
Thank you, Matilda. What do you think is the greatest challenge for Lindab in the area of sustainability?
That is so tricky because, like, this is my biggest interest in life, and I'm so happy to work with it. Today, it's a lot of stuff is happening. There are initiatives, legislation, market demands, and we are trying to run on everything, but we need to prioritize. I think we are facing now a risk where we will report a lot, and that will take time of actually doing something good, and that will change it. We need to find the balance there, and that is for all companies and of course the financial sector as well.
Could you comment on the split between Ventilation and Profile when it comes to the Taxonomy, the alignment numbers that we have presented?
Yeah. The biggest difference there is that we see that for ventilation a bigger part of the products are eligible as well and aligned. For profile the criteria doesn't cover the biggest share of our sales, actually. There we have a much lower number. I think we will see a change also when the EU Taxonomy expands on more products and sectors. We also sell products for like industry buildings that is not insulated. In order for us to say that a roofing is aligned it has to have a certain U-value and those product doesn't. In the end they are also not used in that way. That is quite tricky on how to communicate.
In the annual report, we have included the alignment numbers for the first goal.
Yes.
Yes. That's that. You can take a look there. We actually disclosed more detailed numbers than we had to this year because we find it very important. We got a question about social taxonomy and human rights. How can you monitor and study your value chain to make sure that they actually follow this?
Yeah. I would say, like, what we presented on sustainable sourcing, going in that direction, that is something we have started, but we also find. I think what we need to mention there is that we don't do it to say something that you are bad or you are a good supplier. We do it in order to become better together. We can't become sustainable by ourselves, like I mentioned. We need the suppliers with us. The assessment is both, quality, since we are a premium brand and we need to have high quality, but also environmental aspects and, social aspects, human rights, health and safety, working conditions, everything like that. We try to cover it all.
Any more questions from the audience here? No? Thank you, Matilda.
Thank you.
Today. That is the summary and even more opportunity to ask Ola questions. Ola Ringdahl, please come back on stage.
Thank you, Catharina. I've noted that there are some questions that have been left for me to answer, and we will take them in just a little while. I also noticed that Mattias Johansson, he left some questions unanswered, and I'm sure that you will remember them. It's interesting how the dynamics work here. The audience sitting in front of the screen, they seem to have more time to type questions while the people in the room, they seem to enjoy the show and let the others do that part of the job. One more observation. I listened with great interest to Mattias Johansson, and he mentioned that he does not want his installers to come by a Lindab shop to pick up products.
Every time I go to a Lindab shop early in the morning, I see at least three Bravida cars standing outside, and it's not only because we serve good coffee. I think that the importance of the Lindab locations should not be underestimated. You know, a building job rarely follows plan exactly. There are drawings and many technical preparations made, but then when the installer comes to the building site, it looks a bit different in reality than it did on that nice drawing. Having Lindab as a partner makes that part of the, say, problem much easier to solve.
On the lunch break or in the early morning on his or her way to work, the installer can stop by a Lindab shop, and we have many of them, and they can pick up those items that are missing to finish the job. When we sell our products, we sell much more than that. I usually say we sell availability, the highest availability in the industry. Because you can get via the webshop and EDI orders, and you can get things delivered directly to the building site, but you can also make those last purchases on your way to work or from work, and you get an absolute world-class service. It's my job to try to summarize the discussion.
I know that many of you are wondering, okay, so you are here now, but, you know, where is the economy taking us? Will we go into more difficult economic times? What will happen in the construction sector, et cetera? That is, of course, very difficult to answer. I will comment on it in two ways, long-term market outlook and short-term. The long-term market outlook for Lindab, I think looks fantastic. We happen to be with the main part of our sales in the ventilation industry. I think we have fantastic long-term growth prospects, both in the new build segment, but also definitely in the renovation and upgrading of buildings. Long-term demand, I'm not worried about at all. What about short-term demand? Well, at the moment, we are going full speed.
