Good morning, everyone, most welcome here to the full year report from Loomis. Very delighted to see so many visitors here today to listen to this event. Without any further ado, let me go through the content of the presentation here, where we will look upon the highlights, of course, look into the different segments, few words about the financials, as always, we will finish off with a Q&A here. Couple of highlights. Organic growth of 3%, mainly driven by the growth in the U.S., which for the 10%, if we add back the fuel fee due to the low fuel cost, we are at 12% organic growth, which is, of course, a historical number for Loomis. We never have had anything like that in U.S. before. We also see some other areas in the group where we see growth.
Exciting growth we definitely see in Turkey and in Argentina. I will come back to that. Also in Spain, where we see the organic growth now for the second quarter, it's a trend there, we haven't had that for many years, also very exciting there. The operating margin improved by more than a percentage point. Of course, the growth in the U.S. with SafePoint and CMS is a contributing factor to that, also our continuous work with efficiency. As you know, our whole business model is about small improvements in each and every one of our smallest entities, the businesses. That together gives us a healthy growth in the operating margin.
The earnings per share is up 15%, the board has proposed a dividend which is up 17%, up to SEK 7, to be decided at the annual shareholders meeting here in May. I am also very pleased to announce that the board have appointed Patrik Andersson as the new President and CEO, he will be joining Loomis here at the latest early May here. Very pleased to see Patrik coming on board with Loomis. If we go to this slide, which for you who follow Loomis is very familiar with, the nice trend continues. We had 11.6% organic growth in Q3, we had that this quarter again. As you know, we normally have the third quarter as the strongest quarter due to the effects of the vacation period certainly in Southern Europe.
That we can match that number here now in the fourth quarter is, I would say, very successful for us. If we put it this way, you can see that the increase here in the fourth quarter of 2015 is one of the biggest increases quarter-over-quarter, year-over-year, which we have had. Of course, very pleased with that, we will dig in a little bit more why that is. The essence of it is in this slide, really. It's our improvements in our smallest business units, the branches. You can see here back in 2008, we had a 30% of our branches which did not make money. Today, that number is 14%. That is, of course, a tremendous achievement that we can see so many more branches making money.
Even more important is also the movements inside the gray area here where we can see when we analyze it, because we follow each and every one of the branches, we can see that almost all of them are doing small steps of improvements year-over-year. This year, particularly in 2015, we have seen a lot of branches in the U.S. moving from the red into the gray. Also a few branches or almost 50/50 between the U.S. and Europe and particularly France, we have seen several branches also becoming profitable, going from an area of unprofitability. Very pleased with that also of course. Let's look upon Europe, a few words about that. The organic growth is 1%, and as I said initially here, driven by Turkey, but also by U.K.
As we know, we took a huge contract there which has been rolled out and is now giving us that organic growth. Also in Argentina and what I just mentioned here also in Spain. Turkey, we won three major contracts here from retail chains, several thousand stops or 7,000 shops, which is being serviced by us. This is being rolled out as we speak. We have more than 50% organic growth in Turkey. As you know also, we have now bought the last 40% of that company, so it's now a fully owned subsidiary of Loomis and a very exciting market for us. We said that for many years, and we can now finally seeing that become true.
Again, not to be underestimated, Spain as being one of the most developed markets in Europe or in the world, actually, when it comes to cash handling, and a market which is also having a huge amount of CMS. That we can see growth there again is of course very good for us and for the margin for the whole group here. We continue, however, to see a decline in cash usage. We do not think that we lose any market share in the Nordic countries. However, when we compare that to the negative organic growth a year ago, we can see that it is significantly less right now. There's a few things happening in Sweden, for instance. We have the exchange of the notes and the coins here, which is going to contribute to the organic growth here during 2016 and also into 2017.