We are probably a little bit, say, late in the business cycle from Lindab's perspective. The installation of ventilation comes later in the building process, but we haven't seen any signs of slowdown yet. Is there a risk that there will be a slowdown? Well, I'm sure there is. I mean, interest rates and inflation and everything you read in the newspaper or the stock market is a good indicator that, you know, something is going on. How will that affect Lindab? Well, we are a relatively big ship, but if there are big movements and in the economy, of course, Lindab will be affected, demand will be affected.
I'm not so worried about it because I know that we have built a very strong company, and we have a fantastic, say, earnings discipline, and people take great responsibility in all our units. Even though we might be somewhat affected, I'm quite sure that we will stand very strong also in the coming challenging time, just as we did in COVID times or in material shortage time or when the war broke out. If I should have to try to predict more than that, I should probably be a professional gambler or something because it is not easy to say things with great certainty. Talking about Lindab's priorities. At Lindab we have hundreds of fantastic initiatives ongoing.
All around our European companies, we are investing, we are acquiring, we are doing work on sustainability, et cetera. If I should try to pick some highlight priorities, number one is still that we put the highest focus possible on delivering on time to our customers. Bravida cannot do their job if we are late or if we cannot supply. In turbulent times, it is more important than ever to have that robustness and to be able to deliver no matter what. That is also why we do spend quite a lot of our cash flow on making sure that we have the right stock available in terms of raw material. If you study our balance sheet, you will see that the value of our inventory has increased in the past year, and that is not by chance.
It is a deliberate and very planned action from our side. We want to be the one that can supply when no one else can. Second, well, you have heard during the day some examples of new products being launched. We strongly believe that in the renovation and upgrading of buildings there will be a lot of activity, and it will be very high on the priority going forward. We are spending a lot of our R&D money in developing new products targeting this segment. Yes, we can improve indoor air, but now we also have this extra financial incentive for the property owners to invest in the building and save energy costs, and also to get a better sustainability and ESG value on their properties. The third priority here is to continue with our investment program.
I remember visiting our factory in Poland back in the autumn of 2018. It was pretty much a manual factory producing ventilation products. Today, four years later, it is a fully automated factory. It's been completely automated. We have tripled the output from that factory. That is just one example from Europe where we are doing this transformation. We are doing it in the U.K. , in France, in several sites in Sweden, in Denmark, in Germany, in Switzerland, et cetera. It's a fantastic transformation of a company with a much higher capacity, much higher efficiency, and a much safer working environment today. Of course, that is not only about machines. It's about investing in the competence of people, and it's investing in the infrastructure. The infrastructure we are using, the buildings, et cetera, are key to make this happen.
Even though Tobias from Lindab Steel is an expert at rearranging his equipment in a defined building, we have several places where we need more space if we should continue on this growth journey. Then you have to take some big bets. One was made back in 2016 when it was decided to build this building where we are standing today behind me with a high bay warehouse. It was a huge investment for Lindab. Late 2017, it was taken into operation. Frankly speaking, with today's volume, we could not have coped if we had not built this warehouse. We could have lasted a few more months and maybe a few more months again. If you don't invest in time, well, then it might be too late.
You went through the press hall, those of you who were at the morning visit. The press hall, we have invested a lot of money, and we have really now taking the final steps in fully automating everything with a third generation automation equipment. But you can see that it's quite full. To be able to grow in the future, we have now taken the decision to build a press hall number two, similar in size on this site, connected to the high bay warehouse, and it will be ready in approximately two years time, and it will be gradually filled with automation equipment. I think this will be enough for Lindab to grow from this site on the products we are specialized here for the next 20 years.
Of course, a company which is under financial distress will not be able to take those decisions. Since we have managed to improve Lindab's profitability and how we operate, we can make those decisions that are for the long term. We are making similar investments in many countries in Europe, and that is why I'm quite sure that we will have a very prosperous future. On top of the investment program, we, as Lars Christensson pointed out, we have become quite active in the acquisition arena, and I will come back to that in a couple of slides after this one. Finally, Matilda so elegantly explained how active we are in the area of sustainability.