There's a couple of other things happening in the Nordic country otherwise as well. The real growth is slightly higher because of the Cardtronics acquisition in the U.K. I will come back and talk a few words about U.K. later on here. When it comes to the operating margin, we bought the company VIA MAT here in 2014 and the merger there between our operation and their operation in Switzerland, they were the significant market leader in Switzerland, they were merged here in the beginning of the year, and that continues to give us good margin improvement there and the synergies are being materialized. I'm sure that all of you are aware of the sad things that happened in France here in November.
We had some impact of that in the area of Paris where these terror attacks took place is actually 30% of the business in France, which is the biggest market in Europe. Of course, we had some concerns about the impact on our business there. There was an impact. For almost a week, we couldn't service the client. At the end of the day, those volumes which we couldn't service then, we could then at least do the CMS for later in the month or beginning of December. Overall, that didn't have a major impact on our business in France. France in general have gone through a couple of restructuring exercises here during the year, and we see now the full effect of those and the performance of France in terms of margin improvement is very impressive, although there's no real organic growth there.
As always, and that's almost boring around Loomis, you see that we always talk about that. I've done that for many years now. Those small improvements in each and every one of the entities and units, that's really what drives it. It's very rarely any big events. It's those small improvements all the time. If we come to U.S., the most astonishing number there is of course the organic growth, 10%. If we add back the fuel fee, it's about 12% inorganic growth. As I initially said here, we have never seen any growth like that before in the U.S. There is no reason really to see why that wouldn't continue. We have an excellent market position right now. We are rolling out the SafePoint more than we ever done before. We have a pretty nice backlog when it comes to that as well.
Also some other parts of our business we feel ourself absolutely as the market leader in the U.S. right now. SafePoint, and you are familiar with this, we rolled out here in September a new version together with our manufacturing partner, Tidel, there in the U.S. A new version of SafePoint as you can see, branded in the Loomis way and with some additional features. That rollout have been very successful and we have now 14,626 by the end of the year exactly installed safes which means safes generating cash or services from us by the end of the year. Numbers of sold safes are on an annual basis for 2015 exceeded 5,000. We have quite a backlog there to be installed during 2016. We continue of course to sell safes in the U.S. The other piece here is the CMS rollout.
We announced in 2014 that we gained a huge contract or a contract with the rollout of 30 sites with Bank of America on CMS. That is now completed. The last of those vaults were rolled out here in the fourth quarter. When we see then the percentage point of CMS versus CIT, then you can see that that also have a healthy growth from the 18% back in 2008 to now that we are 32% in 2015. We had at that time, I remember that back in 2008, we said that we had a target of achieving 30%. We would be very pleased when that happened and now we have managed to exceed that as well.
I think we said that many times the beauty of the CMS is obviously that there is a relatively high cost to set up the operation and to get the vault in place and people trained and the machinery there, but you can add a lot of volume to it. The profit on incremental volumes is really nice and sweet. This growth is of course helping our profitability and the operations in the U.S. As I said, the lower fuel fee has an impact about 1.5% added to the 10 and a bit here. We end up at 12% in the real organic growth here. The real growth is also affected by our acquisition of Dunbar Global Logistics. It's a mini VIA MAT which we acquired in 2014. We are a strong believer in that business.
This business however, although the name is Global Logistics, was very local U.S. for being global. The majority of that business is really diamond and jewelry shows around U.S. Again, it's something fits very nicely in with the footprint which we have. As we have the biggest footprint in U.S., we are able to service all those things which Dunbar was not able, although they had the business there. What is then driving this growth then? Because even us running the business, I think is astonished by the power of which we have in the marketplace there. I think it comes down to this, and this is a slide I borrowed from myself from the Capital Market Day, which we had in 2014, which y'all had there back in London. It's really about the quality.
We decided some years ago that we should start investing in the U.S. operation because we saw that there is a possibility to get more of the CMS outsourced. Also to gain other market share, we thought that the quality is going to be a key to it. I think we seem to be right now. We have done buildings. We've done more than of our 25, 30 major vaults have been upgraded or new built. Standardized operations, standardized building, drives quality, drives uniformity. It's easier to benchmark. It's easier to take people from one place to another. It's easier to share best practice. That is something which has been going on and we continue to do that.