As she also pointed out, now it's a lot about measuring, getting the data, how you know. Collecting that data takes a tremendous amount of work. Then to be able to transform that into real improvement actions so that we make sure to reach, to improve these KPIs is of course something that will keep us quite busy in all parts of the Lindab Group for the coming years. Some of the targets will be reached very soon, so we don't have much time. Now, coming back to acquisitions. When COVID broke out, we had one in our acquisition team. He was in Ireland to try to finalize the acquisition of a company called Thor Duct. He caught the last plane back to Sweden before the borders closed.
That was, I believe, back in middle of March 2020. Since then, we have made 14 acquisitions in the last two years, including Ekovent and many more. You see some of the logotypes on this slide. If we want to look at the more detailed list, which you will probably not be able to read anyway, but I will summarize it for you. 14 acquisitions, but let's not forget that we have also divested two groups of companies in Lindab. The first one was IMP Klima, that was divested almost two years ago. Unfortunately, an acquisition that didn't go right back in 2015. We divested the entire business area Building Systems under the brand name Astron.
We managed to do that on New Year's Eve last year. They had a big operation in Russia, so we were quite relieved that we are not the owners of that company, even though we of course feel sad for our colleagues in that very well-functioning Russian entity of that company. We have divested the equivalent of SEK 1.2 billion in turnover, and we have acquired SEK 2.1 billion in turnover. This has changed the shape of Lindab, and of course also the profitability prospects, and also the share of EU Taxonomy alignment, and the share of the ventilation business.
The most recent acquisition announced was in the Netherlands, and this is a good example of the long relationships that Lindab has, in the end, made us the new owners of R-Vent. We have been working with R-Vent for more than 40 years. We are a key supplier to them, and we have known the owner families for decades. When it was time in their big family meeting to make a decision about who the best owner for the future would be, they chose Lindab. I think this is the way that many of the acquired companies think, who is the best owner for the future.
We are looking forward to welcoming R-Vent now into the group, and the Netherlands will now be the 21st country in Lindab, adding a new country with our own company. That was the end of the slideshow. I, of course, welcome questions.
We have quite a lot of them that we saved for you.
Thank you.
If we start in the area of acquisitions, how many acquisitions have been sourced organically, that is internally out of the acquisitions you have made? That the lead came from internal sources.
If Lars is still in the room, he will help me to think about it, but I would say 80% at least.
At least, yes. I think it's even more.
I think there has been one auction process. The rest we have initiated or have been in close contact with for quite some time.
How do you monitor the companies you acquire, and what kind of data do you collect to manage their performance?
Well, the companies quite quickly come into our financial reporting structure and, our financial follow-up, structure. We follow them up as any normal Lindab company. Of course, it depends on at which level they come in. Ekovent will come in in the North Europe region, and we follow them up as part of the Northern European business reviews. We can have even smaller companies that will go in under a, let's say, national company. If it's R-Vent in Holland, they will come into our Region West as a country, which is then they get quite a lot of follow-up. In the quite special case of Felderer, which is the biggest acquisition we have made since 2006, they actually report directly to me. I have direct control of them.
The typical acquisition will go in and report either to a group management team member, not me, or to a country manager.
Can you give some comment on the multiples when we pay for a company?
That is a common question. I would say that at Lindab, we are not overpaying. We believe that if there should be a good match between us and the acquired company, it has to be about more than money. We should be the desired buyer for several different reasons. If we talk about EV/EBIT multiples, we pay single-digit multiples. If the company has a lot of technology and they are growing fast, it might be towards the higher range or higher end of that range. If we're talking about more distribution-oriented companies without so much of their own technology, it could be in the medium range or medium level of that range. Something like that. You know, every negotiation is different, and of course, every company has its different uniqueness.
If we go in and buy a market leader in a country or within a product technology, it is worth paying a little bit more, of course. We try to stick to our single-digit philosophy.
Why do the smaller acquisitions have a uncertain
The way that Lars explained it was actually the opposite way around, that we tend to find that smaller companies have a higher profitability than the bigger ones. The reason for that, I'm not sure why that is, but I think that sometimes with increasing size, you get increasing complexity and the money you generate is still quite big in terms of actual money. The owner family, they are quite happy with a lot of money but not so many percent. In the smaller companies, you need a lot of percent to get a lot of money. I think it's actually a private financial consideration saying the family needs this much money and the rest we spend on expansion or something.