Through next year, again, we're going to be five, six new vaults being opened or reopened because of course we already have operations in those cities, but we will have new sites there. We also done investment in trucks. They're mainly because we're growing, also they're on the CIT basis. That continues. It's also, of course, it's all about fuel economy, getting better trucks than we have had in the past, one-man vehicles, et cetera. Also that. We're rolling out a very exciting thing right now as we speak, Track and Trace, that will drive quality even further in our operations.
This is a CIT tool of how we manage the pickups and how we are performing in the trucks, how much time we're spending in different places so we can track our package, something like some of our distribution colleagues are already doing, but we are now implementing it. It's a system which we have been using in Europe for a couple of years, and now we're also installing that. We've done two sites in U.S. and rolling that out to the other 180 here in the coming year. We have also in the coin processing, we have a totally automated system now where other of our competitors are still doing it in a very manual way. All of those investments which we're doing is to drive quality. I think, and I'm absolute convinced that that is what the clients are looking for.
It's not the cheapest price at all location. Of course, you need to be competitive in your pricing, but you need to have the quality. Going back and talk about the operating margin in U.S., we can see that is up almost two percentage points this quarter over last quarter. As I just talked about, the business mix has an impact. The more the CMS, particularly in existing sites, the better our margin is getting. Also for the CIT, the more density we have in our routes, the better our margin will be. We have also had focus on the cost control. When we have been rolling out all these sites, particularly on the CMS side, excuse me. We have prioritized quality at the first stage.
The order has been really no matter what the cost is, the service is going to be performed and we will fix the cost and efficiency later on. Of course, as we have been rolling them out, the quality has got where it needs to be, then now we can start with the efficiency work. I just took a couple of example. I showed you the last time our branch in Pennsauken, which was one of the major rollouts. I showed you at that time the picture up to the left, what it looks like when we started. You can see it hardly looks like a place where you count cash. We were just forced to take that on that work at that time because some other things were not working out in the previous provider of the service.
Then as we got finished with our facilities, also our profitability came back. Now when we measure it here, you can see the last two, three bars. The last one is obviously December. You can see that our profitability is much higher than what it was when we started before the rollout. There was a period here of about six months where we took a hit of the profitability. This vault, Pennsauken particular vault, was rolled out in June, and that was probably one of the smoother rollouts which we've done. I have one other example, which is up in Rochester, which was rolled out a bit later. You can see here, and I marked the December there where we now start to make money again.
That has a negative impact on our profitability during a period of time, and here we are only three months into it. With this slide, I just want to show you that there is still a lot of cost to be taken out in our operation in the U.S. We are by no means done with effectiveness in our operations, particularly in the new sites. There are several others which actually looks like Rochester. The last rollout which we did in Atlanta, that was as late as in October. Got that question several times, is there still some so-called startup cost here in the fourth quarter? The answer is yes, there is. The third segment to talk about is the Loomis International service.
As I said, we have there made an acquisition in terms of Dunbar Global Logistics, which is fitting very well with our international service. We had an organic negative growth here of 12%. Looking into the numbers, we think this is a temporary decline of the business in total. We have seen that particularly on the precious metal, that activity has gone down during the fourth quarter. It is a very fluctuating business. Some quarters it's high, some quarters it's low for the whole industry. We don't see us having lost any market share, and we think that this is going to bounce back pretty soon. It also has been affected particularly in Switzerland, where we are the market leader by far on art exhibitions. That has also had a negative impact on Loomis International. Of course, in this business, we have a lot of fixed cost.
There's a lot of cost which is there independent of the volume, and that has hurt our operating margin somewhat here in the fourth quarter. To wrap up a bit before we get into Q&A, we can see that the revenue and the growth is really, the revenue obviously have some currency effect in it. The organic growth of 3%, one of the better quarters which we have had, driven by the U.S. We have an operating margin of 11.6%. Again, it's the best margin that we have had in a quarter. It's the same as we had in the third, but for the fourth quarter it's a really good number. You can see it's a percentage point higher than the last year. Finally, and last but not least, also our EPS is up significantly versus last year.
I just remind myself, I promised to say a few words about U.K. also. U.K., we have had very good organic growth, even better real growth because we made an acquisition of the Cardtronics operations there. However, we still don't have that operation running effectively. We have had some issues in the quality, which we now have dealt with those and the quality's up now and the next step is now to get our efficiency into the operations after those added volumes here. We have made some changes in the organization there, so we have now made that to a region of its own, so the whole regional staff there is just focusing on one thing, and that is on the U.K. operation. The volumes are there. We have the facilities, the vehicles, everything is there.
We just need to get that operation effective and also with the right quality measures there. With that, I'd just like to emphasize the financial targets, which was published by Jarl Dahlfors here in 2014 when we had the Capital Market Day. They remain untouched, of course, as they are for 2017 with SEK 17 billion in revenue, the 10%-12% EBITDA margin, the debt gearing of three, and also the dividend of 40%-60%. As a final comment, the proposed dividend of SEK 7 is, if I remember correctly, 49% of the net earnings here. With that, I'd like to conclude the presentation and see if we have some questions here from the floor.
Stefan Åhron from SEB. Starting with two questions. First, where you ended on the international and logistics. I remember one year ago, Q4, there were some extraordinary activities on the metal side to the positive, and also some activities on taking care of cash in Switzerland, I think. My question is really, is it maybe that this is the more normal level in activity and that you had really difficult comps in Q4 last year?
No, I don't think so. I think by definition, everything is extraordinary because there's no fixed contracts, there's nothing there which is regular. You don't have any shipments which is booked long in advance. Like our CIT business, we know we have for five years, we're going to have two pickups per week and so on. Here, you have business. As you said, yeah, we probably have some good business then, but I don't know if that was extraordinary. It's just that's the nature of the business. I think that the level which we have right now is on the low side, and that we will expect that to bounce back.
Yeah. The second question is on the U.S. You're outperforming your peers dramatically on earnings and I think also on growth. Haven't seen all the competitors' top line numbers yet.
That's a good guess.
I would guess so. You're doing a great job there. I know that there's been some owners there of activist type. If there were an opening for you to take on Brink's, would that be of interest at all, or is it just too big of a chunk to melt?
I think that question comes up every now and then. I think it's more of a theoretical nature. First of all, we are the market leader in the U.S., we are the market leader in France, and our biggest competitor there is Brink's. That is actually the two major markets in the world almost. That's a difficult equation to see how that would work out. I think that what we try to do is we focus on our business. We're going to be running that as good as we can, and right now we're doing it extremely well in the U.S., I dare to say. I think they need to focus on their issues.
Thank you.
Staffan Åberg, Handelsbanken Capital Markets. I'd like to talk a little bit about the European Union Anti-Money Laundering Directive. Could you please tell us a little bit about that, and also outline the impacts it will have on you?
Probably not. No, I'm not too familiar with that, I must say. I haven't followed that on a close basis. I don't see that there is anything that would have a major impact. I know that some of the things there is with the recycling of cash, and it has to pass through some of the authentic machinery. I don't dare to have any prognosis of what is that going to do to us. It's nothing which is going to have any major impact. I'm sure that, in that case, I would've known about it.
Okay. A question you might be able to answer then. Could you please list three countries where you currently do not have operation, but within three to five years' time, you probably will?
If life was that easy. You can always make a wish list. I think that is something which is doable. Whether we're going to be there in three or five years, there's a lot of things which is out of our control. There is obviously, we always said that it is of interest to be where we understand the business, which is reasonable given our limited staff on a central basis. The European arena is definitely something where there is major countries there, like Germany. We have talked about Italy. There are some other major countries in the part of the world where it is pretty close to us and we understand. I would list those two to start with, and I keep the third one for myself.