It is not true for everybody, but that is the general way that we have found.
Which companies would you count as competitors, and have you considered to acquire them?
Which companies we believe are competitors? Lindab is by far, and I mean really by far, the European market leader. We have, of course, competitors. They are normally local or national competitors. They might be strong in one country. We have very few competitors who are strong in more than one country. We are the only Pan-European player who can offer the same services throughout Europe. At the same time, it must be said that a lot of construction companies and a lot of installation companies are also quite local. Bravida is a good example of somebody who has actually managed to operate in several countries at the same time, and there are those examples. Quite often in the construction industry, business is quite local. We have a very strong market position.
Let's change topic, and this is a question about the share of our sales that's related to more basic products such as ducts compared to more advanced products such as UltraLink.
Well, Lindab is still producing a lot of volume of what you call ducts. But I would not consider ducts to be so simple, even if they might look simple. It takes a lot of engineering effort to understand how the air can flow in the most economic way possible through kilometers of air duct work in a building. So even though it might, you know, our products might look simple, there is a tremendous amount of engineering going into what those products look like. In the duct system, you have a lot of technological components, sensors, dampers, smoke, fire and smoke protection, cleaning hatches, silencers.
The whole system is packed with technology. It might look simple from, you know, just when you would look at it, but if you look up in the roof here at the ventilation systems, these are not simple products. They are extremely connected and well-designed. I would then again come back to your question and say, what we call technical products is probably around 30% of our sales, where you have a high technology content, and the more normal technology content is, I would estimate around 70%.
Now a question about e-commerce. What kind of development do you see, and do you think it's an opportunity or a threat for Lindab?
I don't see it as a threat. I see it as a big opportunity. Buying ventilation equipment is not something you as a private person will do so much on a website. There might be for certain handy people that they can buy some components, and we of course offer that, but our customers are. They run their businesses. They might be a one-person installation company, but they are very professional. They will order through our web shop, and they will get home delivery or delivery to building site, or they can pick up on their way to work.
If you integrate the very smart systems that Jan Behrens was talking about, when it comes to how you design a ventilation system, and you take everything from the design and the drawings, and you get that into a shopping list, which you automatically can send in to become an order, with automatic shipment to exactly the right location. You get the right goods for apartment 12 on floor 16, on Monday morning at 7:05 A.M. That is pretty powerful. To go from really the beginning to the end delivery, with pretty much no people being involved is a huge opportunity for Lindab. We do that today, but we find that customers are pretty conservative.
It is not uncommon that they will, you know, on the back of some paper slip, write something, come into the Lindab shop, hand it over and sit and drink a cup of coffee. That also happens. We have all types of customers. Digitalization, including how you design and configure and shop, how you get your installation instructions, the commissioning of the equipment, and also how you monitor how it's performed is a great opportunity for us.
The next question is, how many percentage of the revenue comes from products that are centrally produced and how much is locally produced?
Yeah. That's then you come into so many definitions, but clearly, we have two central ventilation factories, the one here in Grevie and the one in the Czech Republic. We have one central factory for the building components, and that's also here in Sweden in the neighboring village, Förslöv. The output value from those factories is of course high, but I will not comment on exactly how high that is. We will keep that a secret. Mind you, we have, depending on how you define it, we have around 100 production locations, and out of those 30 can be seen as real factories in Europe. The footprint is pretty big.
The next question is about the percentage of third-party products as part of our revenue.
Yeah. In Lindab in total, it is not so much that is from a third party. We make most of what we sell, we produce ourselves. I would estimate around 10% is sourced externally. For an individual Lindab country, the number can vary quite a lot. We have certain companies in Lindab where the traded goods represents 25, 30% of sales, and we have some where the traded goods only represents 5% of sales. Depending on the country and our history and the way that the installers work and what they expect can change that number quite a lot. Lindab is a homemade, home-baked bread. We make pretty much everything ourselves.
Now to a difficult one then.
Mm-hmm.
Steel prices are down 15% from recent highs in May and nearly down 20% from a year ago. What will be the impact from a financial perspective on Lindab sales and earnings, and how will the inventory be affected?