Okay. Finally, what about wage inflation, particularly in the U.S.? What is your outlook?
That's a very good question because with the growth which we have now, I think it's maybe fair to say that out of that 10, 12, let's call it 12% organic growth which we have, there is actually some real organic growth out of the market also growing. We see more stops, we see more cash in the bags and so on and so forth. Maybe there's a couple of 2% or 3% of that which is actually the market growth. When there is difficult times, the clients cut down on the numbers of stops and there's less cash in the bag. Now we see the reverse. That means the economy is quite strong in the U.S., at least what we see. The biggest issue we have right now is to find labor.
We see the pressure there from health reforms, we see it from minimum wage discussions. There's only one way to deal with that is price increases. There's no way that we can accept or take on that cost. That needs to be passed on. Am I worried about the pressure for higher wages? No. I'm worried about how do we get those price increases in place.
What about Europe?
Much less of an issue here. Much less of an issue.
Okay. Thank you.
Hi, Karl-Johan Bonnevier , DNB Bank. Very impressive development in North America, I must say. It is both growth-wise and obviously earnings leverage coming out of the franchise now. It sounds like when you talk about growth, that you have quite a strong pipeline also to talk about these kind of levels continuing. Could you shed some more light on new CMS contract that you have been managed to secure? Is there a lot of those things in the pipeline?
No. Specific contracts, and particularly those who are in the pipeline, that is dangerous to do before they are really secure. What I mean when I talk about that is more our position in the marketplace. Our investments in quality, that takes some time to catch up with us on those things. That is what I mean, that I see that we have such a strong market position, that I think that we will see that growth continue. From a competitive perspective, I do not see anyone really being where we are right now in terms of driving the market. It is more, and of course, we see the SafePoint. What I said before here is that the numbers sold is much bigger than the numbers installed right now. We have a very healthy backlog there, and before they get into the ground, they do not generate any income.
That is something which will come as well.
Earlier on SafePoint, you have earlier talked about the ambition to maybe add about 5,000 safes per year or something like that. Is that a realistic target for 2016, or is the base still too small to get up to those numbers?
No, I think we will be higher than that. We sold 5,000 during 2015, and I think we will do more in 2016. Everything else will be a disappointment, of course.
Excellent. Finally, obviously Brink's might be a little too big to chew, if you put it like that, and might not fit you perfectly. How does the acquisition pipeline look in other parts of your franchise at this moment?
That's something which we always look into. I must be honest and say, obviously I'm in an interim position. Patrik is on his way in. I think that is something which we as a company need to go through first. Patrik needs to be on board and take the responsibility, and to dig into and make sure that we do the right acquisitions there. To some extent, it's not the highest priority right now. I think the highest priority right now is to drive the business and work with what we have. Then Patrik comes in, and I'm sure he's going to do a good job in seeing and finding out the right things to acquire going forward. That is in our ambition. We have a growth ambition, and we're continuing with the leads which we have in that respect.
To talk about long-term specific targets, that needs to be Patrik who does that.
Excellent. Thank you.
Mikael Ramm, at Danske. I think on the third quarter call, you talked about using external financing for the SafePoint, basically. Could you give any update about that progress?
Yeah, that is soon to be there. It's Anders and our finance team in the U.S. is working on that. As we grow now, we have to find another solution to that. It will be in place. I don't want to say exactly because we are in negotiation with different alternatives, but that is our ambition, to have that in a very short period of time, it will be there.
Could you give us a rough estimate how much of the CapEx this year that is related to SafePoint? I mean last year.
15.
Yeah.
Third? I'm looking at Anders here.
It's like 4,000 safes and 8,000.
Dollars. That's about $32.
$32 million.
It's about a third.
These 5,000 will come in 2016, that you have sold but not installed, or?
We sold 5,000, actually more than 5,000 in 2015. Obviously we don't pay for them until they are installed. We buy those from a manufacturer, we're not manufacturing them ourselves, as you know. Before they hit the CapEx, all those 5,000, then it's going to be in 2016 when they are installed.
I also have a question on the organic growth in Europe. 1% for the full year, I guess the Tesco deal is 3% growth, you're talking about Spain growing, you talk about Argentina, Turkey. Is it just the Nordics that is explaining why it's not being a higher figure than 1%, considering that significant growth in other markets?
When you look upon it, France is the biggest market which we have. We have no organic growth there. That's very flat. That, of course it's not negative, but it's flat. That has an input. Otherwise, it's the balance between the, I would say, the Nordics and the countries which you just mentioned there.
My last question is, for the full year, you have SEK 79 million of these acquisition-related costs, a lot of that was integration and restructuring. Is all that related to that Cardtronics acquisition? It seems like a quite high figure considering what you paid for it, basically.
I have to ask Anders that.
Most of it is related to Cardtronics, but there's always ongoing acquisition-related activities. There will always be a number on that line regardless whether we make acquisitions.
I guess the restructuring costs and the integration costs, that's Cardtronics.
Yes.
Okay.
Yeah. Thank you, Anders.
No problem.
Hi, Henrik Nilsson from Nordea Markets. One question, if I may. Obviously, you've been investing a lot in your business over the past few years, even if we exclude the SafePoint investments ongoing right now. Is it reasonable to expect that you, sometime during the coming two, three years, actually will see a reduced level of investments?
That is depending on how much we're growing, of course. If we have a 10%-12% organic growth, you have to continue to invest. Even if you build a vault now, at one stage, it's going to be full, and we need to build a new one. However, realistically said, yes, you would see that. The trucks will still be there, but certainly the building side of it, that will fade out as we have redone most of them in probably one or two years.
One more question, if I may. On the organic growth in the U.S., how much of the 12% adjusted organic growth is related to the Bank of America contract?
Well, we never released exactly how much that is. It's a smaller part. Just talk about a few %.
Thank you.
Very few.
Hello. Erik Gunnarsson, UBS. I have a question on the general trend here with regards to the digital payment methods. It comes into the market quite rapidly, and as we can see in Sweden, it's quite declined organically. What's your view on that development, medium term and long term?
Well, this is the, probably the most frequently asked question which we get is this a, well, to the extreme, a dying business, or is this something. It's difficult to agree to that when obviously we have the organic growth which we have in the biggest market then. First of all, as a general comment, I don't think that any of these new payment methods, people using that is not the people who normally use cash. I think those are people who already have Left or not using cash on a regular basis. Maybe they go from credit card to whatever other methods there are in terms of payments. I don't think that is the immediate threat to cash. Then comes the question, is card going to be overtaking cash? We did some studies on that, and I think those are still true.
Yes, the numbers of transactions, the percentage of transactions done with cards or other payment methods are growing, sure. Cash is declining in the numbers of transactions, but at the same time, economy is growing. The numbers of transactions, total numbers of transactions are growing. When we did the study, which is about three or four years ago, at that time, we predicted, and which is quite nice to see now, is the only market of the major ones we've looked at was Sweden, which was going to have a decline in absolute terms of numbers of transactions with cash. That seems to be true right now. That is the only market today where we can see that happening.
Just follow up on that. A lot of things have happened since four years. Google, Apple, those initiation has basically just been into the market, as you can say. Will you think of doing that assessment again, maybe?
Yeah, we tried to do that, to update that study, which was done together with MIT and some researchers in Boston. We're looking at that. Again, the people who uses these Apple and Google and all these things, they were probably not the one who had a bunch of cash in their pocket before. They were probably using some other payment methods already. They probably already left the cash. Then how is this affecting it on a 10, 15, 20 years span? I have no idea. Again, we see still now, I live in the U.S. and I can assure you that question is not even there. It's one of the natural ways of paying, is to use cash and for foreseeable future, I don't see that change. Okay, let's move on to the telephone conference.