Of course, I mean, this occupies many people at Lindab as well. Of course, we try to second guess and forecast, you know, how will the steel prices move? It's been a very dramatic development since 1.5 years now. It is not only after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, but it started in the aftermath of COVID, really with the disruptions. When prices go up, and of course Lindab needs to protect the gross margin, we need to increase prices proportionally to that. If steel prices go up 20%, Lindab will not increase prices 20% because we don't sell unprocessed steel. We are not a trader. But we will have to offset that steel price increase so that our gross margin is protected.
That is our goal. When steel prices go down, we also aim to protect our gross margin. That is the plan. The difficult thing has to do with timing. How can you make sure that you increase quickly enough? How can we make sure that we don't reduce prices too quickly? Because mind you, we have a stock as well that we have to work through. To try to balance this out over time has been Lindab's model over decades. That is how the Lindab model was designed, in a way that such that our purchasing contracts and our customer agreements should be offsetting each other in terms of time.
We know that we can buy on three-month contracts, when it comes to material, and then we have a certain notice period to our customers when we can change the prices to them. The main goal, protect the gross margin. When it comes to sales, if steel prices increase substantially, it will look like Lindab sales is growing. It might not be volume, it can be price. It has been a combination of price and volume, but, you know, it can be quite a lot of price. And when prices on steel come down, after a few months, it will look like Lindab sales is declining. Well, it is in money, but it might not be the same in volume. That is just a fact and something that we have to get used to.
We're jumping a bit between the topics here.
Yeah.
Could you comment on the development of the percentage share from the more technical products over the last five years?
It is increasing. Not because we are reducing the sales of our normal products, but simply because I think technological development is happening. We heard the comment about more and more sensors coming into a ventilation system. Steering and regulating air flows and monitoring is increasing in importance. Both very technical and technical are growing. The very technical is growing a bit faster in percent.
Why is it not a priority to acquire more direct competitors? Or why to acquire more direct competitors? Why haven't we done that?
Well, I guess in some respect you can say that we have also done that. If we look at some acquisitions we have done in Northern Sweden, for example, they have been some kind of competitors to our Lindab Sweden and Lindab Profile Systems activities. In Germany, you can say that to some extent Felderer was a competitor to Lindab Germany because we have our own company in Germany. It is not like we are acquiring competitors because we want to reduce competition. It is because we find that those companies have some real true advantages and some qualities that we think are amazing. We really want them to be part of our group and to continue to build upon those companies.
we want the companies to invest in themselves, and they might also acquire companies in their turn. If Gabriella from Ekovent comes to me and says, "I want to make an acquisition," I will listen very eagerly to her ideas. I think we are building this good ecosystem of the best companies in the industry.
Okay. Lindab has a small operation in the U.S. Do you plan to use that as a platform to expand in the U.S.?
It's an interesting question, and Lindab has made an attempt in the past to establish a Lindab company in the U.S. to sell air duct systems, the core competence of Lindab. It was a long and difficult ride, and it ended with an exit actually. The standards in the U.S. are different. We don't have any footprint there really today. Our model builds upon having very short distances between the production and distribution nodes, and always be very close to the customer. If we will go into the U.S. with our ventilation offering, we will have to go in big, at least in one part of the U.S. I would not consider it as one country from that perspective.
In one part of the U.S., we will have to go in big and build something Lindab like there. That would be a big step. We are not considering that today. We are quite happy with the expansion possibilities in Europe. You know, who knows in the future. The company we have in the U.S., that is actually a subsidiary of Spiro International. Spiro, the maker of the ventilation production equipment, making the Spiro tubes, et cetera. They are a fully owned subsidiary of the Lindab Group, so we control and develop the technology with which you make ventilation production equipment. They are the world leaders in everything that has to do with circular ventilation production. They have a subsidiary in the U.S. where they are the very clear market leader.
It is not a production site, it's a sales office with limited number of people.
Now a question about investments. If you could give some comments about the return rates and how you think about the return on investments.
As you have noticed, I am investment friendly, and coming into Lindab, it was a fantastic experience. There was ripe fruit hanging low on every tree. We have amazing paybacks on the investments we make. Typically for machine investments, the payback is three years. It can sometimes be four, but it can also sometimes be two years. Pretty much three years is what we want to achieve. We don't only invest in machines, we also invest in expanding buildings and production areas, et cetera. Of course, there you have a much longer depreciation time. We have reached a three-year payback on some of those investments, but I'm willing to accept a slightly longer payback time on that type of infrastructure. Five, six years I can accept, but not more.
Soon coming to an end to the questions, but this one is about.
They haven't started maybe asking any questions.
No, they haven't started yet. I'll take this first, and then we'll take Tobias. Could you give some comments to what kind of threats you see, not the like macro trends, but more of disruptive threats?
If we disregard say how the business cycle and construction industry will develop, which I don't really know, I don't see any big threats. I think that's one of the beauties with Lindab that we control pretty much, or maybe I should not say 100%, but at least 90% of our own destiny. We control that ourselves. We are not depending on one patent or one site or one country or one customer category. There is not a seismic technological shift from, you know, steel ducts to cardboard box ducts or something. It's a, you know, stable industry, stable technology, which I like because you can plan.
Of course, the downside of that is that you don't see 50% growth per year in terms of sales development like you can do in a new industry. We are in the ventilation industry. I think we have heard today that there are fantastic long-term growth prospects. If anything, I would say that the disruptive effects, they are working to our advantage, and that is in terms of indoor climate awareness, energy savings and sustainable buildings.
Yes.
Hi. Douglas Lindholm with DNB Markets. I have two questions, but I'll take them one by one, I think. On the green steel partnership you have with SSAB, which I think is for 2025, do you have any sort of similar discussions with any of your other suppliers? Obviously, you won't sign anything, but just on a sort of, yeah.
We are working closely with SSAB, of course, because they are our main partner for Lindab, and we have worked together for many years. We're also working closely with H2 Green Steel. We read a lot about them in the newspaper. Matilda, we are working with ArcelorMittal as well, on I think not on fossil-free steel, but on, say, steel with much lower carbon content. They're using slightly different technologies. Those are the main ones, I think.
Okay, thank you. Switching topic on or coming back to investments, you've done quite a lot in recent time in your facilities and also on your new product launches, and you state that you have a sort of market position which is leading. Do you feel like you've expanded that position even further, or your competitor is keeping up with the product cycle, which I think is maybe structurally becoming more difficult from an investment standpoint?
We have definitely taken market share in the past couple of years. I will admit that when I joined Lindab in 2018, we were overheated. We had too much volume. Temporarily, I reduced that volume a bit so we could cope and we could lift margins. After that, with the system in good balance, we have definitely become more competitive and taken market share.
Okay.
We intend to continue to do so, but not, you know, not by reducing the profitability requirements.
Mm-hmm.
I'm pretty strict at that we, in order to, have, well-invested factories, safe work environments, and to be able to be a truly class A supplier, you need to have a certain profitability to be able to invest in that. With high requirements on profitability, we will through increased competitiveness and, say, ESG parameters, et cetera, continue to take market share.
Sounds good. Thank you.
Thank you.
Now we got some more questions.
That's good. They're active.
Yes.
Oh.
What is the expected investment level going forward?
We initiated this bold investment program late 2018. It's you know, an investment program stretching until 2025. We peaked in 2020 and 2021, where we had investments annually of around SEK 400 million. Now we are gradually reducing that a bit because most of these investments are made. I think we will go down to SEK 350, SEK 300, SEK 250, something like that in the coming years. It is difficult to forecast exactly because when an investment is activated, it depends on a lot of factors. You know, the projects we are performing here, they often take between one and two years if it's a complex investment. It will taper off until 2025.
In my original plan, I said in 2025 we will be on average on annual SEK 200 million in spending for investments. Now, of course, we are also acquiring companies. We see in those companies that there are pretty attractive opportunities there as well. If there are, we will of course make them. We are clearly coming down from the highest level from now and onwards.
I think we have one more question from the audience.