Thank you very much.
Operator, do we have any questions?
Remind you, star and one if you wish to ask a question over the phone. We have the first question coming from the line of Arianna Simina from Goldman Sachs. Your line is open.
Hi, it appears to be only me here on the call. Two questions, if I may. First one, on your French operations, you mentioned that some of the branches turned to be positive margin-wise. Can you provide a bit more color on what upside there is left in terms of profitability, whether you think you'll be able to improve it this year and how long it will take to improve it if it's not in 2016? My second question would be on the guidance. It seems to be that it looks a bit conservative at the moment, your 2017 outlook, given where you are at the end of where you were at the end of 2015. Is the reason why you're not revising or might not be revising or being conservative is the change of management or there's something that you are worried about going in 2016?
Thank you.
Okay. Let's start with the second question because I remember that one. No, there's nothing there which we're worried about which is of any concern or anything. I think it's also fair to what you first elaborated on, that there is a change of management. When Patrik comes in, of course, he needs to get his own view of what is the financial targets going forward, particularly after 2017, I think. I think that's one of the reasons, but I don't see any worrying thing in the horizon right now anyway. To the first thing around France and profitability there, as I said, I think there is still a lot of uncertainty in France.
We are still not clear on Bank of France, what they want to do in terms of numbers of vaults which they have around France, if that is going to change over the coming years. There is a slight trend in France that also the bank branches locally is doing recycling of cash versus sending it with us. I think that all the improvements in profitability in France is not going to come from any growth or any new business. I think it's going to come from us being more efficient in what we do. In France, for instance, we just rolled out a new system for the cash management, which we have implemented from Spain, which as I said before, is probably one of the most advanced countries in the world when it comes to cash handling.
We just implemented that in France, and that is also driving efficiency in our operations. Yes, I think we will continue to be more efficient in France, and that is going to drive profitability, but I don't think we're going to get any help from a growing market or some other things happening externally.
Thank you.
Thank you.
We have one more question which is coming from a line of Viktor Lindeberg from Carnegie Investment Bank. Your line is open.
Thank you. Two questions, if I may. Starting off in the Nordics, can you comment on what actions, if any, you're taking here in the Nordic to mitigate the declining trends that we are seeing? Is it possible to adjust prices or is it more about improving operational efficiency? Then also looking on the SafePoint units, you are now revising up the target from 5,000 to at least 5,000 going forward. Would you say that there's a pricing component in this that you are lowering prices to capture growth, or is it pure a market opportunity? Thank you.
Okay. Easy thing first. Absolutely no price cutting or any price reduction in terms of getting more market share with SafePoint. Quite the opposite. That is one of the things which is most important in our whole business model, is that provide quality but also get decently paid for it. We're not going to budge on that, nothing. That's not going to happen. We're going to place more safes because we have a good offering, not because it's a cheap version of something else. The first question was around the Nordic countries. Just to be clear, because there was one thing I said here in the presentation is that what we see now as the decline is actually, I dare to say, much slower than what it was just a year ago.
If that is a coincidence or if there is some reasons for that is something I'm not yet sure about. What we have done in Sweden is that we have closed almost half of our CMS centers. We did that during last year. We are working with efficiency measurements all the time. Of course, we are also looking into the pricing piece of this. As there is going to be less units processed, the price for each unit needs to go up because we have a fixed cost which needs to be paid for. As long as there's any cash circulating in Sweden, which I think is going to be for a long time, we need to continue to both increase prices and also become more and more efficient. I think it's a combination of both those things which you're saying.
I don't think we should over exaggerate the decline of cash in the Nordics. Right now the only country where we see it really happening is in Sweden, and that is less than what it was before.
Okay. That's clear. Thank you very much.
Thank you. There are no further questions on the phone today.
Okay. Thank you everyone then.