Yes. We talked a lot about production and fantastic products. Now we are seeing a decreasing market. Normally in a good market, sales performance, sales profitability, decrease. When it's get tougher, we have to be more professional in marketing and sales. Can you tell us something about the sales strategy or sales culture? Do you have something like that in the Lindab Group?
I think in any way you talk about culture, I think Lindab has a strong culture. We have it in production, but we also have it in sales. I would say for the type of company that Lindab is, with a lot of production and distribution, we have a very commercial nerve and presence. We are meeting customers every day through our 130 locations in Europe. We have a big sales force interacting with the customers, and we have a commercial drive and focus in every Lindab entity. Like you heard with Ekovent, but also in all the other companies that you know they are proud to have the position they have, and they are staying extremely close to the customers.
When I was working, I've been working around in the different Lindab units, and I remember one morning when I was in our pro shop in Lund here in Sweden. I came in early at 6:30 A.M. when the shop opened, and the branch manager, he greeted all the first 20 customers by their first name. We have extremely tight relationship with the people we work with. I think Lindab has a very good sales methodology and sales culture. Where I think that we might be lacking a bit is to chase new customers in, say, the new technology areas where we are not really comfortable, what is new to us.
There, I think we have to put in some extra effort now with all the new products we are launching, because that's a little bit of a different challenge. We have a good starting point.
We have five more minutes, so let's see if we can cover the last questions as well.
Okay.
Can you talk about product availability and how it has affected your market share?
The product availability, since we are outstanding from that perspective, it has clearly improved our market share further. When others could not deliver, we could, and that is still the case. We still get quite many new customers knocking on the door wanting to buy from Lindab. Now we bring in new customers. There was a time last year when there was severe material shortage, and then we prioritized the existing customers so that we would not risk having to fail on our promises to them. But once we felt certain that we had enough material to cope with any circumstance, we welcomed new customers as well. Quite many customers have brought in new volume to Lindab because we have been the only ones who can supply.
Not only supply, but also supply with an extremely short delivery time.
Do you view Lindab's purchasing capabilities or tech height in products as the most competitive advantage?
Yes. We are good at both.
Okay, next question. You said in the beginning that 10% margin should be considered a floor in terms of growth. What could be the worst case for Lindab in terms of organic volume decline? Or do you think the company is less cyclical, now than in the past?
I think when we talk about floor, I think about the profitability target. It is clear that on the growth, that has to be seen over more than one year. There can be many acquisitions coming in at the same time, like the past two months, and there can of course be a little bit of a slower period for different reasons. The organic part of the growth will be affected by material prices. It can of course be that there will be a year with fewer acquisitions and price reductions when it will look like we are not growing like we should. I think that target needs to be seen a little bit for a little bit longer period than one year.
Do we have any final question from the audience here in the room? No. The final question is.
Uh-huh.
What kind of company do you think Lindab will be in five years' time?
In five years' time we will be a company coming closer to SEK 20 billion in sales. We will have profitability. Depending on, say, business timing, we will have a profitability between 12%-15% EBIT. We will have achieved the growth by a combination of organic growth and acquired growth, approximately 1/3 coming from organic and 2/3 from acquired growth. We will be present in, I'm now starting to guess a little bit, but in 25 countries. Still majority of footprint in Europe, but we will have looked at some little bit, or at least test our toes outside Europe as well. Whether we will go big somewhere or not, I don't dare to say right now.
We will still have our focus in the air distribution and air diffusion, which means the air duct systems and the technical products that we have today. We will be stronger than today in fire and smoke protection. That is an area which is very important and there's increasing regulation. We will have made our first deliveries of fossil-free steel products in a limited range because I think the availability of material will be small, but there will be a green line of Lindab products at that time. Does that sound good?
I think so.
All right. Sounds good. The market cap-
Oh, yeah.
Will be higher than today. Yeah.
We have reached 4:30 P.M., it's time to round up. Thank you everyone for listening on the webcast and here at Lindab in Grevie we will continue with dinner and some social activities.
We want to thank everybody who listened in digitally as well as in the room. Thank you to the organizers, and thank you to you, Catharina, for managing a tight show. Thank you very much for your interest, and I hope that you have enjoyed the sessions and the day. Thank you.